Casey Ryan Kelly
Biographic Data
| ID | 5594926 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Casey Ryan Kelly |
| GIVEN NAMES | Casey Ryan |
| FAMILY NAME | Kelly |
| SIGNATURE | KELLY C R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Nebraska–Lincoln |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2250-6822 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 72 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Manifesting Violence: White Terrorism, Digital Culture, and the Rhetoric of Replacement
White nationalist fairytales: The Little Mermaid and neo-segregation in the Breitbart town square
Monetizing Failure: Fyre Fraud, Social Media, and the Normalization of Crisis
This essay analyzes the social media rebranding of the infamous Fyre Festival, a disastrous and fraudulent music concert that went viral in 2017. The posthumous life of the ill-fated festival illustrates the unique confluence of neoliberal crisis and the entrepreneurial logics of social media that enable failed entrepreneurs to exploit their own abject spectacles of fraud and unethical business practices into lucrative opportunities. By looking a…
The Reliant (2019) and the rhetoric of necropolitical Christianity
This essay examines the manufactured controversy over the independent Christian film The Reliant (2019), a film advertised as a pro-gun action-adventure. Despite receiving virtually no attention from the political left, the filmmakers’ engaged in a public relations campaign to spotlight the putative opposition to the film as evidence of a broader effort by secular progressives to persecute Christian ideas and values. In this essay, we argue that …
The most hated tree in America: Negative difference, the White imaginary, and the Bradford pear
Against claims that we now live in a post-racial era, this article argues that panic over so-called “invasive species” illustrates how negative conceptions of difference are built into the White imaginary. We argue that the calls to exterminate the infamous Bradford pear tree across the US function as a kind of nanoracism, or what Achilles Mbembe defines as the organization of everyday affairs according to us–them logics that further justify over…
Covid-19 conspiracy rhetoric and other primal fantasies
Planet Lockdown, a documentary film, claims that the COVID-19 pandemic was manufactured by finance capitalists, Silicon Valley, and the pharmaceutical industry to microchip the population, consolidate global wealth, and enslave the population. Viral videos from the film have received tens of millions of engagements throughout social networks and media, constituting a major source of COVID-19 disinformation. This article argues that COVID-19 ensla…
Do You Even Lift, Bro
This essay examines how pro-weight-lifting rhetoric on the Reddit forum r/TheRedPill is illustrative of how far-right networks prepare white men's bodies to participate in white supremacy. I argue that recent figurations of the muscled white cisgender male body unite nationalistic commitments with neoliberal subjectification in a rhetoric of bodily capacitation: discourses that resuscitate debilitated subjects back into the realm of able-bodied c…
Pants on Fyre: Parasitic masculinity and the Fyre festival documentaries
The documentaries Fyre Fraud and FYRE: The Greatest Party that Never Happened recount the fraudulent and imprudent decision-making process that led up to the ill-fated Fyre Fest. These documentaries represent the music festival’s failure through depictions of white masculinity that seek parasitic attachment and proximity to the hegemonic ideal of masculine authority in the neoliberal marketplace. We argue that these movies map the operations of a…
Embodied abject play: Women “sex comics” and abject feminism
We analyze the performances of comics Whitney Cummings, Nikki Glaser, Amy Schumer, and Ali Wong that address topics that patriarchal culture has deemed abject about women’s bodies. These routines destabilize the patriarchal grounds of abjection through what we have termed embodied abject play: the shocking yet humorous re-presentation of bodies and bodily excesses that have been relegated to the margins, repressed, disavowed, or otherwise expelle…
White pain
President Trump’s 2016 electoral victory prompted a series of journalist inquiries into the pain of white Rust Belt voters. Imploring readers to heed their cries for help, profiles of “Trump Country” suggested that declining physical health and economic anxiety explained Trump’s success more so than racism and xenophobia. This essay argues that the rhetoric of white working-class pain reproduces what Franz Fanon called a historical-racial schema:…
Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood
Introduction: The apocalyptic male -- Doomsday Preppers: the man-pocalypse -- Incel rebellion: fascism and male autarky -- Sun's out, guns out: open carry and the white male body -- Midnight in America: Donald J. Trump and political sadomasochism -- Conclusion: Return to Charlottesville
Heavy: The Obesity Crisis in Cultural Context
Donald J. Trump and the Rhetoric of White Ambivalence
This essay examines how President Trump’s vacillations between overt and colorblind racism represent the intensification of white racial anxieties in anticipation of an impending demographic shift toward a nonwhite majority. Trump’s contradictory rhetoric on race becomes legible in the context of white ambivalence, a condition that entails that white identity, history, and culture be respected as morally superior but, at the same time, not be cha…
Donald J. Trump and the rhetoric of ressentiment
This essay contributes to and reframes the preliminary scholarly assessments of President Donald J. Trump's appeals to rage, malice, and revenge by sketching the rhetorical dimensions of an underlying emotional-moral framework in which victimization, resentment, and revenge are inverted civic virtues. I elaborate on the concept of ressentiment (re-sentiment), a condition in which a subject is addled by rage and envy yet remains impotent, subjugat…
Virgin Lands: Gender, Nature, and the Frontier Myth in David Magnusson’s Purity
This essay examines David Magnusson’s 2014 photographic volume Purity featuring portraits of fathers and daughters who attend “purity balls,” ceremonial dances that celebrate young women’s decision to remain sexually abstinent until marriage. Staged outdoors near the subjects’ homes, most portraits feature fathers in black ties and daughters in ball gowns against a distant backdrop of sublime natural landscapes. We argue that the project’s arrang…
Constructing Lumbersexuality: Marketing an Emergent Masculine Taste Regime
This article examines the online retailer Huckberry.com as a singular, centralized authority responsible for marketing “lumbersexuality” as an emergent, gender-normative taste regime. As an evolution of the devalued hipster marketplace myth, analysis reveals Huckberry promotes an adaptable taste regime to its young, educated, urban, White male clientele that unites goods, meanings, and practices across multiple fields of consumption that reconnec…
Emasculating Trump: Incredulity, Homophobia, and the Spectacle of White Masculinity
This article examines the artistic campaign to emasculate Donald Trump through an analysis of public art installations and protest art that inverts the president’s avowed gender identity, depicting him as a woman, cross-dresser, eunuch, queer, transgender, and/or castrated male. Central to my argument is that white masculinity is so intertwined with homophobia that even ironic critiques of so-called toxic masculinity insulate more banal expressio…
The wounded man: Foxcatcher and the incoherence of white masculine victimhood
American cinema has recently favored representations of white men as victims of socioeconomic and political change. Recent scholarship on white masculinity suggests that representations of male victimhood enable white men to disavow that hegemonic white masculinity still fundamentally structures society. This essay argues that Hollywood’s wounded man similarly provides white masculinity with stable footing. I illustrate how the unintelligibility …
The man-pocalpyse: Doomsday Preppers and the rituals of apocalyptic manhood
This essay argues that recent male performances of disaster preparedness in reality television recuperate a preindustrial model of hegemonic masculinity by staging the plausible “real world” conditions under which manly skills appear necessary for collective survival. Representations of masculinity in uncertain times intensify the masculinity-in-crisis motif to cultivate anticipation of an apocalyptic event that promises a final resolution to mal…
Camp Horror and the Gendered Politics of Screen Violence: Subverting the Monstrous-Feminine in Teeth (2007)
This essay argues that Mitchell Lichtenstein’s film Teeth (2007) is an exemplary appropriation of the femme castratrice, a sadistic and castrating female figure that subverts the patriarchal mythologies undergirding the gendered logics of both screen violence and cultural misogyny. The film chronicles Dawn’s post–sexual assault transformation from a passive defender of women’s purity to an avenging heroine with castrating genitals. First, I illus…
