Elsewhere in America

Americans think of their country as a welcoming place where everyone has equal opportunity. Yet historical baggage and anxious times can restrain these possibilities. Newcomers often find that civic belonging comes with strings attached--riddled with limitations or legally punitive rites of passage. For those already here, new challenges to civic belonging emerge on the basis of belief, behavior, or heritage. This book uses the term "elsewhere" in describing conditions that exile so many citizens to "some other place" through prejudice, competition, or discordant belief. Yet, in another way, "elsewhere" evokes an undefined "not yet" ripe with potential. In the face of America's daunting challenges, can "elsewhere" point to optimism, hope, and common purpose?

Through 12 detailed chapters, the book applies critical theory in the humanities and social sciences to examine recurring crises of social inclusion in the U.S. After two centuries of incremental "progress" in securing human dignity, today the U.S. finds itself torn by new conflicts over reproductive rights, immigration, health care, religious extremism, sexual orientation, mental illness, and fear of terrorists. Is there a way of explaining this recurring tendency of Americans to turn against each other? Elsewhere in America engages these questions, charting the ever-changing faces of difference (manifest in contested landscapes of sex and race to such areas as disability and mental health), their spectral and intersectional character (recent discourses on performativity, normativity, and queer theory), and the grounds on which categories are manifest in ideation and movement politics (metapolitics, cosmopolitanism, dismodernism).

Autorentext

David Trend is Chair of the Department of Art at the University of California, Irvine. He holds a PhD in Curriculum Theory and an MFA in Visual Studies. His books include Worlding: Identity, Media, and Imagination in a Digital Age (2013), The End of Reading (2010), A Culture Divided (2009), Everyday Culture (2008), and The Myth of Media Violence (2007), among others. Honored as a Getty Scholar, Trend is the author of over 200 essays and a former editor of the journals Afterimage and Socialist Review. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Inhalt

Belonging Where? Introduction

Part I: Belonging There: People Like Us

• Makers and Takers: When More is Not Enough

The Wealth of Nations **Other People's Money

The Virtues of Selfishness

Cultures of Unreason

2. True Believers: Spiritual Life in a Secular Age

**Surprised by Sin

True Believers?

Selective Memories

A History of Religious Outsiders

3. Ordinary People: The Normal and the Pathological

**Inventing Normal

Laws of Averages

Standard Deviations

Common Denominators

4. Homeland Insecurities: Expecting the Worst A Dangerous World?

Barbarians at the Gate

Privacy Rights and Wrongs

Something to Hide

Organized Hate

Part II: Belonging Somewhere: Blurred Boundaries

5. Reality is Broken: Neoliberalism and the Virtual Economy

**Neoliberalism Revisited

Citizenship, Inc.

The Politics of Culture

Aesthetic Contradictions

Virtual Rebels

6. Mistaken Identities: From Color Blindness to Gender Bending Welcome to "Post-Identity" America

The Race for Race

Pictures at an Exhibition

Bending Sex and Gender

Varieties of Gazing

7. No Body is Perfect: Disability in a Posthuman Age No Body is Perfect

Constructions of Ableism

The Dismodern Condition

The Posthuman Body

8. On the Spectrum: America's Mental Health Disorder

**Stigma and Discrimination

On Invisibility and Passing

The Shame Game

The Affective Turn

Political Feelings

Part III: Belonging Elsewhere: The Subject of Utopia

9. Gaming the System: Competition and its Discontents

**No Contest

Doing God's Business

Capitalism and Schizophrenia

The Power of Giving

Game Over

10. To Affinity and Beyond: The Cyborg and the Cosmopolitan

**A Cyborg Manifesto

Third Person Plural

Queering Heterosexuality

Crip Analogies

Realms of Mattering

11. Medicating the Problem: The New American Pharmakon

**The Narcotic Tower of Babel

Models of Addiction

Writing on Drugs

Recovery

Big Pharma

12. The One and the Many: The Ethics of Uncertainty

**Be Here Now

Possession and Dispossession

The One and the Many