Christian Haines
Biographic Data
| ID | 3634978 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christian Haines |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christian |
| FAMILY NAME | Haines |
| SIGNATURE | HAINES C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pennsylvania State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3647-0939 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Introduction: Utopian Futures in an Authoritarian Present
Editors’ Message
Metabolism
Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'
Critical Forum Introduction: Muñoz’s Ghost, or, The Sparks of Other Tomorrows
It is tempting to write of José Esteban Muñoz’s death in December 2013 as if it coincided with the historical fate of queer theory, as if the passing of Muñoz were the harbinger of the latter’s extinction. It’s not that queer theory has stopped being written, of course, nor that it’s gone out of fashion, but rather that its historical mission has been called into question by its own proponents and practitioners.1 To what degree has queer theory t…
Editors’ Message
This final issue of Utopian Studies 36 (2025) offers topics ranging from early Islamic utopianism to Soviet-era urban design, and from prison abolition to “trans excess.” Shea Hennum’s “Abolitionist Speculation” opens the ARTICLES section, theorizing the practice of imagining a world without prisons and the conditions that would make such a world possible. Hennum locates this concept in the history of utopian and dystopian literature’s attention …
The Anthropocene Interregnum: Ecological Marxism and the Social Metabolism of the Present
This essay argues for an understanding of the Anthropocene as both historical impasse and historical transition. It is an impasse insofar as there is a conceptual and practical gap between human history and planetary history, or politics and ecology. It is a transition insofar as it marks the passage from one geological epoch to another and from one dominant social formation (capitalism) and the possibility of another. The author makes the case t…
Response 3: “Unshakeable Want”: Solarpunk, Petromodernity, and the Death Drive
Dex escapes the city: “Sometimes, a person reaches a point in their life when it becomes absolutely essential to get the fuck out of the city.” They change careers, become a tea monk, a vocation blending botanical remedy with therapeutic conversation. Dex embraces a new form of life; they learn to occupy time and attune to nature in a different way. They also repeat the foundational reconciliation between civilization and nature that is the signa…
Introduction: Hope Through Action—Solarpunk Blueprints, Desires, and Politics
What can solarpunk make us believe? What can it make us do? Can it inspire the kind of action that might resolve, overcome, or adapt to climate crisis? These are the questions asked in Alexa Weik von Mossner’s “Wish We Were There: Hope, Desire, and Utopian Community in Contemporary Solarpunk,” the feature article of this CRITICAL FORUM on the emergent genre of solarpunk. Weik von Mossner praises solarpunk’s “dynamic of realist audacity and radica…
Editors’ Message
This issue of Utopian Studies represents a journal milestone: thirty-five years of publication. Our gift to ourselves is the expansion of our editorial team, with Associate Editor Christian P. Haines overseeing the CRITICAL FORUM section of the journal. He is already at work on the FORUM for the upcoming special issue on Queer Utopias (vol. 36, no. 1). An associate professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University, Christian specializes i…
Planetary utopianism: Geoengineering, Speculative Fiction, and the Planetary Turn
This essay proposes the term planetary utopianism to name the imagination of a radically changed planet Earth in the future. Such utopianism is ecological at its core, for it implies the reconstitution of nature, as well as society. It’s also inextricable from a critique of capitalism insofar as the latter has become, in Jason W. Moore’s expression, a world-ecology. The essay focuses on geoengineering and on the representation of geoengineering i…
Utopias of OneLiterary Primitivism
Utopia is more often than not a term of embarrassment for the humanities. It finds itself caught between a post–Cold War liberal conviction that system change is a thing of the past and a version of radical criticism that has an easier time naming complicities than imagining alternatives. There have, of course, been scholars who have bucked against these conventions, detecting the positive tremors of utopia emanating from literary and cultural pr…
The Existential Drama of Capital. A review of Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets
The Existential Drama of Capital. A review of Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire:The Psychic Cost of Free Markets Christian Haines (bio) McGowan, Todd. Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. Columbia UP, 2016. In Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets, Todd McGowan offers a perverse starting point for the critique of capitalism: not the injustices and inequalities produced by capital accumulation, nor the repre…
Life After the Subject
The Impersonal Is Political: Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language , Feminism, and the Art of Biopolitics
Christian P. Haines, The Impersonal Is Political: Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language, Feminism, and the Art of Biopolitics, Cultural Critique, Vol. 96, What Comes After the Subject? (Spring 2017), pp. 178-215
Life's entanglements with writing: On Christopher Breu'sInsistence of the Materialand Arne De Boever'sNarrative Care
The field of biopolitics can be understood as a response to a fantasy: the fantasy of the flesh made word; the fantasy of life as a script infinitely open to revision.1 The response of biopolitics
Specters of the Dialectic
Corporeal Time: The Cinematic Bodies of Arthur Rimbaud and Gilles Deleuze
This article examines the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (especially Cinema) and the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud in terms of the intersection between corporeality, temporality, and the political. The first part analyzes the deconstruction of lyrical subjectivity in Rimbaud’s verse in relation to the breakdown of the “sensory-motor link” described in the first volume of Deleuze’s Cinema; it discusses these homologous movements as a release of free-floa…
Planetary utopianism: Geoengineering, Speculative Fiction, and the Planetary Turn
This essay proposes the term planetary utopianism to name the imagination of a radically changed planet Earth in the future. Such utopianism is ecological at its core, for it implies the reconstitution of nature, as well as society. It’s also inextricable from a critique of capitalism insofar as the latter has become, in Jason W. Moore’s expression, a world-ecology. The essay focuses on geoengineering and on the representation of geoengineering i…
