Public Facing Essays (selected)

Peer-Reviewed Articles (click titles for Full-text PDFs)

  • “THE LABOR OF THE SABINES: WHY WE NEED ART TO THEORIZE SEXUAL VIOLENCE.” SIGNS 50th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL ISSUE ON “BIG FEMINISMS” (2024).
    Circa 1975, radical feminists theorized rape as an issue of gender, not just crime, by centering the stories of acquaintance and family rape that had been neglected by a law-and-order focus on stranger rape. For 2075, we need once more to expand the cultural repertoire of rape stories in order to better understand the larger structures that incubate rape, this time centering stories of state violence that politicize it as an issue of racial capitalism. These stories include such uncounted events of sexual violence as prison rape, strip searches at border control, and forced sterilization in ICE detention. Attending to these stories exercises an art historical way of knowing that disrupts the state monopoly on rape knowledge, whether in its legal prerogative to define what rape is or in its public health prerogative to count where and to whom rape happens. This essay begins by recovering the aesthetic instincts of 1970s radical feminist work, then complicates its racial and transnational dimensions to articulate an abolitionist movement against rape grounded in cultural transformation. Acting as examples and as theories in their own right, threaded through the essay are readings of three art-historical episodes devoted to the Rape of the Sabines: Nicolas Poussin in the colonial 1600s, Pablo Picasso and the decolonial moment of the 1960s, and Andres Serrano and the neocolonialist moment of the neoliberal 1990s. This colonial history brings out the structural function of rape to conscript labor. And it foregrounds an anti-rape strategy adapted from labor’s toolkit: the strike.

  • “Sexual Violence and Racial Capitalism: James Baldwin's Prisons, 1969–74.” PMLA 139.2 (2024).

    This essay engages with James Baldwin's work on prison rape in the early 1970s: his directing of John Herbert's play Fortune and Men's Eyes while in Turkey (1969–70), his nonfiction book No Name in the Street (1972), and his penultimate novel, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974). Over the course of these works, Baldwin theorized that sexual violence constitutes racial capitalism by mediating between the two state-organized institutions tasked with securing the primitive accumulation and surplus value on which racial capitalism relies: the family (and, more broadly, heterosexuality) and the prison (and, more broadly, policing). In turn, Baldwin helps converge two intellectual traditions that developed after him, the black radical and Marxist feminist traditions, in order to explain how sexual violence expropriates both forced productive labor and unpaid reproductive labor through its production of racialized gender and kinlessness.

  • “Crisis/Climax: The Money Shot and the Sexual Wage.” Polygraph (2024)

    This is an essay in two counterpoised parts, each taking on a relat-ed constellation of sex, work, and the aesthetics of narrative form. The first is about the nature of work in heterosexual porn work, how porn has absorbed the insecurities and exploitative demands of a shifting labor regime after deindustrialization, and the ways in which this shift in labor is incarnated in sexual narratives that, literally, offer more bang for your buck. The second is about the nature of sex in heterosexual narratives that seek to distance themselves from the “merely commercial” cultural production of porn—literary fiction that remains ambivalent in its desire to be an artful commodity in a publishing landscape that financially favors, perhaps more than any other genre, the genre of romance fiction. A collection of close-readings of a couple dozen literary novels from the past decade shows how the pornographic and what I call the “sexual wage” meant to compensate the stagnation of real wages and the decline of the “family wage” are anxiogenic for a literary project that aims to reclaim the transcendence of art and sex alike. At a historical period in which capital has crowded out space for leisure, the literary novel finds itself in a double bind of trying to reclaim sex as leisure’s last holdout while distancing itself from “mere” pornography that serves capital’s interests.

  • “Policing (as) the Paradigmatic Scene of Rape.” differences 32.3 (2022).

