R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Hennessy, Rosemary"

Browsing by Author "Hennessy, Rosemary"

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Inhabiting liberalism: politics, culture, and the spaces of masculine professionalism, 1823-1903
(2009) Morrison, Kevin A.; Michie, Helena; Patten, Robert L.; Wiener, Martin J.; Hennessy, Rosemary
Inhabiting Liberalism: Politics, Culture, and the Spaces of Masculine Professionalism, 1823-1903 investigates the physical, social, and epistemological spaces of Victorian liberalism. It argues that liberalism is locatable and that its locations matter. By locatable, I mean that the tenets of liberalism—a set of contentions about how one should live in the world—were formulated from within preexisting physical environments and also served as the basis for new ones. These environments were the places where liberalism was conceived or put into practice, its sites of meaning. This dissertation, therefore, takes up the following questions: How did the structures constitutive of particular environments shape Victorian intellectuals' conceptions of liberal norms and practices? What kinds of spatial configurations did they think were ideally suited to liberalism? Why do liberal characterological and temperamental ideals—detachment, objectivity, many-sidedness—seem so inextricably intertwined with the physically objectified social spaces that these intellectuals inhabited but often thought themselves to have transcended? And, if the places where liberalism was conceptualized or put into practice provide the background conditions of its intelligibility, then what might this mean for the recuperative approach to liberal theory recently advanced by a number of scholars working on the period? Although the following chapters explore various answers to these questions, my underlying premise is that social space, or the arrangement of differentiated positions, is instantiated by physical structures and inscribed within cognitive faculties that are themselves constituted, at least in part, by these structures. Through an examination of key architectural sites—including India House, the House of Commons, the country estate, the Athenaeum Club, and the People's Palace—as John Stuart Mill, Anthony Trollope, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Besant adapted, imagined, or lived in them and represented them in literary texts, I delineate the relationship between liberalism and the physical locations of its production and reception.
Lesbicas Negras' Ethics and The Scales of Racialized Sexual Recognitions in Gynecology and Public Discourses in Salvador-Bahia
(2015-04-20) Falu, Nessette; Faubion, James D; Howe, A. Cymene; Bongmba, Elias; Georges, Eugenia; Hennessy, Rosemary
This dissertation is an ethnographic investigation of the bio-cultural ethics of gynecological care among Afro-Brazilian lesbians, or lesbicas negras, in Salvador-Bahia. I argue that many lesbicas negras’ pursuit of what they believe is their human right to reveal their sexuality and integrate it into accessing quality gynecological care and health education from their physicians is informed by their ethical obligation to confront the wide social issue of “preconceito.” Preconceito, which literally translates to “prejudice,” represents a social phenomenon that signals how preconceived ideas can materialize micro-social inequities and the barriers to effective and affirming medical-patient interactions for these women. This project is an interpretation of the motivations and strategies to achieve social well-being in a context entrenched with preconceito toward skin color, homosexuality, poverty, and more. I contextualize particular strategies that help these women conceive themselves as agents of their well-being as black women, homosexuals, and as bodies historicized and continually marginalized as a population afflicted with economic, political, and health disparities. Theoretically, I demonstrate the ethical as a domain of relationships that my key interlocutors have toward themselves (also with others), and as a result, I pay attention to how such relationships inform a particular set of ethical practices for the acquisition of well-being and human rights as openly black gay women. I interpret such relationships to the self to be composed of the understandings my interlocutors have about the impact that the freedom to speak about their sexuality, particularly as consumers of healthcare system, has upon their well-being. Analytically, I scale the social complexities of pursuing recognition of sexual liberty across public discourses, micro-social quotidian experiences, and social interactions. Thus, I argue that lesbicas negras become ethical subjects everyday as they strive toward well-being and such strivings can demonstrate the complicated relationships across sexual health, sexuality, racial formations, social well-being, citizenship, public discourses, and freedom (libertade).