I’m Here to Do Business. I’m Not Here to Play Games.” Work, Consumption, and Masculinity in Storage Wars
This essay examines the first season of Storage Wars and suggests the program helps mediate the putative crisis in American masculinity by suggesting that traditional male skills are still essential where knowledge supplants manual labor. We read representations of “men at work” in traditionally “feminine” consumer markets, as a form of masculine recuperation situated within the culture of White male injury. Specifically, Storage Wars appropriate…
Chastity for democracy: Surplus repression and the rhetoric of sex education
Moving from opposition to participation, the Adolescent Family Life Act (1981) and the development of abstinence education marks the conservative movement's pivot to a rhetorical strategy of tolerance that enabled it to coopt the public culture of sex discourse. Working from Herbert Marcuse's theory of “surplus repression,” I argue that the New Right seized the liberationist argument for open public discourse about sexuality to sublimate libidina…
American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment
Cooking Without Women: The Rhetoric of the New Culinary Male
Between their detailed instructions, measurements, and helpful hints, cookbooks provide directives about the proper management of household space. Cookbooks establish rules that govern intimate habits, helping readers to make sense of how cooking rituals fit within the domestic division of labor. They cultivate, naturalize, and sometimes resist domestic habits as they pass into the realm of unconscious investments that ideological critics call “c…
Shaved or Saved? Disciplining Women's Bodies
Proponents of sexual liberation and abstinence-until-marriage advocates appear to be on opposing ends of the sociopolitical spectrum; however, both are invested in the regulation of women’s vaginas. We argue that the rhetoric of both communities produces the same disciplinary configuration for the control of women’s bodies. Both communities instruct women that the appearance of a prepubescent and pure vagina is essential to sexual appeal and self…
Donald J. Trump and the rhetoric of ressentiment
This essay contributes to and reframes the preliminary scholarly assessments of President Donald J. Trump's appeals to rage, malice, and revenge by sketching the rhetorical dimensions of an underlying emotional-moral framework in which victimization, resentment, and revenge are inverted civic virtues. I elaborate on the concept of ressentiment (re-sentiment), a condition in which a subject is addled by rage and envy yet remains impotent, subjugat…
The man-pocalpyse: Doomsday Preppers and the rituals of apocalyptic manhood
This essay argues that recent male performances of disaster preparedness in reality television recuperate a preindustrial model of hegemonic masculinity by staging the plausible “real world” conditions under which manly skills appear necessary for collective survival. Representations of masculinity in uncertain times intensify the masculinity-in-crisis motif to cultivate anticipation of an apocalyptic event that promises a final resolution to mal…
Camp Horror and the Gendered Politics of Screen Violence: Subverting the Monstrous-Feminine in Teeth (2007)
This essay argues that Mitchell Lichtenstein’s film Teeth (2007) is an exemplary appropriation of the femme castratrice, a sadistic and castrating female figure that subverts the patriarchal mythologies undergirding the gendered logics of both screen violence and cultural misogyny. The film chronicles Dawn’s post–sexual assault transformation from a passive defender of women’s purity to an avenging heroine with castrating genitals. First, I illus…
Donald J. Trump and the Rhetoric of White Ambivalence
This essay examines how President Trump’s vacillations between overt and colorblind racism represent the intensification of white racial anxieties in anticipation of an impending demographic shift toward a nonwhite majority. Trump’s contradictory rhetoric on race becomes legible in the context of white ambivalence, a condition that entails that white identity, history, and culture be respected as morally superior but, at the same time, not be cha…
Constructing Lumbersexuality: Marketing an Emergent Masculine Taste Regime
This article examines the online retailer Huckberry.com as a singular, centralized authority responsible for marketing “lumbersexuality” as an emergent, gender-normative taste regime. As an evolution of the devalued hipster marketplace myth, analysis reveals Huckberry promotes an adaptable taste regime to its young, educated, urban, White male clientele that unites goods, meanings, and practices across multiple fields of consumption that reconnec…
