Not-Fiction

This project uncovers the pre-history of the “post-truth” in an unexpected place: not, or not just from the history of changes in media and politics, but as a history of changes in genre and reading practices. It is the ubiquity, emptiness, obviousness, and recentness of "nonfiction" as a term and an idea that make it an overlooked and productive site for thinking about the actual practices discursive communities use to discern sincere claims to truth from other idioms of speech and model the forms with which they evaluate those claims.

We are living, as cultural narratives would broadly have it, in a moment both oversaturated by nonfiction and in deficit of some ability to value it. It is the era of the selfie, the era of “reality hunger”; it is also the era of disinformation, misinformation, of “doing your own research” and not “believing the facts.” And yet we have paid almost no critical attention to nonfiction as such, as a quality that mediates genre categories and belief -- even though scholarship has paid quite a bit of attention to the rise of “creative nonfiction,” to the difference, especially in feminist and ethnic literary criticism, between autobiography and the novel, and to the truth status of history. For seemingly good reason: “nonfiction” is a relatively recent term, a term that emerged belatedly (in the late 19thcentury) to lump together a set of genres much older than it, an industry term used to shelf things and move product. But it is, I argue, precisely these qualities of emptiness and negativity that make an investigation of “nonfiction” critically promising: it is a term that emerges to describe our lack of a concept for what it tries to name and categorize, which is instances of language use that are both true (with all that implies about directness, objectivity, lack of interference) and crafted (the less something is a work of nonfiction, the more it slips to the periphery of that categorization). “Nonfiction” indexes historically how a discursive community developed a sense that those qualities are contradictory or paradoxical, and how that conceptual lack has shaped the reading and interpretive practices that go on under its aegis.

An article that looks forward to this larger project and sounds out some of its main methods is currently out on submission. 

Abstract, Literal, Reductive: How Feminism Thought

Abstract, Literal, Reductive analyzes and refigures the conceptual qualities that have long been taken to describe qualitatively what was erroneous about Second Wave feminism. The Second Wave is infamous for exhibiting some of the qualities my title names in excess: crudely naïve, melodramatic and too blunt, myopically white in its abstracting claims about Woman, literal-mindedly essentialist in its transphobia, overly militant in its separatism – for being, in a word, bad. We understand both feminist history and feminist thought differently, I show, when we see these peculiarities of the Second Wave’s discourse not as indices of mistakenness but as aesthetic qualities and functions of a consciously, collaboratively developed style. Drawing on writers such as Ti-Grace Atkinson, Silvia Federici, Catharine MacKinnon, Malcom X, Toni Cade, Audre Lorde, and Andrea Dworkin the chapters of the book move from exploring how these styles work formally, to telling the story of how and why this collaboratively worked out style developed in the new social movements, to finally showing how feminist style became aware of itself as a theory of symbolic action. Abstract, Literal, Reductive develops a new approach to feminist aesthetics in order to refigure the history of 60s and 70s social movements in ways that open up new ways of seeing and thinking about the social theory of identity that emerged out of them.

Read my work in Signs and the Chicago Review

Looking Back to the Feminist 1970s

I am co-editing, with Robyn Wiegman, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly called "Looking Back to the Feminist 1970s," forthcoming in 2028.

As Free as Air and Water LINK