I am an associate professor of English at Rice University, where I am also affiliated with the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Previously, I was an assistant professor of English and Media Studies at Beloit College and, before that, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, where I also completed my Ph.D. in English and was a residential fellow in the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. My first book, Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair (Stanford UP, 2021), theorizes how stylistic developments in contemporary U.S. fiction, sculpture, film, and design respond to a sense of pervasive crisis. My second book, the 33 1/3 volume on Madonna’s Erotica, explores the politics of sex in the wake of the AIDS crisis and the 1990s culture wars—and why all this is pressing today amidst renewed hysteria over queer theory and critical race theory. Currently, I am at work on new books theorizing contemporary systems of genre and humanistic contributions to the movement against sexual violence. Pieces from these projects have appeared in academic journals such as PMLA, differences, New Literary History, Signs, and Social Text, as well as para-academic forums such as Public Books, New Inquiry, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Artforum. I am also Editor of ASAP/Review.
My work entangles my identities as a cultural critic of post-1945 art and literature and as a queer and feminist theorist of sexual violence and racial capitalism. I view all my writing as part of a research program I call TRANSFORMING TAXONOMIES. In particular, I am interested in theorizing and historicizing cultural categories, including:
Forms as structural theories. The material shapes and rhythms of aesthetic objects are analogues for more abstract social structures. For instance, my first Signs essay considers how Ana Mendieta’s earthworks model the entanglement of ecological and sexual violence, and my forthcoming essay in PMLA considers how James Baldwin’s works from the early 1970s understood sexual violence as a tool of making race and gender for the primitive accumulation of capital. For Artforum, I have written a series of essays on how contemporary visual art—including that of Mona Hatoum, Igshaan Adams, Tania Candiani, and Lygia Pape—models reproductive labor, racial capitalism, and ecocide.
Genres as affective institutions. Because genres encode conventions and expectations around social roles and feelings, studying how genres emerge or change is a way of tracking the fluctuating emotional architecture of the present. For Post45, I wrote about how “leaks” have emerged as a genre that processes our shifting attachments to a state because of the pleasures it provides us of its own embarrassment. In essays for Genre and Polygraph, I have historicized pornography’s evolving relation to late capitalist labor. And for a special issue I edited for Television & New Media, my contributors and I show how televisual genres have adapted to new stories of rape and abuse after #MeToo.
Styles as skilled actions. In Crisis Style, I developed a theory of style as action, a particular coordination of form and content that indexes shared habits for navigating the world. I analyzed four styles—which I called detoxing, filtering, bingeing, and ghosting—and surveyed their incidence across media, from novels to Snapchat. Preliminary writing for the project appeared in New Literary History and Modern Fiction Studies. For a polemic on why we need stylistics to study the present, you can read a metacritical essay I was invited to write for Textual Practice.
Judgments as purposive categorizations. When we classify an object as belonging to a category (classically, something like “the beautiful”), we do so not by arguing from first principles but by offering a compelling description of the object’s features. My first peer reviewed article, for Social Text, offered the aesthetic category of “camp” as a supplement to Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories, which I argued was logically incomplete. My book on Madonna argues the 1992 album Erotica belongs not to the category of the erotic but to the category of the sentimental. More recently, as in a forthcoming essay for the 50th anniversary issue of Signs on “Big Feminism,” I theorize political categories as similarly matters of aesthetic judgment, in particular what harms and events we describe as “rape.”
You can find more information on TRANSFORMING TAXONOMIES in the “Books” section of this website, while article-length writing (including public-facing publications) are under the “Essays” section. For my editorial projects—on ambivalence, sexual violence, minimalism, and more—consult the “Editing” section.
You can download my C.V. below. My e-mail is michael.dango<at>rice<dot>edu