#undisciplining

Select an established historian of sexuality and read their “canon.”  Write an intellectual biography describing what you see as their central preoccupations, methodologies, and contributions.  What are the questions their work raises and does not answer?  How do they exemplify (or fail to exemplify) the broader development of the subfield?  What is the relationship between earlier and later work?  Note that in order for this exercise to be successful, you will need to select someone who has written at least two books and several articles in the field.  (See me for suggestions.)

i’ve been thinking about this in the context of several popular (left theory) reappraisals i’ve watched happen over the past few years--not necessarily a new approach, but definitely something i’m noticing, not as much in the form of a zeitgeist (although the most recent zeitgeist around ep thompson has interested me) as personal scholarly preoccupations. the biggest example in my mind is sophie lewis picking up firestone as a kind of duty and personal dedication, and lewis does this kind of long-arch marxist reappraisal intellectual biography a lot. this piece on lillian faderman, for example, which i didn’t like--i almost never like anything at the baffler, awful editing--but which is essentially good work. gabriel winant’s work on barbara ehrenreich is another great example. winant does a lot of really i think field-shifting reappraisal of thompson, but ehrenreich is really his blorbo. i’m totally blown away by his ability to pick up one of the most well known public intellectuals of our time and force us to look at their body of work in its context, asking brand new questions--can’t even describe it. “a place to die” is the name of the article he primarily does that in, it’s one of the works of history that has impacted me the most. that’s kind of the work i’m imagining can come from the prompt above--that and something like an intellectual biography. that, and the introduction of gayle rubin’s deviations, which is like...one of my favorite things i have ever read. the way she tells us the story of her own work in its own times is such a treasure, in part because her way of historiciizing her own thinking serves as an emulation of the project of particularizing social life that her work was doing. it’s very clever. i think also of katherine mckittrick’s work on sylvia wynter, and certain (non philosopher) traditions of writing about your mentors--robin kelley on cedric robinson, for sure. there were some other scholars who did some interesting work on betty friedan, but i can’t think of them.

i’m thinking of chasing after this: who are the thinkers i am compelled to reevaluate, but who i also really love, enough to become their keepers? with the kinds of big bodies of work that require keeping? (margot canaday is an excellent example of a scholar whose intellectual biography i’m fascinated with, who i adore, and whose work i think is underratedly important, but who, because of the conditions of the institution under which she w,orked, has no “body of work” to speak of.) who are the thinkers that i keep finding myself thinking, nobody really knows what they were about, or up to? 

i’m very interested in this approach to historians, who don’t get approached like this very often, and who, over the past twenty years or so, have stopped producing bodies of work [structurally] as such. charles and louise tilly come to mind since their appearance in rubin’s autobiographical notes (whole side interest on the intellectual couples biography--the other one that has for some reason always hung me up is joan ockman and robert slutzky). old public school laborists--sidney fine is probably the most bizarrely forgotten labor historian, i have an attachment to him because i came across him early (since he wrote about flint). leon fink and dorothy sue cobble--basically people whose work show us something about an extinct relation between labor thought and public education. historians who were able to produce criticism alongside their monographs (other than just as timely pegged promotions of their monographs...)

i have a lot of this already with architecture thinkers--venturi and scully maybe obviously, but particularly charles jencks, who i became quite obsessed with when the public was looking toward “late modernism” and found themselves very wrong about both skyscrapers and what jencks said. i still think i love him, as a writer, more than almost any of them. above all though, insanely, and i think really getting at the heart of this prompt, are the critical/cultural turn/media studies 90s-on capital-T Architectural Theorists that nobody will even touch: beatriz colomina, reinhold martin (who has produced the most writing of anyone that i’d describe as “exactly the book i want to write exactly how i wouldn’t write it”) and, more than absolutely anyone, sylvia lavin. she’s one of the most powerful thinkers in architecture but the self-consciously populist critics loathe and ignore her, no one cites her, no one outside of MIT reads her, and everyone thinks she’s a huge bitch. sylvia lavin is one of only a handful thinkers who published something that fundamentally changed everything i thought about everything (outing that venturi and scully both lied about the antennae on guild house, which she says is the foundational myth of postmodernism). i would really love to understand everything she’s written, and how it came to be. also uncover the truth about whether she fired charles jencks from ucla (my white whale). also to say something stupid and insane like “actually she was a materialist. here’s why.”