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The work of being a wallflower: the peripheral politics of male sentimentality

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THE WORK OF BEING A WALLFLOWER:

THE PERIPHERAL POLITICS OF MALE SENTIMENTALITY

by

Matthew Carrillo-Vincent

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

August 2013

Copyright 2013 Matthew Carrillo-Vincent
ii

If you’re listening,

Then sing it back.

...are you listening?

- Jimmy Eat World, “Sweetness”

iii

To Christine –

So many adventures are wrapped up in this book,
And its completion promises so many more.

iv

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
Perhaps my habit of always turning to the acknowledgments section the first time
I pick up a new book stems from an insight, well before I would understand it, that such
projects are deeply collaborative in ways that render it impossible to determine where
influence ends and scholarship begins. This dissertation has been shaped in all the same
ways I have been shaped over the past many years, filled with the echoes and harmonies
of others’ thoughts, contributions, and generosities.
I should begin by acknowledging what a privilege it has been to complete my
graduate studies at USC. That the community of scholars and students has embraced my
counterintuitive approach to work and cultural objects speaks to a spirit at the university
evident from my earliest correspondence. I was always encouraged – and expected – to
do exactly the project I wanted to do, exactly the work that I believed in most.
No one did this encouraging more than my chair, Jack Halberstam, who remains
in all nuances of the term one of the best teachers I have had the joy of working with.
From someone who has long felt called to teach, I hope that this is as high a complement
as I can offer. I could write more about always being treated like a professional, always
being inspired to argue for what was right more than what was popular, and always
seeing the classroom as the centerpiece of the educational experience, but I’ll leave it at
this: Good teachers often beget good teachers, and I hope I can follow through on that
promise.
There could not have been a better complement to Jack than the project’s
unofficial co-chair. Emily Anderson has been all the other things that I hope I can be to
v

my students: a selfless, humble, and generous support who always puts her students first,
often in ways that receive little credit. I really mean this – I don’t know that I would have
made it here without her. Mil gracias also to the rest of my committee, Josh Kun and
Michelle Gordon, both of whom pushed me to do work that was intelligent, yes, but more
importantly, ethical. The value of their contributions in this respect cannot be overstated.
So fitting that English is at the heart of the humanities, because it was through the
labor and love of teachers, students, and friends that this project serves as an extension of
their charity and support. For all those whose generosity is marked by their open doors:
Meg Russett, Flora Ruiz, Jack Blum, and Jeanne Weiss. For all those who shared their
(irreplaceable gifts): Ignis Viet Nguyen and the Caltech community (for a second home
to work in), Armando Corado (for kindness and burritos), the Huntington library (for
being so MI6), and the universities and scholars who welcomed me along the way,
enriching my understanding of the world and my place in it. Infinite thanks to my
students, who offered as much of themselves as I tried to offer them, and who, when all is
said and done, were the collaborators who infused this work with relevance and sincerity.
Finally, and very importantly, thank you to Meghan Boyle Olivas, Gino Conti, April
Davidauskis, Penny Geng, Genevieve Kaplan, Alexis Lothian, and Arunima Paul, each a
ship in the night whose beacon told me I was not lost.
I always wondered why those closest to the author were stuck at the bottom of
these sections, when the contributions of those below made all of this possible in ways I
can hardly begin to acknowledge here. My hope is that, here at the end, their names
vi

resonate throughout the rest of your reading, echoing in the periphery of a project I could
not complete without them.
For my parents, Dan and Mary Ann Vincent, who gave so much to make this
happen, and who made my own children’s lives so much better along the way. For the
rest of my family – Jim, Claire, Dave, Michael, Melissa, James, Nicole, and Rebecca –
whose open homes, warm meals, and rides to the airport were so selflessly given. And a
special thanks to the men of feeling I know, especially my dad, Jim, and James Garcia,
for changing the way I think about what it means to be a good guy.
Which leaves only Christine and our group of Goonies: Emerson, Quinn, Atticus,
and Aurora. I have always wondered, in the back of my mind, what it would be like to
make a mixtape of my life, what songs I could piece together that could soundtrack this
adventure we’ve all gone through together. But I realize how ambitious such a project
would be, and so my only hope is this: That when I die, and the good Lord gently sets the
needle on that big record player in the sky, I hear the joyous sounds of all their laughter,
filling a home where I belong.

vii

T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Epigraph ii
Dedication iii
Acknowledgements iv
Abstract ix

The Preface What’s Straight about Queer Studies Now? 1

The Introduction A Peripheral Blooming 10

The Wallflower: A Sideways Glance
The Periphery: Between Privilege and its Discontents

Chapter One On the Budding of the Wallflower: 35
The Emergence of the 18
th
Century Man of Feeling

The Public Debut; The Periphery Unfolds
The Hostilities of Either Side
Ambivalently in Bloom

Chapter Two “Those Songs Still Follow Me”: 82
Sentimental Listening and the Echoes of Slavery

“I’m Not a Racist, But…”
From Slavery’s Mouthpiece to Slavery’s Ears:
A Methodology of Critical Listening
Soundscape Cartography
Still Listening:
The Return of the Abolitionist Novel
What’s an Echo but a Sound that Doesn’t Change?

Chapter Three The Schools of Our Imaginations: 125

Curriculum Design and National Identity
in the Post-Brown v. Board Era
The Education of the Nation
Teaching Feeling
“Nothing Ever Happens the Way You Imagine It Will”

viii

Chapter Four No Hay Un Movimiento: 173
The Peripheral Public of Emo

Structures of Feelings
“And If I Started Crying, Would You Start Crying?”
Emo’s Origin Stor(ies)
Do Your Part to Save the Scene and Stop Going to Shows:
Refusing the Public
After the Afterlives: Affect Sin Fronteras

References 204

ix

A B S T R A C T
One need not strain to find examples of male sentimentality in contemporary US
popular culture: From frequent news stories on “Weeper of the House” John Boehner, to
the success of Judd Apatow’s poignant “bromance” movies, to last year’s film adaptation
of Stephen Chbosky’s celebrated adolescent novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
(1999), the man of feeling seems more present and popular than ever. With an unsettling
display of excessive emotion emanating from the male body, each iteration provokes in
viewers, listeners, and cultural critics any one of several disparate responses: Whether
committed to the transgressive potential of a male who feels different because he offers
vulnerability where others offer hardened restraint, or whether insistent in the claim that
these texts simply add to what Gail Bederman would call the “remaking” of a continually
complex normative subject, we find in the man of feeling an ambivalent subject for the
public sphere.
The initial question for readers, listeners, or viewers is often a simple one: is male
sentimentality transformative and progressive, or is it pathetic and self-serving? But the
presumption that we must answer one way or another belies the historical and cultural
complexity of the man of feeling, and merely reinforces a kind of political approach to
reading that simply replicates our own attitudes and relation to normativity and its
privileges. This dissertation – under the impulse of recent work in queer theory and affect
to reach closer to, rather than further from, normativity – takes up the counterintuitive
position that we might draw this unlikely subject of the wallflower out from the sidelines
and use him to interrogate normativity not from outside, but rather beside, its unsteady
x

borders. It asks a central question – What does it mean for a critique of normativity to
come from the normative subject? – and argues that the “peripheral” reading of
normativity he helps enable might serve to render the logics of normativity in different
ways than we can with more traditionally oppositional forms of critique.

1

P R E F A C E What’s Straight about Queer Studies Now?

On January 1
st
, 2012, as if in some portentous signal of a new beginning, or some
nod to resolutions and change and progress, The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an
expansive reflection – some took it for a eulogy – on the two-decade-plus run of queer
theory. Written by Michael Warner, himself a key figure in the field’s development over
the years, the article recounted queer theory as an intellectual progression of activist
pursuits, tracing the roots of ACT UP and Queer Nation in the work of an academic
movement associated with Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
Prompted by the announced end of Duke University Press’s Series Q, an influential book
series whose first and last books were both written by none other than Sedgwick herself,
1

and taken together with Eve’s unfortunate passing in 2009 and “the passage of time,”
these events seemed to be, as Warner put it, “occasions for taking stock” (“Queer and
Then”).
The completion of a dissertation, of course, presents its own opportunity for
taking stock, though, as an exercise often marked by the conservatism of “getting it
right,” I might be hesitant to begin with such candor. But with the conviction that self-
reflexivity might do well to situate the project and its aims, and under the belief that this
methodological deviance might help to illustrate the intervention of what I refer to as a

1
Tendencies was published in 1993; The Weather in Proust at the end of 2011.
2

“peripheral” project, I’d like to echo Warner’s call. The time, it seems, it right: With a
looming sense of crisis in the humanities signaled by books like Richard Arum and Josipa
Roksa’s Academically Adrift (2011) and Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas
(2010), a national surge in post-identity politics after the reelection of Barack Obama,
and the apparent openness of gendered and sexual identifications in mainstream popular
culture in the “after-Ellen” era,
2
we might benefit from tasking ourselves with these
questions. As Janet Halley and Andrew Parker recently tried to ask, in their edited
collection After Sex?(2011), “What has queer theory become now that it has a past?”
perhaps we ought to ask, in a cultural moment marked by ambivalence about the extent to
which cultural studies has done its job, “Where will queer theory turn now, in the
future?”
Such efforts at retrospection aren’t entirely unique to queer studies, but, for a
fairly young field, queer studies does seem to take seriously its responsibility to, as it
were, “take stock.” And that, essentially, is my task here, in anticipation of introducing
perhaps the least likely subject for consideration in a field so often dedicated to critiquing
normativity from outside the normative sphere. Following the line of inquiry raised in
2005’s widely-circulated special issue of Social Text, “What’s Queer about Queer Studies
Now,” I will raise a somewhat counterintuitive inquiry of my own: What’s straight about

2
Perhaps most histories frame themselves in the language of crisis, though the second decade of the
21
st
-century has proven particularly unsettling for scholarship in the humanities invested in studying
social difference. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift and Louis Menand’s The
Marketplace of Ideas, for instance, speak to the increasing public scrutiny over the “work” of the
university, asking humanities departments in particular to justify their worth. But as academic
departments interested in gender, race, and sexuality find themselves in the middle of what the public
often considers the post-racial, gay-friendly present, it can be difficult to forge this gap between crisis
and irrelevance.
3

queer studies now? Eventually, in answering that question, I will suggest what I think
might be an important future subject for consideration in queer critical inquiry: a figure
that I call “the wallflower,” which is the name I’ve given to a rather distinct, affectively-
oriented normative subject who, awash in tears, alone in thought, and empathetic in
reaching outwards to others, tasks himself with a critique of normativity.
But we might do well to begin with an answer to that question in the present –
what is straight about queer studies now, already – and, in the present perfect – what has
it been? In this way, perhaps asking what is straight about queer studies now isn’t such a
counterintuitive gesture after all. In 21
st
century US politics and popular culture, “queer”
has done nothing if not inched closer to normativity than it has ever been. In the
mainstream public sphere, contemporary iterations of queer activism have brought us the
repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; an “It Gets Better” campaign in response to a “queer
suicide epidemic”; and, in what seems like the only axis on which many in the US
understand the role and desires of LGBT individuals in mainstream culture, a resurgence
in campaigns for the right to gay marriage.
3
There is a way in which each of these efforts
seems productive and progressive, altering major laws and effecting certain kinds of
change for certain kinds of people. And so, in the spirit of deference, or perhaps because
my own project is so ambivalent, I think it fair to postpone a critique of these efforts for

3
Mainstream LGBT politics have found a welcoming niche in public discourse, so much so that
they’ve earned certain political and legal recognitions under the Obama presidency. The repeal of
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the military policy banning openly gay service members in the armed
forces, was passed and implemented in 2011. Columnist Dan Savage’s widespread, optimistic video
project, “It Gets Better,” circulated widely in 2010 in response to a series of nationally visible gay
teen suicides. And despite a panicked push to forward anti-gay marriage legislation in certain US
states, the US Supreme Court’s reviews of California’s Proposition 8 and the Federal Defense of
Marriage Act in 2013 hold certain promise that such issues will soon, if not now, be normalized.

4

the ways in which their bargains with normativity might be argued to reinscribe the
“charmed circle,” as Gayle Rubin would say, of privileged subject-hood in ways that still
render many subjects outside the walls of what’s considered “normal.”
4

Still, it is interesting to note that those voices most clearly critiquing the
mainstreamed gay and lesbian politics exemplified by these efforts have themselves
responded by getting closer to, and not further from, normativity and the normative
public sphere. Jasbir Puar’s work on homonationalism and the normative logics
underwriting transnational queer activism, Leela Gandhi’s fascinating account of the
Derridean “friendships” between colonial subjects and privileged “non-players,” and Jack
Halberstam’s queer readings of what he or Lauren Berlant might call a “silly archive” of
mainstream kids’ films all advance and complicate our understanding of what queer work
looks like in the 21
st
century. And what queer work looks like, it seems, is finding more
intricate intersections with normativity itself, demanding that we begin thinking about
logics of normativity that circulate irrespective of the bodies, genders, and sexualities
from which we assume them to generate.
Because here’s the thing: queerness always already presumes a certain
relationship to normativity, but it is the refined articulation of that relationship – what it
looks like and what we should do with it – that drives queer studies forward. The turn to
the wallflower, I suggest, advances that directive, because it takes the same impetus – an

4
Though I will elaborate on Rubin’s figure in the introduction, I intend here to articulate the critique
often leveled at these mainstream LGBT politics, that such gestures simply make certain, already
normalized behavior (marriage, teen angst, adoption, etc.) available to a slightly higher number of
acceptable queer subjects. For further reading, see, for instance, Michael Warner’s The Trouble with
Normal (1999) and Lisa Duggan’s The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on
Democracy (2004).
5

interrogation into the privileges of normativity, and an investigation into their ability to
develop and replicate – but it does so from the periphery of normativity, rather than from
outside its steady walls. The turn to the wallflower – the white, middle class, heterosexual
male attempting to disidentify with his privilege via an excessively affective performance
– enriches our conception of normativity by sketching a new topography of normalcy that
refuses the simplicity of inside and out.
5

Allow me to illustrate this point: A few years ago, there was a state of the field
conference in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, organized
by Heather Love, on the 25th anniversary of Gayle Rubin’s field-opening essay,
“Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.”
6
When I was
prompted as a graduate seminar participant to revisit the essay and ask some of these
same questions I ask today – what does “Thinking Sex” mean for us now and in the
future – I was struck by what I considered to be the essay’s most dated concept: this
insistence on a spatialized topography of sex which articulated certain kinds of privilege
via a metaphorical “charmed circle” of normativity, with increasingly stigmatized sexual
practices mapped further and further away from a “good” or “normal” circular center.

5
“Disidentify” here refers to José Esteban Muñoz’s articulation of a performative process, “formed
in response to the cultural logics of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and misogyny,” that “works
within and outside the dominant public sphere simultaneously” (Muñoz 5) to make negotiations with
the normativity it develops alongside. Though Muñoz’s work appears less frequently in the body of
this project, it is important to note that his theorization of negotiating with, rather than
oppositionally resisting, normativity, is at the very heart of this project. First encountering the book
at the earliest stages of this project, it made more tenuous relationships with normativity legible for
someone else trying to work in the margins. That Muñoz’s work attends to queer of color analysis
first presaged this counterintuitive alliance, but the ethical and methodological resonances have
always felt important to making this project possible.

6
The “Rethinking Sex: Gender and Sexuality Studies State of the Field Conference” was held at the
University of Pennsylvania from March 4
th
-6
th
, 2009.
6

These maps, in one sense, were literal: Rubin had not only described, but illustrated two
diagrams to reinforce the spatial rhetorics she was invoking in the text. In one diagram,
“good” sex was located at the center of a circular diagram (the aforementioned “charmed
circle”), diametrically opposed to “bad” and “unnatural” sex in the outer ring. In another,
little sketches of walls concretized the abstract boundaries between “normal” and
“abnormal” behaviors, again with the normative categories safely tucked away from the
“bad” outside. In all their cartoonishness, the drawings appear innocuous, particularly as
they seem merely to reflect the arguments that Rubin is making about rethinking sex at
the close of the 20
th
century. But when we consider her drawings as a sketch, a map, of
the social topography she articulates, the rigid boundaries may also reinscribe many of
the principles of difference she aims to critique.
Of course, Rubin’s essay is brilliant in its own right, and effectively generated
some of the enormous shifts in feminist studies that would allow for queer theory to
develop years after its publication. But again, one of the ways in which nostalgia for
Rubin’s particular kind of topography – one which articulates deviant sexualities as
staunchly at odds with normativity – seems misguided is in its insistence on this strict set
of delineations. Not that Rubin is particularly at fault here – this kind of rhetorical
characterization happens all the time: Consider, for instance, a response to Michael
Warner’s piece, also published in the Chronicle, in which William Germano longs for a
moment when, and here he quotes Henry Abelove, Michele Barale, and David Halperin’s
Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (1993), “lesbian and gay studies, like feminist studies,
had an oppositional edge.”
7

If this is what we understand to be losing in queer studies – this straightforwardly
oppositional stance against normativity – then I suppose I’m content with reading
Warner’s piece as a eulogy after all. The movement of queer studies to more complex
subjects and formations, and away from the privileged LGBT liberal subject, in my
opinion, has been both welcome and necessary. From queer’s movement to the
transnational in the work of Gayatri Gopinath and Saba Mahmood, to its steps toward the
transgendered in Susan Stryker and Dean Spade, to the development of nuanced
formations of queer of color critique from Roderick Ferguson or José Esteban Muñoz,
queer’s deviance away from oppositionality and towards a more tenuous negotiation with
normativity has only enriched the field many times over.
7

In the introduction that follows, I will more thoroughly establish the theoretical
framework inspired by scholars like Berlant, Sedgwick, and Leela Gandhi in an effort to
clearly articulate what I mean when I refer to the periphery, and I will use this theoretical
grounding in order to set up what I consider to be the fairly simple intervention of the
project: What does a critique of normativity look like when it comes from the normative
subject, and what work does it do? With a specific focus on the figure of the wallflower,
who strains to hear the logics of normativity circulating in culture and responds
affectively in an effort to disrupt those logics, I argue that we might be able to construct a

7
Though these are rough approximations of recent directions in queer scholarship, I am simply
pointing out the ways in which the trajectory of “queer” has, alongside gravitating towards
normativity, worked its way outside the national, white, cisgendered LGBT body it has often been
attached to. Saba Mahmood (The Politics of Piety 2011 ) and Gayatri Gopinath (Impossible Desires 2005)
challenge the naturalized centering of the US in the presupposed frameworks of queer studies. Susan
Stryker (Transgender History 2008) and Dean Spade (Normal Life 2011), among others, have helped
queer make a trans turn it has historically been uncomfortable with. And Rod Ferguson (Aberrations
in Black 2003) and José Muñoz’s (Disidentifications 1999) attentiveness to queer of color critique has
brought a much-needed depth to the white, normative imaginary of the LGBT subject.
8

differently-detailed map of normativity and privilege than we are used to in the
interdisciplines of Cultural and Literary Studies. This investigation of the wallflower
comes at an important moment for the liberated, enlightened United States of America –
a nation which, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, in the
aftermath of Barack Obama’s reelection, and in the era of global democracy we’ve
proudly thrust upon the world, feels it has successfully produced the “work” necessary
for a free and equal society. For, as I investigate in this project, “feeling” that one has
accomplished a certain task, or framing “feeling” as a substitute for political action, are
contentious historical conditions, particularly for the subject of normative privilege.
As the long history of sentimentality, from its early emergence in 18
th
century
British literature and culture, can attest, the politics of affect demand that readers pay
careful and nuanced attention to distinguish feelings that reproduce normativity from
those that disrupt it. Such affective laboring is, as Lauren Berlant calls it, “ambivalent” at
best, caught in the peripheral space between these rigid distinctions.
8
But my hope is that
this project might be read in the generative possibility that, so long as we can
acknowledge male sentimentality’s complicity in ultimately strengthening normativity’s
association with the white, middle class, heterosexual, male body, perhaps also we can
attest to the possibility that it sizes up normativity differently from its peripheral

8
Ambivalence, as a critical term routed through the work of Lauren Berlant, helps to mark the
tensions between affective labor that feels productive and transformative and the ways in which that
labor largely fails to change the material and affective conditions of women’s nondominant publics.
In this project, the term will continue to mark the complicated ways in which sentimentality in
particular seemed to capture a tension between privilege and its discontents through each of its
historical iterations – here variously represented as 19
th
century abolitionist literature, 20
th
century
high school reading curricula, and the Reagan-era emergence of emo. See Lauren Berlant’s The Female
Complaint (2008).
9

viewpoint. A viewpoint, I argue, that may provide new insights into why dominant
structures of social inequality continue to reproduce themselves so effectively, in the face
of both historical “political” change and oppositional protest.
Or maybe, in all its sentimental, utopian yearnings, this is just a project that
wonders if there are other possibilities for lives that can be full of the contradictions that
abound in privilege and its discontents. Not for the recognition of those lives themselves,
per se, but rather for the recognition that perhaps there is a work they might do. Not to
change culture, and not to undo normativity. But to simply be moved to consider others,
when it is so fitfully easy to consider oneself.
How very queer, indeed.

10

I N T R O D U C T I O N A Peripheral Blooming

“[You’re] a wallflower…You see things. You keep quiet about them. And you
understand.”
- Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999)

“And I’ve found things in this life that still are real
A remainder refusing to be concealed.
And I’ve found the answer lies in a real emotion
Not the self-indulgence of a self-devotion.
- Rites of Spring, “Remainder” (1985)

One need not strain to find examples of male sentimentality in contemporary US
popular culture: From frequent news stories on “Weeper of the House” John Boehner, to
the success of Judd Apatow’s poignant “bromance” movies, to last year’s film adaptation
of Stephen Chbosky’s celebrated adolescent novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
(1999), the man of feeling seems more present and popular than ever.
1
With an unsettling
display of excessive emotion emanating from the male body, each iteration provokes in
viewers, listeners, and cultural critics any one of several disparate responses: Whether
committed to the transgressive potential of a male who feels different because he offers
vulnerability where others offer hardened restraint, or whether insistent in the claim that

1
It is important to notice not only the ubiquitousness, but the diversity of representations of male
sentimentality in the 21
st
century. From House Speaker John Boehner’s tearful patriotism, invoked
each time he speaks of family and country, to brief moments of poignant homosocial bonding in
films like Superbad (2007) and I Love You, Man (2009), it sure has felt like an emotional cultural
moment. Of course, as this section elaborates, the man of feeling has constantly recirculated in
culture for quite some time, always feeling salient to a viewing and listening public.
11

these texts simply add to what Gail Bederman would call the “remaking” of a continually
complex normative subject, we find in the man of feeling an ambivalent subject for the
public sphere.
The initial question for readers, listeners, or viewers is often a simple one: is male
sentimentality transformative and progressive, or is it pathetic and self-serving? But the
presumption that we must answer one way or another belies the historical and cultural
complexity of the man of feeling, and merely reinforces a kind of political approach to
reading that simply replicates our own attitudes and relation to normativity and its
privileges. This dissertation – under the impulse of recent work in queer theory and affect
to reach closer to, rather than further from, normativity – takes up the counterintuitive
position that we might draw this unlikely subject of the wallflower out from the sidelines
and use him to interrogate normativity not from outside, but rather beside, its unsteady
borders. It asks a central question – What does it mean for a critique of normativity to
come from the normative subject? – and argues that the “peripheral” reading of
normativity he helps enable might serve to render the logics of normativity in different
ways than we can with more traditionally oppositional forms of critique.
In so many ways, the greatest insights in the 20
th
century into the structural
privileges of normativity have derived from models of difference. From Audre Lorde’s
assertions in “The Master’s Tools…” to Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex,” some of the most
powerful arguments in feminist, race, and sexuality studies in the 20
th
century were
predicated on imagining a space outside normativity from which we might rethink
normativity’s privileges and logics. But if we can begin with the insights of certain
12

iterations of male sentimentality that see countercultural stances from the normative body
as often replicating the logics of privilege they seem to stand in opposition to, then we
must find new models for critiques of normativity that can’t truly be said to come from
the “outside.” With recent turns in queer and affect studies towards these more
ambivalent, equivocal spaces, I open up what I call the periphery as a model for cultural
criticism that, as Eve Sedgwick suggests, “permit[s] a spacious agnosticism about several
of the linear logics that influence dualistic thinking” (Sedgwick Touching 8).
2

Inspired by Sedgwick’s notion of the “beside,” Lauren Berlant’s attention to
“ambivalence,” and Leela Gandhi’s generous reading of “friendships” between colonized
peoples and British “nonplayers,” I turn to the wallflower – an affectively-oriented male
who watches, listens to, and criticizes culture from the sidelines of the privileged public
sphere – as an ambiguous figure of male sentimentality invested in revealing and
disrupting the logics of normative masculine privilege in culture, while acknowledging
his own complicit role in enjoying its benefits. As a figure who appears in a wide range
of cultural objects, across a rather disparate set of time periods and locations, the rise and
fall of the wallflower at moments of racial, gendered, and national crisis speaks to what I
identify as the figure’s structural role in the development and untethering of normative
privilege. In other words, under the assumption that a critique of the periphery warrants a

2
So many of our conceptions of normativity, power, and privilege derive from spatial models
separating those who benefit from privilege (what Gayle Rubin refers to as the “charmed circle”)
from those outside its reach; even more complicated models of power (Foucault, Mignolo) rely on a
geometric grammar to convey their insights. But the recent turn in queer and affect theory to more
peripheral spaces – from Eve Sedgwick’s “between” to Kathryn Bond Stockton’s “sideways” to
Lauren Berlant’s “juxtapolitical” – have continued to offer models of reading that aim not to
repudiate, but rather “postpone,” more traditionally oppositional critiques of public culture.

