Grace Lavery will discuss "Personal Demons: Possession Narratives of Late Liberalism." A Q and A and signing will follow the discussion. At the Co-op.
About the book: "Personal Demo"ns offers a new theory of the relation between sex, desire, and personhood, asking what we should make of the many contemporary instances when bodies seem to want different things from the consciousnesses within them. Grace Lavery maps the negative energies--demonic, incoherent, resistant--through which liberalism produces and disciplines its scapegoats.
Through an examination of modern possession narratives, from racialized spectacles of bodily transformation and disguise to the liturgy of the Church of Scientology, Lavery unspools the knot of body, affect, and representation at the end of liberalism. In the face of the uneasy bargains queer and trans liberal organizations made with the phobic state, Personal Demons elaborates a vision of queer collective living that does not assume a shared concept of interiority, taking the incompatibility of such concepts as the founding axiom for a coalition against the ideological regulation of bodies and minds.
About the author: Grace Lavery is a writer, editor, and academic. As an Full Professor of English, Critical Theory, and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, her research explores the history and theory of aesthetics and interpretation, with particular interests in psychoanalysis, literary realism, and queer and trans cultures. Her speculative memoir, Please Miss, was published by Seal Press in 2022.
Her first book, "Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan," was published by Princeton University Press in 2019, and her scholarly essays have been published in Critical Inquiry, Differences, Social Text Online, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a General Editor of Transgender Studies Quarterly. She writes for non-specialist readerships on queer/trans culture and politics, and has published work in Autostraddle, The Guardian, Gay Magazine, them, and Catapult.
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5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL, United States, Illinois 60637
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