Publications
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Co-written with Annie McClanahan and published July 2021 in South Atlantic Quarterly
This article considers the figure of the sex worker across Marxist political economy. Taking up what Melissa Gira Grant terms the “prostitute imaginary,” the authors suggest that from classical political economy to contemporary Marxist-feminist thought, the sex worker has been rhetorically deployed to trouble the boundaries between productive, unproductive, and reproductive work. More recently, the prostitute imaginary has shaped accounts of contemporary service work: in particular, the figure of the sex worker has been used to metaphorize the intimate affects demanded by service work. Rather than use service work to think about the exploitation and coercion that shapes all wage labor under capital, however, such accounts tend to treat service work and sex work as uniquely abject. As a result, they do not attend to the systemic and structural features common to both. The authors take up one of those features in particular: the use of tip-based or piece-rate methods of wage payment. They explore the history of this insecure and informalized wage form not only to track the systematization of hyperexploitation in the service sector, but also to unearth a history of resistance to that exploitation, arguing that service workers and sex workers offer a new and urgent model of revolutionary class consciousness.
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Abstract of dissertation published by the University of California in December 2021.
The picaresque genre attempts to represent a subject outside History—in early modern Europe, the newly dispossessed peasant, “dissolute, crooked, thieving and idle”—who will eventually become the modern wage laborer. The genre uses slapstick humor and parody to make for witty stories that to this day retain their power to make us laugh out loud. But alongside the genre’s humor, the picaresque also figures its protagonists’ refusal to submit to the discipline of wage labor. Attending to the ideological and aesthetic strategies of the picaresque, this project examines the ways in which the genre has acted as an apparatus of capture for those living outside and on the margins of the enclosures of wage labor and the home. At the same time, it takes the picaresque as the genre of the lumpenproletariat and a chronicle of the making of new forms of life. The errant path of the rogue in the long picaresque traced here begins in early modern Spain, in La Celestina and Lazarillo de Tormes, moves through 18th C. England in Moll Flanders, leapfrogs continents and centuries to reappear in 1970s Mexico City in El vampiro de la colonia Roma, and ends with a bang in contemporary South Africa in Thirteen Cents. In terms of method, this project thinks alongside Herbert Marcuse, who writes that “art is perhaps the most visible ‘return of the repressed.’” It interrogates the shift in the literary figuration of the poor from holy mendicant to homeless subject, reading the genre slant—like a picaro—and against its function as moral fable of capital, in order to reveal a rich lumpen imaginary overflowing with other ways of being and living. Finally, in imagining a time before and after the long picaresque, I sketch out the contours of a radical psychoanalysis grounded in the urgency of working through the deadening effects of the philosophy of productiveness and the pain of private property.
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Work in Progress.
Sleeping on cardboard boxes, in tents or on the sidewalk, homelessness transfigures people into disposable life to be swept up by outreach workers, sanitation corps, and the police. Like the waste of the city, the person sheltering on the streets is consigned to its literal margins: sidewalks, underpasses and bridges, abandoned lots, navigation centers and homeless shelters, and single room occupancy hotels. Disposable life inhabits and haunts these marginal spaces as the afterlife of the home and the workplace. Its relegation to these spaces is intentional and constitutive: the unhoused person’s abjection makes possible the mythic joy of the housed and the fully employed. Their social death keeps capitalized life alive. The unhoused person’s loss of ontological status through the affliction of homelessness both enriches and immiserates like the accumulation of capital. But if we only become a person through labor, debt, and rent, what are we when we refuse those things? What are we when those things are refused to us? What mode of thought within us makes people into objects against which we define ourselves? And if, as Khadijah Queen points out, “We already live the truth of what and who gets tossed aside”, what structures of knowing and experiencing the world give us the truth of disposable life?