13

peripheral methodology, I consider a broad range of iterations of the wallflower in an
effort to trace his structural role in both advancing and challenging our dominant
conceptions of what it means to be a normative public, what it means to be in a normative
public, and what it means to critique a normative public from the position of
normativity.
3

Many aspects of this dissertation follow the conventions of such an undertaking:
Carefully situated to respond to larger scholarly conversations about male sentimentality
and the regulative nature of the public sphere, the project makes its interventions within
the context of contemporary debates in literary and cultural studies. Alongside the
insights of these other critics, I work to articulate the relationships that these texts have to
the cultural moment in which they appear, and draw out the dynamics of normativity,
masculinity, and affect circulating beside their emergence. I remain committed to cultural
objects – including periodicals and music subcultures, but especially books – as indices
of cultural discourses, anxieties, and critiques of male sentimentality, and have been
compelled to read carefully and closely for the nuances that might arise in, for example,
Frederick Douglass’s thoughts on listening to the slaves’ mournful singing, or John

3
The methodology here derives from touchstones in work by Ann Cvetkovich, Lauren Berlant, Sara
Ahmed, and Kathleen Stewart, whose work not only aims often to consider more “ambivalent”
subjects, as Berlant might say, but insists on more peripheral critical methodologies in speaking to
that work. For Sedgwick and Stewart, books comprised of ostensibly disparate chapters and sections
allow an opportunity to think about concepts of pedagogy and affect that traditional genealogical
approaches don’t necessarily allow. For Cvetkovich and Berlant, the constant exchange between
historical readings and contemporary counterparts presents new ways to think about a strict
Foucauldian “history of the present.” In Stewart’s words, I want to open up this space by remaining
“committed not to the demystification and uncovered truths that support a well-known picture of
the world, but rather to speculation, curiosity, and the concrete” (Stewart 1). As I would put it, under
the looming ghost of Derrida (Archive Fever 1998), to curate an alternative archive is to radically
change the possibilities for what we might say about any of those objects in relation to one another,
and give new insight into readings of those objects with which we’ve become so familiar.
14

Green’s insistence on the significance of which metaphors we use in teaching high school
students what civil or ethical behavior should look like.
But if I’ve done my job correctly, the project holds a degree of tenuousness in its
relationship to certain kinds of scholarship as well. In resisting the call to write a “history
of the present,” as so many brilliant Foucauldian genealogies have done, instead I take a
more peripheral view of the nexus of male sentimentality. My hope is that the project’s
emphasis on investigating the peripheral politics of male sentimentality leads to the
development of a peripheral methodology – a topic discussed at length in Chapter Two –
which derives from the kinds of critical, sideline listening practices I attend to in my
work. One of the most important claims in the dissertation is that normative structures
(such as, for instance, the genealogical or historical model of critique) tend to reproduce
normative logics: we need only glance at the “history” of US slavery to see the ways in
which an emphasis on historical progression prevents us from seeing the complex ways
in which slavery’s echoes continue to recirculate in adaptations to changing political or
social arrangements. And so the turn away from genealogy or chronology serves to
disrupt the normative logics that tell us “it gets better,” and instead offer an open
opportunity to consider the role of male sentimentality as a longstanding structural
component of public culture. Poised alongside privilege and negotiating its boundaries,
the wallflower strains to hear the echoes of inequality and normativity across strict
genealogies, and refuse the movement of time, or the development of one cultural
dynamic into another, as an index of our refined ascent to becoming a civilized,
democratic nation.
15

T H E W A L L F L O W E R A Sideways Glance

To suggest that we might benefit from thinking about the wallflower through a
non-genealogical approach is not to suggest that he is without history. Indeed, insight into
the role of male sentimentality in contemporary culture benefits very much from a
consideration of the forces that first produced the formal emergence of the man of feeling
in the latter half of 18
th
century Britain. In the inheritance of Enlightenment discourses of
sensibility – Lockean considerations of the body’s senses as intimately linked with our
experience of the world – and the development of those discourses into sentimentality –
which moved sensibility cerebrally toward becoming a “moral reflection,” a
“thought…influenced by emotion” (Todd 7) – the man of feeling cohered several cultural
logics at the height of British nationalism and imperialism.
4
On the one hand, sentiment
emerged as a socially and politically transformative act – as Julie Ellison writes, it
“started with the efforts of elite men to imagine political opposition and to understand
political change” (4). The turn to affect in the male body, at a time when affect had
increasingly been coded as feminine, offered a potent contrast: The increasingly sharp
divisions of gender coalescing at the end of the 17
th
century, wrapped up in the
codification of a newly “transformed” regulative public sphere, had allocated the private,
domestic virtues of affective excess to women, linking their delicate and sensitive bodies

4
Historians and literary scholars debate the history here, and largely fall into one of two camps:
either the man of feeling emerged as the eventual progression of a corporeally-oriented sensibility
into a more morally-inflected sentimentality (See, for example, Janet Todd, G.J. Barker-Benfield), or
that dichotomy, in fact, falsely separates a discourse that always circulated both (See, for example,
Julie Ellison).
16

with an inability to restrain themselves emotionally. The appearance of these virtues in
the male body thus felt deliberate, transgressive. To be a man of feeling was not to be a
man of the world, and readers and theatergoers understood that contrast well.
On the other hand, sentiment was also bound up in the decidedly complicated
entanglements of civilized subjectivity and the social order. The gendered contrast of
sentiment appearing in (and, very importantly, on) the male body,
5
as opposed to the
female one, may have given it its initial poignancy. But as part of a more systemic
organization of certain kinds of sentiment – the mark, as it came to be, of the
enlightened, sensitive civilized man – distinct from others, it was also bound up in a
project establishing the white, bourgeois, heterosexual male as privileged because he was
in control of his emotions, unlike those racialized and gendered bodies beside him.
6
Not
only was male sentiment partitioned as part of some vague social divisions taking place
between equally-classed men and women – it was also underwriting the cognitive and
ethical distinctions between subjects both domestic (the lower classes) and abroad (the
colonized savage).

5
The performance of affect displayed in appropriately shed tears was very much a part of the way in
which sentimentality circulated as a marker of civil, classed, and gendered identity in the 18
th
century.
See, for instance, Ildiko Csengei’s account of these dynamics at work in Henry MacKenzie’s The Man
of Feeling: “As contemporary opinions testify, crying over The Man of Feeling was the test of the
sensibility of its early readers, by whom tears were not only valued, but, by the time of the novel’s
publication, were more or less compulsory attributes and signifiers of a feeling heart and
unquestionable morality” (Csengei 952).

6
The rich critical history attentive to this dynamic informs this project in so many ways. Gail
Bederman, Anne Cheng, Lynn Festa, Tania Modleski, and others have offered careful insights into
criticism (scholarly and popular) that makes an effort to interrogate the normative male subject, but
often simply renders a certain depth to that subject in his complexity. This methodological tendency
reflects a cultural one, in which the civilized, properly feeling male body in the 18
th
-century was
defined in the fine complexity of emotions he could manage, unlike those bodies around him, which
were read as either too savage or hysterical. We inherit this dynamic, of course, today.
17

Ellison points to Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713), which she refers to as “the most
politically significant drama of the century” (17), as an index for the contradictory
possibilities and privileges circulating in male sentimental discourse. Dramatizing
affective difference alongside racial difference, Cato bounds up the ambivalence of
empire and republicanism with the drama of male emotion. Cato himself is the noble
stoic who, at the periphery of the Roman empire, holding fast to his republican ideals in
the face of an approaching Caesar, manages the nuances of emotion that helped
distinguish his character and virtue from those around him. Set against a cadre of
weeping conspirators, and alongside a thoughtful and sentimental African prince, Juba,
Cato remains master of his emotions while all those around him struggle to negotiate.
Weeping only once in the play – for the ideal of the republic, and not for his dead son –
Cato commits suicide as a final act of control and stoicism. That the play circulated so
widely and for such a long time – it became something of a centerpiece for the American
Revolution – either speaks to or belies just how complicated a cultural object it was: the
play was performed in a circum-Atlantic network that was undergoing tremendous
changes with respect to colonialism, republicanism, and the advent of partisan politics.
And it thrived perhaps because of its ambivalence, equally powerful for the wide range of
logics underwriting male sentimentality to challenge or reinforce the social systems being
established and undone at the time. Ellison articulates this well:
Cato discourse comprises not a discrete set of beliefs or attitudes, but a
recurring arrangement of positions defined by the interdependent presence
and absence of gendered sentiment. The variability of these positions in
18

different works and, in particular, the shifting role of race in relation to
them suggest that sensibility’s long life arises from the ongoing cultural
pertinence of affection experienced as public crisis, of public crisis
experienced as affection. (73)
What I want to make clear through Ellison’s reading is this: not only was male
sentiment “inseparable from ambivalence” (57), as she insists, it was an essential
component of the structural fabric of the public sphere at its very emergence. That
Addison, together with Richard Steele, was at the helm of the single most-often cited
centerpiece of public sphere discourse (the widely-circulated periodical The Spectator)
speaks to this convergence, and to the ways in which sentiment, masculinity, and a
critical approach to the regulative public sphere were intertwined well before we would
see a coherent man of feeling appear later in the century. The turn in this project to a
wide range of wallflower iterations across the Atlantic and across a wide historical range
thus attempts to engage male sentimentality through this presumption that it is a
structural, rather than historical, phenomenon. Blossoming in relation to what Ellison
calls moments of “public crisis,” the wallflower represents the promise of a critique that
emerges in relation to the public at its most vulnerable moments; whenever we begin to
recognize the public as a structure that requires certain social hierarchies in order to
privilege certain bodies, we can be sure to find evidence of a wallflower ready to emerge.
As I explore in Chapter One, this notion of a “public” is essential to
understanding what it means to think about the wallflower, and what it means to think
about a system of regulative normativity to which he responds. As a governing structure
19

of contemporary culture, the public can be difficult to examine at a distance – as a
structure that we live in, it can be difficult to recognize. But recent scholarship in public
sphere theory has made a concerted effort to interrogate this fundamental social building
block. The centrality of Jürgen Habermas’s work on the public sphere to contemporary
debates on the matter cannot be understated: first translated into English in 1988, The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere set the terms (public, private, structural),
the time (18th century), and the stakes of what it meant to think about public culture as it
became increasingly legible to itself. Brilliant work has followed: Michael Warner’s
writing in particular is both clear and compelling without losing any of the complexity of
Habermas, and it helps to politicize and inform Habermas’s work with the most critical of
insights that queer, gender, and affect studies have to offer. Specifically, the partitioning
of Habermas’s rubric into its finer parts – public and private, public and counterpublic,
present publics and imagined publics – helps Warner to articulate the latent emphasis
Habermas puts on the public as a kind of social structure which orders our participation
in it. As Warner writes, “…to think of oneself as belonging to a public is to be a certain
kind of person, to inhabit a certain kind of social world, to have at one’s disposal certain
media and genres, to be motiviated by a certain normative horizon, and to speak within a
certain language ideology” (Publics 10). Negotiating between the distinctions of a public
and the public, Warner highlights the way in which, even when we assume to be speaking
about the public as “a kind of social totality” (65), there is a sense in which its scope is
still limited. Not limited in the sense of having an inside and an outside – far too simple a
distinction, as I argue in this dissertation – but rather limited in the way in which we
20

might relate to it differently in nuanced ways. Even the public, for Warner, holds the
possibility for different kinds of belonging, opening up the edges of the public as possible
alternatives to relating to the public sphere.
This social context, I argue, is essential both to understanding the relationship that
male sentimentality has to the public sphere (a relationship I later identify as
“peripheral”) and to establishing a key limit on the scope of this project, which is
invested in exploring only certain kinds of male sentimentality. With respect to the latter,
what I mean is this: The project is not about male sentimentality, its histories, or its
politics writ large. Instead, it is about a particular kind of response to normativity from
the normative subject who willfully pushes away from the center of normativity to its
boundaries in an effort to notice the structural privileges and inequities of a system that
otherwise seems so familiar and inclusive to him. This peripheral shift is important for
two distinct reasons, both of which represent a rejection of the normative logics of
privilege that this subject sees from the sidelines. First, such a shift represents a turn
outward, away from himself, in an effort to notice others. Whether considered under a
rubric of sympathy, compassion, or empathy, this turn away, when all other logics seem
to direct towards that subject, is fascinating, if not still quite complicated.
7
That this turn
away often takes the form of a turn to affect is the second important point. Evidenced in
sympathetic weeping, a desire to listen to others’ stories, and a recognition of structural

7
The nuances of these terms are interesting to explore for the ways in which they help to articulate
the distinctions between feelings for others that are self-serving or other-oriented, distanced or close,
etc. Marjorie Garber’s wonderful cataloguing of the terms in “Compassion” (in Berlant Compassion),
an article in Lauren Berlant’s edited collection of the same name, helps illustrate the wideness of
possibility in thinking through these relations between dissimilar subjects.
21

inequalities, the affective turn disrupts the normative masculinities circulating in the
public sphere, highlighting the ways in which such masculinities rely on a distancing
from emotions as part of their logic of privileging certain bodies over others.
And so the two key terms of this project stand in for its governing investments: In
referring to this figure of critical male sentimentality as a “wallflower,” I echo what I
read as the potential in Stephen Chbosky’s term to represent both a marginal figure,
watching the proverbial dance unfold from the sidelines, and a feminized figure that
stands in opposition to normative masculinity. In its most recent edition, the Oxford
English Dictionary still forwards this gendered aspect to the term in its definition,
pointing to the wallflower as, “A lady who keeps her seat at the side of a room during
dancing, whether because she cannot find a partner or by her own choice” (“wallflower,
n.” OED Online). Chbosky’s book, discussed here in Chapter Three, avoids making this
latter connotation explicit – characters largely avoid challenging the protagonist’s
masculinity so directly – but it underwrites much of Charlie’s character throughout. Like
his 18
th
century progenitors in Henry MacKenzie’s Harley (The Man of Feeling 1771)
and Goethe’s Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther 1774), Charlie spends much of the
narrative weeping, hanging out almost exclusively with girls (with the exception of one
other young man who happens to be gay), and feeling excessively empathetic to those
around him. Importantly, then, “wallflower” captures the saliency of these gendered
performances and offers up a rubric for thinking about how normativity articulates its
own critique. It also sets up the second guiding term of the project – the periphery – by
22

insisting from the start that when we think about normativity and the male sentimental
response, we must always return to structure.

T H E P E R I P H E R Y Between Privilege and its Discontents

So often, critical considerations of normativity have relied on figurative language
to articulate the ways in which, they suggest, power or knowledge circulates. From
Foucault’s use of the panoptic prison to Althusser’s mini-narrative of the hailing
policeman,
8
these metaphors for disciplining and interpellating subjects describe the
circulations of power and knowledge with metaphors that help to illustrate abstract
dynamics happening in culture. Their figurativeness seems to hold an intellectual cache
that helps them travel through several disciplines with ease, and the steady proliferation
of such metaphors persists in classrooms today. What such metaphors attempt to do, of
course, is provide insight into the regulative dynamics of society – those things that
compel us to act in certain ways, those things that define normal at the exclusion of what
they define as not normal.
9
But I wonder if that work can also reify the abstract dynamics

8
Foucault’s infamous “panoptic” model is most clearly articulated in Discipline and Punish (1977);
Althusser’s interpellating policeman (who calls out to us – “Hey You!”) is illustrated best in
“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1972). Not only do both widely circulate in cultural
theory today, but they resonate with other similar models that either preceded or followed, like
Frantz Fanon’s earlier moment of racial interpellation in Black Skin, White Masks (1952).

9
One of the limits of this framework, which goes underexplored in this project, is the possibility for
identities that remain illegible both to the mainstream and its resistance. Judith Butler speaks about
this position at length in Undoing Gender (2005), where she writes that “[T]hese are possibilities that
become increasingly disregarded in the sphere of politics…an illegitimacy whose temporal condition
is to be foreclosed….not only not yet legitimate, but it is we might say the irrecoverable and
irreversible past of legitimacy: the never will be, the never was” (Butler 207).
23

of a social system that it attempts to describe. In attempting to articulate that which such
critics so clearly stand against (normativity and privilege), perhaps these metaphors fix
into place too singular a vision of what they name “normativity.”
The danger of such figures is that, in their tendency to provide a metaphor for
power and privilege from a theoretical vantage point outside that privilege, they tend to
imply both that normativity has an “outside” and that we should understand that outside
as the ideal space for critique. Not that it is easy to imagine an alternative: even the
language I am using here (inside/outside) replicates the figurative distinctions I am trying
to unpack. But the tendency of 20
th
century scholarship and activism to rely so heavily on
these figures of a totalizing, autonomous normativity in order to articulate its own dissent
can limit our own imaginings of what makes normativity work. Such figurative
explanations imagine a critic distanced from normativity’s privileges, privileging the
space outside normativity as the place from which they might draw insights into
normativity itself. Adrienne Rich’s claim that “the master’s tools will never serve to
dismantle the master’s house” – a statement that continues to accrue countless references
many years after the fact – suggests completely removing oneself from a system of
oppression in order to design a challenge or rebuilding of that system. As elaborated in
the Preface, Gayle Rubin’s figuring of the “charmed circle” and its walls separating
“good” from “bad” sexualities similarly insists on a privileged normativity that some
have and others do not. Trying to make one powerful, if complicated point – “normativity
can make those lives marked as non-normative particularly difficult, and I stand against
that normativity” – at the expense of opening up other avenues for a critique of
24

normativity, such readings too easily lock us into imagining that the critique of something
must always come from elsewhere, sharply distinct from that which it describes.
Popular readings of a poststructuralist turn might assume that critics largely
deconstructed the need for these types of oppositional frameworks by the end of the
century. Indeed, even the Althusserian and Foucauldian models seem to imply their
investment in turning away from more binaristic models of power and its opposition. But
practice here appears to divide from theory, and the proclamation of a post-dualist
critique is often undercut by the spirit in which that proclamation is delivered. Still today,
critics desire to make the gesture of capaciousness – but remain absolutely invested in
clarifying which side of the line they stand on. To engage such scholarship, whether in
texts, or conference rooms, or classrooms, is to find one truth: the worst thing that a good
cultural critic can be is normative, or on the side of normativity. And so even the most
generous of critiques burden themselves with shoring up the looseness of these non-
binaristic models in order to articulate their dissent. Polarized against normativity, such
critiques reify normativity as an “us and them” thing – let us stand in firm opposition to
the privileged them.
But for a few marginal texts that have emerged recently, at the nexus of gender,
queer, and affect studies, there has been a concerted effort to “postpone,” as Eve
Sedgwick might say, this self-conscious insistence on declaring one’s opposition to
normativity. Together with work by Lauren Berlant, Leela Gandhi, and others, Sedgwick
pushes us to imagine new ways of relating to normativity without pretense that to
imagine such a space would constitute a lesser commitment to interrogating privilege.
25

This work presupposes from the start that oppositional models tend to reify that which
they critique and, often enough, produce their own complicated norms and regulations.
Sara Ahmed provides wonderful insight into this dynamic:
What we might remember is that to be against something is precisely not
to be in a position of transcendence: to be against something is, after all, to
be in an intimate relation with that which one is against. To be anti ‘this’
or anti ‘that’ only makes sense if ‘this’ or ‘that’ exists. The messy work of
‘againstness’ might even help remind us that the work of critique does not
mean the transcendence of the object of our critique; indeed, critique
might even be dependent on non-transcendence. (Declarations 47,
emphasis hers)
In being so firmly committed to a politics of “againstness,” Ahmed writes, oppositional
critique does two things: it takes on an “intimate relation” with the thing it critiques, and
it produces its own glass ceiling of transgressive potential. This intimacy, I later argue,
often is one of reproduction, as opposition tends toward a mirroring of the privileged
normative sphere itself.
Curiously enough, this scholarship relies on figures of its own to articulate its
distinction from more oppositional models. Specifically, it makes a turn to a spatial
understanding of normativity and critique – as opposed a temporal, or genealogical, one –
in an effort to imagine different relations to normativity. For Sedgwick, this means a turn
to the “beside,” as opposed to the “beneath” or “beyond” models of critical work, because
beside implies a much wider range of relationships outside a dualistic model without
26

being reduced to some sort of “egalitarian or even pacific” (Sedgwick Touching 8)
middle ground. For Berlant, working in the liminal spaces of women’s culture that feel
transgressive without being politically engaged, “juxtapolitical” conveys a nuanced sense
of “proximity to the political, occasionally crossing over in political alliance, even more
occasionally doing some politics, but most often not, acting as a critical chorus that sees
the expression of emotional response and conceptual recalibration as achievement
enough” (Berlant Female x, emphasis hers). For Gandhi, the turn is even more intimate:
the “cartography” of her argument, as she calls it, is marked by its “redesignat[ion of the]
political as the place of an always deferred and therefore always open and hospitable
community” (Gandhi 19), which she focuses on both methodologically and in her choice
of content. Under a Derridean notion of “friendship,” she moves to consider specific
historical moments of convergence between colonized peoples and the British “non-
players” who could treat one another as “sympathetic but irreducible outsider[s]” (16).
These models cohere in their affective and spatial politics: they propose liminal
models that explore normativity and its opposition from near or beside either – and
though they clearly remain committed to a critique of normativity, they issue it from a
marginal position. The gesture is illustrative of a certain methodological ethics; with a
dose of humility, each embraces the opportunity to “postpone” the firm commitment of
dualistic thinking and opens itself up to new relationships to normativity. But beyond
this, such work proves productive as well: generating radical new insights into
normativity and its regulative politics, these models offer an abundance of opportunities
to rethink privilege and social change. Berlant wonders if, in the “cruel optimism” of
27

sentimental culture, for instance, we might find ways to talk about social engagement that
is politically unfulfilling but that remains, perhaps paradoxically, sustaining.
10
Gandhi
unapologetically opens up the politically-charged critical history of postcolonial studies,
and tries to imagine ways out of valuing “sameness” (we are all one) or “difference” (we
are all different), both of which reduce to an “eternal recurrence…of solipsism.” Instead,
she suggests, the “ethical agent of the host-friend relies precisely on her capacity to leave
herself open…to the risk of radical insufficiency” (31).
In my own decision to move to the margins in this project, I stand, waveringly, on
the side of the median. With a turn to what I refer to as the periphery, the wallflower
figures in this project offer insights all their own into normativity and its regulative
politics. The uniqueness of their contribution, though, derives from the ways in which, as
privileged subjects, these wallflowers move to the periphery from the “charmed circle,”
rather than moving closer to the periphery from those outer limits. The turn here is often
figured in the work itself: the wallflowers watch or listen to a culture that they are
certainly a part of, and yet they step away in order to observe its patterns and demands.
From the margins, normativity emerges not as a freestanding structural entity, secure in
its boundaries holding tight to those within its regulated grasp; rather, normativity begins
to take shape as a set of logics that privilege, but do not necessarily emanate from,
particular bodies. Echoing Judith Halberstam’s claim that “masculinity must not and
cannot and should not reduce down to the male body and its effects” (Halberstam

10
In Cruel Optimism, Berlant elaborates on this space in the key terms of this project: “a precarious
public sphere, an intimate public of subjects who circulate scenarios of how best to live on,
considering” (Berlant Cruel 3).
28

Masculinity 1), the wallflower distinguishes the regulations governing bodies from the
sites that produce those regulations, opening up the possibility of reframing normativity
as a system sustained even by its opposition. Like Berlant or Gandhi’s work,
Halberstam’s scholarship often derives from these imaginings out of dualist thinking, and
remains invested in new ways to think through, and around, and beside, normativity and
its pull. The wallflower claim makes a similar gesture: it sees or hears the logics of
privilege circulate through both the normative public sphere and those figuring
themselves outside it, and insists that, though such logics still functioned to privilege
certain bodies over others, they could just as easily come from non-privileged as
privileged subjects. Indeed, we might even take a step further in suggesting that, even
formed in direct opposition to the regulative public, these oppositional publics began to
recirculate the same regulative norms as the publics they critiqued.
11

From sensitive emo kids searching for sincerity between Reagan’s bootstrap
politics and hardcore punk’s hyperaggressive brashness, to Frederick Douglass’s
sentimental rhetoric about the politics of listening to slave’s songs; from Mr. Spectator’s
claim that he “lives in the World, rather as a Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the
Species” (Addison and Steele 1.197) to Quentin Jacobsen’s reflection that “what a
treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person" (Green 282); these

11
I will elaborate on some of these explicit counterpublics in Chapter Four, where I point to the
ways in which emo subculture’s emergence articulated itself precisely against a counterculture –
hardcore punk – that it resisted for the ways in which it replicated the normative logics of Reagan, or
later Bush’s, America. Though I do not elaborate on them in this project, these other models of more
direct oppositional publics are interesting to explore. See especially Michael Warner’s essay on
“Publics and Counterpublics” in his book of the same name, or Lauren Berlant’s discussion of
“intimate publics” in both The Female Complaint (2008) and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City
(1997).
29

wallflowers hold some affective resonance across their wide historical emergence.
Blossoming in moments rife with division and standing so disparately apart, we can still
find in each some affective tether that strings them together. The turn to affect for the
wallflower becomes an index of his disidentification, deferring from both privilege and
its critique, and instead he simply offers new ways to map the social hierarchy. From the
US abolitionist era to the fragmented 1980’s, from post-Brown v. Board desegregation to
the birth of the public, these wallflowers find affective alliances that refuse genealogical,
or linear connections, and instead can only be felt, seen, and heard across the sentimental
plains of recent cultural history. To turn to them is to make a postponement, but it is also
an opportunity to read normativity in ways that, perhaps, help us to imagine new
possibilities for pushing back against normativity’s pull. And so the work of the
wallflower becomes, in a way, the work of the project itself, developing its own
methodologies for peripheral thought and social change.