Corporeal Time: The Cinematic Bodies of Arthur Rimbaud and Gilles Deleuze
This article examines the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (especially Cinema) and the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud in terms of the intersection between corporeality, temporality, and the political. The first part analyzes the deconstruction of lyrical subjectivity in Rimbaud’s verse in relation to the breakdown of the “sensory-motor link” described in the first volume of Deleuze’s Cinema; it discusses these homologous movements as a release of free-floa…
Life After the Subject
Specters of the Dialectic
Corporeal Time: The Cinematic Bodies of Arthur Rimbaud and Gilles Deleuze
This article examines the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (especially Cinema) and the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud in terms of the intersection between corporeality, temporality, and the political. The first part analyzes the deconstruction of lyrical subjectivity in Rimbaud’s verse in relation to the breakdown of the “sensory-motor link” described in the first volume of Deleuze’s Cinema; it discusses these homologous movements as a release of free-floa…
Life's entanglements with writing: On Christopher Breu'sInsistence of the Materialand Arne De Boever'sNarrative Care
The field of biopolitics can be understood as a response to a fantasy: the fantasy of the flesh made word; the fantasy of life as a script infinitely open to revision.1 The response of biopolitics
Life After the Subject
The Impersonal Is Political: Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language , Feminism, and the Art of Biopolitics
Christian P. Haines, The Impersonal Is Political: Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language, Feminism, and the Art of Biopolitics, Cultural Critique, Vol. 96, What Comes After the Subject? (Spring 2017), pp. 178-215
The Existential Drama of Capital. A review of Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets
The Existential Drama of Capital. A review of Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire:The Psychic Cost of Free Markets Christian Haines (bio) McGowan, Todd. Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. Columbia UP, 2016. In Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets, Todd McGowan offers a perverse starting point for the critique of capitalism: not the injustices and inequalities produced by capital accumulation, nor the repre…
Utopias of OneLiterary Primitivism
Utopia is more often than not a term of embarrassment for the humanities. It finds itself caught between a post–Cold War liberal conviction that system change is a thing of the past and a version of radical criticism that has an easier time naming complicities than imagining alternatives. There have, of course, been scholars who have bucked against these conventions, detecting the positive tremors of utopia emanating from literary and cultural pr…
Planetary utopianism: Geoengineering, Speculative Fiction, and the Planetary Turn
This essay proposes the term planetary utopianism to name the imagination of a radically changed planet Earth in the future. Such utopianism is ecological at its core, for it implies the reconstitution of nature, as well as society. It’s also inextricable from a critique of capitalism insofar as the latter has become, in Jason W. Moore’s expression, a world-ecology. The essay focuses on geoengineering and on the representation of geoengineering i…
Response 3: “Unshakeable Want”: Solarpunk, Petromodernity, and the Death Drive
Dex escapes the city: “Sometimes, a person reaches a point in their life when it becomes absolutely essential to get the fuck out of the city.” They change careers, become a tea monk, a vocation blending botanical remedy with therapeutic conversation. Dex embraces a new form of life; they learn to occupy time and attune to nature in a different way. They also repeat the foundational reconciliation between civilization and nature that is the signa…
Introduction: Hope Through Action—Solarpunk Blueprints, Desires, and Politics
What can solarpunk make us believe? What can it make us do? Can it inspire the kind of action that might resolve, overcome, or adapt to climate crisis? These are the questions asked in Alexa Weik von Mossner’s “Wish We Were There: Hope, Desire, and Utopian Community in Contemporary Solarpunk,” the feature article of this CRITICAL FORUM on the emergent genre of solarpunk. Weik von Mossner praises solarpunk’s “dynamic of realist audacity and radica…
Editors’ Message
This issue of Utopian Studies represents a journal milestone: thirty-five years of publication. Our gift to ourselves is the expansion of our editorial team, with Associate Editor Christian P. Haines overseeing the CRITICAL FORUM section of the journal. He is already at work on the FORUM for the upcoming special issue on Queer Utopias (vol. 36, no. 1). An associate professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University, Christian specializes i…
Critical Forum Introduction: Muñoz’s Ghost, or, The Sparks of Other Tomorrows
It is tempting to write of José Esteban Muñoz’s death in December 2013 as if it coincided with the historical fate of queer theory, as if the passing of Muñoz were the harbinger of the latter’s extinction. It’s not that queer theory has stopped being written, of course, nor that it’s gone out of fashion, but rather that its historical mission has been called into question by its own proponents and practitioners.1 To what degree has queer theory t…
Editors’ Message
This final issue of Utopian Studies 36 (2025) offers topics ranging from early Islamic utopianism to Soviet-era urban design, and from prison abolition to “trans excess.” Shea Hennum’s “Abolitionist Speculation” opens the ARTICLES section, theorizing the practice of imagining a world without prisons and the conditions that would make such a world possible. Hennum locates this concept in the history of utopian and dystopian literature’s attention …
The Anthropocene Interregnum: Ecological Marxism and the Social Metabolism of the Present
This essay argues for an understanding of the Anthropocene as both historical impasse and historical transition. It is an impasse insofar as there is a conceptual and practical gap between human history and planetary history, or politics and ecology. It is a transition insofar as it marks the passage from one geological epoch to another and from one dominant social formation (capitalism) and the possibility of another. The author makes the case t…
Introduction: Utopian Futures in an Authoritarian Present
Editors’ Message
Metabolism
Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'
Art (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · History (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction (6 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works)