16754
Hurst

Hurst Professor Grace Lavery Workshop - Liberalism and Demonology

Grace Lavery's work addresses the history and theory of interpretation under capitalism, with a focus on the ascription of sexual meaning to flesh. Embarking from the psychoanalytic insight that flesh is both meaningless and the means by which meaning becomes possible, Grace has studied rarefied and complex construals of flesh in a set of highly-specific historical circumstances: the late-Victorian obsession with Japanese effeminacy (in her first book, Quaint, Exquisite); the emergence of the transsexual as a focal point for modern ideas about bodily technique (in her second scholarly monograph, Pleasure and Efficacy); the rigorous making and unmaking of the modern heterosexual in the postwar sitcom (in her third scholarly monograph, Closures); and in the post-2016 period’s cinematic, literary, and metaphysical narratives of demonic possession (in her fourth, Personal Demons).

The consolidation of a rights-based discourse on gender transition over the last three decades has coincided with the heyday, and then the last days, of neoliberalism. What relation could the two bear to each other? In her new book, Personal Demons: Possession Narratives of Late Liberalism, Grace argues that the liberal trans rights framework undermined the liberal gay rights framework, by exposing its dependence on a form of mine/body dualism officially forbidden, but actually ubiquitous, in the power/knowledge matrix of neoliberal globalization. That exposure permits and necessitates attention to the spectacular dualisms that we are required to hold secretly in the present moment—her book considers notions of trans racialism, paedophilia, Scientology, the “incorrigibly violent criminal,” and the psychoanalytic drive.