T H E W O R K A Peripheral Methodology

Though counterintuitively designed, this project’s arrangement derives from an
investment in hearing the echoes of certain social structures across a wide historical
range. As Chapter Two suggests, such arrangements help us to hear the echoes of
normative logics recirculating in culture even when we imagine such logics to have been
suppressed. The turn away from more normative arrangements – genealogical approaches
underwritten with the rhetoric of progress so endemic to the US – helps to imagine a new
30

mapping of normativity beyond the simplicity of the haves and the have-nots. The
moments isolated in this project for their heightened production of these wallflowers –
variously emerging in the 1770’s British literature of sentiment, the early American
abolitionism of Frederick Douglass, the post-Brown vs. Board of Education changes to
high school reading curricula, and the Reagan-era flash of emo music subculture –
represent the range of possibilities for thinking about when, where, and how the
wallflower emerges, and in the steady movement through these figures that this project
offers, I hope to continually reflect on the implications that male sentimentality continues
to hold in culture today.
In Chapter One, “On the Budding of the Wallflower; or, The Emergence of the
18
th
Century Man of Feeling,” I challenge the initial “novelty” of the contemporary man
of feeling by turning back to that historical era from which most literary and cultural
historians consider male sentimentality to have emerged: 18
th
century Britain.
Specifically, I argue that the emergence of what Jürgen Habermas calls “the public
sphere” alongside the emergence of male sentimentality tells us quite a bit about the
relationship between the two: As I hope to demonstrate over the course of the chapter,
male sentimentality developed not necessarily in response to, but rather in conjunction
with, both the public and the emergent forms of normative masculinity that characterized
the public. Through widely-circulated periodicals like Richard Steele and Joseph
Addison’s The Spectator (1711-1712) – texts central both to Habermas’s thesis and to the
discussions of this chapter – the articulation of the public as a particular kind of social
structure came into circulation directly from the removed, sentimental perspective offered
31

by the periodical’s titular narrator. In carving out a space from which to analyze, critique,
and even call into being the new normative public, Mr. Spectator offered a “peripheral”
perspective on culture that helped locate male sentimentality as an important component
of public criticism. In moving through Mr. Spectator to Harley, the titular cult hero of
Henry MacKenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), I move to open up the biggest question
to come from these peripheral insights: How do we respond to the regulative public in
ways that feel sincere or ethical? Or, to use the key terms of the project, what is the work
that the wallflower ought to do? Deferring a question of genealogical development, I
suggest we might think about a “trajectory” of sentimentality as a response whose ends
are well-intentioned, but ambivalent. But I ask if ambivalence might be a capacious space
from which we could raise a new set of questions about the work that the wallflower
does, and the possibilities for active social change he might engender.
Ch. 2, “’Those Songs Still Follow Me’: Sentimental Listening and the Echoes of
Slavery,” advances the insights we derive from consideration of the wallflower in Ch. 1,
opening up more specifically sentimentality’s capacity to read culture from the periphery.
In a reading that links the sentimental insights of the US abolitionist and neo-abolitionist
novel into the racial structures underwriting normative public culture, I cultivate a
methodology of “critical listening” which derives, in this case, from Frederick Douglass’s
anecdote about the songs of slavery in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
(1845). From this passage, which has received recent attention from Jon Cruz, Saidiya
Hartman, and Josh Kun, I trace the sentimental roots of Douglass’s critical approach to
cultural listening, and use this method of listening to try to “hear” the echoes of racial
32

structures repeating across a wide range of bodies, periods, and nations. In complement
with the neo-abolitionist young adult novels of Laurie Halse Anderson (Chains, 2008)
and M.T. Anderson (The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, 2006), Douglass’s
wallflower insights help us to hear social inequality even as it adapts to a changing
culture: we learn to listen not for the “truth” of racial inequality in some aspect of
normative culture, but rather we train ourselves to hear its logics, circulating melodiously
across the normative and the counternormative, the privileged and the deprived, the
White and the Black. Listening defers the easy trajectories of a “victory” over racism
with something much more subtle: the ability to recognize the replicated logics of racial
inequality across a spectrum of times, places, and bodies. It refuses the self-oriented
logics of personal feelings – “that’s just the way I feel” – for an other-oriented
sentimentality, making a fine distinction between sympathy and empathy; it strives for
reflection over action, affective labor over political change, and the deferral of answers in
favor of structural perspective.
Ch. 3, “The Schools of our Imaginations,” turns to curricular changes made to
high school reading lists in the 1950s US as a response to desegregation and the Brown v.
Board court case, in an effort to examine the increasingly complex ways in which male
sentimentality became a dominant cultural affect that could be mobilized to replicate as
well as challenge the dominant logics of privilege and normativity. Specifically, it
highlights the ways in which the turn to the novel of the adolescent man of feeling – from
Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) to J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the
Rye (1951) – in the wake of desegregation derived from larger cultural attitudes in
33

education about racial difference, affect, and social change. Instead, though, of simply
following the chapter in an arc towards male sentimentality’s co-opted reinforcement of
structural differences and privileges, I turn once more to a new periphery of male
sentimentality – the reemergence of the wallflower figure in books about youth
disidentifying with the high school curriculum I address in the chapter. Through readings
of Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999) and John Green’s Paper
Towns (2008), both of which feature protagonists who are depicted as reading through the
high school curriculum, I argue that, even as male sentiment becomes reappropriated to
secure normative privilege in secondary school reading lists, new forms of the wallflower
figure emerge to critique the changing forms of normativity that male sentiment helps
stabilize. These texts, I suggest, insist once more that the periphery might be a critical and
theoretical component of the public sphere that continues to produce careful readings of
privilege from ambivalent spaces.
Finally, Ch. 4, “No Hay un Movimiento: The Peripheral Public of Emo,” returns
the dissertation, at last, fully to the present, in a reading of “emo” music subculture that
first appeared in response to the steadily increasing hypermasculinity of hardcore punk in
the 1980s. Considering emo as a movement “[que] no hay un movimiento,” as Telehit VJ
Kristoff famously pronounced before widespread attacks on emo youth in Mexico, this
chapter reiterates the saliency of male sentimentality and our cultural response to it in the
21
st
century as indicators of the resonant juxtaposition of “feminine” young men. Raising
important questions about the limits emo faces in forming as a public – for fear of
replicating the normative logics it sees underwriting public culture – I trace the scene’s
34

ephemeral disappearances and resurgences over the past few decades in an effort to
connect the insights of the preceding chapters. With a turn at the end that culminates in
emo’s shift south of the border to the disaffected youth of Latin America, I point to the
possibility that perhaps male sentimentality, in being moved to other bodies, other
nations, and other visions of privilege, unraveling, holds the potential for transformation
after all.
35

– 1 –

O N T H E B U D D I N G O F T H E W A L L F L O W E R:
The Emergence of the 18
th
-century Man of Feeling

“Thus I live in the World, rather as a Spectator of
Mankind, than as one of the Species…I am very
well versed in the Theory of an Husband, or a
Father, and can discern the Errors in the Oeconomy,
Business, and Diversion of others, better than those
who are engaged in them; as Standers-by discover
Blots, which are apt to escape those who are in the
Game.”
– Mr. Spectator, in the first issue of Richard
Steele and Joseph Addison’s The Spectator,
1711

If one of the sustaining inquiries of this project is to interrogate the political and
cultural significance of male sentimentality in the contemporary moment, we must insist
that the “novelty” of the contemporary man of feeling, from Stephen Chbosky’s Charlie
in The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999) to “Weeper of the House” John Boehner, may
obfuscate a more complicated history to affect and its relation to masculinity than we can
easily recognize. This is not to suggest that we might do well in tracing the historical man
of feeling across centuries and oceans in articulating a lineage that culminates in the 21
st

century US cultural production. Rather, it is simply a claim that, indeed, much of the
complexity of reading affectively-oriented male figures in the contemporary moment
might be better untangled with attention to the discourses and cultural histories which
produced these tensions. In other words, to begin unpacking what “feels” transgressive
36

about male sentimentality, it is important that we think about the features of mainstream
culture that have contrasted, complemented, and produced sentimentality as a kind of
critical response to normative culture.
It should come as little surprise, then, that the starting point for this project ought
to turn to that historical era from which most literary and cultural historians consider
male sentimentality to have emerged: 18
th
-century Britain. From Janet Todd’s Sensibility:
An Introduction (1986) to G.J. Barker Benfield’s The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and
Society in Eighteenth –Century Britain (1996), many of the most authoritative texts of the
era establish the historical trajectory of male sentimentality from the Enlightenment-
inflected discourse of sensibility cohering in the work of John Locke to the rise of the cult
of sentimentality in novels from Samuel Richardson to Henry MacKenzie about a century
later. We do often hear, of course, of a “literature of male sentiment,” characterized by
the work of MacKenzie, Lawrence Sterne, and others in the 1760s and 1770s. But
MacKenzie’s widely-circulated The Man of Feeling (1771), which, in its depiction of the
weeping, sentimental protagonist Harley, can be seen in these critical texts to have
derived from a century of precedent in works as diverse as Adam Smith’s The Theory of
Moral Sentiments (1759), Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
(1751), and Anthony Ashley Cooper’s Characteristics (1711).
The disjointedness of these timelines tracing the “history” of male sentimentality,
as it turns out, deserves interrogation. Not only because so many different histories might
be drawn or archives delineated, but because the sheer proliferation of male
sentimentality in the 18
th
-century offered widely contradictory narratives about what
37

precedents ought to be included in a genealogy of the man of feeling and which ought
not. Moreover, this ambivalence seemed, on some level, unproductive – by which I mean
that, though it may have felt politically salient or transformative, often enough male
sentimentality failed to produce tangible social changes that we could identify in its
wake. As such, this chapter intends to unpack the logic and dynamics of the man of
feeling in lieu of articulating a specific historical moment from which he might have
emerged. This turn to a structural reading of male sentimentality, as I hope to
demonstrate both in this and in later chapters, reflects the alternative methodological
investments with which this project began, and raises a new set of questions in thinking
through the cultural phenomenon of the man of feeling: What was it about this cultural
moment, I wonder, that enabled the proliferation and legibility of the man of feeling? In
which context did he emerge, and in which context did he distinguish himself from other
men in ways that felt novel or transformative? And, finally, what are the stakes of turning
to rather normatively-privileged figures in thinking about transgression and the critique
of normativity?
* * *
Let me not get too far ahead of myself – the man of feeling, who only shows up at
the end of this chapter, isn’t really my focus here. Instead, I want to unpack some of the
important cultural precedents which both produce and enable us to see male
sentimentality as a logical response to inequalities it could identify in the developing
social order of 18
th
-century Britain, and then later suggest that these precedents came to
coalesce in the man of feeling at the end of the century. Early on, I argue that the
38

emergence of what Jürgen Habermas calls “the public sphere” alongside the emergence
of male sentimentality tells us quite a bit about the relationship between the two: As I
hope to demonstrate over the course of the chapter, male sentimentality developed not
necessarily in response to, but rather in conjunction with, both the public and the
emergent forms of normative masculinity that characterized the public.
1
Through widely-
circulated periodicals like Richard Steele and Joseph Addison’s The Spectator (1711-
1712) – texts central both to Habermas’s thesis and to the discussions of this chapter – the
articulation of the public as a particular kind of social structure came into circulation
directly from the removed perspective offered by the periodical’s titular narrator. In
carving out a space from which to analyze, critique, and even call into being the new
normative public, Mr. Spectator offered a “peripheral” perspective on culture that helped
locate male sentimentality as an important component of public criticism.
In the first section, “The Public Debut; the Periphery Unfolds,” the articulation of
the public from the periphery provides an early framework for thinking about the
structures through which male sentimentality emerges as a particular kind of response to
that public. Specifically, it develops the periphery as a place to watch “the Game” of
public life, as Mr. Spectator calls it in the first Issue, discovering its rules and
idiosyncrasies as part of the larger structures of a social hierarchy. The second section,
“The Hostilities of Either Side,” attends more specifically to the players in that game, and

1
Habermas remains the starting point for most scholars interested in thinking through the concept
of the “public,” as his work gained significant traction in the academy after its translation and US
publication in 1989. Interestingly, the touchstones of Habermas’s argument – the texts and time
periods in which he located his thesis – have become adopted by scholars in his wake, regardless of
their agreement with his claims.
39

addresses both the ways in which we tend to interpellate particular bodies into particular
roles (e.g. relegating women to the “domestic” and men to the “public” sphere) and the
ways in which those models might be challenged. Specifically, in deferring attention to
the body itself in favor of its position at the periphery, I look at the ways in which
Addison and Steele disrupt the essentializing distinctions we have between how the
different sexes act and how they are capable of acting. And I point out that, in disrupting
those distinctions, each author discovers that certain logics of privilege and normativity –
certain “rules” of the game – emanate from all sorts of bodies regardless of which ones
they ought to.
These explorations help to enrich our understanding of the discourses which
preceded and helped to establish the emergence of the man of feeling – and yet, as we
will see, they leave us with an important open-ended question: Why is it that male
sentimentality flourishes in this peripheral space as a response to normative culture from
the sidelines? The final section, “Ambivalently in Bloom,” attempts to answer this
question by reframing the man of feeling himself, Henry MacKenzie’s Harley, in terms
of these peripheral cultural spaces that Addison and Steele explore. The comparison
allows us to see the ways in which sentimentality and the periphery intersect in their
relation to the public sphere; simultaneously observant and disruptive, each flourishes as
a way to critique normativity and the regulative public sphere from up close. But in that
flourishing, I argue, there is also a hesitancy: the ambivalence of the man of feeling holds
the promise of a new perspective on, and challenge to, normativity’s regulative social
forces, but over and over something fails to connect his desire to change the world with
40

any tangible, material, or political result. Which leaves us with the ambivalent question of
this ambivalent project: after all this, who is the man of feeling, and what work does he
do?

T H E P U B L I C D E B U T ; T H E P E R I P H E R Y U N F O L D S

There is a perfect ordinariness to the way in which, in Penguin’s widely circulated
edition of Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator (1982), Angus Ross glosses the
first issue of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator with the generic subtitle,
“[Mr. Spectator introduces himself]” (Addison and Steele 1.197)
2
Framing the titular
character’s “entrance” into the public in this way makes sense – after all, Mr. Spectator’s
strong personality would become for many readers inextricable from the paper he
narrated
3
– and yet, as I hope to explore in this section, the focus on Mr. Spectator’s
introduction perhaps overly simplifies the scope of a periodical dedicated to “the
Advancement of the Public Weal” (1.200) as the end of the issue declares. Substituting
personal history for public criticism, the focus on Mr. Spectator over the public that he
wants to observe and improve seems to tangle many of the embedded assumptions about
public-ness raised in Steele and Addison’s periodical, from what constitutes a public, to

2
The citations for The Spectator will follow this format, whereupon the authors’ names are followed
by X.Y, in which X represents the issue number and Y represents the page number in Angus Ross’s
edited collection, Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator (1982).

3
Like Isaac Bickerstaff before him in Steele’s Tatler, the animated and personified narrator at the
center of Steele and Addison’s periodical attracted a kind of attention that endeared early readers,
who were encouraged to exchange ideas and inquiries with him through the frequent “Dear Mr.
Spectator” issues of correspondence.
41

what constitutes being in public, to what constitutes public criticism in the post-
Restoration era. In other words, as I argue in this section, we must not simply claim that
the issue, like the periodical itself, represents the introduction of Mr. Spectator, emerging
from the sidelines of the public. Rather, we must insist that Mr. Spectator, as he turns the
tables on an unsuspecting readership, seems to introduce the public to itself.
As faithful readers, of course, Ross and others may simply be attempting to
rearticulate Mr. Spectator’s own claims at a self-introduction in the first paragraph of the
1711 issue; he is a character immediately obsessed with self-identification. After some
musings on potential readers and their investment in knowing “whether the Writer of it be
a black or a fair Man, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with
other Particulars…that conduce very much to the right understanding of an author”
(Addison and Steele 1.197), Mr. Spectator offers up a prefatory remark on his own (as he
calls it) “History”:
To gratifie this Curiosity, which is so natural to a Reader, I design this
Paper, and my next, as Prefatory Discourses to my following Writings,
and shall give some Account in them of the several Persons that are
engaged in this Work. As the chief Trouble of Compiling, Digesting, and
Correcting will fall to my Share, I must do my self the Justice to open the
Work with my own History. (1.197)
And so Mr. Spectator himself, despite his claims at being dedicated to “the Advancement
of the Public Weal,” keeps insisting that he ought to begin with the explanation and
revelation of who he is. The only problem, however, is that what follows never really
42

elucidates any of the “Particulars” he claims his audience to want to know; instead, he
tells a curious story about being a quiet young man at university and then traveling before
settling back down in London. This is not to say that it would be difficult to make some
assumptions about “who” Mr. Spectator is, and the casual way in which critics tend to
think about him as an incarnation of Addison and Steele’s personae evidences this fact.
4

But the readers’ reliance on such assumptions belies the remaining point that, when all is
said and done, there is something amiss about the public debut of this auspicious
character. In other words, though Mr. Spectator ends the paragraph by saying that he will
“open the Work with my own History” (1.197), implying that he will tell us about these
socially-coded identifiers like race, affect, and marital status, he has already reneged on
the promise. What he has opened the work with – and it would be difficult to oversell this
point – are three simple words that set the tone for the paper, and the public it reifies, in
each subsequent issue: “I have observed” (1.197).
If Mr. Spectator has defined himself as anything, it is, both literally and
figuratively, as one who observes. Though we do come across some details of his History
– well-educated and traveled, extremely quiet, without a father – the only conclusive
point that we can make about him is the one he pronounces for himself: “Thus I live in
the World, rather as a Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the Species” (1.199). It’s an
important claim, and it initially appears to satisfy, albeit in an idiosyncratic way, the
readerly desire that Mr. Spectator sought to accomplish in his early introduction: If the
reader wants to know about who the author is, they now know that he is an observer, a

4
See Albert Furtwangler, for instance, in “The Making of Mr. Spectator”, 1977.
43

peripheral character that watches life more than he participates in it. But of course, there
is some discrepancy between these socially-coded markers of identification that Mr.
Spectator points out readers want to know – race, affect, marital status – and the specific
ways in which he identifies himself. Though it feels revealing, his words in fact tell us
very little about the who that Mr. Spectator initially claims all readers desire to know.
And so this curious reversal, which begins with every pretense that Mr. Spectator’s
public debut will be a revealing one, results in a feeling of exposure – but the one being
exposed seems much more to be the public and much less to be Mr. Spectator. Indeed,
this tension between “observing” the reader’s desires – which Mr. Spectator brings in full
view to his audience – and actually fulfilling those desires – which he certainly does not
do – begins to feel less and less arbitrary as the paper goes on.
To put it another way, and to return to the framing anecdote with which this
section began, Mr. Spectator doesn’t so much make his public debut as he instead debuts
the public. In refusing to fulfill the reader’s desire to know who he is, he leaves that
desire exposed, articulated as a behavioral pattern, a social phenomenon that extends
beyond the boundaries of the paper’s originally proposed scope. To some extent, of
course, the social tendency that Mr. Spectator observes in his readers is an arbitrary
phenomenon, a “natural…curiosity” (1.197) on the part of the reader to know something
about an author – and yet, in this simple gesture, which sets the tone for one of the most
influential periodicals of the 18
th
-century, something grand takes place. On the one hand,
Mr. Spectator presents us with a very specific critical and cultural space – the space of
the periphery – where observing social phenomena, and attending to the intricacies of the
44

public and its normative patterns, might flourish. A periphery where one can be “in the
World,” but not of it; a periphery where one can be “well versed in the Theory of an
Husband, or a Father” (1.199) without ever having to be either one. On the other hand,
the public that Mr. Spectator invokes also seems to be both reified and interpellated in its
very invocation: the public comes into being because he can articulate its normativities,
and the reader, always already part of the public that Mr. Spectator observes, necessarily
becomes part of that same public.
Historically, the moment was right for this kind of intervention: the emergence of
the middle or bourgeois class in London at the turn of the century had created new
cultural, economic, and even physical spaces from which a community could be borne
into coherence as a public.
5
In this way, The Spectator’s figurative vision of the daily life
of 1711 London helped the newly complicated social hierarchies and dynamics of early
18
th
-century England to coalesce in such “observations,” virtually conjuring the very
public it sought to describe. We can see this in the critical legacy attached to the
periodical: two of the biggest scholars of “public” theory in the 20
th
-century, Jurgen
Habermas and Michael Warner, identify the periodical as a foundational touchstone in
the rise of the “public sphere” and the “public,” respectively, finding in their semi-
genealogical methodologies moments leading to and from these texts. And Terry
Eagleton goes so far as to insist that both The Spectator and its predecessor, The Tatler,

5
Essentially, Habermas’s basic point that the “bourgeois public sphere” emerged in the circulating
rhythms of periodical and coffeehouse culture has been taken up by nearly all who follow in his
wake. From Peter Lake and Steve Pincus’s “Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modren England”
(2006) to Manushag Powell’s “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil: Spectation and the
Eighteenth-Century Public Sphere” (2012), scholars continue to parse through the many ways we can
understand these cultural shifts under a common vocabulary and framework.

45

were invested in no less than “class consolidation, a codifying of the norms and
regulating of the practices whereby the English bourgeoisie may negotiate an historic
alliance with its social superiors” (Eagleton 10). Other critics waver on this point, either
insisting or refusing the possibility that such a dramatic social shift could be traced back
to such a specific moment, let alone a specific cultural object.
6
But the point remains: The
Spectator, and particularly its titular narrator, emerge at the same time that we can
observe major shifts in class structure and popular conceptions of what it meant to be in
and of a public.
While the arguments surrounding the periodicals, and the discourse about the
publics that they generate, are important for making the link between the two in
complicated and insightful ways, the largely genealogical or historical framing that these
criticisms tend to rely on can prevent us from seeing – and I use the metaphor
intentionally – in some of the ways that Mr. Spectator does, or rather, the position from
which he sees. In other words, arguments about which came first – the coffeehouse or the
conversation, Mr. Spectator or his public – seem wrongheaded in their presupposition
that we could “find” a starting point for the public, or for male sentimentality. Instead, I
propose that Mr. Spectator gives us an opportunity to take a more ambivalent, peripheral
stance. Caught between being a “Spectator” and “one of the Species,” the periodical’s
narrator positions himself in a way that resists an easy introduction or starting point – this

6
In The Spectator: Emerging Discourses, Donald Newman chronicles this debate quite succinctly: On the
one hand, he links Terry Eagleton’s reading with Erin Mackie’s claims about the personalization of
power structures as exemplary of middle-class culture, both of which insist on these periodicals as
reflective and influential in cultural shifts at the time. To contrast this, he cites J.G.A. Pocock and
William Walker’s insistence that such cultural shifts were in no way evident to Addison, Steele, and
their contemporaries (see Newman 18-19).
46

is the point of this section’s early anecdote. But what it does enable, as I argue here, is an
opportunity for readers to see the public as a structure of culture that had specific rules
and mores, steadily governing the subjects of Imperial Britain far beyond the
development of one simple class or historical moment. It served both as guarantee and
invitation: readers could see these structures, too, if only they could find new, peripheral
places from which to observe.
The relatively brief initial run of The Spectator eventually became known for this
social and cultural analysis, particularly as it concerned the behavior of men and women
in, yes, the emergent middle or bourgeois class. Mr. Spectator and his cast of coffeehouse
commentators articulated and addressed the emerging daily life of the London public:

From reviews of plays and literature, to light commentary on the ways in which men
ought to treat women,
7
the periodical gave shape to a world that was transforming in its
own particular ways; it contextualized and analyzed the experiences of a public as it was
first encountering them. At the time, this included politicized cultural events as they
happened, such as Addison’s devastating response to the 1712 Stamp Act (Issue 445), but
it more often skewed to general social phenomena in their budding phases: How ought
we to treat our new servants? What do we do when a beggar asks for money? How ought
we to behave in a carriage? Often enough, readers wrote in to request addressing a social
situation, with the periodical publishing both the letter and a response, showcasing both a
timeliness and an active engagement with the public on its own terms. In just under two

7
For reviews of cultural events and texts, see, for instance, Issue 65 on Sir Fopling Flutter, or Issues
267 ff. on Paradise Lost. For critiques of the politics of gendered interactions between men and
women, see especially Issues 88, 137, 11, and 57.
47

years – the length of its initial run in 555 issues – The Spectator had projected the wide
scope of the social milieu, detailing its absurdities and rhythms, watching for its patterns
and curiosities, on the sidelines of a coffeehouse. And the sheer breadth of coverage, its
systematic regularity displayed for all to judge themselves against, presented one
overwhelming sketch of what it meant to be in public: under a system of logics, and
social patterns, and recommended etiquette, the public existed by virtue of its regulative
capacity. This wasn’t the birth of the public – it was the observation of the public as a
normative space.
Later, I’ll explore and unpack the ways in which these observations importantly
derive from a particular social position, what I have identified above as the periphery.
Here, though, I want to emphasize the quality of the public that Mr. Spectator most
attended to, most made visible to readers for years to come: its normative capacity. To
see the public through Mr. Spectator’s eyes was to see it as a particular kind of space –
not just capacious, but regulative, with complicated rules about propriety, civilization,
and order. Regulative in the sense that to be part of the public, which happened whether
one wanted it to or not, was to be interpellated, positioned, subjected. In issues as wide as
“Good Breeding” – as a meditation in No. 119 on the refinements that distinguish city
dwellers from aristocrats and country folk – or “Courtship” – as a steady reading of the
fairness and unfairness of the artfulness of securing a wife in No. 261, the rules of proper
behavior are enunciated plainly and systematically. One ought to do this; here’s what I
think about that. Which is not to say that The Spectator resembled the conduct novels
circulating at the same time – instead, the periodical presented in its plainness the
48

systematicity, and the thoroughness, of such a social order, and in doing so highlighted
what it meant to say that the public regulated. While conduct books and primers posed
themselves as manuals for social, religious, or cultural achievement, The Spectator
remained perceptive, almost voyeuristic in its presentation.
8

This may not seem to have left much room for the readership to move outside the
bounds of the emergent normativities – particularly because Mr. Spectator’s relative
neutrality could as easily reinforce as challenge such social expectations from issue to
issue
9
– but I would still suggest that it left them something differently useful. Faithful
readers, after all, weren’t only members of the public that Mr. Spectator critiqued, at least
as much as Mr. Spectator wasn’t only a Spectator. They were invited, or perhaps they
were under some temporary, ephemeral contract, to join with Mr. Spectator in the
ambivalence of his peripheral position. In both of the issues mentioned above, as in many
others, Mr. Spectator switches registers at some point to either the second person or an
inclusive form of the first person. In issue No. 119, he uses the personal pronoun “we” to
invite the reader, side-by-side, to look outward to the Country: “If after this we look on
the People of Mode in the Country, we find in them the Manners of the last Age”
(Addison and Steele 119.277). Rejecting the mode of the majestic plural, or “royal we,”
Mr. Spectator complements his “we” with an ever-important “them” later in the

8
The proliferation of conduct novels at the turn of the 18
th
century, on everything from marriage to
letter-writing, provides an important backdrop to thinking through the ways in which The Spectator
offered its own insights into “proper” behavior that were much different from its predecessors.
Though outside the scope of this project, see Linda Mitchell, “Entertainment and Instruction.”

9
Though I tend to treat Steele and Addison’s periodical as generative with respect to the
development and encouragement of a political public sphere, others do not always make this
assumption. Brian Cowan, for instance, insists that the periodicals “aimed to reign in and discipline
these practices,” rather than encourage their proliferation (Cowan 346).
49

paragraph. In Issue No. 261, he does the same, preceding an account of what “we” want
in a happy marriage with his own story of a failed courtship years prior. In other words,
at several points throughout the run of the periodical, he pulls his readers away from the
public even as he implicates them in it.
That Mr. Spectator offers his readers both a peripheral vision of the public as a
regulative space and implicates them in it, that he offers them both the opportunity to
belong to that public and to resist it, reflects just how ambiguous a project the periodical
had become. We can see the ways in which, in the consideration of “fine Taste”
(409.364) in Issue No. 409, Mr. Spectator reifies a regulative public by “lay[ing] the
Rules how we may know whether we are possessed of it,” effectively enumerating in the
series of essays that follow the distinctions of civilized artistic appreciation. But we can
also see, from the very beginning of the run, articulations of the regulative public in an
effort to point out its predisposed unfairness. In Issues No. 66 and No. 11, for instance,
Steele offers steady critiques – one in response to reader letters about the education of a
young girl, and one in the form of a narrative-within-narrative anecdote of the
“Hypocrisie” (11.463) of gender relations – of a system that privileges certain social
positions over others. Issue No. 66 lays out the nuances of public regulation explicitly,
and notes just how pervasive and efficient such regulations can be: “When a Girl is safely
brought from her Nurse, before she is capable of forming one simple Notion of any thing
in Life,” Steele writes, “she is…taught a fantastical Gravity of Behaviour” (66.254). No.
11 similarly frames the pervasiveness of the phenomenon, comparing two commonly
50

circulating stories alongside one another to identify some of the threads that link them in
their unfair assumptions about women and the way that men ought to regard them.
10

To frame Mr. Spectator in terms of ambiguity, as Lauren Berlant might help us to
understand it, is potentially overambitious: In situating the periodical’s tenuous efforts at
critiquing and reifying the public as ambiguous, we may be too presumptive about the
radical potential of the periodical, when it often enough replicates the system we claim
that it critiques. But when I say that Mr. Spectator and his periodical became an
ambiguous project, I am trying to emphasize not its potential for radical social
transformation; rather, I am simply noting the ways in which the very idea of a public, its
regulative capacity, and the role of members in the public all become simultaneously and
ambiguously de-articulated through the conceit of the Observer at the heart of the project
itself. The great contradiction of Mr. Spectator – and this is particularly notable in the
very first issue – is that while he claims to be “a Spectator” rather than “one of the
Species,” he follows that up with the foundational premise that he knows the public
because he is of it. And so when he pulls his readers into that space, simultaneously in the
public and yet observers of it, he changes something fundamental about how publics and
their regulations might work: he offers a space to critique the public from a person who is
both of it and not of it, and he radically shapes the way in which 18
th
-century readers
would come to interpret and critique the very normativities that made the public what it
was.

