front cover of Bad Modernisms
Bad Modernisms
Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds.
Duke University Press, 2006
Modernism is hot again. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, poets and architects, designers and critics, teachers and artists are rediscovering the virtues of the previous century’s most vibrant cultural constellation. Yet this widespread embrace raises questions about modernism’s relation to its own success. Modernism’s “badness”—its emphasis on outrageous behavior, its elevation of negativity, its refusal to be condoned—seems essential to its power. But once modernism is accepted as “good” or valuable (as a great deal of modernist art now is), its status as a subversive aesthetic intervention seems undermined. The contributors to Bad Modernisms tease out the contradictions in modernism’s commitment to badness.

Bad Modernisms thus builds on and extends the “new modernist studies,” recent work marked by the application of diverse methods and attention to texts and artists not usually labeled as modernist. In this collection, these developments are exemplified by essays ranging from a reading of dandyism in 1920s Harlem as a performance of a “bad” black modernist imaginary to a consideration of Filipino American modernism in the context of anticolonialism. The contributors reconsider familiar figures—such as Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Josef von Sternberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein, W. H. Auden, and Wyndham Lewis—and bring to light the work of lesser-known artists, including the writer Carlos Bulosan and the experimental filmmaker Len Lye. Examining cultural artifacts ranging from novels to manifestos, from philosophical treatises to movie musicals, and from anthropological essays to advertising campaigns, these essays signal the capaciousness and energy galvanizing the new modernist studies.

Contributors. Lisa Fluet, Laura Frost, Michael LeMahieu, Heather K. Love, Douglas Mao, Jesse Matz, Joshua L. Miller, Monica L. Miller, Sianne Ngai, Martin Puchner, Rebecca L. Walkowitz

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front cover of Rethinking Sex, Volume 17
Rethinking Sex, Volume 17
Annemarie Jagose, Ann Cvetkovich, and Heather K. Love, special issue editors
Duke University Press
This special issue of GLQ celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Gayle Rubin’s groundbreaking essay, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” Credited with inaugurating the contemporary field of sexuality studies, Rubin’s essay calls for an “autonomous theory and politics specific to sexuality.” Looking at the intellectual and political gains of sexual freedom movements over the past two decades, “Rethinking Sex” explores the critical and activist afterlife of the controversial 1982 Barnard College Conference on Sexuality, where Rubin originally presented the essay.
In her contribution to this special issue, Rubin reflects on her earlier essay and examines developments in “pro-sex” feminism since the publication of “Thinking Sex.” Other noted scholars assess the significance of Rubin’s work for histories of sexuality and for new areas in queer studies, such as transgender studies, disability studies, and transnational studies. In honoring Rubin’s scholarship, the contributors address the history of sexual theory and politics and the forms that they might take in the twenty-first century.
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