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 citizen-epitomized 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 overregulation-except 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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