10
The two stories are that of Inkle and Yorico and the Ephesian matron, which I will elaborate upon
later.
51

Simply put, he carves out a space to critique normativity even from the position of
the normative subject, and, as I hope to demonstrate in the next section, this allows an
opportunity to develop new insights into how normativity works that aren’t otherwise
available in other conceptions of normative privilege. Whereas critics, especially 20
th
and
21
st
century critics of culture, empire, and social difference, might challenge the ways in
which The Spectator narrowed the sphere of the public to be “class-specific” (Eagleton)
or “bourgeois” (Habermas), reifying the public as a space of inclusion and exclusion may
miss the scope of Steele and Addison’s claims at articulating the public. And what results
is an opportunity for the emergence of a very particular kind of figure from this space –
namely, the man of feeling – as exemplary of the cultural critic who most benefits from
the culture he critiques. Paving the way for more explicit male sentimentalists critical of
culture later in the century, The Spectator carves out the periphery as an essential
component of the social topography of the public – a space that perhaps was part of the
public from the very beginning.

T H E H O S T I L I T I E S O F E I T H E R S I D E

“I never espoused any Party with Violence, and am
resolved to observe an exact Neutrality between the
Whigs and Tories, unless I shall be forced to declare
my self by the Hostilities of either Side.”
- Mr. Spectator, The Spectator Issue No. 1

In so many ways, it is easy to see why Mr. Spectator could have become such a
lightning rod for thinking about emergent publics and shifting national subjectivities in
52

the 18
th
-century. Addison and Steele’s creation was able not only to concretize, but
embody, the social transformations unique to this particular cultural moment, and in
doing so served as a representative corporealization of a new set of cultural ideals.
11
So
many developing institutions and social sites evidenced the changes in class structure and
social values, or the demarcations of private and public spaces, that had been taking
place. But none were able to so clearly link those changes with the emergence of new
kinds of circulating bodies in these social spaces, or could capture the nuances of the
effects these changes had for divisions taking place between those of differing sexes.
The potential slipperiness of this conflation, however – between the cultural
discourse of a public sphere invested in regulating its bodies and the role that Addison
and Steele’s personified narrator played in relation to that ordering – has proven to be
something of a contentious point among contemporary critics. While some have insisted
that the looming presence of Mr. Spectator’s body played a distinct role in reinforcing
and “naturalizing,” as Thomas King argues (King 201), the body of the rising middle
class, others have argued that, in fact, Mr. Spectator served as a disembodied figure,
whose abstract gaze functioned as a regulative device to keep in place a highly ordered
social structure.
12
Each side’s point is well-taken, as we can see the ways in which the
relationship of Mr. Spectator and his body to the public is an exceedingly ambivalent one.

11
A point which seems clear enough to Addison and Steele themselves in the way that they privilege
the corporealization of their figure. See also, fn. 3.

12
As King elaborates: “The Spectator thereby naturalized the particularly conscious embodiment of
the propertied and educated elite as the sign of their legitimacy, offering the class body as the public
representative of private interests” (King 204). This stands in contrast to scholars like Scott Paul
Gordon, who insists that Mr. Spectator is simply an “unprejudic’d eye,” regulating all around him in a
disembodied, Foucauldian fashion (Gordon, “Voyeuristic Dreams”).
53

And yet, this critical rubric, which assumes that Mr. Spectator’s corporealness helps to
mark a simple division of 18
th
century gendered, classed, or racialized body, has often
produced scholarship that risks reifying the very structures it sets out to critique. In its
potentially misplaced emphasis on what kind of body Mr. Spectator has, for instance, it
overlooks the way in which that body held a complicated relationship to the public it was
admittedly both of and not of. Indeed, such scholarship tends to mistake the perceptions
of Addison and Steele’s figurehead for prescriptions, and ends with the overly simplified
point that, somehow in the 18
th
-century, authorities divided the sexes and their behaviors
into categories that continue to resonate in culture today.
Of course, such generalizations feel true in their saliency, but fail to account for
the complex relationships that cultural objects tend to have with the publics that circulate
them. Instead, in this section I want to advance some of the points established above that
attempt to defer this question of the body in a turn to that body’s position, and further
develop this notion of the periphery as a much more nuanced cultural phenomenon than
the clearly gendered divisions we assume to have taken place. From two very different
peripheral insights – one from each of the paper’s primary authors – I show that Mr.
Spectator grounded social divisions in their political contexts, and in doing so, linked
politics to public feelings in ways that set up the groundwork for the later emergence of
the man of feeling. In articulating culture as asymmetrically oriented towards a set of
values that privileged certain bodies over others – that is, a culture totally under the logic
of normative masculinity – Addison and Steele’s writing began to find complex spaces
54

for critiques of normativity that issued from the peripherally-positioned normative
subject.
As I hope is clear, in this circling round the body, I do not intend to discount
discourses of the 18
th
-century body so much as reorient them to thinking about how and
why that body carried the meanings that it did. That Mr. Spectator gained such visibility
and traction speaks to the fact that particular kinds of bodies need unpacking, and
historicizing this development only makes the point more clear. Historically, of course,
bodies and their feelings were certainly on the emergent public’s mind in the 17
th
and 18
th

centuries. Between the Enlightenment discourses of sensibility and the moral-humanist
discourses of sentimentality that would arise later in the century, Mr. Spectator appeared
as an amalgam of sorts, cohering in the seemingly disparate cultural logics of bodies and
affects circulating at the time. And so even though contemporaries of Addison and Steele
were equally preoccupied with the role the body and its feelings might play in culture –
from those developing theories of bodily feelings as sense perceptions in the wake of
work by John Locke, to those anticipating the emphasis on moral behavior and interior
feelings that would come from Shaftesbury, David Hume, and Adam Smith – nothing had
been able then, or is often considered now, to have stitched these discourses together
quite like Mr. Spectator.
13

13
Most agree upon reading sensibility and sentimentality as distinct discursive formations, usually
genealogically and chronologically related in that same order. Sensibility’s derivation from an
attention to and emphasis on the body in the 17
th
century (via Locke and others) was linked with
developments in thinking about self-awareness and interiority. As these things blended and
intertwined, sensibility moved away from the body towards the unseen affective. (Ahern refers to this
as the move from “the physiological to the ethical” (Ahern 25), and both Barker-Benfield and Brown
find this link in the affective poets like Thomas Gray that come just after Richardson.
55

To be sure, both the affects and the effects of the body took on significant
political, philosophical, and social resonances in the 18
th
-century, inside and out. On the
one hand, the legacy of Locke’s work developed a discourse of sensibility that rooted
behavior in the hard-wiring of the body, both naturalizing and de-naturalizing the link
between bodies and their thoughts and feelings. Sensibility not only emphasized the
connection between emergent scientific perceptions of biology and cultural interest in
social feelings, but did so in a way that generated a great degree of assent among the
public. On the other hand, poets and philosophers had steadily worked their way into the
interior lives of men (the interior lives of women, of course, being potentially dangerous
and perpetually mysterious), exploring the male body from the inside out. From John
Gray’s pensive poetry to Adam Smith’s questions about the moral feelings generated in
class-conscious social interactions, anticipation of the ephemeral, affective interiority of
the individual (male) steadily developed as the century went on.
Understandably enough, critical attention to the period in the late 20
th
and early
21
st
centuries has remained firmly dedicated to routing its arguments and insights around
the body as well. A broad range of scholarship has insisted on centralizing the body in its
claims about the historical and cultural significance of the era. From Jürgen Habermas’s
historical division of the public and private spheres alongside splits among gendered
bodies, to Thomas King’s claim that The Spectator “naturalized the particularly
conscious embodiment of the propertied and educated elite as a sign of their legitimacy”
56

(King 202), scholars – especially in queer and gender studies – focus on the emergence,
destruction, and resurrection of a body at the center of a changing era.
14

If we are to take seriously the claims in the previous section regarding Mr.
Spectator’s ambiguous relation to the public and hesitancy to reduce social behavior to
biological fact, I wonder if we might postpone the primacy of the body as the sine qua
non of 18
th
-century philosophy and culture. As Mr. Spectator might help to illustrate, the
peripheral relation of this emergent figure I call the wallflower in fact offers us much
more insight into the position of the 18
th
-century body than it does about that body itself.
Certainly, King, Habermas, and many other scholars’ privileging of the body as a central
site of discourse has always been both clever and well-researched. But this fetishization
of the body as part and parcel of the development of these newly classed and gendered
subjectivities and social distinctions may not allow us to see the ways in which Mr.
Spectator was at least as ambivalent in his embodiment as anything else. If anything, his
presence, and the willful disavowal of his body as a clearly delineated marker remind us
that to think only about Mr. Spectator vis-à-vis his body is to develop a structural
blindness to the positioning of that body in the emerging publics. And if we know

14
To be sure, the discourse of the body in the wake of scholarship in Women’s and Gender Studies
at the end of the 20
th
century has certainly made its mark on an entire range of texts across a wide
historical swath. But the post-Enlightenment’s particular emphasis on a newly legible, public body at
the center of enormous cultural shifts has brought studies of the body to the eighteenth century in
particularly fruitful ways. Thomas King details much of this history in his reading of Mr. Spectator, as
he suggests that the narrator was able to stand in for (or embody) the changing social forces of the
time (The Gendering of Men, v. 1). But scholars as wide ranging as Paul Goring (The Rhetoric of Sensibility
in Eighteenth Century Culture, 2005) and Erin Goss (Revealing Bodies, 2013) continue to take up the body
in all sorts of diverse ways, suggesting that we continue to privilege this line of discourse when
thinking through the eighteenth century. I resist that insistence here, without discounting its value.

57

anything about Mr. Spectator, we know his dedicated attention to resisting blindness, and
to seeing structures.
* * *
As Mr. Spectator’s readings of public culture became increasingly both abundant
and widespread in the early 18
th
-century, several patterns could be seen in the kinds of
issues addressed by the paper and the perspectives from which they came. Despite
multiple authors and a rapid turnaround in writing and distribution,
15
there was a sense of
coherence about what topics might be addressed in The Spectator, and one could often
assume the stance that the periodical would take. And so to follow the paper from its
advent would be to chart a specific sort of social topography through the lens of the
peripherally-located, normatively-positioned, critic of normative public culture. With
broad tendencies parsed between its two major authors – that is, between Steele’s
tendency towards sentimental critique of injustice and Addison’s (complicatedly
troubling) critique of certain women’s bold public behavior – readers could come to the
confident conclusion that the structures that governed which bodies ought to behave in
which ways never quite lined up with the seemingly “natural” behaviors we might expect.
Indeed, far from offering simple explanations of social behavior that reduced to appeals
for a clear division between the sexes, The Spectator opened up a matrix of behaviors,
bodies, and feelings, and often enough encouraged the readers to sort through the mess.

15
The demands of a quick turnaround (the paper had a daily circulation) necessitated contributions
from multiple authors, each of whom (including Addison, Steele, and Jonathan Swift) had distinctly
different political and expository styles. And yet, again, the paper remained reliably consistent to its
reading public.
58

Consider Addison’s analyses of women’s aggressive behavior in Issues No. 57
and 81, for instance, which, though they certainly sound uncomfortably conservative to
21
st
century readers, may not have made the clear distinctions between men’s and
women’s proper behavior that we assume them to. When he writes about the detrimental
effects that an ill-temper might produce in an otherwise comely young lady (e.g., No. 57
and No. 81) – a tendency he refers to as “party rage” – he initially seems to suggest that
his disapproval is rooted in the particularly unseemly way in which such behavior ought
not to emanate from women. With an emphasis on the distinctly “black and monstrous”
(Addison and Steele 57.252) quality of aggressiveness when proceeding from the “wrong
Sex,” Addison’s critique suggests a clear case of normative policing along the lines of
gender. And yet, in the way in which he takes pains in these instances to insist that party
rage is a “Male Vice,” he also seems to implicitly condemn the affect just as harshly
when it comes from men. It isn’t a clear division in either case; rather, it seems to
annotate and catalog an emergent system being described as it was coming into existence,
instead of solely being invested in furthering that system’s regulations. And so though we
feel compelled to hold up moments like this as clear evidence of the social divisions
we’ve mapped onto the 18
th
-century, Addison’s writing resists such simple and
symmetric divisions. Indeed, to write him off here as simply another force regulating
women and their bodies is to miss the fairly complicated way in which Addison had been
reading privilege, gender, and sex as they had begun to align in new ways in the 18
th
-
century.
59

To unpack Addison’s distinctions further, then, is to render a more capacious
analysis of sex-specific behaviors and affects, charting a new social topography that more
carefully attends to the nuances of how bodies were circulating at the time. Issue No. 57
offers us the chance for a closer look: In an appeal that appears to make a turn to lecture –
“There is one Consideration which I would earnestly recommend to all my Female
Readers” (57.252) – and proceeds by discussing the specific and negative physical effects
that result from “Party-Zeal,” Addison seems as straightforward in his reinforcement of
gendered behavior as he possibly could. But again, two subtle points are made that seem
to stretch these social commentaries further. Just as in Issue No. 81, he makes the same
point that “a Man makes an odious and despicable figure that is violent in a Party”
(57.253), condemning the behavior unequivocally for men and women. But in this
explicit condemnation, the critique also clearly highlights the cultural context of the
offense. It isn’t just that an affect of aggression is bad for women; it is that
aggressiveness seems to culturally reflect the burgeoning cultural rifts along political
parties that characterized the period. We’ll continue to unpack this, but I want to make
this general point clear first: Burrowing further into Addison’s claims, we can begin to
see the ways in which gendered divisions were always underwritten with other social
complexities, part and parcel of the divisions characterizing the political public sphere in
the post-Restoration era. If culture was the structure that governed the asymmetrical
division of the sexes, then The Spectator could help us sketch that structure through the
lens of political divisions underwriting it.
60

In other words, “party rage” coalesces as an index of this intersection between
gender and politics. This does not necessarily mean that Addison delineates the
distinction – the diction remains ambiguous – but it still offers in its plainness a unique
opportunity for readers to try to make those connections on their own. The phrase itself is
never explicitly defined – merely carrying an assumption that the reader is familiar with
the term – but its cadences stand out regardless. The key emphasis seems to be on
“party,” which, in the post-Restoration era, has an unequivocal political resonance, much
as it does in the present-day US. To experience party rage, generally speaking, was to
adopt a certain firm heatedness, an unyielding polemical stance or perspective. In
Addison’s particular usage, party rage seemed to carry a particular reference to and
critique of the vastly polarized public sphere, split most saliently between Whig and
Tory, rather than male or female, bourgeois or aristocrat. Throughout The Spectator, in
fact, Addison continually offers anecdotes about “party” behavior, lamenting its
“ill…Effect on our Morals [and] Judgments” (125.445). He writes of both parties’
ridiculous and rude treatment of a man asking for directions to St. Anne’s Lane, rounded
upon by everyone he speaks with because of the presumptions in referring (or not
referring) to Anne as a saint. He dramatizes a scene of ladies at the opera wearing patches
on only one side of their face, depending on political alliance (81.442). In anecdote after
anecdote, Addison makes one point exceedingly clear – the zealousness of party
affiliation wasn’t only destructive because it reified social divisions and created
antagonism among citizens. It was destructive because, regardless of which side of the
political spectrum one was on, it operated under the same dominant, normative logics of
61

privilege. And it had begun to infuse the cultural divisions along lines of gender that set
up a system of bodies and affects we can recognize after the fact.
And so when we unpack Addison’s seemingly banal, simplistic critique of
women’s party rage, we actually begin to see the nuanced relationship between the
divisiveness of a public sharply divided by politics as it manifests tangentially in
gendered divisions of affects and behaviors. Beyond simply condemning particular kinds
of behavior because they ought to come from a differently sexed body, Addison catalogs
the structures of gender and affect as they were coming into public legibility, opening up
the possibility for finer readings of culture as it had aligned these bodies. It’s the kind of
ambivalent observation that flourishes in what I call the periphery, because it works in
the fundamental register of reading both sides of a public alongside one another. It also,
alongside Steele’s own emphases on affect and its relation to cultural politics, makes up
some of the foundational impulses for the emergence of the man of feeling later in the
century.
I understand that, depending on the disciplinary and methodological affiliations of
the reader, this argument might seem either too buried, or not buried enough, in some of
the specificities of Addison and Steele’s language and text. But what I want to convey in
this intermediary approach is the way in which we might see The Spectator as an
ambivalent cultural object resting in the margins even of the culture that circulated it. For
while it certainly served to help produce the public that it attempted to articulate, it did so
in an ever-so-distanced way that allowed for the passive criticism of many of that
public’s norms. This, really, is what I mean when I say that The Spectator helped to see
62

the structures of normativity in culture from the periphery. In being both of the public and
alongside it, Mr. Spectator is positioned from the outset not only to observe the way in
which certain affects and behaviors became associated with and policed in differently
sexed bodies, but also to recognize that that division wasn’t strong enough to prevent
those affects from slipping from one sex to the other. Even though he suggests that party
rage was more unseemly in women (and we can recognize the bias in this), for instance,
Addison still suggests that it could just as easily have emanated from, and was culturally
linked to, the male body. Later in the century, as I will unpack below, this ability to see
normativity’s asymmetrical privileging of the white, middle-class, heterosexual male
body through the circulation of normative logics emanating from all sorts of bodies and
cultural sites became an identifying characteristic of the man of feeling. But here I want
to make the simple point that Addison helps to foreground that possibility, revealing the
ways in which the partisan behavior associated with the male body – and which he
clearly detests – circulates beyond the scope of the male body, and only further advances
the interests of privileged men even when it comes from the women.
In this sense, Addison’s contribution rests not only in this mapping of social
hierarchies, but in his articulation of the forces that informed them: shifting political,
classed, and even imperial distinctions unfolding at the time.
16
But it was Richard
Steele’s writing, ultimately, that gave the paper its burgeoning cultural resonance when
he insisted, beyond observation, to respond to these structures of privilege in ways that
would echo throughout the rest of the century. I am referring here to the ways in which

16
For a thorough and well-argued exploration of the development of sentiment in the context of an
expanding imperial subject, see Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire (2006).
63

Steele’s frequent turn to sentimentalism – empathetic concern for others, excessively
affective displays, etc. – complemented Addison’s writing by offering readers a step
further towards engaging the public. Where Addison could render the social maps of 18
th
-
century London, encouraging us to notice the structures of the new public, Steele could
point to its inequalities, and insist that we respond.
Often within the context of gendered distinctions, and frequently underwritten
with the politics of class, Steele’s contributions tended to represent a dedicated interest to
the margins in ways that resonated most with the early-issue introduction of Mr.
Spectator. Under Steele’s authority, Mr. Spectator ventures almost literally into these
spaces, moving about in London at night (454.307), visiting the haunts of “poor and
publick whores” (266.266), and even giving in to “peep at a Crevise” to observe the
procurement of one young Country-Girl for the position of a Maid (266.266). But instead
of offering critiques directed at the vice or wickedness of certain behaviors for certain
bodies – as Addison offered with frequency – Steele turned his eye back onto the public
that reinforced those norms, and then he reacted to them. Often times, this was as simple
and subtle as a few tears shed, a trope that would continue to serve as an index for critical
male sentimentality later in the century. For the very few times that he responded more
aggressively, insisting that the public change the ways in which it sorted through certain
social expectations of gender, he provoked something fierce.
We need only consider Issue No. 266 to illustrate this point: In prefacing his brief
encounter with a young prostitute – an encounter limited to talking, of course, as was
typical of later iterations of male sentimentalism – he writes:
64

No Vice or Wickedness, which People fall into from Indulgence to Desires
which are natural to all, ought to place them below the Compassion of the
virtuous Part of the World; which indeed often makes me a little pat to
suspect the Sincerity of their Virtue, who are too warmly provoked at
other Peoples personal Sins. The unlawful Commerce of the Sexes is of all
other the hardest to avoid; and yet there is no one which you shall hear the
rigider Part of Womankind speak of with so little Mercy. (266.266)
Though framed in what seems, to contemporary readers, the cloak of generosity and
deference, the sentiment generated quite a bit of blowback at the time. Ten issues later, in
fact, The Spectator merely reproduced several angry, presumptive, and openly inquisitive
letters to the editor, which all more or less made the point clear: don’t overstep your
ground, Mr. Spectator. Highlighting his difference from, rather than his tangential
relation to, the readers would seem to bite the hand from which he fed.
17

That as simple a critique as this one generated such a response tells us quite a bit
about public criticism in the 18
th
-century, and to meditate on this point offers us the
chance to continue to establish the saliency of the work that Steele carves out for the male
sentimentalist. Issue No. 276’s recirculation of the voices of dissent provides that
opportunity, running the gamut from outrage to disbelief at Mr. Spectator’s criticism, and
most potently articulated in one of the letter’s closing line: “All I mean here to say to

17
The development of this new kind of cultural exchange that takes place between Issues 266 and
276 of The Spectator is exemplary of many of the new social formations and temporalities enabled by
the periodical and encouraging new forms of exchange in the early 18
th
century. That readers could
not only respond to, but exchange follow-up correspondence with, Mr. Spectator speaks to the
increasingly complex social relations emerging in what Habermas calls “the public sphere.”
65

you,” the letter advises, “is, That the most free Person of Quality can go no further than
being an unkind Woman; and you should never say of a Man of Figure worse, than that
he knows the World” (276.270). The point was made here as clear as it would be in the
salutations of the other letters: “Unless thou dost speedily amend and leave off following
thine own Imaginations, I will leave off thee” (276.272). Clearly, it should come as little
surprise that, as the paper continued, Steele seldom offered as direct a criticism as this –
and much more often offered a kind of sentimental resistance from the sidelines.
Issue 11, discussed briefly above, is exemplary of this other side to Steele’s
intervention – a representation of the unfairness of (masculine) normativity, followed by
a few tears on behalf of the observer. The Issue presents two tales, told back to back, with
the latter serving through an interlude as a direct response to the former. This first tale of
the “Ephysian Matron,” offered by a male visitor of the charmingly intelligent and
popular Arietta, is referenced more than relayed. And in that tale’s portrayal of a
mourning widow falling in love with a soldier who comes by a mere five days later,
Arietta is outraged by what she sees as a broad justification for an essentializing claim
against women’s tendencies towards betrayal – what Steele sets up as “the Perjuries of
the Fair.” “Sensibly touched” by the insult to her sex, Arietta offers a proto-feminist
18

attack on the uneven power dynamics inherent in men’s privileged access to writing:
“You Men are Writers,” she insists, “and can represent us Women as Unbecoming as you

18
Her argument seems to resonate with later feminist readings from Judith Fetterley; the distance
between such arguments may reflect the ways in which The Spectator offered a forward-thinking
critique of normative culture that would continue on through to the 21
st
century. See Fetterley, The
Resisting Reader (1978), which similarly suggests that if men write the stories and circulate them, they
create the truth or reality of women’s lived experience.
66

please in your Works, while we are unable to return the Injury” (11.464). And then
follows with the devastating, but more plausible, tale of Inkle and Yarico.
Briefly, the tale relates what Steele calls men’s “Hypocrisie.” Thomas Inkle, an
Englishman, is saved from being slayed by Native Americans, and taken care of by
Yarico, a beautiful “Indian…of Distinction” (11.465). Hiding him in a cave and securing
him with food, water, and the spoils of her suitors, Yarico eventually secures a passage of
escape for the two out to Barbados. When they arrive, Inkle makes little time of selling
Yarico, using the knowledge that she has revealed in her pregnancy to “rise in his
Demands upon the Purchaser” (11.466). It’s a brief tale, but a powerful one, and the
reveal offers little room for Steele to return to the framing narrative and the tale’s
narrator, Arietta. But he pulls back just in time to make a simple claim:
I was so touched with this Story, (which I think should be always a
Counterpart to the Ephesian Matron) that I left the Room with Tears in my
Eyes; which a Woman of Arietta’s good Sense, did, I am sure, take for
greater Applause, than any Compliments I could make her. (11.467)
It isn’t much, but framed as it is amongst a set of competing masculinities, Mr.
Spectator’s affective exchange with Arietta clearly showcases a powerful refutation of
certain normative behaviors and feelings in a way that seems compelling without being
offensive to readers. Which is not to say that Steele’s use of tears as an index of
masculine performance was particularly unique – but in the context of The Spectator’s
larger concerns over partisan divisiveness and competing masculinities, Steele effectively
infused male affect with a juxtapolitical salience it had yet to fully develop.
67

* * *
In the next section, I’ll continue to think through male affect’s juxtapolitical
salience in the context of its fruition later in the century. But I do want to acknowledge,
as many readers here might anticipate, the fairly underwhelming promise of this kind of
social critique. In other words, to step away from political claims and resist calling out
his audience seems to render Steele and Addison’s figurehead as fairly impotent behind
all that political promise. And yet, as I hope to have demonstrated in this brief attention to
the periodical, what remains important about Addison and Steele’s approach is the
generation of a social map that, in including the periphery as a possible site of legibility,
and the challenge of injustice through a disruption of its social norms, offers access to a
reading of culture that reveals a structure difficult to see from the outside. Essentially,
Steele and Addison’s London is partisan – split amongst Whig and Tory, public and
private, male and female – and the arrival of Mr. Spectator on the sidelines allows readers
a place of what Eve Sedgwick would call “betweenness.” Caught between parties, caught
between publics and readers and personal allegiances, Mr. Spectator allows us to see the
logic that works on both sides of spectrum, the privileging of certain bodies even when
the instruments of their advancement emanate from the disparate productions of society’s
changing membership.
On the one hand, we might do well to believe that, in framing his critique
differently in Issue No. 11 and Issue No. 81, Steele was always toying with the idea that
he wanted to find new ways to distinguish certain masculinities from others. And the
post-Restoration era had a special hand in informing that vision, drawing on-stage and
68

on-page distinctions between men with a public weeping that characterized the
sentimentalist and the stoic almost entirely at odds. But his specific alliance of excessive
affect with the peripheral male body provided something readers hadn’t seen before: a
figure that was normative in every common sense of the word – and thus legible to
readers on either side of the political spectrum – but that still somehow found a way to
critique that normativity while still benefitting from it. This alignment becomes the logic
and legacy of male sentimentality that would infuse the century, and coheres in the
emergence of the wallflower, reappearing throughout the US and the UK over the course
of the next few centuries. Later chapters will find the particular cadences and tones to the
wallflower’s emergence in these other times, but our special attention to the wallflower in
the 18
th
-century – at the pinnacle of visibility and influence in the rising man of feeling in
the 1770’s – suggests many of the cohering discourses that went into producing that
figure in the first place.
It never was much. But Steele and Addison’s attempts to take a structural view of
the public as it first emerged in 18
th
-century London provided an opportunity to look at
and critique normativity in ways not possible from the vantage point of “outside” the
public sphere. In offering up the public as a new kind of social text for an increasingly
literate public, Addison and Steele worked from the sidelines to showcase what they
considered the sincere, honest look at that public as it was coming into being. But that
peripheral insight came with a warning: to react to the emergent public from a political
perspective, they insisted, was to already be compromised by its regulative norms. To be
affected by such tales, on the other hand, was to take a heartfelt, apolitical surrender to a
69

system that, even though it offered you its privileges, you felt compelled to critique. That
powerful shift would come to resonate in the century in ways that still echo in culture
today – it provided what has perhaps become the only legible site (the periphery) and
register (affective) that we’ve seen for the normative subject to critique normativity, and
it still feels, if I might use the word, as powerful as ever. With The Spectator guiding
sensitive individuals to read about and critique the very culture they were a part of, the
floodgates of normativity opened up, and out poured the tears from the sensitive
sidelines.

