And Early Twenty-First-Century American Culture

Felt Spaces: Affective Communities in Late Twentieth- and Early Twenty-First-Century American Culture by Peyton Meigs Joyce BA in English, August 2003, George Mason University MA in English, August 2009, Georgetown University A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 19, 2018 Dissertation directed by Robert McRuer Professor of English The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Peyton Meigs Joyce has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of December 5, 2017. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation. Felt Spaces: Affective Communities in Late Twentieth- and Early Twenty-First-Century American Culture Peyton Meigs Joyce Dissertation Research Committee: Robert McRuer, Professor of English, Dissertation Director Kavita Daiya, Associate Professor of English, Committee Member Gayle Wald, Professor of English, Committee Member ii Acknowledgments This dissertation would never have been completed without the encouragement and support of colleagues, friends, and family. I was fortunate in my time at George Washington to have worked so closely with Robert McRuer, who has been the best mentor and friend anyone could ask for. Kavita Daiya has been a great advocate for my work, and I’m grateful for the much-needed reassurance she provided at a key moment. Gayle Wald and Tony Lopez helped guide this project, particularly through courses that offered an expansive view of American literature. David Mitchell offered some insightful comments on an early draft of chapter 2 as well as excellent feedback on the dissertation as a whole. Ricardo Ortiz generously stepped in as an outside reader late in the game. I’m also grateful to everyone in the George Washington English Department, who have all been incredibly magnanimous with their time and energy. This project would not have been possible if I hadn’t taken a course on public feeling with José Muñoz in my first semester at George Washington, which laid the theoretical groundwork on affect. Thanks to my family, who were always interested in my work but never overwhelmed me with questions like “When will you be finished?” and “What are you going to do with that PhD?” (except for my grandmother, whose constant demand for me to just finish already was both endearing and motivating). And finally, to my wife, Rachelle, who had no idea what she was getting into dating someone about to start what turned out to be a decade spent in grad school, I would have never finished without you. You encouraged me to keep going through the toughest moments and have always been my biggest supporter. iii Abstract of Dissertation Felt Spaces: Affective Communities in Late Twentieth- and Early Twenty-First-Century American Culture Felt Spaces investigates marginal communities across a range of spaces and subjectivities that exist beyond the bounds of narratives of normalcy or progress. These communities, among them maquiladora workers on the Juárez-El Paso border, crystal meth users in rural Missouri, homeless men in New York City, and genderqueer punks in San Francisco, each fail to (and, at times, refuse to) participate in the normative demands of neoliberal capitalism, under which social, political, and economic forces resonate in the affective experience of everyday life. I mean affect to refer to the interplay of these forces through and between bodies but also, following Raymond Williams, the interplay of forces between bodies and the structures organizing contemporary existence. In conversation with recent works of queer theory and disability studies that expose alternative ways of being that challenge the constant call for normalcy, I argue that through the circulation of affective contact—represented in the texts themselves and also transmitted to their respective audiences—the works examined in this dissertation reveal the connections between seemingly confined narratives of economic dispossession and transnational capitalism. At times Felt Spaces traces the affective dimensions of how these groups are marginalized and raises questions of who is included in mainstream society and culture (and who is not), but more important, the chapters explore the alternative spaces and practices that these communities make for themselves within US culture and argue that these alternative felt spaces created through resistant practices of care, sustenance, and even joy offer openings into a more revolutionary community of resistance. In refusing to be bound by the lens of a specific community, my project complements current scholarship by drawing attention to affect as a source of potential community across iv identities. My analysis attends to the commonalities these specific local experiences of the economic present bring to light and asks to what extent these critical affective relationships open—or mark the limits of—a space for ethics or justice. