Fail Epics: Gender, Race, and the Narration of Institutional Failure A

Fail Epics: Gender, Race, and the Narration of Institutional Failure A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Katie L Bashore IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Jigna Desai December 2016 ©Katie L Bashore University of Minnesota 2016 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction to Fail Epics ………………………………………………….. 5 Part I Narrating ‘Crisis Ordinary’ From the Left: Institutional Failure in Popular Progressive Text ……………………………………… 56 Failure Redux: Trigger Warnings and the Re-Articulation Of Academic Feminist Failure Under Austerity ……………………………………… 108 Part II Economies of [Institutional] Abandonment: Misery, Desire, and Belonging in AMC’s The Walking Dead ………………………………………………. 174 The Rightful Place of Failure: Orange is the New Black and the Spectacle of Black Death ………………………………………… 216 Coda: Rethinking the Narrative Approaches of the Left ……………………………... 251 Introduction Fail Epics: Gender, Race, and the Narration of Institutional Failure Everywhere around us we see evidence of institutional failure: government malfeasance, fraud and corruption in the banking industry, the collapse of mass access to higher education, home foreclosures, rising rates of poverty and houselessness, swelling prison populations, and failed military endeavors, among other examples.1 One can argue that the crisis management strategies engineered by various statist and imperialist entities in light of recent disastrous events create the conditions under which institutions face erosive restructuring. While valid, such an analysis does not allow us to explore the complex ways that people grapple with these circumstances. “Fail Epics” is invested in developing a cultural study of institutional failure, the narration of which is integral to how subjects see themselves as part of their political modernity. As such, I argue that the story we tell about institutional failure is just as important as the contexts from which it emerges. This dissertation critiques the rhetorics through which we name and assess institutional failure. It explores how the languages of injury, loss, abandonment, and betrayal, so commonly used to articulate failure, liberalize the themes of precarity that have long animated the lives of the racially and sexually marginalized: the poor, criminalized, undocumented, and unprotected. To broadly attribute the precarious nature of life is not merely to trespass on these histories but to occult them, rendering certain, minoritized experiences of and reactions to institutional failure something wholly unrecognizable, even uncanny, to contemporary formulations of injustice. In turn, I contend that the narration of institutional failure reproduces normative 1The articulation of some of these instances may be found in Wendy Brown’s “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconvservativism, and De-Democratization,” Political Theory, vol. 34, no. 6 (Dec., 2006): 690-714. 5 notions of violence and injury that, nevertheless, do not go uncontested. This dissertation illuminates the ways that common representations of institutional failure—in popular political nonfiction, critical text, television, and news media—implicitly center particular experiences that do not allow us to more robustly examine the traumatic effects of power or the politics by which lives come to matter. When I say “institutional failure,” I am referring to the various ways that institutions break down, outwear their metaphors, or are simply unable to act as guarantor of the “good life” many Americans believe is their birthright. It is outside the scope of this project to trace the implosion of our core animating structures. Instead, my interest is in understanding how the institution is imagined, indeed narrated, as unjust—as harming, injuring, or traumatizing—and how, from such a narration, causality is constructed. As such, this project is a cultural study of the narrativization of institutional failure, as it reveals a range of modern anxieties and, more importantly, desires. By “narrativization” I mean the storytelling that gives a context its meaning. Whereas the term, borrowed here from literary criticism, means the interpretation of certain “real” events as stories, I use it to imply the particular rhetorical framework we develop around a given instance of institutional failure. Rather than uphold a firm distinction between the material nature of the things being described and the fictionality of their description, I suggest a symbiotic process by which institutions are contingent upon their human infrastructure while the frameworks through which we speak of them are linked to certain objectives of power that play out in institutional spaces. But it is not these politics alone that interest me. The argument of this dissertation is ultimately an ethical one. In suggesting that these narrations reproduce hegemonic 6 notions of violence and injury, I aim to problematize the effects of storytelling on our ability to understand institutional violence as having a deeper root in the systemic oppression of populations of color, queered by the demands of a white hetero- reproductive nationalism that drive institutions… of marriage, education, religion, military, etc. It would once have been anathema for the majority of Americans to see themselves as debilitated by institutions but now that a system of governance has emerged to injure, so as to galvanize, populations, more people find themselves staking such claims. But as our knowledges of institutional failure are filled out by normative experiences, gendered and racialized histories of such things are either entirely eclipsed or carefully scaffolded within a white ontology. Thus, the foregrounding of normative experiences is premised on gendered/racialized erasure. I explore the tensions of this dynamic between presence and absence throughout my project and importantly allude to the labor such a struggle performs for the US racial state. In this introduction, I further explain my terms and methodologies but begin with my own storytelling of this project’s emergence. Importantly, I hope to make clear that the overall intervention of my work is with questioning the reliance we as scholars have on certain intellectual paradigms that may not enable us to see the limitations within how we produce meaning. The Story of “Fail Epics”- Moving Away from Neoliberalism as Explanans to Tackling the Problematic of ‘Narrative Normativity’ This project emerges from a particular constellation of intellectual, political, and cultural observations. I defended my prospectus in fall 2011, proposing a dissertation project on campus safety. At the time, I was interested in understanding how campus safety regimes do two key, interrelated things: prompt campus populations to police themselves and perpetuate the colonizing mission of the public university through a 7 covert mechanism of spatial regulation. I was interested in understanding how the “neoliberal university” continues to engage in exclusionary practices, despite the preponderance of mission statements professing the merits of diversity. Following Rod Ferguson in The Reorder of Things,2 I proposed that, through the appropriation of social justice rhetoric and an ostensible commitment to the liberal arts, the contemporary public university alibies its injustices. Specifically, in the name of “safety,” students are asked to inhabit campus space defensively—modulating their own behaviors and those of others that pose a threat to “civility.” Terms such as “safety” and “civility” are not immediately problematic but are linked to certain social ideals, bodies, and modes of conduct. In the post-9/11 moment, “safety” sanctioned a variety of policies and behaviors enacted in the name of protecting the white, western, democratic ideals that stood in for “civility.” In the current moment, safety means neutralizing dissenting bodies that pose a threat to the post-racial multiculturalism espoused by the academy. Safety, then, is not only about policing the borders of public universities from the encroachment of persons deemed “outside” or “other than” the institution but also patrolling certain bodies and political vernaculars in classrooms. In sum, the project intended to argue that campus safety regimes stealthily preserve university space for the reproduction of white hetero-capitalism. I was especially interested in the nuances of conduct. Inspired by emerging scholarship on biopolitics, I sought to elaborate what I called the “student-consumer- 2 Rod Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference. (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press), 2012. 8 subject” hailed by these policies.3 It seemed the “student-consumer-subject” was a quintessential biopolitical subject. As Michele Foucault makes clear in his late life lectures, the circumstances of late capitalism expose subjects to certain risks against which governments provide little to no protections. Being a subject in late capitalism requires one to assume an undue degree of responsibility for life outcomes. One accrues value by remaining vigilant amidst such uncertainty, and thus, by administering to the self as would an institution or government. This particular subject, homo economicus, scapegoats the shortcomings of a disenfranchised state as its own inability to self- regulate.4 The student-consumer-subject succeeds in the neoliberal university, where resources are limited and the conditions of debt prevail. Following Aihwa Ong, its

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