A M B I V A L E N T L Y I N B L O O M

As readers might already begin to presume, both this chapter and this project as a
whole are invested in following these trails of tears, watching them trace through the
valleys and channels of history in the wake of Mr. Spectator’s affective interventions.
Many projects in cultural studies rely on this methodological framing, using cultural or
literary phenomena as genealogical touchstones in the advent of some larger discursive
formation.
19
Before concluding this chapter, though, I want to emphasize a point that I
will continue to make throughout this project: instead of thinking about Addison and

19
Major texts in cultural studies, exemplified in Habermas’s sweeping historico-cultural account of
the emergent public sphere, or in Michel Foucault’s “histories of the present,” can be both
progressively insightful and, arguably, implicitly normative. The suggestion that The Spectator might
serve as a fixed point on a timeline of male sentimentality creates a narrow framework from which
we might understand its complexities, and so I resist suggesting this methodological approach. See
Chapter Two for an expansion of this argument.

70

Steele’s paper as a generative point from which we can trace the genealogical roots of
contemporary male sentimentality in the US – an argument that offers little for the great
burden it places on a certain vision of history – I want instead to think about the
trajectories of male affect that continue to inform and underwrite significant political and
social events in the wake of The Spectator. As Ann Cvetkovich would say, I want to
develop an “archive of feelings” in sharp contrast to the strict genealogical impulses of
certain approaches to 18th-century culture as it informs contemporary iterations of
similar social dynamics.
20
And in doing so, I hope to privilege one particular framing
question of the project above all others, and I want to interrogate its import both in terms
of the cultural objects I am exploring and in terms of my own methodological approach.
The question that I continue to ask of these iterations of male sentimentality in history –
and the question that I ask of this project as its own form of critical and affective labor, is
this: What is the work of being a wallflower?
As Addison and Steele’s debut of Mr. Spectator demonstrates, the work of the
wallflower, as a response to the structures of masculine privilege circulating in normative
culture, is to disrupt the very rules of normativity in an effort to call attention to their
injustice. With flourishes in affective displays, gentle and passive gestures that express
fellow-feeling at a distance, Addison and Steele characterize male sentimentality as a
possible site for beginning to recognize and untether the privileges that circulate in public
culture. For critics, this may sound like a convoluted claim; after all, male affect doesn’t

20
Cvetkovich’s work allows us to rethink archives beyond the strict temporalities of traditional,
normative frameworks, instead organizing objects in more affective, ephemeral ways. See
Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings (2003).

71

actually do anything. Instead, they argue, male sentimentality and its attendant affects of
compassion, empathy, and passivity tend to muddle our vision and distract from a truly
progressive labor that changes culture, that effects structural developments with tangible
results for making underprivileged lives better. Male sentiment feels like it challenges
norms of privilege and power relations, when in fact it merely reorients social progress
around the white, heterosexual, middle class male body.
21
But as I hope to have made
clear in the approach I’ve taken to Addison and Steele’s widely circulated periodical, I
argue that certain iterations of male sentimentality provide us with an insight into the
object of their critique – public culture – in ways that differ from traditional analyses of
privilege. Generated in the observational spaces at the margins of culture, popular
iterations of male sentimentality acknowledged their privilege but stood to the side,
noticing the patterns of culture in ways that allowed the public to recognize a developing
social map, a freshly rendered topography of the effects and workings of normativity
from the vantage point of the normative subject.
Largely, this derives from what I’ve been referring to as the possibilities of the
periphery. Critical of normativity but indebted to its privileges – Mr. Spectator in, but not
of, the public – the wallflower flourishes in the space between, the space just to the side
of the normative public sphere. The periphery represents a spatialized relationship to
privilege and normativity that we can see in literary and critical traditions attending to

21
The literature here is both extensive and compelling – from Gail Bederman to Anne Cheng,
scholars have long chronicled the ways in which, rather than signal a kind of vulnerability, male
emotion often worked to complement the stoicism of normative masculinity. As opposed to those
bodies who could not control their excessive emotions (women, men of color), normatively bodied
male sentimentality shored up the edges of an increasingly complex, “deep” subject of privilege. I do
not mean to discount, but rather simply to defer, that conversation here. See Bederman, Manliness and
Civilization (1995) and Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (2001).
72

gender, affect, and the political public sphere: From Addison and Steele to Eve Sedgwick
and Lauren Berlant, peripheral theorizations of relations to power have proven
fascinating opportunities to think through alternative and non-oppositional approaches to
the production of normativity. They have rearranged the terrain on which such debates
about privilege and its opposition rests, and they have relied on the impulses of radical
liberal critique in developing rhetorical positions that begin in more ambivalent territory.
Leela Gandhi’s beautiful 2006 book, Affective Communities: Anticolonial
Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship, is exemplary of this
impulse. In it, she articulates her indebtedness to postcolonial scholarship (like that of
Edward Said and Homi Bhabha’s) that posits “the epistemic and existential impossibility
of colonial division” (Gandhi 3), but remains skeptical of theorizations of culture that
reify these divisions in the name of “hybridity” or “interstitiality” (Gandhi 5). Instead,
her “perception of the imperial periphery as an undifferentiated, horizontal terrain…gave
possibility to a new politics of unlikely conjunction and conjuncture” (7-8, emphasis
mine). Though Gandhi speaks to anti-colonial resistance from privileged agents of empire
in late-Victorian India, her composition and framing resonate with the principles of my
own approach – and it is in this turn that I suggest my own methodological archive from
which this generative work might emanate. From Kathleen Stewart, who remains
“committed not to the demystification and uncovered truths that support a well-known
picture of the world, but rather to speculation, curiosity, and the concrete” (Stewart 1), to
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose framing of “beside…as permitting a spacious
agnosticism about several of the linear logics that influence dualistic thinking” (Sedgwick
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8), this archive has helped me to develop the periphery as a generative theoretical space
that rethinks what it means to critically attend to normativity, and freshly renders the
contours of that normativity in the affective spaces of culture.
In the introduction to this project, I speak more at length about the methodological
possibilities of the periphery in an effort to more fully flesh out its theoretical
underpinnings. But here, at the conclusion of the first chapter, I wish to articulate the
ways in which this methodological frame is particularly apt for thinking through the
politics of male sentimentality in the 18
th
-century, and specifically characterizes the most
prominent texts of the era generating those politics. This, of course, can clearly be seen in
Addison and Steele’s clever positioning of Mr. Spectator and the complex insights that
that positioning generates. But we would not do well to consider him an anomaly: Indeed,
the periphery was at the very heart of the development and politicization of male affect
throughout the century, culminating in the cult of the wallflower figure that would ascend
in popularity at its end. At the height of that cultish following, Henry MacKenzie’s
Harley (from 1771’s The Man of Feeling) assumed not only that the public functioned by
regulative norms, but that those norms were infused by a particularly masculine logic that
privileged certain bodies over others. And in responding to those norms in the language
of affect – regardless of the knowledge that such affect did little, if anything, to alleviate
the injustices of the public – Harley promised a model of juxtapolitical
22
engagement
invested in a better vision of relations between those in privilege and those outside it. He

22
Again, juxtapolitical here derives from Lauren Berlant’s use of the term to reflect affective labor
that flourishes “just to the side of the political,” doing some work but largely failing to effect some
structural transformation. See Berlant, The Female Complaint (2007).
74

turned the insular navel-gazing of mid-century affect back outward, and insisted that to
listen to others, and to defer to them in gentle weeping, did far more to change the
meaning of social difference and reveal the structures of inequality than the political
antagonism characterizing the era ever did. Even if, when all was said and done, there
may have been nothing obvious to show for it.
If ambivalence was the hallmark of sentimentality in 18
th
-century philosophy and
periodicals, MacKenzie’s The Man of Feeling took the tenets of affective politics and
wrote them into the very form and structure of the novel itself. Remarkably short –
particularly relative to the sweeping mid-century sentimental tomes of Samuel
Richardson and Henry Fielding – and yet surprisingly dense, MacKenzie’s text is
comprised of the episodic fragments of a torn up manuscript. We begin the text with this
frame: two hunters trade the books they have been tearing up and using for gun-wadding,
“saving” each from total destruction. The fragments of one of these books – a “bundle of
little episodes” (MacKenzie 4) about Harley – comprise the remainder of the text, which
proves largely plotless and constantly undercut by the levels of editing between the
original manuscript and its eventual reproduction. Consider the framing preface, featuring
perhaps as ambivalent an introduction to a text as one might get:
When I returned to town, I had leisure to peruse the acquisition I
had made: I found it a bundle of little episodes, put together without art,
and of no importance on the whole, with something of nature, and little
else in them. I was a good deal affected with some very trifling passages
75

in it; and had the name of a Marmontel, or a Richardson, been on the title-
page – ‘tis odds that I should have wept: But
One is ashamed to be pleased with the works of one knows not
whom. (MacKenzie 5)
It is a curious passage, for so many reasons. But perhaps most relevant here is the way in
which the text is signaled as both “of no importance on the whole” and a “good deal
affect[ing].” That the text is first identified in such ambivalent terms makes sense – after
all, ambivalence continued to be the primary marker of male sentimentality from Cato to
Harley throughout the century. But ambivalence here seems to work much differently
than we’ve previously considered it. In the context of MacKenzie’s novel, ambivalence
seems to be worked into the text itself, and the frame-within-a-frame literary device that
sets up the tome (similar to Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) produces an
almost, as Maureen Harkin argues, “self-conscious moment” (Harkin 318) in
sentimentality’s trajectory. If Addison and Steele worked first to notice, and then
sentimentally respond to, regulative public culture, MacKenzie’s novel toes the line
between advocating and calling into question the usefulness of this affective labor.
Before the story even begins, in fact, MacKenzie seems both preoccupied with the
significance of the work itself (vacillating between a belief in its strong affectation and its
lack of importance), and with the way in which the work might be received. The first two
readers – the curate and the narrator – are given a chance to share their opinion before we
even have a chance to see, and both responses fascinatingly undercut the possibility that
76

MacKenzie is as confident in the work of the wallflower as either other readers, Addison
and Steele, or Harley might be.
The curate’s opinion can be determined without even attending to his comments:
he’s used the manuscript as gun wadding, because, we are to assume, this has proven a
far more practical use. Forwarding this idea of usefulness up front, MacKenzie sets up the
new terms in which we might consider sentiment, leaving us tethered between the sharp
distinction between practicality (i.e., gun-wadding) and value (i.e., moral improvement).
The narrator’s reflection, on the other hand, frames the text ambivalently in a different
way: in being caught between being “affected” by the story and knowing whether he
ought, socially, to be affected by it, the narrator complements the question of value with
the question of social convention. Highlighting the difference between being “moved”
and knowing whether one should be moved (“One is ashamed to be pleased with the
works of one knows not whom”), MacKenzie further digs into this looming question: 60
years after The Spectator, what has sentimentality’s trajectory been? What work did it
attempt to do, what did it accomplish, and what now does it have to show for itself? Such
ambivalence persists throughout the text – titling a powerful vignette critical of the
Britain’s imperial ventures “The Man of Feeling Talks of what He does not Understand –
An Incident” (76), for instance, or putting the eloquent words of progressive politics in
the mouths of what turn out to be pimps and footmen – and MacKenzie really seems
invested in their tentativeness. If the trajectory of male sentimentality is towards failure,
he seems to ask, what work can it be said to do? Is ambivalence doing its own kind of
77

work, and can we explore that before insisting, one way or another, whether the trajectory
showcases male sentimentality as a transformative or failed effort?
Neither he, nor we, are alone in such questions. This terrain has been explored at
length, for instance, in the work of Lauren Berlant, whose writing speaks to
sentimentality and politics in ways that are similarly critical, but capacious. Though she
considers “compassionate liberalism [as] at best, a kind of sandpaper on the surface of the
racist monument whose structural and economic solidity endures” (Berlant Female 6),
she insists that affective labor produces something that doesn’t necessarily need to be
legible to the political public, nor need to be “valued in the elitist terms of value that
mark capitalist culture” (24). Instead, she “seeks to understand the flourishing of the
social to one side of the political as something other than a failure to be politics” (26). All
of this, no doubt, “feels” affectively aligned with MacKenzie’s work – or, to put it more
precisely, it feels aligned with the kinds of circulation that took hold of MacKenzie’s
work and held up Harley as an exemplar of noble and ethical thinking in the 18
th
-century,
even when MacKenzie himself seemed to be hesitating in his agreement.
One of the more affecting scenes in the novel, I would argue, involves Harley’s
series of (theoretically) innocent exchanges with a prostitute, which eventually lead to her
own reconnection and reconciliation with her father. In all sorts of ways, the scenes move
back and forth from charming and sentimental to hesitant and potentially exploitative:
The title of the first section (“The Man of Feeling in a Brothel”), the cajoling of Harley
by the other men in the bar when Harley pawns his watch to pay for the young lady’s
room, and the near-revenge that the young lady’s father enacts when he finds Harley and
78

her alone all seem to pull us back each time we begin to fall into sympathy with our
weepy hero. In some way, this tension is the mark of sentimentality itself, what Berlant
refers to as the dynamic of being both “very complex and not complex enough” (Berlant
6). But there may still be a way in which the salience of the work – the power it has to
develop insights into culture, even from its ambiguous footing – deserves more than a
casual dismissal. This last point, I argue, is the realization of the claim that begins this
final section: If MacKenzie’s novel, as an index of the trajectory of male sentimentality
that does some “work,” is fraught with these contradictions by its own author, can we
find peripheral insights in the work worth preserving?
The one dynamic that MacKenzie allows to remain consistent – the sentimental
Harley in an unfeeling world – perhaps holds the answer to that question, precisely
because it too allows for a reading that “postpones” the ambivalence that MacKenzie so
clearly did not want to resolve. What I’ve always been struck by in these undercut
passages of the novel – the insinuating titles placed by the editor, the cajoling of Harley
for offering his own sacrifice to help the prostitute, the near-revenge that her father enacts
on Harley – is that, like a full circle, they return us to the scene of the regulative public.
The one consistency of the text, it seems, is in MacKenzie’s insistence that challenges to
Harley’s behavior come from other men: Harley’s sentiment is much more than benign –
it’s disruptive enough to the social order that it calls for a response, and it meets
resistance in ways that Addison and Steele had not fully anticipated
At times, MacKenzie takes great pains to open up this nuanced space in the
peripheral moments of his scattered text. For many readers, these moments are what
79

endeared them so genuinely to the novel, and, revisiting the text, it isn’t too difficult to
see what was potentially so attractive about Harley: despite social awkwardness,
gullibility, and a reluctance to reveal his love to Miss Walton until just before he dies, he
remains, quite simply, sincere in an insincere world. In the words of the anonymous
“author” of Harley’s found history, via the character of Ben Silton, Harley is “bashful”:
not in the sense of “the aukwardness of a booby, which a few steps into the world will
convert into the pertness of a coxcomb,” but rather in “a consciousness, which the most
delicate feelings produce, and the most extensive knowledge cannot always remove”
(MacKenzie 8). This distinction – between the sincere Harley in an insincere world, or
between “consciousness” and the “extensive knowledge” that “cannot…remove” it –
highlights the protagonist’s resistance to the social order, even as his relatively privileged
background obviously implicates him in it. Harley, at the peripheral edge of normativity
– in the world but not of it – brings the wallflower sensibilities of Mr. Spectator on a
trajectory out of the 18
th
-century. To follow this path is to open up the tenuousness and
ambivalence of the wallflower beginning to bloom.
What we are left with, then, is a work that must be done, a sentimental labor that
might be produced, without always insisting on its ends. I realize that this may sound like
an easy out, having it both ways; but what I am trying to get at here is a point that
MacKenzie was trying to write into the novel the whole time. The work of male
sentimentality, he insists, doesn’t “do” anything as such: it replicates selfishness, it tends
towards reproducing privilege, and, for guys like Harley, you’ll end up dead and alone.
But when sentiment is done right, it still resonates as disruptive (meriting the disdain of
80

other men) in ways that can’t fully be resolved. In fact, in an essay published in The
Lounger some 14 years later (a periodical MacKenzie edited and modeled after The
Spectator), MacKenzie still finds himself veering back and forth as he ponders the
question of whether male sentiment produces a worthwhile work, suggesting first that the
reader has the “open…judgment” to make a free decision about his ambiguous text, but
later coming down hard on the potential sentimentality has to creating a “childish pride of
our own superior delicacy” (as quoted in MacKenzie 102), making sentiment more about
us than “those around us” we ought to be concerned with.
This final distinction serves this project well. As we begin to think about the ways
in which the rest of the project will frame what we ought to make of male sentimentality,
it’s a distinction that seems to advance the own text’s ambivalence, and yet ends with a
kind of clarity that resonates long after the conclusion of the essay. He writes:
Of youth it is essential to preserve the imagination sound as well as pure,
and not to allow them to forget, amidst the intricacies of sentiment, or the
dreams of sensibility, the truths of reason, or the laws of principle. (103)
It is tempting to read this as a repudiation of all the things that MacKenzie’s novel, and
the literature of male sentimentality, had become for then contemporary readers, who had
grown in certain ways to a cultish desire for imitating heroes like Harley and Werther.
23

And MacKenzie’s emphasis on “truths” and “laws” here seems almost blasphemous to
the affective excesses of sentimental discourse. But something else may be happening

23
The extent of the famous “Cult of Werther” is difficult to determine, though the wide circulation
of the rumor that Goethe’s book had inspired significant numbers of young male readers to commit
suicide (in empathetic solidarity with the protagonist) itself says something about the cultural
significance of the novel.
81

here as well: Sentimentality’s salience works precisely because it is a response to
normativity. The codification of sentimentality into its own ethics, its own public, simply
reproduces the regulative dynamics of the normative public that sentimentality first
emerges to critique. This is the distinction he’s trying to make in the passage above: when
sentiment and sensibility become modus operandi for youth to live by, they circle back
into themselves, “dreams” that will never change the social order that they critique. But
more peripheral affects – “imagination…the truths of reason…the laws of principle” –
shade one’s perception of the world as one moves through it. The turn to affect for
MacKenzie becomes not a lifestyle, but an ethics, a way to read the world while one did
one’s best to make negotiations.
As we begin our own negotiations in the unfolding of this project, I’d ask of the
reader the same generosity: could you imagine ways in which sentiment could do
something more than simply recirculate privilege? Not to let such an affect off the hook,
as it were. But simply to postpone, for a moment, that insistent determination – and
instead to wonder if, at the edges of normativity, something might be coming undone.
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– 2 –

“ T H O S E S O N G S S T I L L F O L L O W M E ”:
Sentimental Listening and the Echoes of Slavery

If one of the central claims of this project is that it investigates a kind of “work,”
an affective labor that affects the way we think about normativity, or the way we might
be able to live in normativity, then Chapter One attends to the ways in which that work
first becomes intelligible in 18
th
century British literature and culture. Establishing the
cultural forces which preceded the man of feeling that would emerge later in the century,
the first chapter articulates the development of affect as a salient, juxtapolitical response
to the unjust social regulations of the emerging public sphere, and argues that its
emotional labor helped to shape that public as it emerged. This context is inarguably
essential to grounding discussions of the significance of contemporary iterations of male
sentimentality, and sheds light on this project’s underlying investigation into what
“work” the peripheral, sentimental wallflower does.
But the latent promise of the project – the thing, arguably, that makes it worth
writing – is the way in which it might point to the possibility that critical writing, and
critical listening, themselves might offer their own kind of affective labor. Work, in this
context, is performative: a peripheral methodology suggests that we might imagine
normativity differently in approaching it from the periphery, developing new frameworks
for bringing cultural objects together that resonate with each other beyond the ways
83

we’ve learned to arrange them. And so Chapter Two works, largely through the insights
of Frederick Douglass, to develop a methodology of critical listening that strives to hear
culture differently than we are used to – across, rather than alongside, the narrative
histories that structure the nation. Listening for echoes of normative privilege
recirculating in culture, this chapter finds new ways to stitch a cultural present together, a
mixtape that reinvigorates the past by bringing it against a contemporary set of thematic
counterparts.
So listen up:
Just weeks before the 2008 Presidential election, Diane Fedele, then president of a
Republican Women’s Group in Alta Loma, California, distributed a newsletter containing
a caricature of Barack Obama on a $10 “Obama Bucks United States Food Stamp.” With
grinning face atop a cartoon donkey body, Obama was featured prominently on the bill,
resting between a bucket of fried chicken, a rack of ribs, a dancing Mr. Kool-Aid, and a
slice of watermelon. Equal parts over-the-top shtick and wistful nostalgia, the image
recalled a Jim Crow past, but in a way that seemed as cartoony as its presidential
caricature. Little about the image was complicated, and it didn’t seem to encourage any
critical engagement. Of course, it was only a joke.
Soon, however, responses both in the mainstream media and within the group
itself (notably referenced in the press as coming from one of the group’s African-
American members) indicated that something about the image was uncomfortable, to say
the least. As Fedele would later suggest, after the image began to circulate beyond the
bounds of its immediately intended audience, the logic of the joke had been lost in all the
84

fuss: In a telephone interview to the Inland Empire newspaper The Press Enterprise,
Fedele “said she simply wanted to deride a comment Obama made over the summer
about how as an African-American he ‘doesn't look like all those other presidents on the
dollar bills.’” Giving proof that she couldn’t be a racist – after all, she at one point had
supported African-American Republican Alan Keyes – Fedele concluded decisively: “If I
was racist, I would have looked at it through racist eyes. I am not a racist, which is why it
probably didn’t register.”
It is easy to see how our response to Fedele’s comments might be motivated to
dispute her claim, but, in accordance with the methodological impulses of this project, I’d
like to postpone our determination of whether or not the circulated image was, in fact,
“racist.” Instead, I’d like to draw attention to the logic of Fedele’s response, and open up
what became an increasingly visible cultural trope at the close of the twenty-first
century’s opening decade: From UCLA student Alexandra Wallace’s widely circulated
“Asians in the Library” rant, in which she caricatured “Asian” speech in decrying
“Asian” manners in the school library, to NPR Political Analyst Juan Williams’ claim
that he “gets nervous” when seeing Muslims on planes, controversies around race in the
Obama era tended to include an implicit disclaimer: “I’m not a racist, but…” On the one
hand, the success of this iteration was that it was rooted in a kind of erasure – it precluded
identification of one’s self as “a racist” by refusing that marker from the outset. In this
foreclosure, the lenses for reading the troubling undertones of whatever claim followed
the phrase disappeared, and it became difficult to identify a critical vocabulary that could
properly attend to these claims in a way that actively spoke to their force and
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effectiveness. The wide erasures of the phrase produced a kind of muted effect on public
discourse, categorically eliminating a productive critique of the speaking subject.
On the other hand, the repeated refrain of “I’m not a racist, but…” was so widely
circulated that it soon began to attain a rhythmic familiarity – it even had, dare I say it, a
kind of musical quality. There was something seductive about the repeated structure, and
the way it recirculated in popular discourse often without even needing to be specifically
iterated, that felt catchy, a song that was always there in the back of our minds. In this
sense, the refrain began to sound less like an erasure, and more like an echo, a repeated
structure that, if we listened carefully, we could hear recurring across a wide historical
period that otherwise seemed politically heterogeneous. From slavery to reconstruction,
from Jim Crow to the Obama era, the progressivist logic of US race relations had held
that political change could sweep inequality into the historical past. But to hear the
echoing structures of inequality across such a seemingly disparate history challenged that
logic, insisting that there were ways of listening to culture that refused its tidy erasures.
This, ultimately, is the task of this chapter: I’d like to articulate a methodology of critical
listening that attends to hearing the structures that recirculate normative logics of gender
and race, even when political discourse, and the actors within it, seem to shift. As a
“peripheral methodology” that derives from models of male sentimentality, critical
listening moves away from genealogical, or chronological, thinking in an effort to open
up cultural objects that recirculate the same insights across a historical period, listening to
the ways in which racial difference, for instance, becomes remixed into new social
structures.
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The three central texts of this chapter – Douglass’s Narrative, Laurie Halse
Anderson’s Chains, and M.T. Anderson’s The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Vol.
I – serve to illustrate and articulate these efforts, relying on the trope of listening in their
narratives as a critical, peripheral strategy that attends to both the sentimental and the
political aspects of racial discourse. From Frederick Douglass’s abolitionist musings on
the distinctions of hearing slavery’s songs to the wallflower protagonists of Anderson and
Anderson’s 21
st
century neo-abolitionist young adult novels, listening serves as a strategy
that disrupts the logics of normative privilege, unfolding the ways in which those logics
circulate beyond the bodies and sites that we expect them to. Moving back and forth,
from the 2008 election of Barack Obama, to Frederick Douglass’s sentimental prose, to
the rise of what I call the 21
st
century neo-abolitionist novel, the project strains to hear
inequality in its echoes across the cultural landscape, refusing the narrative that assures us
this has all past.

