Customer Reviews

The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Series Q)

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Lauren Berlant's book contains a series of essays concerning issues of sex and citizenship, though it may be a bit too much to hope that each section deals with both topics. The title itself refers to a cultural perception of innocence and how it relates to the seat of state power. Of course, power corrupts and innocence is tainted, disillusioned.

As with most texts of this type, a careful reading of the introduction will acquaint the reader with the author's ideas and intentions. This is important, because it is likely that in readinging the essays that constitute the majority of the remainder of the book, it is entirely possible to lose track of these ideas. The reward-to-effort involved in reading these essays is minimal, and I felt ripped off. It is also important to check the footnotes: Berlant hides some useful information that adds light to her story (such as the fact that Newt Gingrich not-very-noisily encouraged Republicans to become less hostile to gays).

In her essays, Berlant uses a wide variety of source documents -- her "archive" -- to provide the cues for her analysis. She picks and chooses context at will: The fact that The Simpsons' format requires all characters to forgo any growth is ignored (Lisa couldn't end an episode embittered against the structures of state power, even if it would be appropriate), but factors the creators have no control over (the local TV station places a military recruitment ad in a broadcast of a syndicated episode) are noted. The extreme selectivity of her sources, in my eyes, makes many of her conclusions suspect. In a few other cases, such as when she looks at the cover stories of several issues of TIME magazine to find messages about immigration and citizenship, her selections seem most appropriate.

Each reader will probably have their own sense of how well Berlant chose her source material. Since "your mileage may vary," I will list several chapters along with the sources chosen.

1 - "The Theory of Infantile Citizenship" - Audre Lorde's childhood trip to D.C., an episode of The Simpsons ("Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington"), the movie IN COUNTRY. Also, the movies MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON and THE LITTLEST REBEL provide further context for the critique of The Simpsons episode. Are sweet, innocent little children the ideal citizens? Even if they ask a presidential candidate what type of underwear he wears?

2 - "Live Sex Acts" - This analysis over various censorship controversies looks at the pivotal figures in the debates from the late 80s and early 90s. Former NEA director John Frohmeyer's memoir LEAVING TOWN ALIVE; some NEA projects, like the zines LIVE SEX ACTS and QUEER CITY; anti-porn criticism from the likes of Andrea Dworkin and the Meese Commision; Tipper Gore's HOW TO RAISE PG KIDS IN AN X-RATED SOCIETY (and I was just beginning to like her again after the election) and a variety of images of Jerry Falwell. Gotta keep those little kids sweet and innocent.

3 - "America, 'Fat,' and the Fetus" - If sweet, innocent little children are ideal citizens, what does that make fetuses? Berlant takes on the nations fetus fetish, and it isn't pretty. The archive includes the movies ONCE AROUND, LOOK WHO'S TALKING (and its first sequel) and INNERSPACE; pro-Life propaganda like THE SILENT SCREAM and THE ECLIPSE OF REASON; Raymond Carver's story "Fat"; two episodes of I LOVE LUCY concerning Lucy's pregnancy; LIFE magazine's famous pre-natal imagery; and, finally, videotapes of Berlant's nephew, covering his sonogram, birth, and first birthday.

It kind of goes on like that, but further highlights include the return of The Simpsons when Queer Bart is taken up as a gay icon, pilgrimages to the capitol by slaves, fictitious and real, and a "gallery" of images related to the topics of the essays, including the, uh, bracing cover to Tom Ace's magazine. [....] I would not recommend Berlant's book to non-academic types. Trying to apply Berlant's reasoning to items other than her "archives" might be asking for trouble, and her prose is often tedious in its construction. Further, some of her archive material and topicality seems unfortunately dated. I've been told this is some of Berlant's most clear and incisive writing, which strikes me as kind of sad.

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 uses really loaded/offensive terms, which can be fun if you politically agree with her (for instance patriotism=infantile citizenship, heterosexuality=dead sexuality), but if you disagree even slightly with her they seem mostly like bullying. While I'm rather left leaning, the core of her arguement, that right leaning people vote more based on emotions rather than well thought out ideas, I find to be mostly baseless (I think a misunderstanding of economics and international politics are the reason people vote republican... or immense wealth). Since most of the textual examples she uses I don't think can ever adequatly stand for the majority of the people she claims they represent, and are more caricatures of poltical discourse (which of course most political discourse is) rather than actual personal poltics, her work comes across as being based on a confusion of aggressiveness and refrences to Lacan with strong theorizing.

Unless you want to get into arguements with friends who really like this book, I'd pass it up if I were you.

This book masters the art of doing politics and cultural critique at the same time and it does it with an honesty and pedagogical clarity I have never seen before. Ranging across archives from mass culture to political rhetoric, Berlant does the very hard work of thinking things through in all their complexity (things like the mutual imbrications of nationalism, gender, class, and race)and she does it with writing that has both the stunning beauty of the perfect description and the too-true turn of phrase and the cutting clarity of thoughts that reverberate through the everyday sensibilities of current life in the USA.

