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The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Series Q)
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 323.0420973
EAN: 9780822319245
ISBN: 0822319241
Label: Duke University Press
Manufacturer: Duke University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 320
Publication Date: 1997-12
Publisher: Duke University Press
Studio: Duke University Press
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Editorial Review:
In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, Lauren Berlant focuses on the need to revitalize public life and political agency in the United States. Delivering a devastating critique of contemporary discourses of American citizenship, she addresses the triumph of the idea of private life over that of public life borne in the right-wing agenda of the Reagan revolution. By beaming light onto the idealized images and narratives about sex and citizenship that now dominate the U.S. public sphere, Berlant argues that the political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. She asks why the contemporary ideal of citizenship is measured by personal and private acts and values rather than civic acts, and the ideal citizen has become one who, paradoxically, cannot yet act as a citizen—epitomized by the American child and the American fetus.
As Berlant traces the guiding images of U.S. citizenship through the process of privatization, she discusses the ideas of intimacy that have come to define national culture. From the fantasy of the American dream to the lessons of Forrest Gump, Lisa Simpson to Queer Nation, the reactionary culture of imperilled privilege to the testimony of Anita Hill, Berlant charts the landscape of American politics and culture. She examines the consequences of a shrinking and privatized concept of citizenship on increasing class, racial, sexual, and gender animosity and explores the contradictions of a conservative politics that maintains the sacredness of privacy, the virtue of the free market, and the immorality of state overregulation—except when it comes to issues of intimacy.
Drawing on literature, the law, and popular media, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City is a stunning and major statement about the nation and its citizens in an age of mass mediation. As it opens a critical space for new theory of agency, its narratives and gallery of images will challenge readers to rethink what it means to be American and to seek salvation in its promise.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Do TV shows define your life?
While Berlant is quite definatly a good cultural theorist, the type of work she does is problematic. This book regularly tries to define a national mindset in relation to the productions of a small number of people. While one might be able to analyze any number of the texts mentioned in this book, Berlant insists on saying that these texts relate to a particular way of thinking that are shared by at least a majority of our population (enough to elect republicans to the presidency). She repeatedly ... Read More
Rating:  - One of the best Cultural Studies books I've read
It needs to be acknowledged that this underrated book will not please the reader who has done no serious engagement with the scholarship on a) popular culture, or b) sexuality and gender. It is evocative and deeply insightful, but precisely because it is methodologically sound it is not really as accessible to the casual reader as popular "non-fiction". I hope this - rather than knee-jerk cultural conservatism - accounts for the negative reviews on the site.
As an investigation of the ... Read More
Rating: - No evidence? Maybe you should learn to read.
If you want a better critique of the kind of anxiety this book can inspire in its critics, then read the book itself which of course fully anticipates and explains overly negative panic responses to its arguments and its extensive archive.
Not only is Berlant's Queen stuffed full of evidence, it considers the question of evidence at great length; indeed, EVIDENCE is one of the most important topics this brilliant book carefully considers. Additionally, the included gallery of images, like ... Read More
Rating:  - Editor, Please!
The author needs someone to explain to her that arguments develop not simply by stringing one sentence after another and expecting that with a little tape, good cheer, and hope, a coherent line of thought will emerge. Rather, arguments develop by actually rereading what you have written, revising it so as to clarify the connecting ideas, and making assertions that require some kind of evidence to defend them. A little reseach along the way wouldn't be a bad idea either. While the topics being discussed ... Read More
Rating: - forget the cranks: this book is subtle and brilliant!!!
On the face of it, the Queen of America is a book about family values and the fetish of innocence in the conservative citizenship ideology of the last few decades. But it is so much more than that. It is a brilliant work of cultural theory, but in the language of story telling. It considers why people have feelings about nationality and how they get that way, which couldn't be more important now. It challenges all sorts of norms about proper sexuality, knowledge, and politics, without being condescending. ... Read More
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