As much as this disposable life is abject, cast out and ejected from the social body like so much biowaste, this form of life “from its place of banishment [. . .] does not stop challenging its master” (Kristeva 2): without a ‘home’ people on the streets are unheimlich, unhomely, homeless, something “hidden and dangerous” (Freud 134) yet uncannily familiar that has come into the open world of the streets. Herbert Marcuse argues that “the true spirit of psychoanalytic theory lives in the uncompromising efforts to reveal the anti-humanistic forces behind the philosophy of productiveness” (202). In this project, I take up these uncompromising efforts to suggest that disposable life is dangerous and yet familiar—uncanny, as it were—because it constitutes through negation a structure of knowing and experiencing deeply tied to the accumulation of capital and the philosophy of productiveness. At the same time, it reveals something forgotten and repressed: the possibility of living otherwise. The people living these throw away lives—often in abjection and misery, but still living, breathing, loving—are as close as we’ve gotten to a post-work, post-class world. Put more simply, the negation of capitalism is already happening on the streets. Thinking alongside psychiatrist and analyst Frantz Fanon, I suggest that a radical psychoanalysis—impelled by a movement of love, a gift of self—may be one way to refuse the heartless logics of disposable life and begin to heal from our collective afflictions.
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Work in Progress.
This project seeks to build a critical armature for narratives of home and place in 19th and 20th C. US and Latin American writing, with a particular focus on what José David Saldívar in Trans-Americanity calls the migratory subaltern subject and their representation in canonical and minor literature. I take up Saldívar’s notion of the migratory subaltern subject and their double vision— “revolutionary and antimilitaristic,” inside and outside hegemonic structures—as critical tools for inquiring into the kinds of responses produced by the promises and failures of enfranchisement in the Americas. Canonical texts like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Euclides Da Cunha’s Os Sertões represent or have come to represent hegemonic formations of home, place, and nation and the race, class, gender, and language structures that uphold them. I am particularly interested in the ways in which these texts construct and maintain hegemonic structures, both through the iteration of promises of enfranchisement (“I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear”), and through the figuration of those for whom the promise fails, like the insurgent antiheros of Os Sertões.
At the same time, the multiple forms of writing that speak from the cracks and margins of these hegemonic structures, like modern and contemporary texts by Chicanx, queer, African-American, and indigenous writers, hold together—in negation, refusal, and transgression—this armature of home and place. In “The World and the Home,” Homi Bhabha uses the notion of unhomeliness to describe the sensation of living in a state of in-betweenness; it has to do with “the uncanny literary and social effects of enforced social accommodation, or historical migrations and cultural relocations." Unhomely literature speaks through silence and obscurity and narrates “the outsideness of the inside that is too painful to remember.” What Bhabha calls in-betweenness, Gloria Anzaldúa, using the Nahuatl word nepantla [torn between ways], calls nepantilism: never fully outside or inside, caught between the coloniality of power and its psychogeographies of race, class, gender, and language, and the traces of other ways of being under erasure by settler colonialism. In this sense, my work highlights the ways in which the multitude of internal fissures show how displacement can mean not only physical movement, homelessness, and migration, but also an interiorized in-betweenness and nepantilism.
The responses to dis/enfranchisement in 19th and 20th C. American literatures range from Da Cunha’s nation-building fantasies from above of the ‘noble’ peasant insurgency in Canudos and the necessity of its violent destruction, to John Steinbeck’s narration of the intra-colonial violence experienced by the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath as biblical sacrifice and re-birth, and Macabéa’s indifference as unsurrender in Clarice Lispector’s A hora da estrela. Unhomely narratives of dispossession and migration, insurgency, labor militancy, and outlaw sexualities grapple with heterogenous forms of subjectivity, and as Bhabha notes, “in the stirrings of the unhomely, another world becomes visible.” I follow Roberto Fernández Retamar’s use of the figure of Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (“You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to Curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language” [6]) in describing the in-betweenness of language itself in postcolonial and US literature. In texts ranging from José María Arguedas’s Los Ríos Profundos to Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel and Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper, the multiple forms of the in-betweenness of language and its unhomely silences and ruptures form a final line of inquiry for this project. Maurice Blanchot in “Literature and the Right to Death” describes literature as the murdered word’s afterlife, and provocatively argues that the double negation of writing (the death of the object, and the death of the idea) brings another world into being, an imaginary or set of imaginaries linking death and violence to freedom. Emerging from the shadows and in-between the fissures of hegemonic structures of home and place, how do what Oscar Zeta Acosta calls “the cockroach people . . . you know, the little beasts everyone steps on” and the in-betweenness of variegated forms of language and representation, collide and interact with the violent coloniality of power?