Bruce Burgett

Between Speculation and Population: The Problem of "Sex" in Our Long Eighteenth Century

Mme de Saint-Ange: ’Tis fair enough: as we say, a little theory must succeed practice: it is the means to make a perfect disciple. Domance: Well then! Upon what subject, Eugenie, would you like to have a discussion? Eugenie: I should like to know whether manners are truly necessary in a governed society, whether their influence has any weight with the national genius. —Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom ()

Why Public Scholarship Matters for Graduate Education

Drawing on nearly a decade of experience at the University of Washington, the authors argue for a reorientation of graduate curricula and pedagogy through publicly engaged forms of scholarship. Recognizing that the claims mobilized around public scholarship are necessarily local and situational, they suggest that public scholarship is best understood as organizing language that can align and articulate convergent interests rather than standardize or normalize them. This approach to public scholarship cuts against the disciplinary-professional mandates of most graduate curriculum since it requires both diversified forms of professionalization and pragmatic commitments to institutional change.

Critical Purchase in Neoliberal Times

We thought we’d begin by asking you about the trajectory of your career. Your scholarship has taken up a wide range of concerns, starting with media reception and institutions, then turning toward transnational cultural studies and multiculturalism, and now focusing on cultural research as a form of community engagement, with particular attention to media policy. Can you trace the movement of your interests and concerns for us?

The affirmative character of cultural studies

Drawing on the four authors’ experiences as members of a collective made up of faculty and staff housed across several academic and non-academic educational institutions in the Seattle metropolitan region, the article argues that practitioners of cultural studies can best address questions of praxis by developing and institutionalizing more diverse sites for the critical and creative study of culture. A non-affirmative model of cultural studies needs to be grounded, both institutionally and theoretically, in collaborations that cut across, bridge, and reconfigure the relations among educational institutions, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and community groups.

Long before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America (review)

In an important article published in the wake of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the rebellion at Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn in June 1969, Martin Manalansan draws on his ethnographic research among Filipino gay men to trouble commonplaces that locate the Stonewall riots as ground zero of an international gay rights movement. The most striking evidence marshaled in the article comes from an interview with Mama Rene, one of the few remaining Filipinos who took part in the 1969 events. What is notable about Mama Rene’s narration is the insignificance of the rebellion now shorthanded as “Stonewall”: “They say it is a historic event, I thought it was just funny. Do I feel like I made history? People always ask me that. I say no. I am a quiet man, just like how my mom raised me in the Philippines. With dignity.” Manalansan uses Mama Rene’s narrative to make a critical intervention into international discourses of gay rights that center social and sexual formations typical of urban metropolitan cores at the expense of those of the peripheries, stigmatize individuals who are neither “out” nor “proud” as either repressed or not yet fully realized subjects of a liberationist history of (homo)sexuality, and prioritize a critique of homophobia over an intersectional analysis of the racial and class politics of the “gay world.” This intervention is important on its own terms since it dwells on the diasporic trajectories and personal aspirations of Filipino gay men. It is also significant since it marks one notable origin of the turn within queer studies over the past decade and a half toward research and activism aimed at documenting the myriad ways in which “the local and national are inflected and implicated in . . . the international/transnational on the level of the everyday and political mobilization.” As the title of Thomas Foster’s edited collection of essays indicates, Long before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America bears an ambivalent relation to this useful turn within queer studies. On the one hand, the phrase “long before” locates “early America” at a serious temporal distance from the present marked by “Stonewall,” while the category “samesex sexuality” maps a terrain that extends beyond familiar LGBT identity categories. The research contained in the volume, the title announces, should not be misunderstood as merely tracing genealogies of today’s dominant sexual formations. On the other hand, “Stonewall” names the events of 1969 as the endpoint of that research. Foster makes this ambivalence clear in his

The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (review)

For several decades now, scholarship focused on the U.S. early republic has been bedeviled by the L-word. Liberalism has served as a central problematic and, often, as the central antagonist in and across a wide array of books and articles, ranging from the republican synthesis historiography inspired by the publication of J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment in 1975 to the public sphere debates that followed in the wake of the English translation of Jurgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1989. In all cases, the consensus historiography of an earlier generationwas under fire. Despite heated arguments about the place of race, gender, sex, and class in the diverse historical conjunctures of the late eighteenth century, nearly everyone agreed that the liberal origins of the U.S. republic could no longer be taken for granted. Descriptive reconstructions of the republican vocabularies of virtue, corruption, and publicness boomed in the fields of cultural, political, and social history, while literary and political theorists of various stripes critiqued the normative implications of liberalism for a rethinking of democracy in the late twentieth century.With the collapse of global communism in 1989 and the widely contested rise of neoliberalism over the two ensuing decades, this emphasis on the importance of understanding the historical genesis and limitations of liberalism has continued to shapemanyof the questions central to politically engaged scholarship today. How can we best think about the rise in the late eighteenth century of politically ascriptive categories such as race and gender alongside the deployment of the enlightenment universalisms that liberalism claims as its historical genealogy?What is the relation between these forms of ascription and the development of ideologies and structures of privacy and private property? What is the status of the liberal nation-state in the world system of the period? Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Public Sphere takes this now well-established set of debates as its critical terrain. In six long and cogently argued chapters that span the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Dillon dwells on the

A Center of Wonders: The Body in Early America (review)

The body was a riot in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Given a world that had not yet abstracted corporeality from its social particularities (only then to market commodities designed for a fantasyscape within which those particulars could be bought and sold), bodies did not serve merely as metaphors for social conflict. Bodies were social conflict. They quaked, shuddered, and wept bitter tears; they were bludgeoned and scalped (and occasionally survived); they nursed, suckled, and sucked; they were purified, mortified, and ensouled; they consumed and were consumed; they were transformed from English to Native, female tomale (and back again); they labored, productively and reproductively; they performed and embodied rituals of salvation anddamnation; they turned suddenly white and black; they were bled, purged, nourished, and malnourished; they were hung, denounced as unclean, and celebrated as chaste; they were taken as holy brides, buggered and inseminated by man, god, and devil. Conflicts transected bodies; bodies existed only in conflict. Such is the world surveyed in Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter’s edited volume of new research on the cultures and politics of the body in the prerevolutionary Americas. In it, essays by a mix of established and emerging scholars address topics ranging from legal cases of infanticide and racial impersonation tomedical procedures of disease confinement and childbirth to culture practices of dance and spirit possession. Within and across these varied topics, several themes develop. One traces the transition within medical discourse away from the long-held