Feeling the Nation, Mining the Archive: Reflections on Lauren Berlant's Queen of America

Abstract

This essay engages with Lauren Berlant's 2007 book, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, as a key text in the trajectory of cultural studies scholarship and the emergence of affect theory. It analyzes Berlant's concepts of infantile citizenship, the affective relationship to the nation, the intimate public sphere, the emergence of a national sexuality, and the counter-practices of “Diva” citizenship. The essay argues that Queen of America is a pivotal book in cultural studies scholarship for understanding nationalism, political agency, and the individual, intimate impact of mass culture.

Keywords:

• Nation
• Affect
• Citizenship
• Public
• Queer

Notes

1. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).

2. I know from Berlant that the photo came from her former student Katie Crawford (now teaching at Vanderbilt University), whose father was a lawyer for President Richard Nixon and who was attending the White House Easter Egg Hunt during the Nixon administration.

3. Lauren Berlant, “Critical Inquiry, Affirmative Culture,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 451.

4. See Lauren Berlant, ed., Intimacy special issue, Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 281–637, specifically Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” 547–66, republished in Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2002), 187–208; and Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

5. Berlant, Queen of America, 5–6.

6. Berlant, Queen of America, 1.

7. Berlant, Queen of America, 5.

8. Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public.”

9. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 56.

10. Berlant, Queen of America, 5.

11. Berlant, Queen of America, 5.

12. Berlant, Queen of America, 221.

13. Berlant, Queen of America, 14.

14. Berlant, Queen of America, 14.

15. Berlant, Queen of America, 18.

16. Berlant, Queen of America, 19.

17. Berlant, Queen of America, 2.

18. Berlant, Queen of America, 2.

19. Berlant, Queen of America, 18.

20. For instance, see Toby Miller, Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Néstor García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts, trans. George Yúdice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); and Sarah Banet-Weiser, Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

21. Berlant, Queen of America, 27.

22. Berlant, Queen of America, 29.

23. Berlant, Queen of America, 26.

24. Berlant, Queen of America, 223.

25. Berlant, Queen of America, 20.

26. Berlant, Queen of America, 20.

27. Berlant, Queen of America, 13.

28. Berlant, Queen of America, 11–12.

29. Berlant, Queen of America, 13.

30. Berlant, Queen of America, 12.

31. The classic texts of 1980s scholarship on fan culture and resistant cultural practices are: Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992); Constance Penley, NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America (London: Verso, 1997); and John Fiske, Reading the Popular (New York: Routledge, 1991).

32. Berlant, Queen of America, 47.

33. Berlant, Queen of America, 49.

34. José Esteban Muñoz, “Citizens and Superheroes,” American Quarterly 52, no. 2 (2000): 401.

35. “The New Face of America,” Time, November 18, 1993, http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19931118,00.html.

36. Berlant, Queen of America, 201.

37. Berlant, Queen of America, 200.

38. Berlant, Queen of America, 204.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marita Sturken

Marita Sturken is Department Chair and Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she teaches courses in visual culture, cultural memory, and consumerism. She is the author of Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (University of California Press, 1997), Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Duke University Press, 2007), and Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (with Lisa Cartwright, Oxford University Press, 2009)