Michael Dango
Biographic Data
| ID | 249034 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Dango |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Dango |
| SIGNATURE | DANGO M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Beloit College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Taxonomic Criticism
While advocacy of literary criticism often singles out close reading, this essay argues that a more important skill that enables formalism in the first place is taxonomy—dividing, categorizing, and mapping the cultural field by means other than, say, Amazon’s algorithms that tell us if we like x we should also buy y. Taxonomy is a skill of aesthetic judgment, exploring the dialectic between object and category, and although the paradigmatic categ…
Formalist Solidarity: Nikki Luna and Resquicio Colectivo against Gendered Violence
This article considers the contemporary sculptures of acclaimed Philippine artist Nikki Luna alongside the performance art of Argentine group Resquicio Colectivo, both of which are active theorizations of gendered violence’s imbrication in global racial capital. Luna’s works of lace in the shape of firearms respond to a specific Philippine context in which capitalist extraction has intensified gendered violence, while also joining a larger intern…
The Labor of the Sabines: Why We Need Art to Theorize Sexual Violence
Circa 1975, radical feminists theorized rape as an issue of gender, not just crime, by centering the stories of acquaintance and family rape that had been neglected by a law-and-order focus on stranger rape. For 2075, we need once more to expand the cultural repertoire of rape stories in order to better understand the larger structures that incubate rape, this time centering stories of state violence that politicize it as an issue of racial capit…
Post-Procedural Form and Rape Ambiance: Policing Sexual Violence in Mare of Easttown
Mare of Easttown figures a social environment that is both city and family at once, making it impossible to disentangle stranger rape and forms of acquaintance, date, or intimate partner rape—and therefore to locate the “problem” of rape as one of crimes to be solved by the police; or of ordinary heterosexuality, requiring more radical cultural transformation. Completing filming after the summer 2020 resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement …
Introduction to the special issue: Genres of Rape and Putting Rape Into Genre: Sexual Violence and TV After #MeToo
This introduction to the “Rape, Genre, and TV after #MeToo” special issue articulates the importance of genre for understanding shifting affective and political norms related to sexual violence. Recent TV from the U.S. and the U.K. has worked to expand the public’s understanding of what counts in the genre of rape, bringing into view less discussed harms like nonconsensual condom removal. At the same time, public discussions of rape have put pres…
Not form, not genre, but style: On Literary Categories
This metacritical essay compares three concepts in literary criticism – form, genre, and style – each of which lumps together disparate objects in a common category. Lumping is an essential component of what we as humanists ought to be in the business of doing, and this essay defends the taxonomic impulse. But I argue that different categories produce different kinds of knowledge; and that for contemporary literary criticism, we need stylistic kn…
Rape of the Earth: Ana Mendieta's Defense of a Metaphor
Feminists usually disapprove of rape metaphors because they inappropriately trivialize or inaccurately abstract the experience of sexual violence. I largely agree with these critiques. But in this article, I come to a tentative defense of one metaphor, the “rape of the earth” to describe pollution, mining, climate change, and other man-made harms to the environment. I do so mostly by considering how Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta developed he…
Periodical Utopianism: Charles Fourier, Playboy , and Erotic Serialization
This article argues that the nineteenth-century utopian writings of Charles Fourier and twentieth-century United States pornography franchises including Playboy participate in the same generic form of serialized eroticism. Although Fredric Jameson argued for a formalist study of utopianism, his writings on Fourier engage only with his “content.” It argues instead that Fourier's project is best understood in the serialized form of his writing, whi…
Policing (as) the Paradigmatic Scene of Rape
A queer renovation of "rape" requires beginning not with actors, but with acts, which brings into view the central role of the state as a perpetrator of sexual violence. Radical feminists moved the "paradigmatic scene" of rape from the stranger in the alley to the acquaintance in the bedroom: rape was a problem not of exceptional perversion, but of ordinary heterosexuality. The works surveyed in this essay center the scene of state detention, sho…
Filtering: A Theory and History of a Style
This essay names and theorizes a stylistic development shared by a diverse range of contemporary American cultural phenomena: filter. Whether filtering photographs on social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat or filtering the chapters of novels of short stories by Colum McCann, Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, and Elizabeth Strout, this is a style of improvising new genres of social recognition by purifying the affect of individuals wit…
Camp's Distribution
This article theorizes camp as an aesthetic category that references the divided parts of global society, or the moment of political economy called distribution. By completing Sianne Ngai's unfinished taxonomy of aesthetic categories, I simultaneously collect a promiscuous archive of contemporary cultural materials (classics like the movies of John Waters and the early performances of Bette Midler, as well as such recent works as Zadie Smith's no…
Rape of the Earth: Ana Mendieta's Defense of a Metaphor
Feminists usually disapprove of rape metaphors because they inappropriately trivialize or inaccurately abstract the experience of sexual violence. I largely agree with these critiques. But in this article, I come to a tentative defense of one metaphor, the “rape of the earth” to describe pollution, mining, climate change, and other man-made harms to the environment. I do so mostly by considering how Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta developed he…
Camp's Distribution
