Prose

Election

Election traces exclusionary concepts of property from the Puritan doctrine of unconditional election (including its legal manifestations) through Nathaniel Hawthorne and 19th-century self-defense law to T.C. Boyle and modern domestic violence law. It argues that Stand Your Ground laws’ major legal renovations, no duty to retreat and immunity from prosecution, parallel those of the Puritan Antinomian (“free grace”) Controversy. Even as the specifics of Puritan election fade from common moral vernacular, Stand Your Ground laws simulate the persistence of a still-elect, “original” American community.

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Private (Space), (Public) Property

Private (Space), (Public) Property explicitly, and formally, enacts one of my most enduring concerns: the tension between critic and critique. I enlist my own experience as evidence of the subjectivity and, thus, culpability, inhered in the critic’s relationship with one of America's most foundational ideologies: private property. Toggling between personal essay and critical analysis, this essay explores how we might mobilize literary and philosophical methods to confront and rewrite the ways in which concepts of “home” are used to justify structural exclusion. Holding a mirror up to my face without the protections of critical distance reveals an uncomfortable collusion with these patterns of exclusion, but it also creates openings, opportunities, that conventional criticism does not.

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Privacy

Privacy traces the affective conventions of revolutionary-era sentimental fiction through to legal privacy doctrine and the rhetoric of neo-liberal choice. It argues that the absorption of demands for female autonomy into the persistent structure of sex inequality is a pattern that began with the Revolutionary-era privatization of female political participation, and that it repeated first during campaigns for suffrage and then campaigns for reproductive rights, culminating in the contemporary natural-mother imperative. That is, women keep asking for equality, and they get maternity and the private sphere.

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