    A queer renovation of “rape” requires beginning not with actors, but with acts, and doing so brings into view the central role of the state as a perpetrator of sexual violence. Radical feminists moved what I call the “paradigmatic scene” of rape from the stranger in the alley to the acquaintance in the bedroom: rape was a problem not of exceptional perversion, but of ordinary heterosexuality. The works I survey in this essay make a further move of centering the scene of state detention, showing how regimes of policing in a racial capitalist state always frame and prototype sexual violence. I pursue this argument in three passes: theory (the discourse around Michel Foucault's treatment of the Charles Jouy case), aesthetics (the conflation of state and domestic violence in the installations of Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum), and activism (the convergence of abolitionist and antirape movements in the 1970s writings of Angela Davis and the memoirs of the Scottsboro Boys).

  • “Rape of the Earth: Ana Mendieta’s Defense of a Metaphor.” Signs 48.1 (2022).

    Feminists usually disapprove of rape metaphors, because they trivialize or at least inaccurately abstract what sexual violence is. I largely agree with these critiques. But in this paper, I come to a tentative defense of one metaphor, the “rape of the earth” to describe pollution, mining, climate change, and other manmade harms to the environment.  I do so mostly by considering how Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta developed her famous Siluetas earthworks as elaborations of her performances and installations of rape scenes in the 1970s. While often thought of as two different stages in Mendieta’s career, the earthworks and the rape works temporally and conceptually overlap, and her first Siluetas directly borrow iconography and materials from concurrent blood-based performances.  Whereas Mendieta is often read as an essentialist for conflating “nature” and “woman,” I read the earthworks as aligning, not bodies, but structures of violence: environmental and sexual.  My argument revises and extends an important feminist discourse on indexicality from Rosalind Krauss to Mieke Bal, Tina Campt, and Mary Anne Doane; mounts a defense of metaphoric reasoning, especially in contrast to the legal discourse that has monopolized contemporary American discussions of sexual violence; and reassess the sometimes fraught coalition between feminist and environmentalist movements.

  • “Not Form, Not Genre, but Style: On Literary Categories.” Solicited for a special issue on style in Textual Practice 36.4 (2022).

    This metacritical essay compares three concepts in literary criticism—form, genre, and style—each of which lumps together disparate objects in a common category. Lumping is an essential component of what we as humanists ought to be in the business of doing, and this essay defends the taxonomic impulse.  But I argue that different categories produce different kinds of knowledge; and that for contemporary literary criticism, we need stylistic knowledge more than formal or generic. I theorize genres as affective institutions, which provides more leverage than formalism does in tracking the ongoing modulation of social structure in the historical present. And yet genre can still only get us so far, which is why we need a rejuvenated theory of style.  Drawing but departing from recent critical accounts of style including Mark McGurl and D. A. Miller, I theorize style as action, not an expression of affect, and as a coordination of form and content.  If form attends more to structure, and genre attends more to affect, then style attends to their entanglement, highlighting strategies developed to adapt to the affective pressures of social structure. 

  • "Periodical Utopianism, or: Charles Fourier and the Pornographers.” Genre 54.3 (2021).

    This article argues that the nineteenth century utopian writings of Charles Fourier and twentieth century American pornography franchises including Playboy participate in the same generic form of serialized eroticism.  Although Jameson argued for a formalist study of utopianism, his writings on Fourier engage only with his “content.”  I argue instead that Fourier’s project is best understood in the serialized form of his writing, which, as in Playboy, coordinates two different temporal scales: a larger scale on which the drama of world transformation plays out, and a smaller one on which the hope for this transformation is nourished in daily, increasingly erotic labor.  Tracking the history of this form from the journal culture of the 19th century to the magazine culture of the 20th also tells a story about the sustainability of sexuality as an autonomous sphere of experience that provides a buffer from an increasingly threatening and disorganized late capitalist world.

