Disturbing Attachments

Jean Genet (1910–1986) resonates, perhaps more than any other canonical queer figure from the pre-Stonewall past, with contemporary queer sensibilities attuned to a defiant non-normativity. Not only sexually queer, Genet was also a criminal and a social pariah, a bitter opponent of the police state, and an ally of revolutionary anticolonial movements. In Disturbing Attachments, Kadji Amin challenges the idealization of Genet as a paradigmatic figure within queer studies to illuminate the methodological dilemmas at the heart of queer theory. Pederasty, which was central to Genet's sexuality and to his passionate cross-racial and transnational political activism late in life, is among a series of problematic and outmoded queer attachments that Amin uses to deidealize and historicize queer theory. He brings the genealogy of Genet's imaginaries of attachment to bear on pressing issues within contemporary queer politics and scholarship, including prison abolition, homonationalism, and pinkwashing. Disturbing Attachments productively and provocatively unsettles queer studies by excavating the history of its affective tendencies to reveal and ultimately expand the contexts that inform the use and connotations of the term queer.

It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics. As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx, Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old ''narrative of disenchantment,'' one that presents a new ''alter-tale'' that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world.

A comprehensive treatment approach for the repair and resolution of attachment disturbances in adults, for use in clinical settings. With contributions by Paula Morgan-Johnson, Paula Sacks, Caroline R. Baltzer, James Hickey, Andrea Cole, Jan Bloom, and Deirdre Fay. Attachment Disturbances in Adults is a landmark resource for (1) understanding attachment, its development, and the most clinically relevant findings from attachment research, and (2) using this understanding to inform systematic, comprehensive, and clinically effective and efficient treatment of attachment disturbances in adults. It offers an innovative therapeutic model and set of methods for treating adult patients with dismissing, anxious-preoccupied, or disorganized attachment. In rich detail, it integrates historical and leading-edge attachment research into practical, effective treatment protocols for each type of insecure attachment. Case transcripts and many sample therapist phrasings illustrate how to apply the methods in practice. Part I, "Foundational Concepts," features a comprehensive overview of the field of attachment, including its history, seminal ideas, and existing knowledge about the development of attachment bonds and behaviors. Part II, "Assessment," addresses the assessment of attachment disturbances. It includes an overview of attachment assessment for the clinician and a trove of practical recommendations for assessing patients' attachment behavior and status both outside of and within the therapeutic relationship. In Part III, "Treatment," the authors not only review existing treatment approaches for attachment disorders in adults, but also introduce an unprecedented, powerful new treatment method. This method, the "Three Pillars" model, is built on three essential clinical ingredients: Systematically utilizing ideal parent figure imagery to develop a new positive, stable internal working model of secure attachment Fostering a range of metacognitive skills Fostering nonverbal and verbal collaborative behavior in treatment Used together, these interdependent pillars form a unified and profoundly effective method of treatment for attachment disturbances in adults—a must for any clinician. In Part IV, "Type-Specific Treatment," readers will learn specific variations of the three treatment pillars to maximize efficacy with each type of insecure attachment. Finally, Part V, "A Treatment Guide and Expected Outcomes," describes treatment in a step-by-step format and provides a success-assessment guide for the Three Pillars approach. This book is a comprehensive educational resource and a deeply practical clinical guide. It offers clinicians a complete set of tools for effective and efficient treatment of adult patients with attachment disturbances.

Situated at the crossroads of queer theory and postcolonial studies, Hybrid Anxieties analyzes the intertwined and composite aspects of identities and textual forms in the wake of the French-Algerian War (1954-1962). C. L. Quinan argues that the war precipitated a dynamic in which a contestation of hegemonic masculinity occurred alongside a production of queer modes of subjectivity, embodiment, and memory that subvert norms. Innovations in literature and cinema were also directly impacted by the long and difficult process of decolonization, as the war provoked a rethinking of politics and aesthetics. The novels, films, and poetry analyzed in Hybrid Anxieties trace this imbrication of content and form, demonstrating how a postwar fracturing had both salutary and injurious effects, not only on bodies and psyches but also on artistic forms. Adopting a queer postcolonial perspective, Hybrid Anxieties adds a new impulse to the question of how to rethink hegemonic notions of gender, sexuality, and nationality, thereby opening up new spaces for considering the redemptive and productive possibilities of negotiating life in a postcolonial context. Without losing sight of the trauma of this particularly violent chapter in history, Hybrid Anxieties proposes a new kind of hybridity that, however anxious and anticipatory, emphasizes the productive forces of a queer desire to deconstruct teleological relationships between past, present, and future.

