Transforming Taxonomies

My first book, Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair was published by Stanford University Press in 2021, and my Bloomsbury 33 1/3 volume on Madonna’s Erotica followed in 2023.

Crisis Style in particular is part of my research program of TRANSFORMING TAXONOMIES, a tetralogy of academic books that explores the entanglement of aesthetic and political categories. While defenses of the aesthetic humanities often single out our core methodology of close reading, I argue that an equally important skill, and one that enables formalism in the first place, is categorization—dividing and parceling the cultural field by means other than, say, Amazon’s algorithms that tell us if we like x we should also buy y. Different categories have different analytic affordances, and each of my books takes on a different taxonomic approach: (1) judgments as purposive categorizations, (2) forms as structural theories, (3) genres as affective institutions, and (4) styles as skilled actions.

(1) Violent Judgment: Aesthetic Categories and the Invention of Rape Culture
(in progress; chapters forthcoming in PMLA and Signs)

When second wave feminists first politicized sexual violence in the 1970s, they began with literary criticism, whether in the close readings of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, the exploration of literal Greek “rape myths” in Susan Brownmiller’s Against Out Will, or the experimental use of literature to found an androgynous counterculture in Andrea Dworkin’s first book, Woman Hating. One thing they learned through practicing aesthetic education is the importance of categorization. For instance, prior to the 1970s, rape as categorized by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports belonged to a category of “violent crime” along with murder, arson, and robbery. Feminists instead posited rape was paradigmatic of a different category, “violence against women,” alongside things like harassment, stalking, and child abuse. This practice of re-categorization points out new elements in a social structure demanding remedy: now rape is not a problem of law and order, but a problem of the ordinary cultural scripts of gender.

Taking inspiration from the method of these feminists, Violent Judgment argues that a core competency of our job as literary critics is the invention of categories and the judgment of how particulars are subsumed under them. But in addition to the “rape culture” approach invented by radical feminists and alive today in the #MeToo’s movement focus on free speech (whose stories can be told and believed in the public sphere), this book also tracks a parallel approach focused on labor that I call “rape work,” extending from Wages against Housework in the 1970s to #NiUnaMenos and the International Women’s Strikes of today. To reconcile the “rape culture” and “rape work” traditions, I turn to works of art and literature—from Mona Hatoum to James Baldwin—as theorists in their own right, imagining the fractal logic of sexual violence across domestic, national, and global scales of analysis under racial capitalism. I also historicize the radical feminist turn to more carceral approaches to violence as a symptom of the precarious institutions through which they had originally pursued an aesthetic education: the university and the small press. As we face the continued precarization of our profession today, this book makes a case for aesthetic education that requires attention to the material conditions of educational labor.

(2) What Does Rape Look Like?—Sexual Violence and Aesthetic Education
(in progress; chapters published in Signs and differences)

Our language for discussing sexual violence is dominated by two state vocabularies: law (giving us concepts like “consent”) and public health (giving us statistics like “1 in 5 women”). As an alternative, What Does Rape Look Like? advances an aesthetic vocabulary for diagnosing and interrupting sexual violence. It pairs eleven keywords—from “consent” to “fraternity” to “witness”—with contemporary works of art and literature by women and queer people of color who visualize rape within an expanded transnational and abolitionist frame. These artists conceive of rape in structural terms. Moving beyond an earlier generation of performing trauma, they concretize the abstract machineries of racial capitalism and heteronormativity that produce trauma.

By putting feminist theory and art history into dialectical relation, my book contributes to both. With particular attention to aesthetic form and the history of materials, I provide fresh readings of well known artists such as Ana Mendieta while introducing lesser known artists such as Luzene Hill. Whereas art engaged with sexual violence is usually mined for its representation of events, these materials and forms instead index the structures that enfold events. They also present decentered strategies of fighting sexual violence, from the self-defense of Faith Ringgold’s Slave Rape #3: Fight to Save Your Life to Nikki Luna’s series of sculptures in the form of AK-47s filled with lace torn from wedding gowns, repurposing feminized factory labor as a weapon against colonial gender in the Philippines.

