Lessons for Today

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Notes

1. Earlier versions of Radway's and Stewart's essays in this issue were first presented as part of a panel on Berlant's work organized by Dilip Gaonkar. “Scholars in Conversation: Lauren Berlant and Dilip Gaonkar” (panel discussion, National Communication Association 95th Annual Convention, Chicago, November 14, 2009).

2. Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); and The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

3. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 1.

4. Karma R. Chávez, “Border (In)Securities: Normative and Differential Belonging in LGBTQ Immigrant Rights Discourse,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (2010): 151.

5. Lisa Henderson, “Body Optimism,” International Journal of Communication 4 (2010): 253–7, http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/740/403.

6. Sarah Sharma, “The Biopolitical Economy of Time,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 35, no. 4 (2011): 439–44.

7. John M. Sloop, Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex Identity in Contemporary US Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 158 n7. Sloop actually engages with Berlant's work far more extensively, as in the process of thinking though the cultural desire for fixed gendered forms (see 26, 52, 68), but these brief comments are representative of the thinking in communication studies that Berlant's work has engendered about cultural objects.

8. Lauren Berlant, “On the Case,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (2007): 663–72.

9. Berlant describes this practice differently as the “study [of] the kinetics of aesthetic form (as opposed to being formalist).” The Female Complaint, 266. In her essay for this issue, Radway provides a careful reading of the twists and turns that Berlant's attention to forms takes in this book.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher Kamrath

Christopher Kamrath is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing & Rhetoric at Stanford University

Melissa Deem

Melissa Deem is an Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University