Shaved or Saved? Disciplining Women's Bodies
Proponents of sexual liberation and abstinence-until-marriage advocates appear to be on opposing ends of the sociopolitical spectrum; however, both are invested in the regulation of women’s vaginas. We argue that the rhetoric of both communities produces the same disciplinary configuration for the control of women’s bodies. Both communities instruct women that the appearance of a prepubescent and pure vagina is essential to sexual appeal and self…
The wounded man: Foxcatcher and the incoherence of white masculine victimhood
American cinema has recently favored representations of white men as victims of socioeconomic and political change. Recent scholarship on white masculinity suggests that representations of male victimhood enable white men to disavow that hegemonic white masculinity still fundamentally structures society. This essay argues that Hollywood’s wounded man similarly provides white masculinity with stable footing. I illustrate how the unintelligibility …
The Post-Nuclear Family and the Depoliticization of Unplanned Pregnancy in Knocked Up, Juno, and Waitress
This essay explores three films from 2007, Knocked Up, Juno, and Waitress, which foreground young women's unplanned pregnancies. These movies depoliticize women's reproduction and motherhood through narratives that rearticulate the meaning of choice. Bypassing the subject of abortion, the women's decisions revolve around their choice of heterosexual partners and investment in romantic relationships. Although they question the viability of the nuc…
Women's Rhetorical Agency in the American West: The New Penelope
This essay theorizes women’s rhetorical agency in the nineteenth-century American West. Contrast between fluid gender norms in frontier life and the Cult of True Womanhood highlights how agency is confined by materiality. Agency is the capacity to recognize and act in moments when material structures are vulnerable to resignification. I offer an analysis of Frances Fuller Victor’s novella The New Penelope to demonstrate how pioneer women writers …
Covid-19 conspiracy rhetoric and other primal fantasies
Planet Lockdown, a documentary film, claims that the COVID-19 pandemic was manufactured by finance capitalists, Silicon Valley, and the pharmaceutical industry to microchip the population, consolidate global wealth, and enslave the population. Viral videos from the film have received tens of millions of engagements throughout social networks and media, constituting a major source of COVID-19 disinformation. This article argues that COVID-19 ensla…
Pants on Fyre: Parasitic masculinity and the Fyre festival documentaries
The documentaries Fyre Fraud and FYRE: The Greatest Party that Never Happened recount the fraudulent and imprudent decision-making process that led up to the ill-fated Fyre Fest. These documentaries represent the music festival’s failure through depictions of white masculinity that seek parasitic attachment and proximity to the hegemonic ideal of masculine authority in the neoliberal marketplace. We argue that these movies map the operations of a…
White pain
President Trump’s 2016 electoral victory prompted a series of journalist inquiries into the pain of white Rust Belt voters. Imploring readers to heed their cries for help, profiles of “Trump Country” suggested that declining physical health and economic anxiety explained Trump’s success more so than racism and xenophobia. This essay argues that the rhetoric of white working-class pain reproduces what Franz Fanon called a historical-racial schema:…
Virgin Lands: Gender, Nature, and the Frontier Myth in David Magnusson’s Purity
This essay examines David Magnusson’s 2014 photographic volume Purity featuring portraits of fathers and daughters who attend “purity balls,” ceremonial dances that celebrate young women’s decision to remain sexually abstinent until marriage. Staged outdoors near the subjects’ homes, most portraits feature fathers in black ties and daughters in ball gowns against a distant backdrop of sublime natural landscapes. We argue that the project’s arrang…
I’m Here to Do Business. I’m Not Here to Play Games.” Work, Consumption, and Masculinity in Storage Wars
This essay examines the first season of Storage Wars and suggests the program helps mediate the putative crisis in American masculinity by suggesting that traditional male skills are still essential where knowledge supplants manual labor. We read representations of “men at work” in traditionally “feminine” consumer markets, as a form of masculine recuperation situated within the culture of White male injury. Specifically, Storage Wars appropriate…
