In this essay, I engage with the work of the mid-twentieth-century US suspense novelist Patricia Highsmith in order to open up the question of queerness as a historically locatable theory and practice of antinormativity in the post-identitarian, post-new-social-movement United States. I argue that Highsmith's Ripley novels offer a discomfitingly intimate counter-fantasy to the politically radical ambitions of both gay liberation and queer studies, one that reminds us of the constitutive power of commodification in the making of social fantasies of gendered (...) and sexual subversion in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. In offering her readers scenes that become situations in their reliance on repetition in order to create and then alleviate tension, Highsmith's Ripley novels enact a relation of attachment indicative of the momentary and addictive pleasures of consumer capitalism. Through this formal signature, I argue, Highsmith's work offers us access to a different affective history of queerness in the United States, one that illuminates the power and appeal of norms and their constitutive presence in the production of queer subjects and worlds. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPeople often use metaphors to discuss their financial prospects – for example, finding a fortune or searching for wealth. The purpose of the present research was to utilize conceptual metap...

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD).

Video games are a $20-billion-a-year industry, but it is still treated as a niche market. The video game corporations hold considerable power over the articles that journalists write. Through in-de...

With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect to anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced. And everything has more than one definition. A cat is a mammal, a narcissist, a companion, a riddle.[T]here is nothing more tentative, nothing more empirical than the process of establishing an order among things.I am putting away my term. Yes, I am. A little late, but that’s the kind of term it was: things spill over, the boxes will not hold them. The course (...) files are not yet in their folders, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. The season has turned and the objects on my worktable now stare back reproachfully like jetsam on a beach: pens, pencils, piles of books .. (shrink)