This article theorizes camp as an aesthetic category that references the divided parts of global society, or the moment of political economy called distribution. By completing Sianne Ngai's unfinished taxonomy of aesthetic categories, I simultaneously collect a promiscuous archive of contemporary cultural materials (classics like the movies of John Waters and the early performances of Bette Midler, as well as such recent works as Zadie Smith's no…
Policing (as) the Paradigmatic Scene of Rape
A queer renovation of "rape" requires beginning not with actors, but with acts, which brings into view the central role of the state as a perpetrator of sexual violence. Radical feminists moved the "paradigmatic scene" of rape from the stranger in the alley to the acquaintance in the bedroom: rape was a problem not of exceptional perversion, but of ordinary heterosexuality. The works surveyed in this essay center the scene of state detention, sho…
Camp's Distribution
This article theorizes camp as an aesthetic category that references the divided parts of global society, or the moment of political economy called distribution. By completing Sianne Ngai's unfinished taxonomy of aesthetic categories, I simultaneously collect a promiscuous archive of contemporary cultural materials (classics like the movies of John Waters and the early performances of Bette Midler, as well as such recent works as Zadie Smith's no…
Filtering: A Theory and History of a Style
This essay names and theorizes a stylistic development shared by a diverse range of contemporary American cultural phenomena: filter. Whether filtering photographs on social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat or filtering the chapters of novels of short stories by Colum McCann, Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, and Elizabeth Strout, this is a style of improvising new genres of social recognition by purifying the affect of individuals wit…
Periodical Utopianism: Charles Fourier, Playboy , and Erotic Serialization
This article argues that the nineteenth-century utopian writings of Charles Fourier and twentieth-century United States pornography franchises including Playboy participate in the same generic form of serialized eroticism. Although Fredric Jameson argued for a formalist study of utopianism, his writings on Fourier engage only with his “content.” It argues instead that Fourier's project is best understood in the serialized form of his writing, whi…
Policing (as) the Paradigmatic Scene of Rape
A queer renovation of "rape" requires beginning not with actors, but with acts, which brings into view the central role of the state as a perpetrator of sexual violence. Radical feminists moved the "paradigmatic scene" of rape from the stranger in the alley to the acquaintance in the bedroom: rape was a problem not of exceptional perversion, but of ordinary heterosexuality. The works surveyed in this essay center the scene of state detention, sho…
Not form, not genre, but style: On Literary Categories
This metacritical essay compares three concepts in literary criticism – form, genre, and style – each of which lumps together disparate objects in a common category. Lumping is an essential component of what we as humanists ought to be in the business of doing, and this essay defends the taxonomic impulse. But I argue that different categories produce different kinds of knowledge; and that for contemporary literary criticism, we need stylistic kn…
Rape of the Earth: Ana Mendieta's Defense of a Metaphor
Feminists usually disapprove of rape metaphors because they inappropriately trivialize or inaccurately abstract the experience of sexual violence. I largely agree with these critiques. But in this article, I come to a tentative defense of one metaphor, the “rape of the earth” to describe pollution, mining, climate change, and other man-made harms to the environment. I do so mostly by considering how Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta developed he…
Post-Procedural Form and Rape Ambiance: Policing Sexual Violence in Mare of Easttown
Mare of Easttown figures a social environment that is both city and family at once, making it impossible to disentangle stranger rape and forms of acquaintance, date, or intimate partner rape—and therefore to locate the “problem” of rape as one of crimes to be solved by the police; or of ordinary heterosexuality, requiring more radical cultural transformation. Completing filming after the summer 2020 resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement …
Introduction to the special issue: Genres of Rape and Putting Rape Into Genre: Sexual Violence and TV After #MeToo
This introduction to the “Rape, Genre, and TV after #MeToo” special issue articulates the importance of genre for understanding shifting affective and political norms related to sexual violence. Recent TV from the U.S. and the U.K. has worked to expand the public’s understanding of what counts in the genre of rape, bringing into view less discussed harms like nonconsensual condom removal. At the same time, public discussions of rape have put pres…
The Labor of the Sabines: Why We Need Art to Theorize Sexual Violence
Circa 1975, radical feminists theorized rape as an issue of gender, not just crime, by centering the stories of acquaintance and family rape that had been neglected by a law-and-order focus on stranger rape. For 2075, we need once more to expand the cultural repertoire of rape stories in order to better understand the larger structures that incubate rape, this time centering stories of state violence that politicize it as an issue of racial capit…
Formalist Solidarity: Nikki Luna and Resquicio Colectivo against Gendered Violence
This article considers the contemporary sculptures of acclaimed Philippine artist Nikki Luna alongside the performance art of Argentine group Resquicio Colectivo, both of which are active theorizations of gendered violence’s imbrication in global racial capital. Luna’s works of lace in the shape of firearms respond to a specific Philippine context in which capitalist extraction has intensified gendered violence, while also joining a larger intern…
Taxonomic Criticism
While advocacy of literary criticism often singles out close reading, this essay argues that a more important skill that enables formalism in the first place is taxonomy—dividing, categorizing, and mapping the cultural field by means other than, say, Amazon’s algorithms that tell us if we like x we should also buy y. Taxonomy is a skill of aesthetic judgment, exploring the dialectic between object and category, and although the paradigmatic categ…
Sociology (10 works) · Art (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Gender Studies (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Art history (4 works) · Criminology (4 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (4 works)