Cooking Without Women: The Rhetoric of the New Culinary Male
Between their detailed instructions, measurements, and helpful hints, cookbooks provide directives about the proper management of household space. Cookbooks establish rules that govern intimate habits, helping readers to make sense of how cooking rituals fit within the domestic division of labor. They cultivate, naturalize, and sometimes resist domestic habits as they pass into the realm of unconscious investments that ideological critics call “c…
Feminine Purity and Masculine Revenge-Seeking In Taken (2008)
The 2008 film Taken depicts the murderous rampage of an ex-CIA agent seeking to recover his teenage daughter from foreign sex traffickers. I argue that Taken articulates a demand for a white male protector to serve as both guardian and avenger of white women's “purity” against the purportedly violent and sexual impulses of third world men. A neocolonial narrative retold through film, Taken infers that the protection of white feminine purity legit…
Blood-Speak: Ward Churchill and the Racialization of American Indian Identity
After publishing a controversial essay on 9/11, Professor Ward Churchill's scholarship and personal identity were subjected to a hostile public investigation. Evidence that Churchill had invented his American Indian identity created vehemence among many professors and tribal leaders who dismissed Churchill because he was not a “real Indian.” This essay examines the discourses of racial authenticity employed to distance Churchill from tribal commu…
Women's Rhetorical Agency in the American West: The New Penelope
This essay theorizes women’s rhetorical agency in the nineteenth-century American West. Contrast between fluid gender norms in frontier life and the Cult of True Womanhood highlights how agency is confined by materiality. Agency is the capacity to recognize and act in moments when material structures are vulnerable to resignification. I offer an analysis of Frances Fuller Victor’s novella The New Penelope to demonstrate how pioneer women writers …
The Post-Nuclear Family and the Depoliticization of Unplanned Pregnancy in Knocked Up, Juno, and Waitress
This essay explores three films from 2007, Knocked Up, Juno, and Waitress, which foreground young women's unplanned pregnancies. These movies depoliticize women's reproduction and motherhood through narratives that rearticulate the meaning of choice. Bypassing the subject of abortion, the women's decisions revolve around their choice of heterosexual partners and investment in romantic relationships. Although they question the viability of the nuc…
Blood-Speak: Ward Churchill and the Racialization of American Indian Identity
After publishing a controversial essay on 9/11, Professor Ward Churchill's scholarship and personal identity were subjected to a hostile public investigation. Evidence that Churchill had invented his American Indian identity created vehemence among many professors and tribal leaders who dismissed Churchill because he was not a “real Indian.” This essay examines the discourses of racial authenticity employed to distance Churchill from tribal commu…
Neocolonialism and the Global Prison in National Geographic's Locked Up Abroad
This essay examines the reformulation of colonial ideologies in National Geographic Channel's Locked Up Abroad, a documentary program that chronicles the narratives of Westerner travelers incarcerated in foreign nations. An analysis of Locked Up Abroad evinces neocolonialism in contemporary media culture, including: the historic association between dark-skin and savagery, the backwardness of the non-Western world, and the Western imperative to ci…
Feminine Purity and Masculine Revenge-Seeking In Taken (2008)
The 2008 film Taken depicts the murderous rampage of an ex-CIA agent seeking to recover his teenage daughter from foreign sex traffickers. I argue that Taken articulates a demand for a white male protector to serve as both guardian and avenger of white women's “purity” against the purportedly violent and sexual impulses of third world men. A neocolonial narrative retold through film, Taken infers that the protection of white feminine purity legit…
Cooking Without Women: The Rhetoric of the New Culinary Male
