Vulnerable Constitutions : Queerness, Disability, and the Remaking of American Manhood
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Overview
Amputation need not always signify castration; indeed, in Jack London's fiction, losing a limb becomes part of a process through which queerly gendered men become properly masculinized. In her astute book, Vulnerable Constitutions, Cynthia Barounis explores the way American writers have fashioned alternative-even resistant-epistemologies of queerness, disability, and masculinity. She seeks to understand the way perverse sexuality, physical damage, and bodily contamination have stimulated-rather than created a crisis for-masculine characters in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literature.
Barounis introduces the concept of "anti-prophylactic citizenship"-a mode of political belonging characterized by vulnerability, receptivity, and risk-to examine counternarratives of American masculinity. Investigating the work of authors including London, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, and Eli Clare, she presents an evolving narrative of medicalized sexuality and anti-prophylactic masculinity. Her literary readings interweave queer theory, disability studies, and the history of medicine to demonstrate how evolving scientific conversations around deviant genders and sexualities gave rise to a new model of national belonging-ultimately rewriting the story of American masculinity as a story of queer-crip rebellion.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9781439915073
- ISBN-10: 1439915075
- Publisher: Temple University Press
- Publish Date: May 2019
- Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
- Page Count: 282
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