(3) Genres of Neglect: Affective Institutions after the State
(in progress; chapters published in Post45 and Television & New Media)

Genres are institutions. Sociologists talk about institutions such as the family, the university, or Congress as programming roles that people inhabit. Aesthetic genres, too, are normative: they script how we should feel about something. But what happens to genres at a time when we have lost faith in the institutions that are their analogues—when we no longer feel that families, schools, or political parties are strong enough to secure the good life? Genres of Neglect surveys five genres that have emerged as institutions to process the decay of institutions: the family noir, the leak, the mockumentary, the die-in, and the money shot. Working across media—literature, television, and activism as itself a medium—these genres fill in for the institutional roles traditionally the purview of the state: policing, infrastructure, healthcare.

The noir has always been about the failures of the official police to solve crime; the recent vogue for noirs with what Netflix calls a “strong female lead” suggests that sexual violence in particular is best understood not as a crime at all but a family matter. The leak—from the spillage of state secrets in the Pentagon Papers to the loss of state resources through rusting pipes—emerges as a genre that is officially about governmental failure but emotionally re-attaches us to the state because of the iterative pleasures it provides of its own embarrassment. The die-in converts an aesthetic genre of horror into a protest action but in doing so must manage a difficult balance: how to glimpse the structural violence in which Black and queer life is made disposable without reproducing that structure’s routine spectacles of triggering violence. The money shot, with its reversal of the gendered understanding of productive and reproductive work, indexes a larger crisis in the family wage. And the mockumentary, with its characteristic flattened affect, is always in search of an institution that will make sense of deadpan—it’s a genre that presents unknown, unnamed, and still-emerging affects, crystallizing the contingency of our social worlds.

(4) Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair (Stanford UP, 2021)

This book generates categories for examining how contemporary American writers, artists, composers, and designers have developed strategies for carrying on and making do in a world pressurized by ecological and political crisis.  The works I survey are rarely about crisis; nor do they offer explicit interventions to repair the present.  But even before they tell a story, structure a space, or represent an object, their style re-frames the world in order to provide a fantasy of repair.  Demonstrating how stylistic developments in a diversity of media manifest similar practices of providing relief from the contemporary world’s anxieties, Styles of Repair provides a new aesthetic theory of style, complicates literary and art criticism of the late 20th an early 21st centuries, and re-organizes debates in affect theory by centering the question of action: how practical habits of persistence feel out for futures amidst ambivalence in the present.  

I advocate for a stylistic analysis that joins formalism and historicism by exploring how forms emerge to repair, not necessarily represent, history.  My archive traverses the fiction of Raymond Carver, Mary Robison, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, Colum McCann, David Mitchell, Mark Danielewski, and Chris Ware; the architecture of Gabellini Sheppard and John Pawson, as well as urban planning in Chicago; the fashion design of Issey Miyake; prestige television shows including True Detective; musical compositions from Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and other minimalists; visual styles on new media platforms including Snapchat and Instagram; the installation and sculptural art of Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Zach Blas, and Krzysztof Wodiczko; and the culinary art of Ferran Adrià. 

Madonna’s Erotica (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Everyone wanted Madonna's 1992 album Erotica to be a scandal. In the midst of a culture war, conservatives wanted it to be proof of the decline of family values. The target of conservative loathing, gay men reeling from the AIDS epidemic wanted it to be a celebration of a sexual culture that had rapidly slipped away. And Madonna herself wanted to sell scandal, which is why she released Erotica in the same season as her erotic thriller Body of Evidence and her pornographic coffee-table book simply titled Sex.

But Erotica is more sentimental than pornographic. This ambivalence over sex is what makes the album crucial both for understanding its time and for navigating culture a generation later. As queer politics were transitioning from sexual liberation to civil rights like same-sex marriage, Madonna tried to do both. Her songs proved formative for works of queer theory, which emerged in the academy at the same time as the album. And Erotica was-and is-central to a developing consciousness about cultural appropriation. In this book, I consider Erotica and its legacy by drawing both on the intellectual traditions at the center of today's hysteria over critical race theory and “don't say gay” and on his own experiences as a gay man too young to know the original carnage of AIDS and too old to grow up assuming he could get married. Madonna offered up Erotica as a key entry in the 1990s culture wars. Her album speaks all the more urgently to the culture wars of today.