This is a wonderful book about the contemporary imaginary of American citizenship. Discussing an extraordinary variety of cases ranging from television series, to film, to popular magazines to juridical testimony, Berlant traces the fantasies and structures of feeling that have given form to the American nation as an intimate space of increasingly infantalized subjects. Berlant eloquently analyzes the sexual, racial and class anxieties underlying the modeling of the public sphere on the privacy of the heterosexual, white family to the exclussion of other forms of intimacy and political presence. Through her discussion of American citizenship, Berlant writes clearly and insightfully about candent debates such as abortion and immigration. This is one of the best books I have read about nationalism and citizenship, and a pleasure to read as well.

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. A slow, careful reading is powerfully well-rewarded.

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 complex dynamics of culture and citizenship, this is might be the best going. Even as a non-American, and noting the "dated" nature of the sources, I still gained many insights into contemporary nationalism from this book. It's also very funny in parts.

Other reviews have gone into more detail about how useful the book is. I'll just say that if you compare the arguments of the negative reviews against the arguments of the positive reviews, it will be clear to you that this book generates a polarised response of extreme satisfaction or dissatisfaction, and you should be able to work out which camp you fall in. I bought it second-hand, but would have felt that it was a bargain at the new cost. A tremendous piece of scholarship.

Berlant's book is a gem. It is brilliant, clarifying, fresh -- a real stand-out. I'm not an academic and not into theory tomes, but I picked this book up on a recommendation from a friend and was really surprised. This book explains how the right wing has privatized citizenship, systematically destroyed the value of government and how they have 'publicized' and universalized their warped morality. For any feminist, racial justice activist, queer activist or other politically engaged person, Berlant delivers truly original insights and wonderfully sharp analysis. The other thing I love about the book is its author is so clearly (and intelligently) a feminist -- how refreshing in this boring, misogynist era. Final advice: read the book as if you were having a conversation with someone, without being intimidated by its big theory packaging.

Lauren Berlant sent me a copy of this book as a courtesy after I'd given her permission to reproduce the magazine cover that appears on p. 258. I didn't know at the time that (along with a number of other images) it would be printed without any caption or description. Without any indication of the contexts they were taken from, the images are of little more than entertainment value as they appear in this book. Maybe I have old-fashioned notions of scholarship, but I expected more from a professor of English.

This book deals with a number of topics that are worth discussing, but it suffers from several flaws that will limit its appeal for many readers. The writing is by turns pompous, obscurantist, gratuitously ungrammatical, and woolly. An editor of the book tried to explain to me that using conventional forms of writing can perpetuate routinized ways of thinking. I'm sorry, but there are better ways of discouraging rutted thought than resorting to this kind of style.

I didn't care for Berlant's tendency toward simplistic treatment of politics, even when I agreed with her. Her writing is tendentious, she makes unfounded leaps, and she makes annoyingly broad and imprecise use of terms like "capitalists".

It's an abiding mystery to me that books like this receive the acclaim that they do.

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 the photograph mentioned in the review below, provide a rich graphic museum of evidence of the type Berlant considers closely throughout this book. Have you ever read a closer, more evidentiary, or more thorough reading of The Simpsons in relation to what it means to be "an American" than this book provides? Or what of the numerous, numerous, fascinating moments from every American citizen's life that serve as evidence here? The close readings of American literature? The salient keen interpretations of the speech of politicians, news articles, television images and more? If this book lacks evidence, then cats lack fur and whiskers.

The negative reviews I've read here of Queen accuse the book of many flaws (including no evidence) and yet, ironically, offer absolutely ZERO evidence from Berlant's writing to back up their baseless criticisms which exemplify most of all a profound failure of intellectual engagement. Beyond this, I would suggest that when allowing one's own artwork to appear in a publication, one should try to understand the CONTEXT in which one's image will appear. The image in question, rather than appearing "out of context," is given a deep and fascinating context provided by Berlant's analysis. But you have to read the book to understand that context. Duh.

Finally, as to Berlant's style of writing, there is no contemporary author I have read who can take such complex ideas and then translate them into effective, meaningful problems familiar to us all in such direct, intelligent, thoughtful words. If you've ever had a thought that you felt was too complicated to write out in a clear fashion, read this book as much for its argument as for its example of courageous, articulate, living prose. You'll be inspired to write your thoughts too.

In the present politically disastrous, difficult moment in this country, when clear-thinking people fill their heads with fantasies of how to leave rather than remain implicated daily in its murderous, imperialistic, cynical policies, this book reminds us all of the outright power of clear political and social thinking. If there is a way back to an America with which progressives might identify, or about which progressives might again feel some political optimism, then Berlant's work is the vehicle which can move us in a hopeful direction: a direction that requires us to honor and use our intellects just at the moment when we are threatened by drowning inside a spiral of political depression created by a Conservative Ideology which hates individual thinkers just as much as it hates thought itself. I keep Berlant's work close at hand along with my passport, but if she's not willing to defect just yet than neither am I as long as I can be led in part by her thinking.

Anyone interested in cultural studies, sexual politics, or the power of the media in America today will benefit from this sharp, well-written book. Especially interesting is the author's account of the infantile citizen, a concept that links abortion politics, Lisa Simpson, and John-Benet Ramsey.