F R O M S L A V E R Y ‘ S M O U T H P I E C E T O S L A V E R Y ‘ S E A R S
A Methodology of Critical Listening

If we could keep our ears close to the proverbial ground of contemporary cultural
studies, there would be no mistaking the steady footsteps of one of its most frequently
recurring ghosts: Frederick Douglass. Long invoked as a key voice in the 19
th
century
abolitionist movement, Douglass has trafficked in critical race discourse as one of the
preeminent early Black intellectuals, equal parts compelling biographer and powerful
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orator. Indeed, Douglass has always been a figure to be reckoned with – from William
Lloyd Garrison’s passionate introduction to the first printing of Douglass’s Narrative
onward, if Douglass was invoked, you’d better listen. Garrison writes:
After apologizing for his ignorance, and reminding the audience that
slavery was a poor school for the human intellect and heart, [Douglass]
proceeded to narrate some of the facts in his own history as a slave, and in
the course of his speech gave utterance to many noble thoughts and
thrilling reflections. As soon as he had taken his seat, filled with hope and
admiration, I rose, and declared that Patrick Henry, of revolutionary fame,
never made a speech more eloquent in the cause of liberty, than the one
we had just listened to from the lips of that hunted fugitive. So I believed
at that time – such is my belief now. (Garrison, as quoted in Douglass viii)
The fabled production of 1845’s Narrative, according to historians like James Matlack,
had been “virtually forced” by his “success as a stump speaker,” designed through its
powerful rhetoric to establish both “credibility” and “independence” to a doubting public
(Matlack 15). And in the speaking engagements and subsequent autobiographies that
followed, Douglass only further solidified his public reception as metonymic mouthpiece
to slavery’s cruel body. It comes as little surprise, then, that he has so often served as
both a spokesman and an interlocutor for intellectual clarity and unquestioned authority
in the discursive realm of the politics of race.
Of course, if we’re listening carefully, we should notice that Douglass’s
reappearance in recent work by Josh Kun, Saidiya Hartman, Jon Cruz, and others has,
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well, sounded quite different. Douglass’s reemergence in critical race discourse at the
turn of the 21
st
century, like the scores of invocations of his work across the 20
th
century,
again presented the former slave as a kind of force to be reckoned with. Through the
work of Cruz and Kun in particular, though, this was a new kind of force – not one of
overpowering oration, like the figure that had circulated for so long, but one of critical
listening, a passive construction that suggested a more sensitive critical lens. Nevermind
slavery’s mouthpiece – here was slavery’s discerning ear.
No longer simply heralded with his most frequent epithet – “orator” – Douglass
took on a new kind of subjective position in this work. He remained one of slavery’s
prominent public speakers, a point that Cruz and others were well willing to concede. But
that identity had, they insisted, begun to eclipse some of the most important things that
Douglass had to say. In other words, Douglass wasn’t there to mark the moment at which
slaves could become legible by speaking up – instead, he was there to listen, a strategy
that allowed him to redefine the very ways that the public could understand racial
inequality. Favoring affective distinctions over political or corporeal ones, Douglass had
effectively opened up a transhistorical, critical view of culture that listened to the
repetitions and recurrences of inequality that resonated even when the political climate
changed. Redrawing social divisions beyond the simplistic notions of “black and white,”
Douglass moved beyond the historical and the corporeal to suggest that affect was a much
more meaningful way to chart social difference, because affective distinctions could
order bodies by the logics that drove them. This mode of “sentimental listening,” as I will
come to identify it, resonates in the contemporary US public sphere, if only because, in
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attending to cultural patterns and logics instead of racial divisions, it allows us to hear the
echoes of slavery that persist in a culture even when it begins to understand itself as
“post-racial.”
Perhaps much of the critical attention to Douglass as listener can be said to derive
from Jon Cruz’s Culture on the Margins (1999), in which Douglass first appears not as
powerful orator, but as an author inviting his readers to listen. Referring to a now oft-
cited anecdote in Douglass’s 1845 Narrative, Cruz carefully unpacks Douglass’s
“invitation” to hear slavery’s “songs of sorrow,” insisting that this powerful gesture
brought “[unprecedented] attention…to black song making” in the 19
th
century (Cruz 3).
For Cruz, this marks a watershed moment in cultural criticism: “It broke from the earlier
frameworks in which black song making was heard as alien noise, and it created a critical
humanistic interest in the music of African Americans” (3). In this sense, Douglass’s
listening has what Cruz characterizes as a transformative effect, radically shifting these
aural expressions from an archive of noise to an archive of music.
1
Though the shift
initially appears limited to its effect on cultural objects, Cruz insists that parallel changes
were working simultaneously to begin producing legibility to the Black cultural
producers behind the music:
…[T]his interest marked a major turning point in American intellectual
development – it helped install the modern hermeneutical orientation

1
The vocabulary here – archives, noise, and music – recalls the greater critical conversation in which
both this project and the work I cite here is participating. The complementariness of work by Jacques
Derrida on the role of the archive and work by Jacques Attali on noise each point to the ways in
which, in order for certain cultural objects to have meaning, they must be produced against the
illegible field of non-meaning: music comes into being, for instance, precisely because it is not noise.
See Derrida (Archive Fever 1998) and Attali (Noise 1985).
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toward cultural practices and laid the groundwork for a scientistic and
objectivist treatment of black music. The new mode of hearing that he
helped champion….sought out the inner world that was presumably
reflected in the expressions of slaves. Their songs were to be grasped as
testimonies to their lives, as indices of their sense of social fate. (Cruz 3)
And so perhaps even more powerful than the resounding voice with which he had so
often been associated, Douglass’s listening effectively transformed the political ground of
Civil War-era identity politics, redefining the newly emergent inner lives of slaves in
soliciting an emotional response to the music they offered.
Both Saidiya Hartman and Josh Kun offer similar readings of Douglass’s
listening, each drawing attention to the ways in which this new mode helped to unearth
the “distortion, feedback, and discord” (Kun 34) that underwrote the otherwise coherent
national narratives of freedom and liberty circulating at the time. In doing so, each
complements Cruz’s reading in accenting the parallel cultural transformation that
emerges from Douglass’s intervention. Emphasizing the ways in which alternative modes
of reading could uncover previously illegible cultural sites, Kun and Hartman insist that
the changes in reception of the slaves’ music, previously only understood as noise,
mirrored the changes in reception of the slaves themselves, previously only understood as
uncivilized savages. To emerge as human, for the slaves, meant that they now had
narratives of their own to tell about themselves, stories that would connect them in
intimate new ways with abolitionists poised to hear what they had to say. Cruz identifies
this phenomenon under the rubric of “ethnosympathy,” a “cultural current” characterized
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by “the new humanitarian pursuit of the inner world of distinctive and collectively
classifiable subjects” (Cruz 3). And so as the formerly strident mess of noise began to
become intelligible as music to a freshly eager public, so too did an increasingly
intelligible slave “narrative” emerge, both literally and figuratively speaking.
This transformation, in a way, ought to sound familiar. As Chapter One
elaborates, the 18
th
century’s own “cultural currents” of sensibility and sentimentality had
already transformed the subjectivities of white men and women of the emergent middle
classes, imbuing them with an interiority similar to the one Cruz later identifies as
emerging in the slaves. Of course, this earlier inward turn was much more ambivalent of
a gesture, as it tended to distinguish the normative (white, male, middle class, straight)
body from others via an interiorized affective turn that the others couldn’t quite make.
White male sentimentality, in particular, stood in stark contrast to the excessive,
unrestrained affects produced by “hysterical” female bodies and “savage” Black bodies
circulating alongside him, distinctions that rendered the affective performance of
sentimental interiority as the primary indicator of civilized subjectivity. In a way, then,
we might be able to see the project of ethnosympathy arising in the 19
th
century as one
which sought to expand the privilege of civilized, affective interiority to Black bodies – a
gesture that began to become a central component of the abolitionist movement.
From Douglass’s initial exploration of critical listening to the recent scholarship
attending to the intersection of race and sound, it is important that we see the ways in
which difference – whether corporeal or affective – is one of the most important axes on
which public discourse about race circulates. But the intervention that Douglass
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promises, and the one that I want to emphasize here, is that there is no easy way to
collapse the two: While the emergence of affective interiority in abolitionist discourse
became perhaps the most convincing argument to win over abolitionist sympathizers –
the dominant paradigm and rhetoric of the slave narrative and the abolitionist novel – that
intelligibility came at a cost. In inheriting the discourse of sentimentality, Douglass
inherits its peripheral relation to the normative public sphere, a position that guarantees
him the freedom to critique normative race relations, but only within the space of
privileged access to the public.
2

In this way, we might be able to read Douglass as a new kind of wallflower
figure, replicating many of the complicated relations to the normative public established
in the early 18
th
century. As his visibility increased in speaking tours and
autobiographies, so too did he draw further from a place of “outside” the public sphere
and move closer to the peripheral edges of the normative public. Listening to the
fractured nation from the sidelines, he could hear the ways in which the apparently clear
divisions of the country – a backward South and a progressive North – sounded quite
similar to each other. And he responded with a critical invocation to join him in his
listening. If we could only hear it right, he insisted, there would be no imaginable way
that we could not understand the “soul-killing effects of slavery” (Douglass 9).
Such a challenge had a salient resonance for Northern listeners, who largely
understood themselves as the choir to whom Douglass had been preaching. No longer
could they remain the “enlightened” half of the abolitionist debate – they now needed to

2
I elaborate at length on this role of the “periphery” in both the Introduction and Chapter One of
this project.
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recognize themselves in Douglass’s soundscape. And so Douglass presents a challenge to
this project as well: What does it mean here, in the midst of articulating the methodology
at the very heart of this project, to leave the normative body altogether? Certainly, we
might do well to remember that wallflower sentimentality initially emerged as a structural
response to public culture, and in so doing could see that the regulative logics of the
public sphere circulated irrespective of the bodies that benefitted from them. But we
should also be open to the possibility that, if we listen a little closer, we might hear the
early notes of wallflower sentimentality tending towards leaving its normative roots.
* * *
The episode that Cruz and others most often turn to – Douglass’s listening to the
slaves sing on their way to the Great House Farm – is surprisingly brief: over the course
of a few pages of his 1845 Narrative, Douglass begins to meditate on their singing,
detailing the way in which these songs offered him his “first glimmering conception of
the dehumanizing character of slavery” (Douglass 9). Though the anecdote appears early
in the text (the second chapter), it represents the first time that he truly slows down in his
narration. Preceded by his journey from birth to early adulthood, this is the first time that
Douglass slows down the pace to a more reflective tone. It begins with the story of slaves
who had earned their way to run errands to the “Great House Farm,” a task “esteemed…a
high privilege.” As Douglass writes:
While on their way, they would make the dense old woods, for miles
around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy
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and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went
along, consulting neither time nor tune. (8)
Curiously enough, Douglass’s first impression of the songs is that he “did not, when a
slave, understand [their] deep meaning.” “Rude and apparently incoherent,” the songs did
not – could not – make sense to him because he was, as he says, “within the circle.” It’s
an odd distinction: after all, one would expect that the songs would resonate most with
someone who could identify as a slave, a fellow Black man caught in the tangles of
injustice. But as Douglass insists, drawing forth a clear message from what otherwise
appeared “wild…rude…and apparently incoherent” required more than just a corporeal
alliance with the producers of the songs.
What Douglass offers in place of a corporeal alliance is an affective one. “If any
one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery,” writes Douglass, “let
him...in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul, –
and if he is not thus impressed, it will only be because ‘there is no flesh in his obdurate
heart’” (9). With an overt reference to William Cowper, a British sentimentalist poet in
the 18
th
century, Douglass reveals the influence that sentimentalism had on his ability to
properly hear, by way of framing listening as an act open to anyone who could learn to
properly feel.
3
Considering the way in which sentimentalism, and its fraught insistence on
“proper feeling,” was caught up in the discourse of “civilization,” Douglass’s move is
somewhat surprising. But what Douglass draws from a particular strand of
sentimentalism is its power to enable alliances which do not rely on explicit markers of

3
Cowper has his own interesting history as a British Abolitionist poet; Douglass quotes from “The
Task,” written in 1784.
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difference (the raced, sexed, or classed body) to create ties that upset normative forms of
social organization.
This is not to say that Douglass dismisses racial difference as a salient component
of subjectivity. But it is to say that in order to listen – and this is a subtle point that cannot
go unnoticed in Douglass’s short reflection – one must learn to be both “within the
circle” and “without” it at the same time. Douglass effectively reproduces the peripheral
positioning of the 18
th
century wallflower, demanding that being able to hear the slave
songs for what they truly are requires locating one’s self between the normative and the
oppressed, the slave and the master, the singer and the listener. While it seems a fairly
egalitarian gesture, the implications are actually quite different for the two listeners: For
the would-be abolitionists, it meant that they had to learn to put themselves in the place
of the slaves, understanding their songs – and the suffering produced in the songs – as
indices of a fundamental injustice at the heart of the peculiar institution. For the slaves, it
required stepping outside of the frameworks that they had been born into, a kind of proto-
consciousness raising that allowed them to see the structures that not only produced, but
maintained slavery even under the harshest of conditions.
What links the two, in varying senses of the word, is a project in empathy. Instead
of the fundamental inequalities reproduced in a politics of sympathy, whereupon the
sufferer and the sympathizer’s positions become hierarchically fixed, empathy offers a
momentary alliance that draws the disparate parties close enough to meet. In this way,
learning to listen not only upsets the structure of social difference, it allows the listener to
see the structure as structure, with its own set of reproducible logics that helped maintain
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racial inequality as a way to benefit the privileged bodies that controlled the slave-
system. And this is how Douglass essentially shifts the discourse of abolitionist
sentimentality away from a corporeal politics to an affective politics: In emphasizing
reproducible logics that underwrite social structures, Douglass opens up the possibility
that people might inhabit those logics differently, regardless of the color of their skin.
The implications here are both more and less insidious than they seem. If the
difference between those who understand slavery’s injustice and those who do not is
rooted in a sentimental ability to hear suffering from a peripheral subjective position, then
white sympathizers might be able to approach the weight of racial politics in a way
previously impossible. More important than having some essentialist link among slaves,
true empathy was derived from a kind of cultivation – an “attentive and refined
sensibility,” as Cruz calls it – that was required from both Black and white bodies ready
to listen. The dangerous implication of this figurative sweep, of course, is that the very
logics that recirculated and reproduced the structures of inequality could come from just
as diverse a group of bodies as empathy could.
It is important to acknowledge the stakes in opening up and framing Douglass’s
intervention in the ways that I am. Indeed, neither I nor Douglass would suggest that
corporeal politics fade away from relevance, nor that empathy is a project that enables
subjects to meet as true equals. We must remember that Douglass’s promise, in this
respect, is actually fairly limited:
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I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do
more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than
the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do. (8)
Instead of promising equality, Douglass suggests that the goal is merely for listeners to
hear the “horrible character” of slavery, to locate and acknowledge that “the songs of the
slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching
heart is relieved by its tears” (9). Listening doesn’t explicitly suggest political or
structural change, and it doesn’t even suggest that listeners might understand that horrible
character. Instead, it believes in the sentimentalist hope that structural change could only
result from reorganizing and rerouting the logics of inequality already in circulation. It
deigns to do nothing less than to have listening change the sounds themselves by
reorganizing the way that they might continue to echo across culture’s wide grasp.
In unpacking some of the fundamental dynamics of Douglass’s critical listening
thus far, I have attempted to articulate the possibility for a methodology that might open
up new ways of reading social structures that continue to recirculate in public culture
across even a changing political landscape. If we can continue to maintain a critical
distance from both an essentialist insistence on the insurmountability of the color line and
an essentialist insistence on equality simply being a matter of “feeling” the same, then we
can start to open up that methodology to the nuances that make it so powerful. In the
section that follows, I will expand upon what I establish as Douglass’s three key
interventions – namely, locating sentimentality adjacent to the political sphere,
revivifying the salience of affective labor, and redefining the scope of abolitionism
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beyond a North/South binary – and articulate them as part of Douglass’s aural rendering
of culture. Each intervention develops a kind of map, redrawing the cultural landscape
that emerges when we cultivate our listening sensibilities. And so sketching out that map,
we begin to find our larger framework for doing critical sentimental work.

S O U N D S C A P E C A R T O G R A P H Y

That Douglass’s insights into sentimentality’s political saliency derive from
anecdotes rather than “volumes of philosophy,” as he puts it, should not go unnoticed. As
should the fact that the central anecdote in this case – a fairly innocuous account of
singing in the woods – pales in comparison to the series of tearjerkers that precede it. But
I wonder in this section if this alternative form of knowledge production – the turn to a
simple, peripheral observation of slave singing – helps to draw new maps of culture
precisely because it avoids the grandiose gestures of sentimentality we see late in the 18
th

century. Preferring the tenuousness of the periphery, Douglass insists that such
ambivalent spaces are important precisely because of their marginal relation to the
privileged public sphere.
Douglass’s first intervention – locating sentimentality as adjacent to the public
sphere – illustrates this point well. Consider the way in which he sets up the slaves’
approach to the Great House Farm: As the center of (then-master) Colonel Lloyd’s vast
plantation network, “few privileges were esteemed higher, by the slaves of the out-farms,
than that of being selected to do errands” there, making the trip into the “dense old
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woods” where the song-making in question took place. The spatial organization of the
tale is important: Between the out-farms, which we might assume to be associated with
the deep outside of public culture, and the great plantation, which we might assume to be
associated with public culture’s privileged site, we find the scene of affective
transformation. It is important to note that Douglass learns to listen here, in the periphery,
because it is otherwise a transient space, neither the site of culture nor its theoretical
opposition. Here, in the middle, something powerful seems to be happening that
Douglass hasn’t seen from either side of the debate.
Immediately, Douglass politicizes the space. He writes:
A representative could not be prouder of his election to a seat in the
American Congress than a slave on one of the out-farms would be of his
election to do errands at the Great House Farm…The competitors for this
office sought as diligently to please their overseers, as the office-seekers in
the political parties seek to please and deceive the people. The same traits
of character might be seen in Colonel Lloyd’s slaves, as are seen in the
slaves of the political parties. (Douglass 8)
It’s such a curious gesture: the slaves become “representatives,” “elected” to do errands
and seeking to please their masters as much as “office-seekers in the political parties seek
to please and deceive the people.” Each turn of phrase, it seems, adds a new cadence to
the rich comparison between the slave and the politician. The comparison, of course, is
ironic – in all other respects, politically speaking, slaves and politicians had nearly polar
political and legal clout. But Douglass maintains the comparison, and his steady
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politicization of the periphery draws out relations otherwise unthinkable for his captive
audience.
Because here’s the thing: other figures than that of the politician might have
served just as well as metaphors to accent pride, diligent work, and deception in similar
ways – but the choice here seems deliberate. Clearly, the comparison is doing a different
kind of rhetorical work. For the larger (white) abolitionist audience that Douglass is
addressing in his Narrative, the politician represents a very particular approach to
addressing social issues and the public sphere distinct from the work that Douglass as
orator or author might do. The politician’s work here is about cunning, about accessing
the Great House Farm through deception in an effort to get nearer to the center of
political decision-making and benefit. His pride lies in achieving access to the inner-
circle, his deception lies in the path he takes to get there. The subtleties and diligence of
the slaves work similarly, to be sure. But the logic of the slave is quite different: While he
or she works through whatever means necessary to earn the privilege of running errands,
the desire seems not to be in accessing the Great House Farm itself, but rather in
accessing the wild, peripheral space around the farm. The joy of the walk, as Douglass
describes it, is in the affective outpouring that happens in the “dense, old woods.”
And so in framing the end goal of the slave and the politician as differently as he
does, Douglass opens up the work that affect might do as distinct from politics, to “do
more,” as he writes, “to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery.”
Effectively, by creating different trajectories for the two approaches – where politics for
politicians is aimed at the seat of policy- and decision-making, and politics for slaves is
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aimed in the periphery just outside the political space – Douglass creates both different
logics and different desires for the two positions, rendering them increasingly distinct
despite the apparent comparison. Essentially, this is Douglass’s first key intervention: he
insists that the fruits of affective labor are political, sort of. They lie not in the realm of
politics, broadly understood, but rather in the politicized, affective noise that rises up in a
new, wild space just outside of the political sphere. Politicians could change rules – sure.
But this affective periphery could change minds and hearts.
To note the fervor with which Douglass makes this assertion is to express his
second point, which is that, though sentiment works here apart from traditional avenues
of political change, it becomes at least as salient and important as more traditionally
“political” labor. Just as Douglass claims that “the mere recurrence to those songs, even
now, afflicts me,” he works to highlight the unique way in which the affects that rise up
when we listen have a transcendent capacity that exceeds the historical, political solutions
to the overwhelming problem of slavery. Despite the urgency of an approaching civil
war, despite the address to an audience with much more direct access to a political center
that could radically change the experience of slavery in the US, he insists on affect as a
lasting reminder of his “hatred of slavery” instead of a political solution to a structural
problem. Among whippings, families torn apart, killing in cold blood, only one thing
remains: “Those songs still follow me.”
In this sense, the affective experience of slavery’s horrors is at the center of
Douglass’s rhetorical narrative and it resonates across time and bodies in a way that the
political approach fails to do. Not once does Douglass call to his readers to vote, to lobby,
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to storm the capitol; instead, he invites us, as Cruz writes, “to pause and listen” (Cruz 3).
4

He writes:
If anyone wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery,
let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, and, on allowance-day, place
himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him, in silence, analyze the
sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul, - and if he is not
thus impressed, it will only be because “there is no flesh in his obdurate
heart.” (9)
We would do well to keep in mind that the Narrative was not only Douglass’s first claim
for “credibility,” but that it was also his first grand opportunity after the One Hundred
Conventions tour to speak authoritatively to a wide audience. The speaking tour,
organized by the New England Anti-Slave Society, had brought Douglass to an array of
venues across the northern United States in 1863, and had offered him a considerable
amount of time to meditate on the kinds of messages he might deliver to a wider public.
That this reflection led him to insist, above all else, that his audience ought to listen
cannot be underemphasized – here was a man who had spoken countless times to
audiences both hostile and supportive, large and small, and he still believed that a rhetoric
of empathy, rooted in the affective power to listen, would be much more compelling than
a more traditionally political call. As he would write later in his third autobiography, Life
and Times of Frederick Douglass, “All that the American people needed, I thought, was

4
It is worth noting that Douglass eventually did pursue specifically political actions in his quest for
social inequality, not only in the form of political pamphleteering and participation in the women’s
suffrage movement, but in holding several political offices later in life.
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light. Could they know slavery as I knew it, I thought, they would hasten to the work of
its extinction” (Douglass Autobiographies 671).
Identifying in Douglass’s invocation a call for affective, rather than political,
change, is important. But it is also important to frame that call within the larger tradition
of sentimental literature circulating at the time. After all, the citation of William
Cowper’s sentimental-abolitionist poetry at the end of the chapter (“there is no flesh in
his obdurate heart”) opens up both a transatlantic and transhistorical link between British
sentimentality and Douglass’s work that has often remained unacknowledged in
contemporary scholarship in cultural studies. I point this out not to reframe Douglass as a
sentimentalist in the direct genealogical inheritance of 18
th
century poetry, but rather to
emphasize the alternative alliance I would suggest it performs: true affective connection,
for Douglass, has a transformative – even transhistorical, transatlantic – power to move
across a range of bodies. Again, this is an important claim to make: because what
Douglass suggests is that the reference to Cowper – which goes uncited in the original
prose – is not meant to link his work to a canon of sentimentality, or an “official” archive
of sentiment’s political power. Rather, it extends beyond genealogy in an insistence that
the only divisions one ought to draw are between those who can feel with another, and
those who simply can’t extend beyond themselves. In other words, between those who
are willing to, “in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his
soul,” and those who hear only noise.
And this, finally, brings us to Douglass’s third – and, arguably, most important –
intervention. In suggesting that we open up a new cartography of social difference rooted
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in affect, rather than bodies, temporalities, or locations, Douglass effectively upends the
North/South distinction so endemic to our understanding of the approaching Civil War.
Because Douglass, in the conclusion of his reflection on the singing of the slaves, offers
his most subtly invective critique of what we might otherwise understand as his potential
allies. After claiming that those who could hear the songs of the slaves and not be moved
were less than human – “there is no flesh in his obdurate heart” – he concludes with a
carefully damning portrayal of Northern abolitionist support:
I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find
persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their
contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater
mistake…The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he
is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears….The
singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as
appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the
singing of a slave; the songs of the one and the other are prompted by the
same emotion.
The North, for Douglass, gets no pass for its ostensible support of the abolitionist
movement. Instead, Douglass listens carefully to a North whose logics for supporting
abolition are much more muddied than they appear, and he refuses to hear a hoped-for
empathy in their caricatures of Black performance. No, the North, it seems, must
themselves learn to listen – for the new divisions of social difference and equality pay no
mind to political change, give no credence for those on “the right side of history.” And so
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the sentimental listeners, who can come to understand the “horrible character” of slavery
through an attentive and empathetic ear, end up comprising not as wide of a population as
we might otherwise have guessed.
This, I would suggest, is ultimately what places Douglass and his intervention for
affect on the side of a radical, and not a conservative, side of the critical spectrum,
because it means that he creates even less opportunity for social progressivism and
equality, rather than more. In opening up access to affect and empathy beyond the limits
of corporeal, economic, temporal, and spatial, Douglass engenders affect with a
capaciousness that allows access to any who desire it. But in suggesting that many of
those who might seem to be seen as affective allies were in fact unable to hear slavery for
what it truly was, he renders a tear in the fabric of a unified North. Much of Douglass’s
later work and life reflect this: Douglass was free to admit the fractured and tumultuous
response to the One Hundred Conventions, and would continuously revise his political
alliances with other Northern abolitionists.
5

And so what Douglass ultimately ends up producing in his emphasis on affect
over politics is a radically revised social map that splits the nation not by color, region, or
even – as he would take pains to insist later – gender.
6
Instead, he creates a soundscape

5
Douglass’s public revision of his own thinking, manifested in his repeated return to
autobiographical writing, allows fascinating insight into his changing ideas on the constitution,
Garrison, and the North. As he grew older, Douglass became more comfortable investigating the
new complexities of post-Emancipation race relations, and stood fervently behind his understanding
of affective, rather than racial, divisions of the social order. He would go on to criticize Abraham
Lincoln, for example, at his own funeral, demanding again and again that change and sincerity will
spring from affective, rather than political, alliances.

