A biting, funny, up-to-the-minute collection of essays by a major political thinker that gets to the heart of what feminist criticism can do in the face of everyday politics.
Stormy Daniels offered a #metoo moment, and Anderson Cooper missed it. Conservatives don’t believe that gender is fluid, except when they’re feminizing James Comey. “Gaslighting” is our word for male domination but a gaslight also lights the way for a woman’s survival.
Across two dozen trenchant, witty reflections, Bonnie Honig offers a biting feminist account of politics since Trump. In today’s shock politics, Honig traces the continuing work of patriarchy, as powerful, mediocre men gaslight their way across the landscape of democratic institutions.
But amid the plundering and patriarchy, feminist criticism finds ways to demand justice. Shell-Shocked shows how women have talked back, acted out, and built anew, exposing the practices and policies of feminization that have historically been aimed not just at women but also at racial and ethnic minorities. The task of feminist criticism—and this is what makes it particularly well-suited to this moment—is to respond to shock politics by resensitizing us to its injustices and honing the empathy needed for living with others in the world as equals.
Feminist criticism’s penchant for the particular and the idiosyncratic is part of its power. It is drawn to the loose threads of psychological and collective life, not to the well-worn fabrics with which communities and nations hide their shortcomings and deflect critical scrutiny of their injustices. Taking literary models such as Homer’s Penelope and Toni Morrison’s Cee, Honig draws out the loose threads from the fabric of shock politics’ domination and begins unraveling them.
Honig’s damning, funny, and razor sharp essays take on popular culture, national politics, and political theory alike as texts for resensitizing through a feminist lens. Here are insightful readings of film and television, from Gaslight to Bombshell, Unbelievable to Stranger Things, Rambo to the Kavanaugh hearings. In seeking out the details that might break the spell of shock, this groundbreaking book illustrates alternative ways of living and writing in a time of public violence, plunder, and—hopefully—democratic renewal.
Tabla de materias
Preface | xiii
1 Trump’s Family Romance and the Magic of Television | 1
2 Gaslight and the Shock Politics Two-Step | 13
3 The President’s House Is Empty: Inauguration Day | 33
4 He Said, He Said: The Feminization of James Comey | 39
5 The Members-Only President Goes to Alabama | 46
6 An Empire unto Himself? Harvey Weinstein’s Downfall | 52
7 Race and the Revolving Door of (Un)Reality TV | 56
8 They Want Civility, Let’s Give It to Them | 62
9 Stormy Daniels’s #Me Too Moment | 70
10 The Trump Doctrine | 76
11 Jon Stewart and the Limits of Mockery | 81
12 Bullying Canada: An American Presidential Tradition | 86
13 House Renovations: For Christine Blasey Ford | 92
14 No Collision: Opting Out of Catastrophe | 98
15 Epstein, Barr, and the Virus of Civic Fatigue (with Sara Rushing) | 107
16 Mueller, They Wrote | 112
17 Unbelievable: Scenes from a Structure | 117
18 Gothic Girls: Bombshell’s Variation on a Theme | 126
19 Boxed In: Debbie Dingell vs. Donald Trump | 130
20 Mediating Masculinity: Rambo Republicanism and the Long Iran Crisis | 138
21 “13 Angry Democrats”? A Noir Reading of 12 Angry Men | 145
22 In the Streets a Serenade: Siena under Lockdown | 153
23 Isn’t It Ironic? Spitballing in a Pandemic | 157
24 Build That Wall: The Politics of Motherhood in Portland | 163
25 Impenetrable: Gaslighting the 14th Amendment | 171
26 “Hallelujah”: The People Want Their House Back | 178
27 Loose Threads | 184
Acknowledgments | 195
Notes | 199
Credits | 241
Sobre el autor
Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University. Her most recent books are Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair and A Feminist Theory of Refusal.
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