Vulnerable Constitutions: Queerness, Disability, and the Remaking of American Manhood

Amputation need not always signify castration; indeed, in Jack London's fiction, losing a limb becomes part of a process through which queerly gendered men become properly masculinized. In her astute book, Vulnerable Constitutions, Cynthia Barounis explores the way American writers have fashioned alternative-even resistant-epistemologies of queerness, disability, and masculinity. She seeks to understand the way perverse sexuality, physical damage, and bodily contamination have stimulated-rather than created a crisis for-masculine characters in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literature.

Barounis introduces the concept of "anti-prophylactic citizenship"-a mode of political belonging characterized by vulnerability, receptivity, and risk-to examine counternarratives of American masculinity. Investigating the work of authors including London, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, and Eli Clare, she presents an evolving narrative of medicalized sexuality and anti-prophylactic masculinity. Her literary readings interweave queer theory, disability studies, and the history of medicine to demonstrate how evolving scientific conversations around deviant genders and sexualities gave rise to a new model of national belonging-ultimately rewriting the story of American masculinity as a story of queer-crip rebellion.

Author: Cynthia Barounis
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 05/24/2019
Pages: 282
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9781439915073

About the Author

Cynthia Barounis is a lecturer in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.