  • “Filter: Theory and History of a Style.” New Literary History 51.1 (2020)

    This essay names and theorizes a stylistic development shared by a diverse range of contemporary American cultural phenomena: filter. Whether filtering photographs on social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat or filtering the chapters of novels of short stories by Colum McCann, Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, and Elizabeth Strout, this is a style of improvising new genres of social recognition by purifying the affect of individuals within a given scene or space. In each case, filtering responds to a generalized sense of crisis when previously powerful institutions have declined in their ability to organize social life, including the institution of the family and the political institutions of Congress and the American political parties. By trying to repair this crisis, the stylistic developments I survey depart from simila aesthetic forms earlier in the twentieth century, whether photographic tinting and toning (e.g., sepia) in the case of social media filters; or rural short style cycles (e.g., Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, or Eudora Welty) in the case of contemporary novels of short stories. I develop a new theory of style up to the task of tracking this transition across media: style as an action of coordinating form and content.

  • “Minimalism as Detoxification.” Modern Fiction Studies 65.4 (2019)

    Whether in La Monte Young’s 5-hour piano solos or Richard Serra’s 100-foot steel sculptures, minimalism has never been minimal. Nor would minimization explain what is distinctive about the sentences of Raymond Carver or Mary Robison when Ernest Hemingway had simplified form 50 years before. This essay argues late twentieth century minimalism is best understood as a practice of detoxification. It emerges in the United States the same decade that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring visualized an omnipresent threat to American domesticity from environmental pollution, a threat minimalists conflated with racial and sexual anxiety and sought to expunge in their style.

  • “Leaks: A Genre.” Post45 (November 2017)

    This essay theorizes governmental leaks as a discursive genre, therefore an emerging contract of affective relation between citizen and state.  Through a close reading of the media surrounding the Pentagon Papers of 1971—the most discussed leak of the past half century—as well as a reading of Jonathan Franzen’s Purity and the uses of “leak” in everyday language, I argue that the genre of the leak responds to a contemporary condition of institutional instability: the inability of any institution, paradigmatically the bureaucratic state, to discipline its members into appropriate behavior.  This does not mark the emergence of people leaving behind institutions altogether, however, nor their detachment from the state associated with them.  Rather, the leak oversees a strategy of re-attaching to the state in all of its fantasized weakness because of the pleasures provided by the leak’s promise of embarrassment.

  • “Representation Between Utilitarianism & Liberalism: Focalization in Phineas Finn.” NOVEL 50.1 (2017)

    This essay argues that the form of Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Finn mediates sociality without the resources of interiority.  Even as Phineas Finn speaks the idiom of John Stuart Mill’s liberal orientation toward feelings and beliefs, the novel’s distribution of focalization provides an alternative pedagogy in Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian orientation toward action.  Reading the novel’s form against its content in this way borrows from Jacques Rancière’s understanding of the correlation between aesthetic and political regimes, and this essay elaborates and historicizes Rancière’s theory at the turnover between utilitarian and liberal ideologies.

  • “Camp’s Distribution: ‘Our’ Aesthetic Category.” Social Text 131 (2017)

    This paper theorizes camp as an aesthetic category that references the divided parts of global society, or the moment of political economy called distribution.  By completing Sianne Ngai’s unfinished taxonomy of aesthetic categories, I simultaneously collect a promiscuous archive of contemporary cultural materials (classics like the movies of John Waters and the early performances of Bette Midler as well as recent works including novels like Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, television shows like Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, and music videos like those of Fergie, Nicki Minaj, and Psy) and show how this archive provides lessons on the distribution of wealth, precarity, and belonging in our world.

  • “On Teaching the Anthropocene: An Interview.” EuropeNow (May 2017)

    In 2015-16, I was the student coordinator of "Climate Change: Disciplinary Challenges to the Humanities and Social Sciences," organized by Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Emily Osborn, and Benjamin Morgan, and sponsored by the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago.  The project included a year-long reading group that brought together students, faculty, and community members to probe the role of the humanities in discussions of climate change, culminating in a day-long symposium.  EuropeNow, the journal of Columbia's Council for European Studies, interviewed us on our experience.