The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Series Q) | 
| Authors: Lauren Berlant, Lauren Berlant
Publisher: Duke University Press
Category: Book
Buy New: $79.95
Rating:  13 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 308
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 5.8 x 1.2
ISBN: 0822319314
Dewey Decimal Number: 323.0420973
EAN: 9780822319313
ASIN: 0822319314
Publication Date: December 1997
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, Lauren Berlant focuses on the need to revitalize public life and political agency in the United States. Delivering a devastating critique of contemporary discourses of American citizenship, she addresses the triumph of the idea of private life over that of public life borne in the right-wing agenda of the Reagan revolution. By beaming light onto the idealized images and narratives about sex and citizenship that now dominate the U.S. public sphere, Berlant argues that the political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. She asks why the contemporary ideal of citizenship is measured by personal and private acts and values rather than civic acts, and the ideal citizen has become one who, paradoxically, cannot yet act as a citizenaepitomized by the American child and the American fetus.
As Berlant traces the guiding images of U.S. citizenship through the process of privatization, she discusses the ideas of intimacy that have come to define national culture. From the fantasy of the American dream to the lessons of Forrest Gump, Lisa Simpson to Queer Nation, the reactionary culture of imperilled privilege to the testimony of Anita Hill, Berlant charts the landscape of American politics and culture. She examines the consequences of a shrinking and privatized concept of citizenship on increasing class, racial, sexual, and gender animosity and explores the contradictions of a conservative politics that maintains the sacredness of privacy, the virtue of the free market, and the immorality of state overregulationaexcept when it comes to issues of intimacy.
Drawing on literature, the law, and popular media, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City is a stunning and major statement about the nation and its citizens in an age of mass mediation. As it opens a critical space for new theory of agency, its narratives and gallery of images will challenge readers to rethink what it means to be American and to seek salvation in its promise.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 One of the best Cultural Studies books I've read May 12, 2005
Danny (Aotearoa)
6 out of 10 found this review helpful
It needs to be acknowledged that this underrated book will not please the reader who has done no serious engagement with the scholarship on a) popular culture, or b) sexuality and gender. It is evocative and deeply insightful, but precisely because it is methodologically sound it is not really as accessible to the casual reader as popular "non-fiction". I hope this - rather than knee-jerk cultural conservatism - accounts for the negative reviews on the site.
As an investigation of the complex dynamics of culture and citizenship, this is might be the best going. Even as a non-American, and noting the "dated" nature of the sources, I still gained many insights into contemporary nationalism from this book. It's also very funny in parts.
Other reviews have gone into more detail about how useful the book is. I'll just say that if you compare the arguments of the negative reviews against the arguments of the positive reviews, it will be clear to you that this book generates a polarised response of extreme satisfaction or dissatisfaction, and you should be able to work out which camp you fall in. I bought it second-hand, but would have felt that it was a bargain at the new cost. A tremendous piece of scholarship.
No evidence? Maybe you should learn to read. December 13, 2004
Ransom Edgeblood
7 out of 14 found this review helpful
If you want a better critique of the kind of anxiety this book can inspire in its critics, then read the book itself which of course fully anticipates and explains overly negative panic responses to its arguments and its extensive archive.
Not only is Berlant's Queen stuffed full of evidence, it considers the question of evidence at great length; indeed, EVIDENCE is one of the most important topics this brilliant book carefully considers. Additionally, the included gallery of images, like the photograph mentioned in the review below, provide a rich graphic museum of evidence of the type Berlant considers closely throughout this book. Have you ever read a closer, more evidentiary, or more thorough reading of The Simpsons in relation to what it means to be "an American" than this book provides? Or what of the numerous, numerous, fascinating moments from every American citizen's life that serve as evidence here? The close readings of American literature? The salient keen interpretations of the speech of politicians, news articles, television images and more? If this book lacks evidence, then cats lack fur and whiskers.
The negative reviews I've read here of Queen accuse the book of many flaws (including no evidence) and yet, ironically, offer absolutely ZERO evidence from Berlant's writing to back up their baseless criticisms which exemplify most of all a profound failure of intellectual engagement. Beyond this, I would suggest that when allowing one's own artwork to appear in a publication, one should try to understand the CONTEXT in which one's image will appear. The image in question, rather than appearing "out of context," is given a deep and fascinating context provided by Berlant's analysis. But you have to read the book to understand that context. Duh.
Finally, as to Berlant's style of writing, there is no contemporary author I have read who can take such complex ideas and then translate them into effective, meaningful problems familiar to us all in such direct, intelligent, thoughtful words. If you've ever had a thought that you felt was too complicated to write out in a clear fashion, read this book as much for its argument as for its example of courageous, articulate, living prose. You'll be inspired to write your thoughts too.
In the present politically disastrous, difficult moment in this country, when clear-thinking people fill their heads with fantasies of how to leave rather than remain implicated daily in its murderous, imperialistic, cynical policies, this book reminds us all of the outright power of clear political and social thinking. If there is a way back to an America with which progressives might identify, or about which progressives might again feel some political optimism, then Berlant's work is the vehicle which can move us in a hopeful direction: a direction that requires us to honor and use our intellects just at the moment when we are threatened by drowning inside a spiral of political depression created by a Conservative Ideology which hates individual thinkers just as much as it hates thought itself. I keep Berlant's work close at hand along with my passport, but if she's not willing to defect just yet than neither am I as long as I can be led in part by her thinking.
forget the cranks: this book is subtle and brilliant!!! November 9, 2001
8 out of 13 found this review helpful
On the face of it, the Queen of America is a book about family values and the fetish of innocence in the conservative citizenship ideology of the last few decades. But it is so much more than that. It is a brilliant work of cultural theory, but in the language of story telling. It considers why people have feelings about nationality and how they get that way, which couldn't be more important now. It challenges all sorts of norms about proper sexuality, knowledge, and politics, without being condescending. A slow, careful reading is powerfully well-rewarded.
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