The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship
by Lauren Berlant
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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 show more 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. show lessTags
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In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (2007), Lauren Berlant explores the "privatization of U.S. citizenship", taking it for granted that "there is no public sphere in the contemporary United States" (3). Citizenship has been reduced to personal acts and values, especially modeled after or directed toward the family (5). She argues that citizens have been made "like children, infantilized, passive, and overdependent on the 'immense and tutelary power' of the state" (27). Citizenship has become "dead citizenship," where citizenship takes place in the private zone (59) and citizens aspire to "dead identities," "Identities not live, or in play, but dead, frozen, fixed, or at rest" (60).
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20+ Works 1,121 Members
Lauren Berlant is George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, coauthor of The Hundreds, and author of Cruel Optimism, both also published by Duke University Press.
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- Canonical title
- The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, Sexuality and Gender Studies, Politics and Government, Literature Studies and Criticism, General Nonfiction, LGBTQ+, Philosophy
- DDC/MDS
- 323.042 — Society, government, & culture Political science Civil Rights & Liberties/ Human Rights Civil Rights Essays; Special Topics
- LCC
- JK1764 .B47 — Political Science Political institutions and public administration (United States) Political institutions and public administration United States Political rights. Practical politics
- BISAC
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- 167
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- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (4.67)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 3