Literature and the Long Postwar: Recuperating the Post-45 Veteran
(2021-04-30) Pladus, Mallory; Hennessy, Rosemary; Comer, Krista
“Literature and the Long Postwar: Recuperating the Post-45 Veteran” examines the critical omission of the World War II veteran in literary studies. It argues that depictions of an aggrieved, often racialized veteran have been obscured for implying disapproval of a war that has been racially re-remembered and culturally protected as “good.” Retracing the World War II veteran in postwar cultural production elucidates a “problem” figure, for whom “readjustment” was a euphemistic slogan to encompass a variety of social, psychological, regional, racial, and sexual challenges. And yet, representations of anxious reentry have largely been smoothed over and replaced by the meta-narrative of the postwar good life and by canonical war literature focused on individual combat soldiers. As this study focuses on novels by N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, John Okada, and Louis Chu, it forces the distinction between war and postwar novels, and it analyzes the veteran as a strategic figure for embodying the discrepancies of American racial ideologies in theory versus practice. It reads the work of Flannery O’Connor as lamenting the status of white veterans maladjusted to the racial reform of the postwar South. Read together, reentry novels reveal how postwar writers responded to the war and the movements it catalyzed – such as decolonization, immigration reform, and civil rights – through the figure of the demobilized veteran. At the broadest level, this study identifies a set of tropes for the veteran’s portrayal, highlighting discourses of recuperative sexuality and representative patterns of displacement and removal. And it contends that a study of this kind is necessary given the framing of the field of contemporary literature, expressed through the shorthand of post-45.
Sexual Deregulation: Reading U.S. Subjects of Affective Labor from the Early Cold War to the Neoliberal Era
(2016-06-13) Fax, Joanna; Hennessy, Rosemary; Lurie, Susan
In recent years, critics of neoliberalism have turned to new forms of affective labor as one of the features of late-capitalist shifts in production. What remains less scrutinized, however, is the extent to which these forms of labor, as they are structured by the industries that make use of them, play a role in the development of homosexual identity categories that have also been understood and represented as affective. My study interrogates how the cultural regulation of postwar bodies intersects with an economic program that valorizes market freedom. I view this phase of homosexual modernity as unfolding through the logic of deregulation, linking new homosexual subjects to larger systems of flexible, affective labor integral to the ongoing project of free-market hegemony. Affect theory frames this story as the embodied and emotive capacity for social bonding, an element of labor that must be managed by and extracted from working subjects. My readings of novels featuring gay and lesbian subjects at work disclose writers’ critical engagement with cultural and economic deregulation from its nascent stages in the United States. My analysis traces the narration and re-narration of this modernizing program from the mid-twentieth to early twenty-first-century writers who wrestle with neoliberalism’s ambivalent impact on sexual identity and politics. The project consists of two parts each engaging neoliberal adjustments inaugurated in the early Cold War epoch. My analysis of works by James Baldwin, Patricia Highsmith, Jane Rule, and the lesbian pulp author Paula Christian in the first two chapters explores the recurring centrality of service labor as a significant though under-examined feature of the representation of homosexuality in fiction in the 1950s and early 1960s. These works showcase authors confronting the fraught relationship between homosexuality and deregulation ideology, which diminishes the dominance of particular heteronormative arrangements at the same time as it collaborates with new exploitative regimes under late capitalism. The two chapters of the dissertation’s second part examine the significance of historical fiction that revisits the McCarthy period. I read Audre Lorde’s 1982 biomythography Zami and Barbara Kingsolver’s 2009 novel The Lacuna as pivotal commentaries that re-examine this history through the lens of emotional labor to explore the racial, national, and class-based dimensions of queer identity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
States of Suffering: Marital Cruelty in Antebellum Virginia, Texas, and Wisconsin
(2012-09-05) Sager, Robin; Boles, John B.; Camp, Stephanie M.; Hennessy, Rosemary
This dissertation explores the nature of marriage, violence, and region in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. Based on more than 1,500 divorce cases, it argues that marriages were often characterized by open enmity, not companionate harmony. Violence and cruelty between spouses generally erupted as part of ongoing struggles for power in the household and in the relationship. As the only book-length study of marital cruelty for a southern state, this work challenges much of what historians have argued about the relationship between violence and region. It finds that, contrary to what is generally understood about the American South, marriages in Texas and Virginia were not exceptionally violent, at least not compared with those in Wisconsin. The presence of marital cruelty was most pronounced in environments suffering from gender role instabilities. As the statement above shows, this dissertation takes seriously the use of gender as a lens through which to analyze marital discord. Correcting the historical perception of women’s violence as trivial, rare, or defensive, this dissertation contends that antebellum wives were indeed capable, and often willing, to commit a wide variety of cruelties within marriage. This work presents the first multi-state comparative study of marital discord focusing on the United States. Exploring nineteenth-century marriages from “way, way below” allows us to move beyond ideals to examine the messiness and unhappiness that characterized many conjugal unions.
