Theory: The Queen of America

"The Queen of America Goes to Washington City" -- detail of the cover, from Google books. Love that face!

Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Professor Berlant looks carefully at an eclectic "archive" of materials from the 1980s and 1990s that helps her explain the rise of conservative and liberal politics in America that use sex and other normally 'private' parts of our identities to define what a 'citizen' is. She "repudiates" compulsory heterosexuality, of course, but what makes the book interesting, possibly, is the use of popular materials, including materials that demonstrate the re-strengthening of conservatism in the Reagan years, to "take the temperature of hegemony."

I have a few opening comments on what I'm reading:



I was planning to go out to the library to look at this book today, but it was checked out. I made do by inspecting the introduction, which I found very hard going. I really need to get through more of this sort of cultural studies prose so I can become familiar with all its vernaculars. A sentence like this:

Portraits and stories of citizen-victims -- pathological, poignant, heroic, and grotesque -- now permeate the political public sphere, putting on display a mass experience of economic insecurity, racial discord, class conflict, and sexual unease.

is not so bad on its own, but I do wonder at the rhetoric used here. There are too many different words, so its difficult to get what is important. The sentence is too complex to comprehend easily. Terms like "citizen-victims" have only implied meanings, which is an aggravation to me. For the reader not experienced with this rhetoric, it is necessary to make a translation:

There is a vast population of America that is frustrated, and shows it in a wide variety of ways, some heroic, some not.

Of course, this exercise reveals much of the motivation for the type of prose used -- Berlant wants to make multiple connections at once. Its not just that Americans are made because they are poor, or at risk of becoming poor, or feel racial and sexual tension. It's all of these things at the same time. So Berlant wants to see basically how this frustration has been working itself out. There's an interesting hint that if we don't make these kinds of explorations, the nation itself faces some kind of vague risk:"Mass national pain threatens to turn into banality, a crumbling archive of dead signs and tired plots."

I'm attempting to focus closely on the concept of an intimate public, which is elaborated on in this passage:

The fear of being saturated and scarred by the complexities of the present and thereby barred from living the "Dream" has recently produced a kind of vicious yet sentimental cultural politics, a politics brimming over with images and faces of normal and abnormal America. In the patriotically-permeated pseudopublic sphere of the present tense, national politics does not involve starting with a view of the nation as a space of struggle violently separated by racial, sexual and economic inequalities that cut across every imaginable kind of social location. Instead, the dominant idea marketed by patriotic traditionalists is of a core nation whose survival depends on personal acts and identities performed in the intimate domains of the quotidian.

It is in this sense that the political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. The intimate public of the U.S. present tense is radically different from the "intimate sphere" of modernity described by Jürgen Habermas. Habermas portrays the intimate sphere of the European eighteenth century as a domestic space where persons produced the sense of their own private uniqueness, a sense of self which became a sense of citizenship only when it was abstracted and alienated in the nondomestic public sphere of liberal capitalist culture. In contrast, theintimate public sphere of the US present tense renders citizenship as a condition of social membership produced by personal acts and values, especially acts originating in or directed toward the family sphere. No longer valuing personhood as something directed toward public life, contemporary nationalist ideology recognizes a public good only in a particularly constricted nation of simultaneously lived private worlds.

notes:

1. personal and political collapsed; mass experience of unease. the intimacy of national power. 2. the public rhetoric of citizen trauma; feeling vulnerable (3) 4. American Dream, intimate domains of the quotidian, Habermas, nostalgia-based fantasy notion, 5. explain conservative politics via intimacy. 6. fetus. national icon, 7. natoinality, trauma. intimacy, rhetoric and economic crisis. Institutions of intimacy <-> national questions. (8), 9 subjectivity. distract from structural conditions. hegemonic Reaganite. personal and structural: a false distinction. (10) 11. "national sentimentality." advertising. 12. reading and analysis. Foucault, Gramscie, Benjamin. Archive. quotidian citizenship. 13 naiton. (14) 15. counterfantasy, 16 sex and death. heteronormative culture (Michael Warner) (17) (18) identity. sex and crisis. "person" in American history. a heterosexuality to repudiate. 20 risky work. "takes the temperature of hegemony" nation, politics, culture, personhood. 21, 22. 1, 2, 3: Fetus. "Fat" by Raymond Carver. The Silent Scream. 4. Queer Nation. 5.