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements iii Abstract of Dissertation iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Wavering Smiles, Open Wounds, and the Ghosts That Haunt the 14 Borderlands: Transnationalism and the All-Affected Chapter 2: Uneasy Encounters with Dis-Integrated Bodies: Drug Users and 55 Drug Economies in Half Nelson and Winter’s Bone Chapter 3: Let the Mad Man Play: Virtuosity, Affective Exchange, and Labor 94 in Two Movements Chapter 4: You Is Just Vibrations: Punk Practices of (De)control 134 Chapter 5: Counterattacks in a Spatial War: The Potential and the Limits of 178 Squatting as a Communal Practice of Resistance Conclusion: Framing Justice for the Multitude 217 Works Cited 232 vi Introduction This dissertation examines the affective dimensions of a number of locales within the contemporary United States, uncovering the limits and potential of what I’m calling felt spaces. To distinguish a specific location as a felt space is perhaps unnecessary and may even seem tautological. All spaces are felt, through both a body’s physical engagement with the material environment and the wider social and cultural resonances of the space itself, however it’s defined: how a space makes you feel, what you feel about that feeling, and, ultimately, what you do with these feelings. The felt space of the United States has been hanging over my head the entire time I’ve been working on this project—figuratively, as the country has slipped from the increasingly uninspiring (but at least stable) neoliberalism of the Obama administration to the current Trump administration, in which everything feels uncertain, but also, quite literally, in a large woodcut print that sits on my mantle. Titled America the Beautiful, the print depicts a map of the United States. As a focal point in the room, the piece perhaps alludes to a nationalism that is not precisely felt—something my wife and I thought about before buying the work, as neither of us are given to patriotic displays. However, when we saw America the Beautiful at a craft fair in our old Washington, DC, neighborhood of Adams Morgan, we were struck by the detailed craftsmanship and the stark graphic impression the black-and-white test print made on us. Until very recently, I hadn’t given too much thought to the work. (It’s sometimes difficult, after all, to critically engage with the things that have become incorporated into our everyday lives.) However, as a stared aimlessly at it from the couch while trying to finish this dissertation, it became clear that the print illustrates some of the tensions that this dissertation investigates. America the Beautiful is a product of a specific moment in US history. Meticulously hand-carved by Valerie Lueth and Paul Roden, the detailed print imagines what 1 its creators call “a topographical United States with no visible state boundaries.” The overall effect is a unified national space marked by “select cities, notable landmarks [and] monuments, and regional geographic characteristics” (“America the Beautiful”). This positive national space is precisely the point. America the Beautiful was created for the Manifest Hope: DC gallery show held during President Obama’s inauguration weekend, which recognized “artists who use their voices to amplify and motivate the grassroots movement that carried President-Elect Barack Obama to victory” (“Manifest Hope: DC”). As the artwork’s descriptive materials explain, the piece attempts “to capture a positive, upbeat spirit of America.” In this sense, it is an attempt to represent the United States as a felt space of the optimism circulating during this moment. Its artists suggest that the print “reads as a simultaneous narrative” of a version of American history “that speak[s] to our growth as adaptable, pioneering people.” Of course, this pioneering spirit—represented through colonial sailing ships, log cabins, and what the descriptive materials breathlessly name “The railroad! Covered wagons!”—disguises as progress the violence of US imperialism, further emphasized by the depictions of major US cities, skyscrapers and monuments emerging from what is otherwise a veneration of the natural landscape. Although there are no people depicted in the print, there are also no representations of Native American life (save perhaps an igloo squeezed into the very top corner of Alaska), nor are there references to anything that might be construed as part of the wider racial history of the United States. It’s unfair perhaps to criticize a self-described positive work of art for failing to address some of the nation’s gravest sins. However, these erasures are notable for what they say about the ways that a positive national affect is constructed through exclusion. As America the Beautiful demonstrates, the space of the nation itself inscribes and demands a national mood. Jonathan Flatley, following Heidegger, defines mood as “a kind 2 of affective atmosphere . in which intentions are formed, projects pursued, and particular affects can attach to particular objects” (19).

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