The Dialectics of Form: Reification and Genre in Early Twentieth-Century American Literature
(2016-02-29) Macellaro, Kimberly Ann; Hennessy, Rosemary; Waligora-Davis, Nicole; Derrick, Scott; Yarbrough, Fay
This dissertation foregrounds genre as a politically-charged modality in early twentieth-century American literature, specifically the entangled relations between realism, romance, and naturalism through which the shifting formations of race and gender reproduce or challenge transnational capitalism’s reifying processes. My readings of articulations of racialized and gendered subjectivity during two pivotal periods in US history offers a new way of understanding the historical conditions underlying the emergence and circulation of reified identities and addresses many puzzling textual ambiguities as the cultural effects of the reified abstraction of labor. Reification’s relation to labor frames the dissertation’s four chapters, appearing in the opening chapter as unconscious forgetting and in the final chapter as deliberate remembering. In the dissertation’s first part I devote attention to under-theorized representations of white heteronormative masculinity. I situate the emerging configurations of racialized heterosexuality at the interface of consumer culture’s social engineering of subjects of desire. In the dissertation’s second part, I turn to two narrative experiments that more strategically and dialectically manipulate conventions of romance and naturalism to recast reified racial and gendered subjects as they emerge out of histories of transnational capital’s hyper-extraction of value from the colonial body. I draw out the narratives’ romantic utopian aspirations for overcoming racialized divisions between agency and structure, culture and labor. Chapter one on Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie foregrounds memory as a mediatory code for analyzing how reification relates to capitalism’s mechanization of labor and its effects on new white feminine and masculine disembodied consumer subjects. Chapter four on W.E.B. Du Bois’s novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece reads the epic memory of the slave’s labor congealed in the commodity cotton as crucial to the black utopian socialist project of de-reifying the racialized division between labor and culture. Chapter two on the stories of Sui Sin Far and Chapter three on the novel Cogewea by Mourning Dove theorize reification as a process through the splitting and doubling of racialized subjects to manage white anxieties about miscegenation. These chapters examine how texts featuring mixed-race heroines work with and against romance and naturalist conventions to re-narrate histories of colonial capitalism and overcome experiential disconnections imposed upon self and community. Reading form dialectically draws out the intensely cathected constellations of relations as they open up vantages for understanding totality, all be it ones that hover in the margins.
Trafficking in the Spaces of Poverty: Reading the Post-War Wars of American Literature and Culture
(2014-07-21) Bezusko, Adriane M; Hennessy, Rosemary; Lurie, Susan; Howe, Cymene
Trafficking in the Spaces of Poverty reorients the “post-war” period of American literature and culture through a reading of various cultural and ideological wars at home: the Cold War, the War on Welfare, the War on Poverty and the War on Terror. By bringing together policy documents, sociology, psychology, literature and film, this project analyzes the discursive limits of portraying lives lived in and along the lines of poverty. To tease out the underlying assumptions about the people whose bodies are marked by poverty, I set up the historical contours of the period and then discuss the ways in which literature resists, supports, and traffics in the spaces of poverty as it was being variously defined in the period. The narratives that I have chosen are tutor texts designed to disclose the conditions and circumstances of poverty as well as their ideological displacement. Reading against the grain of the dominant discourses, I argue that writers who are typically read as working against various forms of oppression actually enforce a neoliberal commonsense, performing the emotional work of absolving middle and upper class guilt when faced with the persistence of inequality. Managing the poor through these discourses has stabilized white middle-class privilege and produced uneven geographies. These spaces are socially managed and constructed through ideology to maintain uneven geographies but they are also deployed to explain why the poor remain poor. Movement in and out of spaces of poverty and spatial freedom as a way to express social and class mobility characterizes much of the literature that I read in Trafficking in the Spaces of Poverty. Migration, or the traffic of bodies across space, is another organizing principle of this dissertation. Social relations are expressed and enacted in and across spaces where identities are divided, defined, and limited. I argue that in their processes of trafficking in poverty, actual impoverished conditions and peoples’ unmet needs become fetishized and as fetishes enables a readjusted national imaginary and new ideological configurations of freedom and home, race, masculinity, motherhood, and the child.

Browsing by Author "Hennessy, Rosemary"

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