Between their detailed instructions, measurements, and helpful hints, cookbooks provide directives about the proper management of household space. Cookbooks establish rules that govern intimate habits, helping readers to make sense of how cooking rituals fit within the domestic division of labor. They cultivate, naturalize, and sometimes resist domestic habits as they pass into the realm of unconscious investments that ideological critics call “c…
Shaved or Saved? Disciplining Women's Bodies
Proponents of sexual liberation and abstinence-until-marriage advocates appear to be on opposing ends of the sociopolitical spectrum; however, both are invested in the regulation of women’s vaginas. We argue that the rhetoric of both communities produces the same disciplinary configuration for the control of women’s bodies. Both communities instruct women that the appearance of a prepubescent and pure vagina is essential to sexual appeal and self…
The man-pocalpyse: Doomsday Preppers and the rituals of apocalyptic manhood
This essay argues that recent male performances of disaster preparedness in reality television recuperate a preindustrial model of hegemonic masculinity by staging the plausible “real world” conditions under which manly skills appear necessary for collective survival. Representations of masculinity in uncertain times intensify the masculinity-in-crisis motif to cultivate anticipation of an apocalyptic event that promises a final resolution to mal…
Camp Horror and the Gendered Politics of Screen Violence: Subverting the Monstrous-Feminine in Teeth (2007)
This essay argues that Mitchell Lichtenstein’s film Teeth (2007) is an exemplary appropriation of the femme castratrice, a sadistic and castrating female figure that subverts the patriarchal mythologies undergirding the gendered logics of both screen violence and cultural misogyny. The film chronicles Dawn’s post–sexual assault transformation from a passive defender of women’s purity to an avenging heroine with castrating genitals. First, I illus…
I’m Here to Do Business. I’m Not Here to Play Games.” Work, Consumption, and Masculinity in Storage Wars
This essay examines the first season of Storage Wars and suggests the program helps mediate the putative crisis in American masculinity by suggesting that traditional male skills are still essential where knowledge supplants manual labor. We read representations of “men at work” in traditionally “feminine” consumer markets, as a form of masculine recuperation situated within the culture of White male injury. Specifically, Storage Wars appropriate…
Chastity for democracy: Surplus repression and the rhetoric of sex education
Moving from opposition to participation, the Adolescent Family Life Act (1981) and the development of abstinence education marks the conservative movement's pivot to a rhetorical strategy of tolerance that enabled it to coopt the public culture of sex discourse. Working from Herbert Marcuse's theory of “surplus repression,” I argue that the New Right seized the liberationist argument for open public discourse about sexuality to sublimate libidina…
American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment
Emasculating Trump: Incredulity, Homophobia, and the Spectacle of White Masculinity
This article examines the artistic campaign to emasculate Donald Trump through an analysis of public art installations and protest art that inverts the president’s avowed gender identity, depicting him as a woman, cross-dresser, eunuch, queer, transgender, and/or castrated male. Central to my argument is that white masculinity is so intertwined with homophobia that even ironic critiques of so-called toxic masculinity insulate more banal expressio…
The wounded man: Foxcatcher and the incoherence of white masculine victimhood
American cinema has recently favored representations of white men as victims of socioeconomic and political change. Recent scholarship on white masculinity suggests that representations of male victimhood enable white men to disavow that hegemonic white masculinity still fundamentally structures society. This essay argues that Hollywood’s wounded man similarly provides white masculinity with stable footing. I illustrate how the unintelligibility …
Virgin Lands: Gender, Nature, and the Frontier Myth in David Magnusson’s Purity
This essay examines David Magnusson’s 2014 photographic volume Purity featuring portraits of fathers and daughters who attend “purity balls,” ceremonial dances that celebrate young women’s decision to remain sexually abstinent until marriage. Staged outdoors near the subjects’ homes, most portraits feature fathers in black ties and daughters in ball gowns against a distant backdrop of sublime natural landscapes. We argue that the project’s arrang…
Constructing Lumbersexuality: Marketing an Emergent Masculine Taste Regime
