Lauren Berlant: “Structures of (Un)Feeling: Mysterious Skin”

Monday, December 10 at 4:00, LC 317. The English Department Lecture Series presents: Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman Professor at the University of Chicago. Berlant’s work focuses on the affective components of belonging in the U.S. nineteenth, twentieth, and the twenty-first centuries: in particular, in relation to juridical citizenship, to informal and normative modes of social belonging, and to practices of intimacy as they absorb legal, normative, and fantasmatic forces. Her latest work, Cruel Optimism, is about the wearing out of the fantasy of the good life that has bound people to various kinds of intimate and political normativity despite their constant inadequacy to the fantasies that bring people to them.