In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. There have been numerous books about mother and daughter, but none has dealt with this closest of filial relations as directly or as ruthlessly. Gornick's groundbreaking book confronts what Edna O'Brien has called "the prinicpal crux of female despair": the unacknowledged Oedipal nature of the mother-daughter bond. Born and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of "urban peasants," Gornick grows up in a household dominated by her intelligent but uneducated mother's romantic depression over the early death of her husband. Next door lives Nettie, an attractive widow whose calculating sensuality appeals greatly to Vivian. These women with their opposing models of femininity continue, well into adulthood, to affect Gornick's struggle to find herself in love and in work. As Gornick walks with her aged mother through the streets of New York, arguing and remembering the past, each wins the reader's admiration: the caustic and clear-thinking daughter, for her courage and tenacity in really talking to her mother about the most basic issues of their lives, and the still powerful and intuitively-wise old woman, who again and again proves herself her daughter's mother. Unsparing, deeply courageous, Fierce Attachments is one of the most remarkable documents of family feeling that has been written, a classic that helped start the memoir boom and remains one of the most moving examples of the genre.

This groundbreaking book explores the relevance of queer theory to Translation Studies and of translation to Global Sexuality Studies. Beginning with a comprehensive overview of the origins and evolution of queer theory, this book places queer theory and Translation Studies in a productive and mutually interrogating relationship. After framing the discussion of actual and potential interfaces between queer sexuality and queer textuality, the chapters trace the transnational circulation of queer texts, focusing on the place of translation in "gay" anthologies, the packaging of queer life writing for global audiences, and the translation of lyric poetry as a distinct site of queer performativity. Baer analyzes fictional translators in literature and film, the treatment of translation in historical and ethnographic studies of sexual and linguistic others, the work of queer translators, and the reception of queer texts in translation. Including a range of case studies to exemplify key ethical issues relevant to all scholars of global sexuality and postcolonial studies, this book is essential reading for advanced students, scholars, and researchers in Translation Studies, gender and sexuality studies, and related areas.

"Explores how institutional management of children's sexualities in reform schools, schools for the blind, African American industrial schools, and Native American boarding schools impacted children's future social, political, and economic opportunities - and thus produced queer childhoods"--

In this book, Octavio R. González revisits the theme of alienation in the twentieth-century novel, identifying an alternative aesthetic centered on the experience of double exile, or marginalization from both majority and home culture. This misfit modernist aesthetic decenters the mainstream narrative of modernism—which explores alienation from a universal and existential perspective—by showing how a group of authors leveraged modernist narrative to explore minoritarian experiences of cultural nonbelonging. Tying the biography of a particular author to a close reading of one of that author’s major works, González considers in turn Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry, Jean Rhys’s Quartet, and Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man. Each of these novels explores conditions of maladjustment within one of three burgeoning cultural movements that sought representation in the greater public sphere: the New Negro movement during the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s Paris expatriate scene, and the queer expatriate scene in Los Angeles before Stonewall. Using a methodological approach that resists institutional taxonomies of knowledge, González shows that this double exile speaks profoundly through largely autobiographical narratives and that the novels’ protagonists challenge the compromises made by these minoritarian groups out of an urge to assimilate into dominant social norms and values. Original and innovative, Misfit Modernism is a vital contribution to conversations about modernism in the contexts of sexual identity, nationality, and race. Moving beyond the debates over the intellectual legacies of intersectionality and queer theory, González shows us new ways to think about exclusion.