6
Douglass would of course go on to express deep alliance with women’s suffrage movement, the
only African-American, and one of few men, to participate in the convention at Seneca Falls.
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cartography that weaves through a population to separate those who could listen from
those who could not. As we ought to see in the example above, much of the force of this
impact was taken by a North that had circulated publicly as an entity favorable to an
abolitionist sentiment, but who often replicated many of the more structural prejudices
they seemingly opposed.
7
At the same time, we should remember, his original anecdote
begins with the equally jarring claim that Douglass himself was unable to properly hear
the slave songs while “within the circle” of the institution. Working between both sides
of the political spectrum, Douglass carved out a peripheral subjectivity that, through
careful listening, could hear the new map of a nation divided. Between slavery and
freedom, South and North, politics and affect – in the “dense old woods” where “wild”
songs fill the air outside the plantation – a new kind of subject was born. Nay – a new
kind of response, to a problem that was structurally more vast than the nation could ever
have imagined.
In the end, this was Douglass’s contribution: he answered the most pressing
question of the day – “What are we to do about slavery?” – by refusing to offer a
solution. Instead, he offered a strategy: if we could move ourselves to the periphery, wait,
and listen to the sorrows that held up our tenuous positions, we would surely find a
problem that had been architecturally woven into the very nation itself. In one of the
more fascinating, and underappreciated, moments in the Narrative, Douglass does answer
the second-most pressing question on the abolitionists’ lips: “Why aren’t other slaves
running away as well?” He writes:

7
For more on Douglass’s decision to split with Garrison, who told him just to “tell your story,
Frederick,” see esp., Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (in Autobiographies 367).
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The days between Christmas and New Year’s Day are allowed as
holidays; and, accordingly, we were not required to perform any labor,
more than to feed and take care of the stock. This time we regarded as our
own, by the grace of our masters; and we therefore used or abused it
nearly as we pleased…From what I know of the effect of these holidays
upon the slave, I believe them to be among the most effective means in the
hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of
insurrection….These holidays serve as conductors, or safety-valves, to
carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity. (Douglass 44)
What Douglass works to elaborate here, beyond a kind of proto-consciousness raising for
his fellow slaves, is the way in which the system wasn’t just composed of some lock that
had to be undone, but rather a systemic, disciplinary structure that reached beyond the
imaginary shackles of slavery.
8
He returns to this point again and again: in his claim that
the religion of the south served as a “shelter” for slavery’s worst grievances (Douglass
47), his denouncement of the superstitiousness of “ignorant slaves” (47), and the repeated
betrayals of the lower class and slaves against themselves (58). Over and over, Douglass
weaves a tapestry of a new nation divided, carefully articulating the intricacies of a
structure of inequality that reached far beyond anything that immediate abolition had to
offer. And so, in this sense, Douglass had the foresight to anticipate the difficulties of
Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and even the “post-racial” Obama moment. Or perhaps

8
It is important to read this within the context of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977),
which locates its historical reference points in the 19
th
century shifts of power, albeit in the context of
French prisons.
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we should say, simply, that he heard them coming. And in the 21
st
century, as we arch
our ears back to a past we’ve swept into the US’s racial history, he calls forward:
Open your ears, and you’ll hear it coming, too.

S T I L L L I S T E N I N G The Return of the Abolitionist Novel

In many ways, this chapter began with something of a stumbling point: how, I
wondered, in the post-racial Obama era, can we make sense of the structures of racial
inequality beyond the limits of “I’m not a racist, but…”? Through readings of Frederick
Douglass – whose recent reemergence in critical texts dealing with race and sound
studies has presented some important frameworks for thinking about alternatives to
reading culture in the contemporary moment – I’ve attempted to defer, rather than
answer, that inquiry. In other words, I wanted to establish Douglass’s sentimental
listening as a methodology that could hear something different than simply the “truth”
behind racial discourse in the twenty-first century. And so, as we have unpacked it, this
framework of sentimental listening has helped us to note the repetitions, trajectories, and
logics of racial discourse across a transhistorical spectrum, refusing the progressive
historical narratives that attempt to erase inequality by assuming that we’ve moved on. In
effect, listening demands that the only way to hear the US in the post-Obama, post-racial,
twenty-first century is to insist that this is all a song we’ve heard before.
Let me clarify this point: Douglass’s turn to listening wasn’t just a change in
metaphors for cultural criticism. It represented a shift in criticism that heard difference
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rather than homogeneity; it brought the background track to the front of the mix. Again,
Josh Kun makes this distinction in contrasting Douglass with Walt Whitman, whose own
listening practices found him rejoicing in the unified national character of a coherent
cultural identity just beginning to take shape: “While Whitman listened for the unities of
American consensus,” he writes, “Douglass listened for what that consensus violently
silenced – the distortion, feedback, and discord that were faded out as the songs of
working-class white merchants were faded in” (Kun 34). And so here critical listening
stands in for the kind of nuanced distinctions that help to order a nation not through its
divisions of body, or geography, but rather through affective divisions that were much
more difficult to discern. Douglass rendered a nation split between those who could feel
the injustice of slavery and those who merely paid lip-service to its undesirability.
Which opens up critical listening, I argue here, to becoming a methodology. On
the one hand, the emphasis of the previous section was intended to showcase the ways in
which Douglass, speaking to a Northern audience, was able to make divisions even
among the group that was supposedly comprised of the most progressive minds in the
country. And yet his fervent insistence that many of them still had so far to go changed
the very way we might think about political opposition in the abolitionist era.
9
What this
allows is more than simply a division of affect over body and geography: it allows us to
hear the ways in which difference, as a structure and a logic that we could hear, continues

9
Douglass’s troubled relationship with Northern abolitionists in general, and William Lloyd Garrison
in particular, is well-chronicled in contemporary scholarship about the movement. His own writing,
however, speaks to his vocal acknowledgment of and resistance to the simple binaries of North and
South that abolitionist America seemed to offer up. See esp., Douglass’s speech in Rochester, New
York, on July 5
th
, 1852 (“The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro”).
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to repeat and echo across the lines we typically draw in stories we tell about racial
inequality in the US. It allows us to hear the countermelody of slavery resonate past the
Civil War into Reconstruction, through the Great Migration and Jim Crow, around Civil
Rights, and Brown v. Board, and even in the harmonies of the 2008 Inauguration. Where
history would have us hear social progress, Douglass would have us hear the refrain of
exclusion and sorrow. Where normativity would say, look how far we’ve come, Douglass
would call out, I’ve heard that song before.
The task of this project, though, isn’t just to retread through Douglass’s claim, or
even to expand upon it to notice the ways in which difference figured in the abolitionist
moment for the audience to whom Douglass spoke. It is also imperative, I suggest, to try
to hear the repetition of a response to social difference alongside our hearing of
difference itself. This turn recalls the anecdote with which this chapter began: for while
indeed we must strive to hear the repetition of “I’m not a racist, but…” as a logic that
reappears across the landscape of US race relations, the point of deferring our answer to
that question was that we might find ways to sketch a structure that can respond to it.
Here, then, we open in this section towards a reading of two contemporary
authors invested in this same affective, juxtapolitical labor, striving to hear social
inequality in the “post-racial” Obama era present. If the question for young adult authors
Laurie Halse Anderson and M.T. Anderson is, “How can we hear the echoes of the
abolitionist era in the din of contemporary culture?” then their response is surprisingly
simple: To insist that the abolitionist era is not truly over, write an abolitionist novel to
impress upon your readers the need for some change. With literary backgrounds straying
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from the sentimental (Halse Anderson) to the dystopian (M.T. Anderson), and with
personal backgrounds firmly etched in the (white) Americana of small New England
towns, Anderson and Anderson’s respective decisions to approach multi-volume slave
narratives could be seen as curious choices.
10
But the novels that each has produced,
Chains and The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation, have
evidenced not only an immense commitment to form and craft, but a compelling and
empathetic project that has seemed overwhelmingly to win over critics.
11
Not that the
neo-abolitionist novel hadn’t been done before: The dramatic resurrection of the genre –
particularly in writing for young adults – gathered momentum in the early 1990s,
following the steady handful of titles released each year since about 1968. Strictly
speaking, many of the early works were simple historical morality tales, tidy
melodramatic accounts of escape from an unambiguously evil institution. But with the
publication of Octavian Nothing (Vol. 1) in 2006, and Chains in 2008, the lines began to
become much more blurry. Which is not to say that Anderson and Anderson’s renderings
of slavery become any less insidious or terrifying of an institution – rather, it is to point
out that, within the scope of either text, it becomes difficult early on to distinguish the

10
Daphne Brooks, in a talk about TV on the Radio, had a fantastic trope of postponing discussion of
“the white guy” in the band, ad infinitum, with the phrase, “I’ll get to that later.” I’d echo Brooks
here in the spirit of deferment which characterizes the methodology and framework of this project.
Yes, Anderson and Anderson’s whiteness is something that matters, but the way in which it matters
is perhaps outside the scope of this chapter. (I’ll leave it at this: the development of this argument,
should it be pursued, would certainly speak in complementary ways to the gesture of geo-affective,
rather than racial, alliances, but it would also open up the complex politics of cross-racial writing we
can find in these texts).

11
Not only did they both get lost in the novels, but they wrote in 18
th
century prose, and turned the
tomes into serialized projects. For their efforts, and talent, M.T. Anderson received the National
Book Award in 2006, and Laurie Halse Anderson was a National Book Award Finalist in 2008
(Young People’s Literature category).
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limits of that evil, where it begins, where it (may not) end, and just how far down the
rabbit hole it reaches.
The ambiguity of each text likely derives from the surprisingly peripheral
positions of its narrators, Octavian – a Classically-educated slave raised as a social
experiment in Octavian Nothing, and Isabel – a theoretically free but deceitfully enslaved
young girl in Chains. Through a series of narrative tropes and stylistic decisions,
Anderson and Anderson revise both the genre of the slave narrative and that of the
bildungsroman, eschewing the familiar trajectory of escape to corporeal freedom for a
much more significant quest for cognitive and affective liberty. From their idiosyncratic
choices for temporal setting (both take place in the Revolutionary War, nearly a century
before Emancipation) to their deliberately ambiguous distinctions between Patriots and
Loyalists, the authors devise a world in which, as M.T. Anderson writes, such political
divisions remain fundamentally “uncertain”:
…I decided to write a book from the point of view of someone who
wouldn’t know the outcome of the war and who had to make a hard choice
between sides. I wanted to recapture the feeling of the unknown, the
unclarity of that decision. (M.T. Anderson 364-365)
If the terrain here sounds familiar, it should: Anderson and Anderson write novels that
revise the geo-political topography of US race politics in much the same way that
Frederick Douglass did a century and a half earlier. With the new social maps of affective
– rather than corporeal – distinctions, Octavian and Isabel experience a kind of
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sentimental education that helps them to sketch out the world far more complexly than
Patriot or Loyalist, Black or White, Freedom or Slavery.
Staging each narrative during the Revolutionary War, the authors strive to capture
the ambivalence of determining which “side” to support, eventually using this false
binary as a way to locate their narrators – and their readers – in a peripheral space
between the two. Like Douglass’s own characterization of this space, here the periphery
maintains an adjacent relation to the political sphere in order to challenge the kinds of
narratives we tell about the “good” Rebels versus the “bad” Loyalists, or the corollary
“good” North versus the “bad” South. That ambiguity, within the context of the novels,
begins to disrupt the slave narrative / bildungsroman traditions we expect, veering the
trajectory of each character’s narrative arc away from the typical “growth” or realizations
we expect them to make. Indeed, at the conclusion of each novel, both Octavian and
Isabel’s ostensible “freedom” from malicious owners seems tentative at best: each have
learned in the novels, as Halse Anderson puts it, that “’freedom and liberty’ has many
meanings” (Halse Anderson 31). And so we are left at the end of each novel wondering
why their “freedom” doesn’t seem to solve much at all.
Granted, these unsettled endings derive, at least in part, from their serialized
forms.
12
But to dismiss this feeling of tentativeness as merely the result of some narrative
cliffhanger is, I think, to be less sensitive of a reader than we are called to be. In each of

12
Laurie Halse Anderson’s plan for the series as a trilogy echoes similar historical forms, though the
realities of contemporary publishing practices have delayed the narrative’s completion multiple times.
Following the 2008 release of Chains, the second book, Forge, was released in 2010. The third book,
Ashes, is yet to be released as of July of 2013. M.T. Anderson’s book was also serialized, released in
two parts: Vol. 1: The Pox Party (2006, the primary focus of this chapter) and Vol. 2: Kingdom of the
Waves (2008).
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their own ways, Octavian and Isabel’s trajectories explicitly upend the structures of a
narrative that would produce this cliffhanger dynamic, right from the beginning. Consider
Halse Anderson’s first chapter: After Isabel’s owner dies, leaving her and her young
sister presumably on their own, Isabel runs ahead to her mother’s grave, eager to hear
some advice. Repeating her invocations for Momma to “please cross back over for just a
little bit” (5), Isabel becomes increasingly desperate when she receives no reply:
“It’s here Momma,” I whispered. “The day you promised. But I
need your help…I don’t have much time…Where do you want us to go?
What should we do?...Please Momma,” I whispered urgently. “I need your
help…”
No ghosts. Nothing.
It’s been like this for near a year. (5)
Immediately, the novel refuses to replicate the kind of trajectory it offered, for instance,
Melinda Sorvino, the rape-victim protagonist of Halse Anderson’s earlier, most popular
novel, Speak. Whereas Melinda worked through inner turmoil just to utter a few words at
the end of that book – to locate some new ground on which to locate her own voice –
Isabel waits for a voice that never comes. When Isabel does speak, she is largely ignored
or punished – there is no one waiting to hear what she has to say, no magic return of her
mother’s voice. For Isabel, speaking offers little currency in a world that has no one to
hear – and so Isabel herself must learn not to speak, but rather to listen.
Within the context of Chains, this initially means that Isabel becomes a spy for
the rebel army. As she serves her Tory master and his acquaintances, who talk freely
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about their plans for the King’s cause, she listens in for news of approaching armies.
Though at times this means that she learns to listen while concealed, pausing just before
entering the meeting-chamber where her master holds meetings, just as often she simply
stands invisible and silent in the corner of the room, “face still as a plaster mask, thoughts
chas[ing] round and round” (61). Reinforcing a refusal to articulate Isabel’s growth in
terms of learning to speak for herself, Halse Anderson develops Isabel as a listener
behind the “plaster mask,” aligning her with the male wallflowers that burgeon in the
sentimental literature of 18
th
century Europe. Rewriting the possibility of interior
subjectivity – the very mark of 18
th
century sentimentality – onto a young Black slave
girl, Halse Anderson again disrupts the kinds of scripts that we would come to expect.
Isabel repeatedly and deliberately disavows the simple quest for some corporeal freedom
in favor of something more essential, and much more interiorized:
…I thought of all the ancestors waiting at the water’s edge for their
stolen children to come home. Waiting and waiting and waiting…
A thought surfaced through my ashes.
She cannot chain my soul.
Yes, she could hurt me. She’d already done so. But what was one
more beating? A flogging, even? I would bleed, or not. Scar, or not. Live,
or not. But she could no longer harm Ruth, and she could not hurt my soul,
not unless I gave it to her. (246-247)
Echoing the logic of Uncle Tom at the conclusion of Stowe’s famous novel – a logic
which I would suggest similarly emphasizes a peripheral response to the hypocritical
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political sphere – Isabel’s growth happens not when she escapes physically, but when she
learns to develop affectively. Eschewing the recognition of the outward blooming so
characteristic of the bildungsroman, Halse Anderson only sends Isabel further inward,
offering an interiorized decision as the pinnacle of the narrative’s action.
Listening, then, moves very quickly from a specific, physical act – listening in on
the Loyalist plans in the war – to something much more nuanced. Early on, Isabel is
given the opportunity both to overhear, and report, her master’s traitorous role in the war.
But Halse Anderson clips away the end of a certain trajectory towards “freedom,”
ensuring that, for all Isabel’s efforts, nothing ever comes of them. When Isabel inquires
about her reward, just after having reported important Loyalist information to the Rebels,
her optimistic accomplice and fellow slave, Curzon, remarks, “You need to be
patient…The army has bigger fish to fry than you and your sister” (83). Isabel’s curt
response mirrors her uneasy confidence in the generousness of the Rebels: “And I have
bigger fish to fry than your army.” Twisting the force of the personal narrative against the
larger historical narrative frustrates any easy reading of Isabel’s growth, and extends the
scope of what Halse Anderson might be trying to say about which listening Isabel really
ought to be pursuing. Again and again, Isabel tries to use her literal listening in order to
secure her freedom, occasionally making progress towards her goal; but just as often, she
is met with the tangled logic of an increasingly hypocritical Rebellion, and she is forced
to continue unraveling the logics that seem to repeat on both sides of the war. This, I
would argue, represents the revised narrative trajectory of Chains: Isabel’s growth as a
listener represents, to some extent, the kind of consciousness-raising self-awareness
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typical of the genres of the slave narrative and bildungsroman. But where that leads –
here, towards the discovery of slavery’s evils and hypocrisies – only manages to occupy
the first step in her development. As the novel progresses, listening moves from a
physical strategy of overhearing to a critical strategy for noting the rhythms and
repetitions of a hypocrisy that afflicts both sides of the war. Listening, in other words, is
reinforced as a peripheral critical position that allows one to turn away from the
normative structures that circulate on both sides of the ostensible political binary.
For Octavian, whose narrative seems altogether more surreal, this shifting
trajectory still seems to resonate. Raised in the isolated, luxurious commune of the
Enlightenment-inspired “Novanglian College of Lucidity,” Octavian works similarly to
Isabel in coming to terms with the realization that he is the subject of a terrifying
experiment to “[prove] the inequality of African capacities” (M.T. Anderson 169). Much
of the early part of the novel uses this language of discovery to capture that narrative
spirit: “Around the orchard and gardens stood a wall of some height, designed to repel the
glance of idle curiosity and to keep us all form slipping away and running for freedom;
though that, of course, I did not yet understand” (M.T. Anderson 3, emphasis mine). But
as the novel continues, the layers of the College’s deceptions and logics only become
more tangled, with the novel refusing to definitively distinguish fact from fiction.
Curiously enough, as the novel continues, it is not the College that Octavian seeks
to unravel, nor is it some quest for a vague “freedom” lurking beyond his insular
existence. Instead, Octavian takes a similarly radical turn inward to try to untether who,
of all people, his mother is – where she came from, what her motivations are, and what
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she is or isn’t telling him about who he is. And yet, even this narrative arc refuses any
semblance of tidiness: after his mother dies, a fact he discovers when he stumbles upon
her callous dissection by the College’s men, Octavian still can’t be sure he ever had an
honest moment with her, let alone knew whether she was the “royal princess” that others
referred to her as. After a life of ambiguous glances, passive aggressive comments, and
distancing gestures, Octavian has little to offer in terms of connection to his mother, save
for a few brief moments scattered throughout their lives.
Perhaps the most poignant of these moments illustrates precisely what we are
trying to unpack in the kinds of nuanced listening that I am suggesting to be crucial to
understanding these novels and the sentiments they offer. In the throes of smallpox’s
ravaging of her body, Cassiopeia has a frustrated exchange with Octavian, much like the
exchanges they’ve experienced in the past. Here, Octavian grows impatient, demanding
that his mom, “Tell me one true thing. I will know one true thing. Tell me what you sat
on…I want to touch something. Tell me of an object! Tell me something I could have
touched!” (218-219). She refuses, unable to communicate anything to the son who
desperately, just days before his mother’s death, knows nothing of who she is. But in that
moment, just as we come to think that Octavian is trying to listen in the right ways, trying
to make sense of an increasingly complex, dark world, M.T. Anderson pulls the rug from
under us with a devastating passage:
She did not respond…Whether there is some transmission of
knowledge through the ether, or whether physiognomy and expression
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have some linguistic virtue so subtle that we do not remark its operation,
the eyes may indeed speak.
And so, for a while…I was not looking at my mother, but at a
woman who knew me, and I was a man who knew her; she was a girl of
thirteen, newly arrived in a frigid, alien country; a woman who had been
that girl; who had given birth in bondage, while me with devices and
pencils had observed…We stared at one another, and in that moment, we
knew each other for the first and last time.
And then, this she offered to me, my one truth: “Our language,”
she said, “is not spoken, but sung….Not simply words….and
grammar…but melody.” (219)
The moment, in its deferral of the very “grammar” of normative language itself,
represents for Octavian the same important development that Isabel comes to find in her
determination that they “cannot chain [her] soul”: it represents, in other words, the
salience of sentimental listening. Listening that opens itself onto an entirely new
grammar. That finds alternatives to the false binaries of political thinking. That demands
not to be “free,” but to hear: to hear the melodies of a world saturated in nuance.
No false distinctions between Patriots and Loyalists.
North and South.
Republican and Democrat.
Black and white.
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Only the fragmented losses that leave us wondering how we can ever again make
sense of a geopolitical rendering of the social topography. Instead, all that remains is an
insistence on a geo-affective opening unto a new world, whose divisions remain
irrevocably resonant.
And that, I think, is why it is important that listening resonates in these 21
st

century neo-abolitionist novels. Because, like the final exchange between Octavian and
his mother, it somehow manages to reach for some other language, one that resists the
normative distinctions between time, or bodies, or politics. Instead, it listens for the
melodies of structures that run deep in the stories that a nation tells about itself, and
begins somehow to chart the nuances of those structures. Linking the contemporary
moment to the discourse of slavery; routing it through the Revolutionary, and not the
Civil, War; rewriting a British discourse of sentimentality onto slaves that might stand in
for voices we can never hear – the authors work to tie up these fragmentary histories and
places and bodies with nothing but a feeling, and affective connection that resonates
against the tidy trajectories of US racial discourse that we’ve inherited. They defer, they
disrupt, and they listen – a gesture that allows them not just to tell a new story, shiny and
meaningful for a 21
st
century audience, but which instead offers new ears for hearing the
old stories, the echoes of a racial past that haunt our US present.
What Anderson and Anderson represent is not a revisitation: Listening isn’t
“back,” just as abolitionism and racial inequality haven’t “returned.” Indeed, they insist
that these sounds have never really left us, and we can hear them still, if only we can
learn to listen.
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W H A T ‘ S A N E C H O B U T A S O U N D T H A T D O E S N ‘ T
C H A N G E ?

It is difficult sometimes to remember that, at the height of Barack Obama’s 2008
presidential campaign, a campaign built on the sentimental promises of
“Hope,” “Change,” and “Yes, we can,” his victory was, in some ways, a relief for both
sides of the political spectrum. For the Left, Obama’s election meant that there were
enough open minds across America, enough enthusiasm for a “’68 or Something”
moment, as Lauren Berlant would say, that we could look past Obama’s rich complexion
towards a future – a future that looked so promisingly like the highlights of those MLK
speeches our schools trotted out each February.
13
Trafficking in the rhetoric of
sentimentality, Obama’s campaign seemed to align with mainstream conceptions of
“good” race relations: Like the “I Have a Dream” speech, Obama’s feel-good visions
inspired a nation that thought, perhaps, we were on our way to a more racially egalitarian,
color-blind America.
But conservatives had their own occasion for a celebration. Even they could admit
that something was changing. Finally, after the death of the politically correct 90’s,
thankfully, buried along with affirmative action and much of the infrastructure of the

13
For a wonderful rumination on utopian thinking, activism, and intellectual work, see Lauren
Berlant, “’68 or Something” (1994).

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welfare state, we could now move on. It was finally time to welcome the post-Obama,
post-racial, twenty-first century.
Encouraged by the now-President’s injunction to celebrate our collective
“patchwork heritage,”
14
race became one kind of difference in a society with many
differences, all of which remained measured under the rubric of personal feelings. Not
that this cultural shift represented much new ground - But for a public eager to embrace
a post-racial American landscape, where equal access meant that we could all simply
traffic in the validity of our individual emotions, it seemed a fresh start, a way to truly
wipe the slate clean.
And so it was with great gusto that the steady rise of a certain phrase began to
circulate widely in public culture, from political punditry to popular media: “I’m not a
racist, but…” After all, the logic went, how could one be a racist after Obama? The relic
of “the racist” as an identificatory label was a thing of the past, rendered functionally
obsolete after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and demonstrably obsolete
after Obama’s rise to office in 2008. Sure, people could have opinions and make
generalizations about racially categorized groups – but that didn’t mean that they were
racist. They had Black friends! It was just a joke! I was just being honest!
In one sense, then, Obama’s election began to stand in for an important moment
in US history: the end, as it were, of the racist-as-such. To be identified, or to identify

14
Attention to Barack Obama’s signaling of both the country’s and his own “patchwork heritage”
prompted a flurry of responses in the wake of his first Inaugural Speech, in January of 2009.
Something about the language echoed the common refrain of melting pot analogies attached to the
nation, though it could also be argued that he was signaling his own biracial background. Each
listener’s own background would have heard this moment in the speech differently, exemplary of the
distinctions discussed in this chapter.
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one’s self, as “a” racist in the post-Obama era was an egregious act, a major faux pas that
suggested one’s anachronicity more than anything else. And yet, as the texts we’ve
considered in this chapter and the contemporary anecdote with which we began attests,
racist attitudes, viewpoints, and structures were circulated in ways more abundant, more
intricate, and more compelling than ever before. What does it mean, I wonder, to mark
the distinction between changing iterations of racism in US popular culture? What critical
methodologies would best be suited to hear the nuances of a culture that continued to
recirculate the same structures of privilege, only under a different name?
The answer, I begin to suggest in this chapter, is a tangled one, because the era of
the racist-as-such may, in fact, really be over. As Laurie Halse Anderson and M.T.
Anderson insist, the contemporary moment of US race relations demands not that we
determine to locate the “truth” of racial inequality in some aspect of normative culture.
Rather, it suggests that we must learn to hear its logics, circulating melodiously across
the normative and the counternormative, the privileged and the deprived, the White and
the Black. Listening defers the easy trajectories of a “victory” over racism with
something much more subtle: the ability to recognize the replicated logics of racial
inequality across a spectrum of times, places, and bodies. It refuses the self-oriented
logics of personal feelings – “that’s just the way I feel” – for an other-oriented
sentimentality, making a fine distinction between sympathy and empathy. It strives for
reflection over action, affective labor over political change, and the deferral of answers in
favor of structural perspective.
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In its simplest form, what this chapter offers is the opening of a question: In the
21
st
century, can we begin to locate new models of resistance that are located not against,
but rather beside the normative sphere? Using the language of sentimentality, and the
figure of the periphery, my hope is that we have, at least, a starting point. It isn’t
transformative in the way we thought it would be. It may not effect any of the “political”
change we think it ought to. And it certainly has its limits.
Then again, as this project begins to unfold, I’m wondering if I’m not after
answers after all. I’m just looking for a new kind of map.
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– 3 –

T H E S C H O O L S O F O U R I M A G I N A T I O N S

Curriculum Design and National Identity in the Post-Brown v. Board Era

“At the desk where I sit in Washington, I have learned
one great truth: The answer for all of our national
problems, the answer for all the problems of the world,
comes down, when you really analyze it, to one single
word – education.”

- Lyndon B. Johnson, in a commencement address to Brown University’s
graduating class, 1964

If you are reading this chapter as a graduate of the US public education system, odds
are that you have read J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), Mark Twain’s The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) –
if not all three. It wouldn’t be surprising: even without a national curriculum, these texts
have been overwhelmingly represented in high school reading lists since the late 1950s
and early 1960s, when they were first introduced.
1
There are economic and cultural
reasons for this fact, of course: the turn in the 50s to more student-centered texts in the
English / Language Arts curriculum – under the logic that teenagers wanted to read about
other teenagers – and the rise of the inexpensive, mass-marketed paperback brought
novels to the forefront of high school literary instruction. And the steadily sentimental

1
The two major studies cataloguing the high school reading curriculum in the US were conducted in
1989 and 1964 by Arthur Applebee and Roger Appleby, respectively. Both report Twain and Lee’s
texts in the top ten taught amongst public, Catholic, and independent secondary schools, amongst
work by Shakespeare, Fitzgerald, Hawthorne, and Golding.