This article examines the online retailer Huckberry.com as a singular, centralized authority responsible for marketing “lumbersexuality” as an emergent, gender-normative taste regime. As an evolution of the devalued hipster marketplace myth, analysis reveals Huckberry promotes an adaptable taste regime to its young, educated, urban, White male clientele that unites goods, meanings, and practices across multiple fields of consumption that reconnec…
Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood
Introduction: The apocalyptic male -- Doomsday Preppers: the man-pocalypse -- Incel rebellion: fascism and male autarky -- Sun's out, guns out: open carry and the white male body -- Midnight in America: Donald J. Trump and political sadomasochism -- Conclusion: Return to Charlottesville
Heavy: The Obesity Crisis in Cultural Context
Donald J. Trump and the Rhetoric of White Ambivalence
This essay examines how President Trump’s vacillations between overt and colorblind racism represent the intensification of white racial anxieties in anticipation of an impending demographic shift toward a nonwhite majority. Trump’s contradictory rhetoric on race becomes legible in the context of white ambivalence, a condition that entails that white identity, history, and culture be respected as morally superior but, at the same time, not be cha…
Donald J. Trump and the rhetoric of ressentiment
This essay contributes to and reframes the preliminary scholarly assessments of President Donald J. Trump's appeals to rage, malice, and revenge by sketching the rhetorical dimensions of an underlying emotional-moral framework in which victimization, resentment, and revenge are inverted civic virtues. I elaborate on the concept of ressentiment (re-sentiment), a condition in which a subject is addled by rage and envy yet remains impotent, subjugat…
Embodied abject play: Women “sex comics” and abject feminism
We analyze the performances of comics Whitney Cummings, Nikki Glaser, Amy Schumer, and Ali Wong that address topics that patriarchal culture has deemed abject about women’s bodies. These routines destabilize the patriarchal grounds of abjection through what we have termed embodied abject play: the shocking yet humorous re-presentation of bodies and bodily excesses that have been relegated to the margins, repressed, disavowed, or otherwise expelle…
White pain
President Trump’s 2016 electoral victory prompted a series of journalist inquiries into the pain of white Rust Belt voters. Imploring readers to heed their cries for help, profiles of “Trump Country” suggested that declining physical health and economic anxiety explained Trump’s success more so than racism and xenophobia. This essay argues that the rhetoric of white working-class pain reproduces what Franz Fanon called a historical-racial schema:…
Do You Even Lift, Bro
This essay examines how pro-weight-lifting rhetoric on the Reddit forum r/TheRedPill is illustrative of how far-right networks prepare white men's bodies to participate in white supremacy. I argue that recent figurations of the muscled white cisgender male body unite nationalistic commitments with neoliberal subjectification in a rhetoric of bodily capacitation: discourses that resuscitate debilitated subjects back into the realm of able-bodied c…
Pants on Fyre: Parasitic masculinity and the Fyre festival documentaries
The documentaries Fyre Fraud and FYRE: The Greatest Party that Never Happened recount the fraudulent and imprudent decision-making process that led up to the ill-fated Fyre Fest. These documentaries represent the music festival’s failure through depictions of white masculinity that seek parasitic attachment and proximity to the hegemonic ideal of masculine authority in the neoliberal marketplace. We argue that these movies map the operations of a…
The most hated tree in America: Negative difference, the White imaginary, and the Bradford pear
Against claims that we now live in a post-racial era, this article argues that panic over so-called “invasive species” illustrates how negative conceptions of difference are built into the White imaginary. We argue that the calls to exterminate the infamous Bradford pear tree across the US function as a kind of nanoracism, or what Achilles Mbembe defines as the organization of everyday affairs according to us–them logics that further justify over…
Sociology (25 works) · Political science (23 works) · Gender Studies (21 works) · Art (18 works) · Law (18 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Aesthetics (13 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (11 works)