126

manner in which the tales are told – affectively compelling narrations of individuals
standing up against the mainstream – didn’t hurt. But the resilience of these three texts,
which manage to circulate remarkably similar tales of emotional young men thinking
about social difference, seems rather conspicuous.
2
Why, over fifty years after the fact, in
dramatically different schools and student populations, do these same novels of male
sentiment remain the de facto choice of texts in high school classrooms across the
country?
We could chalk this phenomenon up to large cultural shifts in attitudes about
adolescence and education in the 1950s, an era which saw the emergence of the
“teenager” from the suburban spaces that produced figures like James Dean.
3
But the
assumption that these decisions were based solely on changing perspectives of youth and
youth culture is wrought with a kind of selective vision, an inability to acknowledge the
heavily politicized environment in which such decisions were taking place. In other
words, these casual justifications that the novels gave youth what they wanted – made by
teachers and administrators from the 50s through the present – don’t really reflect the

2
While the protagonist of Lee’s novel is arguably Scout, a young girl through whose eyes we see the
story, this merely seems a twist on the theme: Indeed, much of Scout’s narration arcs around coming
to terms with the figure of her father, Atticus Finch, who comes to stand in for the counterintuitive
figure of the sentimental normative subject working against normativity. These proxies do make for
an interesting close read, but the effect of the book is the same: we come away admirable of Atticus,
the empathetic crusader for those whom he need not defend.

3
The increasing demand for independence and privacy among adolescents in the 50s reflected a
complex set of cultural forces governing the emergent visibility and distinct subjectivity of the
American teenager. Consider, for instance, Jason Reid’s fantastic article on the developing demand
for an “autonomous teen bedroom in post-WWII America,” in The Journal of the History of Childhood
and Youth, which points to the cohering cultural forces – “demographic/economic
trends…consumer-oriented teen culture…[and the] growing importance of child development
theory” (Reid 419) – that reflected larger changes in attitude about the increasing importance of
recognizing, and attending to, adolescents where they are at.

127

nuances of the cultural contexts in which such changes were made. Instead, these
explanations substitute a particular, historical solution for a more structural insight – and
this disconnect, I argue in this chapter, becomes a key moment in the development of US
race relations in the Civil Rights era. And so the dismissal of these curricular changes
misses two important points that I elaborate on in this chapter: Public education, like
many of the early iterations of the man of feeling, has always been dedicated to social
change, and it has similarly striven to achieve such lofty aims with juxtapolitical means.
4

Heavy on affective decision-making and invested in utopian ideas of a better future
nation, public education serves as an important context for thinking about the ways in
which sentimentality becomes mobilized as an affective solution for political problems,
and is employed as a potent technology for sustaining an existing social order. But
something else seems to be going on here as well: That the particular political realities of
the 1950s – the implementation of school desegregation in the wake of the Brown vs.
Topeka Board of Education court decision in 1954 – themselves played out in the
classrooms of America suggests that this was a mutually constitutive affair. Though we
would never explicitly say it, we want public education to change the nation, and we
want it to do so in lieu of more direct political interventions.
That the complicated historical nuances of the US public educational system serve
in this chapter as the site of this tension reflects the terrain – the public, the institutional,
and the affective – on which male sentimentality plays out. Previously in this project, I
have emphasized the ways in which male sentimentality serves an extremely ambivalent

4
Throughout this project, “juxtapolitical” refers to Lauren Berlant’s use of the term to mark affective
labor that works “just to the side of” politics. See The Female Complaint (2007).
128

cultural formation, and have done so largely because of the historical ways in which
sentiment has been employed both to secure and to untether the logics of privilege in
differing contexts. Thus far, though, this argument has all the aura of a critical Clark Kent
– it suggests that both versions of male sentiment exist as distinct affects, but we never
see them together in the same room. This chapter is where that changes: the conflict of
male sentimentality that arises in the wake of the Brown v. Board court case showcases
the direct competing interests of male sentimentality meant to secure normative structures
– where reading Huck Finn solves the racial tensions of the desegregated classroom – and
male sentimentality meant to challenge it – through peripheral texts that appear later in
the century and call into question the logic of the secondary school required reading lists.
And their conflict resolves, at least temporarily, in answering this initial question: Why,
at the most politically and racially charged moment in the history of US public education,
did we respond by having all students read stories about sappy white adolescent boys?
Certainly, this raises important questions about how and why such changes were made. It
raises even more questions, some 60 years later, about why these changes have stuck.
Now, before I get ahead of myself: I do not mean to suggest a strictly causal
relationship between one political event – the Brown case – and its curricular
repercussions. But I will argue in this chapter that these curricular changes tell us quite a
bit about how racial difference and racial conflict have been historically responded to in
the US in juxtapolitical spaces like public education. Further, I will suggest that, in
revisiting the history of curriculum reform in the context of these changes, we can begin
to see both education and the young adult novel as some of the richest and most complex
129

sites of anxiety, inquiry, and exploration of social difference in US culture of the last
century. Our society may hold onto the assumption that the high school classroom
continues to serve as nothing more than the modern site of discipline for our nation’s
youth – and they wouldn’t be entirely wrong – but this assumption ignores the way in
which we have always wanted our schools to do both our dreaming and our dirty work.
This chapter will attend to these questions in three major ways: In the first
section, “The Education of the Nation,” I will investigate the history of education in the
US as always having been governed by the logic of social change and iterated in the
grammar of affect. This context helps to establish the ways in which the turn to the
adolescent novel of male sentimentality might have happened, in response to a court case
that I suggest was underwritten with its own affective and juxtapolitical motivations.
5
In
“Teaching Feeling,” I’ll return to the Civil Rights curricular changes as a direct
inheritance of the public education project as it developed in the 19
th
century, and in
doing so hope to elucidate the tensions that characterize these decisions. In this way, I
turn here to what we might otherwise understand in this project as the ambivalence of
male sentimentality: the juxtaposition of masculinity and sentimentality in these moments
seems to address certain structural inequalities in the political public sphere, but tends to
do so in a way that relies on its own privileges and visibility in so doing. When all is said
and done, what results is a stagnant set of texts that remain in our classrooms because we

5
Though I will elaborate on this further, here I refer here to the ways in which the Brown v. Board
decision reflected the capacity for affect to complicate and engender certain kinds of political labor.
It should be unsurprising that the Brown ruling took place in the culturally peripheral space of public
schools, and was at least partially influenced by the findings of the heavily sentimental Clark Doll
tests, cited in the official ruling to the case.
130

assume they worked: having accomplished their affective/political labor, we can be free
to now read them as universal exemplars of “the human condition.”
The final section, “Nothing Ever Happens the Way You Imagine It Will,” is
perhaps the most counterintuitive gesture in the chapter, though it is also, I suggest, the
most important. Instead of simply carving out a relatively steady reading of these
curricular changes, unpacking the racial and cultural politics that underwrite them (which
still remains essential work), I try to push further to ask what their inheritance might be.
It’s an entirely appropriate gesture – particularly as I’ve set up education reform to be
oriented around the “effects” of curriculum design. But it leaves open the possibility that
the slippages between mandatory reading lists and their reception in the classroom might
leave some unexpected results. In looking here at John Green’s Paper Towns (2008) and
Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999), two contemporary young
adult novels that circulate heavily – though not officially – through US high schools
today, I ask the same question that Green and Chbosky ask of their protagonists: what
happens to kids who grow up with the public high school reading curriculum? In each
novel, Quentin and Charlie, respectively, make their way through the curriculum and
respond to it not through imitation, but rather with a kind of peripheral investment: they
seem to recognize the limits of characters like Holden and Huck, and make attempts to
sketch alternative modes of living in affect, social change, and adolescence.
What results, in a sense, is a much more complex rendering of masculinity,
sentimentality, and normativity than the one with which we began. For even as male
sentimentality begins to emerge in an effort to secure the steady footing of the privileged
131

subject, the wallflower reappears in the periphery to disidentify with the increasingly
complex normative logics circulating in the late 20
th
century. Such complexities should
not, though, be seen to represent only ambivalence and stagnation; instead, they offer
new mappings of normativity that come not from an outside critique, but from the
normative subject himself. And there once again – on the periphery, on the sidelines;
“quiet and seeing things and understanding” – is the wallflower, listening for the
cadences that untether privilege.

T H E E D U C A T I O N O F T H E N A T I O N

“For over a century and a half, Americans have translated
their cultural anxieties and hopes into dramatic demands
for educational reform.”

- David Tyack and Larry Cuban, in Tinkering Towards Utopia: A Century of Public
School Reform, 1995.

The history of public education in the US is, I would argue, the history of a
nation’s dreaming. From idealized visions of what the nation recognizes itself to be in the
present, to utopian hopes for what the nation hopes it will be in the future, public
education captures the imaginative affects of the national imaginary. Telling something
of a story in the present and the past, public education simultaneously works by
presupposing an ideal national subject and then working backwards to develop that
subject through schooling. And what results, of course, is a glossy narrative of a better
future through education. If we take a closer look, for instance, at the early development
132

of the US “common school” – the prototype for the public school classroom of today –
we can see this narrative of a better tomorrow invoked time and time again, from public
education’s earliest beginnings. The goals were differing and, at times, controversial, but
followed the same logic: from 19
th
century discourse about the need to “civilize”
immigrants through schooling, to John Dewey’s desire for an institution dedicated to
solving large-scale social problems, to the Reagan-era emphasis on economically and
internationally competitive graduates, this nation and its representatives frequently
attempted to recast the mold of its desired future generations through a simple belief in
local change, in the form of cleverly designed curriculum and instruction.
6
In each new
incarnation, with each careful adjustment to the local structure and desires of the system,
public education and its reforms become, as it were, a new chance to fall asleep and
dream once more.
This dynamic tension between lofty utopian goals and a commitment to local
change was never more at home than in the context of the mid-20
th
century: the same
prevailing dichotomy underwriting social change – between the lofty goals of the
Martin’s dream and the belief in local protest and change – was at its apex in the midst of
the US Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. The social conflicts that had been
rising to national attention were those rooted in everyday experiences: Rosa Parks’s and
Claudette Colvin’s refusal to sit at the back of the bus, the explosion of aggression
prompted by Emmitt Till’s “whistling” at a white woman, the steady increase of “sit-in”
protests in local commercial sites. And for an extended cultural moment, the promise of a

6
For the expansion of these historical emphases, see especially Tyack and Cuban (Tinkering Toward
Utopia 1997).
133

better future – or the looming possibility of a dystopian one, depending on your
perspective – was understood to be ineluctably linked to small changes in local
communities. In this way, the shape of our national discourse about race mirrored the one
about education, assuming that structural racial tensions manifested themselves in local
episodes, which increasingly became mobilized as affective measures of the toll of
discrimination, just as utopian results could derive from local changes to curricula. In
other words, just as public education had developed under the assumption that the roots
of big change lie in the details, racism began to be understood as a series of distinct,
fixable problems, and the call for major structural shifts in cultural values at the national
level became intertwined with heavily-affective, emotionally-charged anecdotes and
studies that appealed to an ambiguous public.
Consider the major structural processes of desegregation in public schools as a
result of the landmark Oliver Brown v. Topeka Board of Education court decision in
1954, which brought these discourses of race and public education together in
unprecedented ways. An aggregate case involving four previous conflicts over school
integration alongside the Brown dispute, Brown v. Board collected local conflicts
together in an effort to showcase deeper structural inequalities. And it used personal
injustices to demonstrate the possibility that there was still a widespread, identifiable
system of discrimination in effect in the US, even after emancipation. In fact, the logic
consumed the case: not only did it take individuals’ complaints against locally-run school
134

districts as cause for a much more utopian and far-reaching dialogue,
7
it reasoned that
segregation was a harmful structure through its invocation of affectively-charged
evidence like children’s preferences in toys. Specifically, the infamous Kenneth and
Mamie Clark doll tests played a significant role in one of Brown’s aggregate cases,
Briggs vs. Elliott, and wound up in the Supreme Court’s majority opinion write-up of the
case. The tests, which were used to demonstrate the psychological repercussions of
segregation, hinged on young Black children’s preference for white over Black dolls – a
(and this is important) heartbreaking account of very young children overwhelming likely
to identify the Black dolls as “bad” and the white dolls as “good” or “pretty.” Dr.
Kenneth Clark, who testified in the Briggs vs. Elliott case, used the children’s otherwise
seemingly banal preference to insist that segregation had “detrimental effects on the
personality development of the Negro child” (as quoted in Kluger 353).
While the Clark doll tests provide their own complexity with respect to both the
cultural moment of desegregation and its aftermath, the point that I am making here is
that, in the context of civil rights discourse in the mid-century US, there wasn’t anything
excessively jarring about the link between structural inequality and affectively-rich local
experiences, which brought together the discourses of race and education together in
unprecedented ways. And so sandwiched between the infamous Clark doll tests, which
routed racism through children’s preference of white dolls, and Martin Luther King’s “I

7
Consider even the reasoning that the prosecution offered in formally organizing the case as
“Brown, et al,” a specific reference to the small collection of grieved individual incidents that, they
argued, would help to generate sympathy from the court in linking local grievances with structural
problems.
135

Have a Dream” speech, which left its own legacy of utopian thinking about race,
8
came
the curricular changes upon which this chapter turns its focus. The steady incorporation
of certain novels into the high school reading curriculum, which seemed to address major
social tensions and structural changes with sentimental tales of adolescence, exemplified
a certain logic that to make local changes was to effect a better future. As I demonstrate
in this first section, “The Education of the Nation,” that logic lies at the very heart of the
history of public education in the United States.
* * *
I suggested earlier that the adolescent narrative in America began to stand in as a
national story, one with which we could all identify. And so it makes sense that I want to
unpack the changes to high school reading lists as part of its own national narrative that
begins just over a century earlier in the Legislature of the state of Massachusetts. There,
in 1837, progressively-minded politician Horace Mann was tasked with the unique goal
of “putting these means [of self-improvement through education] within the reach of
every one” (Peabody Mann 61), privileges previously only accessible to the elite.
9

Investigating some of the public educational models that had been developing abroad,
Mann began the steady process of articulating the basic structures of what became known
as the “common school,” rooted in a tuition-free, non-sectarian educational model that
would infuse the public with the faculties necessary to maintain the new republic. He

8
Is it any wonder that the single most widely-circulated artifact of the Civil Rights era is the touchy-
feely, utopian “I Have a Dream” speech – whose reductions of structural racism to allegories of the
family have remained remarkably palatable in contemporary culture today?

9
We should consider the fact that this rhetoric of democratic education appears just a decade prior
to the start of Frederick Douglass’s speaking tours and the rise of the abolitionist movement in the
US.
136

was, of course, not alone in this attempt: the venture was underwritten with the
sentiments of early educational advocates like Thomas Jefferson, who characterized the
need for public education as one of the key distinctions between a democratic nation and
the monarchy from which it had just rebelled:
I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the
people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to
exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to
take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. (Jefferson
161)
Jefferson’s insistence on incorporating a widespread, local system to effect a lasting
structural impact is important in the way that it prefigures the local vs. structural
frameworks that I have set up as part of the Civil Rights era. Preoccupied with a
structural concern over the future composition and sustenance of the nation, Jefferson’s
suggestion exemplifies a claim that, for these “ultimate powers of the society” – the
abstract virtues of nation, democracy, and independence – the process must be rooted in
the local ideal of “the people themselves.” With the advent of local schoolhouses would
come changes in both the character and intellectual capacity of the individuals enrolled,
and that influence would coalesce into a mass of citizens invested in the promises of the
new republic.
To frame early public education in this way is already to court two of the major
contradictions of the early US common school: its ambiguous status between local fixture
and structural institution, and its open emphasis of democracy – the rise of the individual
137

voice – using a model perhaps better suited to indoctrination. Indeed, turning to these
contradictions so soon enables us to see the ways in which public education struggled to
find its clear role, peripherally developing on the sidelines of public culture. It is easy to
think of public education today, for example, as an exemplar of a cultural institution, a
structure so big that reforming or changing it seems unwieldy. But in the 19
th
century, the
concept of public education was a local one, begun in small districts and operated almost
entirely outside the purview of federal involvement. And though we can identify Mann’s
emphasis on facilitating critical thinking and social consciousness as remarkably
democratic ideals, the models from which Mann developed the common school actually
had quite different goals in mind.
That I’ve established these contradictions from the beginning is not to undermine
any clear or positive reading of public education as it arose in the 19
th
century. Rather, it
is to insist that we understand public education – at its conception, in the midst of the
Civil Rights movement, and contemporarily – as a complicated, peripheral site just to the
side of the national, political consciousness. It would be silly, for example, to suggest that
the US educational system was, at its core, only an effort to replicate and indoctrinate the
ideals of the state in its new citizens. Indeed, as Mann would have it, education was to be
a bulwark of social change rather than stability. But we also must understand that the
models from which Mann derived much of his conceptions of the common school were
indeed more nationalistic and fascistic than he might have liked. Most often credited as
the direct inspiration for our own system was the “Volksschulen,” or “People’s School,”
of Prussia; despite being accused of merely indoctrinating support for the then-
138

contemporary Prussian government, Mann found much of the model appealing. He
gravitated towards what he considered its other, more “democratic” attributes, especially
its seemingly democratic structure – from government funding and mandatory attendance
to relatively equal access to the schools for all students. But here’s what remains so
fascinating about the contradictory roots of public education: despite its origins as an
institution dedicated to bolstering state power, the US educational system, molded by
Mann, became framed as a challenge to state power. He insisted that such a structure
could do what the US government had failed to accomplish thus far in its tenure: the
undoing of a “class of children…set apart” by financial and social inequality. Responding
to what he perceived as a popular “contempt of the public welfare for the sake of private
gain,” Mann’s school would upheave the social order itself.
Though it is interesting to note just how revolutionary Mann saw his project – in
his first formal report in his capacity as Secretary of the State Board of Education, he
suggests no less than that the common school might serve as a better institution for the
republic than even the traditional family unit
10
– it is more important, for our purposes
here, to emphasize the system’s basic premise that a local, manmade structure could
radically change the nation. And as we unpack the particularities of just how education
could be so transformative, we can see the reappearance of affect as the underwriting
logic of social change. In this way, Mann’s framework wasn’t just about a logic and
pedagogy of the “democratic” system poised to sustain the nation; it was rooted in an
emphasis on a specifically moral education that derived its power from a more

10
See esp., Mann’s First Annual Report on Education (Annual Reports 1891).
139

humanistic, affective approach to learning. By moral, I do not of course mean to say that
there was anything specifically conservative or religious in Mann’s emphasis –
anachronistic assumptions from contemporary readers who might note these valences in
post-Reaganite educational discourse of today. Instead, it was a marker for a set of ideals
and ethics that were explicitly outside both the religious and political spheres. Morality,
in the context of early education in the US, hearkened back to ideas about sentiment,
sympathy, and citizenship that had been heavily circulating in 18
th
century British
philosophy and culture, and helped to articulate a peripheral space of cultural critique that
stayed just to the side of major political and religious forces. Mann was simply doing his
part to ensure that his affective vision resisted the influence of religion, money, and
politics writ large.
Thus, between the local and the structural, between the nonsectarian and the
religious, the early models of schooling in the US became a rather peripheral, but potent,
feature of the “juxtapolitical” landscape, to use Lauren Berlant’s term. “[F]lourishing in
proximity to the political,” as she might say, “because the political is deemed an
elsewhere managed by elite who are interested in reproducing the conditions of their
objective superiority” (Berlant Complaint 3), early education promised a better future
through schooling, and soon developed a following of believers who placed their faith in
the system. But unlike the juxtapolitics of women’s sentimental culture, which relied on
an ambiguity of hope to sustain a relation between nonprivileged subjects and the state,
public education was infused with a slightly more focused sense of its ability to achieve
“the better life.” Mann’s final major influence was here: In claiming that “we shall err
140

egregiously if we regard [the schools] as ends and not means” (Mann 10), he paved the
way to what would become the undisputed, dominant tool and logic of local change in
education: the curriculum.
Increasingly, an emphasis on curriculum as the “heart” of public education began
to emerge, under the assumption that the results or ends of schooling were directly related
to the content of the material studied. The logic, it seemed, was quite simple: if we were
invested in creating a certain kind of subject – what science-minded reformer Franklin
Bobbitt would call a “product” (Tyack and Cuban 26) – then changes ought to be made
first and foremost to the ideas and content that went into creating that subject – what
Bobbitt called “courses” (33). In other words, this attention to curricular reform
presupposed that one could craft a generation simply through the curricular knowledge it
had been taught. Arguably, this seems an obvious point: if we want a secondary school
education to prepare students for college, then we’ll organize coursework that is “college
preparatory.” If we’re invested in producing skilled laborers who can enter the workforce
smoothly and immediately upon graduation, then we’ll organize coursework for a
“vocational” track. But it is important to keep in mind that curricular reform is often
made at the expense of other kinds of educational changes; pedagogical techniques (some
form of direct instruction), academic credit systems (the resilient Carnegie unit), and
school governance (by local boards and districts) have remained almost unchanged in
over a century. We continue to keep the “grammar” of schooling in place, and put our
faith in the possibilities of new content.
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Still, the almost scientific manner in which this principle of curriculum had come
to be understood – particularly in the form of big reform movements like the Committee
of Ten and the Committee of Fifteen, which tried to effect very specific student outcomes
through very specific curricular choices
11
– belied the way in which the curriculum had
always originally been characterized as a much more affective endeavor. Which is to say,
there was a certain discourse about curricular changes being implemented in precise ways
to produce specific “products” – but there also remained an underlying assumption that
the curriculum was an emotional rather than scientific component of the educational
experience. It didn’t hurt that the word itself implied a sort of emotional, developmental
trajectory, propelling students into the utopian unknown: from the Latin “currere,”
meaning “course,” curriculum implied a path one might follow to get from the place one
was to the place one wanted to be. It was the local change that would render the national
dream, the gooey center of a structure just beginning to stretch its legs. Changes to the
curriculum captured this dynamic at the heart of public education in the US, aiming to
form the nation’s citizens on the path to forming the nation itself.
As the famous curricular historian Ivor Goodson has written, “exploring
curriculum as a focus allows us to study, indeed exhorts us to study, the intersection of
individual biography and social structure” (Goodson 58). As we return to the curricular
changes made in the wake of Brown v. Board, then, we are “exhorted” to ask: What did

11
The Committee of Ten (1892) and Committee of Fifteen (1893) were early efforts at the
standardization of both curriculum and the tracking/vocational system. Each offered
recommendations towards uniformity in anticipation of the education boom of the early 20
th
century.
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this social structure have to do with some lonely white kids, and why did educators fight
vehemently to ensure their stability in the core of the curriculum?

T E A C H I N G F E E L I N G

“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused
and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that
score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as
troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records
of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have
something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal
arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”

- Mr. Antolini, Holden Caulfield’s teacher in The Catcher in the Rye.

In “The Education of the Nation,” I wanted to demonstrate the ways in which
curricular reform became a particularly charged site for thinking through long-term
national subject formation in the US. In doing so, I highlighted the ways in which the
logic of curriculum was a particularly affective one – marked by certain kinds of
utopianism, and understood as part of a larger social investment in bringing about social
change through education. And so it should come as little surprise, in following the logic
of this chapter so far, that the question of which books one ought to read in schools – a
decision determined by which had the most affective impact on how students thought and
felt – has long preoccupied educational reformers past and present. Indeed, in 1839, just
two years into the job and several years before the common school system would be
implemented on a mass scale, Horace Mann had privileged textual concerns in two out of
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his five initial major recommendations to the school board. Between “the opinion, that
nothing would more promote the cause of education among us, than the introduction of
libraries into our district schools” (Mann 379) and a concern for the “immediate and
pressing interest” of selecting “school-books” (380), Mann framed the impact that
specific reading materials would have on governing the very purpose and impact of
education: books, as objects that could transform the feelings of students, served to
develop in Mann’s framework the “cause of education” itself. To carefully select the right
text – the one that would have an affective and therefore compelling hold over its young
reader – was to ensure a lasting impact on the citizen one was forming.
Turning back to the curricular decisions made in the wake of the Civil Rights era
– the rise of the adolescent novel of male sentimentality in the 1950s and 60s – allows us
to see both how prescient and how influential Mann’s framing of textual choices was.
Though Civil Rights era educators choosing Catcher and Huck Finn were less explicit
than Mann (and less accountable to a State Legislature), their justifications for including
these texts made clear their own corresponding investment in books that affected student
readers. Often within the context of challenges made by parents to censor such material,
teachers defended their decisions along these lines: they insisted that the novels simply
gave students the opportunities they wanted to read and talk about themselves, a process
facilitated by adolescent protagonists with particularly sentimental – and particularly
expansive – interior monologues. With a resounding emphasis on reading books with
which adolescents could identify – the words “relatability” and “identification” appear
quite frequently in these defenses – educators seemed to understood Mann’s call for a
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curriculum that met students where they were as one that helped teach them about their
own feelings.
12

As I argue in this section, however, the rise of the “relatable” adolescent-centered
curriculum came at a cost: while certain students found solace in the rejection of corrupt
societal ideals offered by Huck and Holden, they did so at the expense of dropping
Mann’s underlying emphasis on broader social justice. And this division marks the hinge
upon which “The Education of the Nation” swings into “Teaching Feeling” – the broader
analysis of public education’s logic and structure allows us to see the Civil Rights era
curricular changes in importantly nuanced ways. Where Mann would have students turn
outward, striving to make their lives a “mere reflex of the lives of others” (Mann Lectures
183), these curricular changes are notable for the way in which they encourage the
opposite, as readers burrowed into themselves on some quest for authenticity that had
little to do with other people. This division might seem innocuous – after all, the turn to
student-centered curriculum was intended, on some level, to better help postwar youth
find their own value systems in the sentiments of these sensitive male protagonists. But it
is precisely this split, which tears personal experience from structural inequalities and
privileges a weepy white boy over his bumbling slave, that encourages us to mistake
certain kinds of affective labor as effective means of constituting social change.
Effectively, the rise of the sentimental adolescent novel in the wake of Brown vs. Board

12
One of many fascinating artifacts of the time period comes in the form of a dissertation published
in 1966 by Fehl Lorayne Shirley. Chronicling the rise in educational research regarding students’
desire to develop their own self-image through textual identification, Shirley’s work offers a glimpse
into a range of studies (Compton, Strang) circulating at the time and reinforcing the assumption that
reading literature was ultimately about recognizing one’s self (Shirley 1-2).
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rewrites all personal narratives as equally affecting, flattening the way in which certain
bodies experience “growing up.” And in doing so, it suggests that, if “learning how to
feel” is the rite of passage par excellence for America’s youth, then the US itself ought to
be seen as an adult who, after Brown, had finally learned that the childishness of
inequality was something that had happened in the past, but could finally now be – nay,
had already now been – left behind.
* * *
Though the voices of educators themselves have been relatively silent in the
twenty-first century, particularly around small curricular changes like these local changes
to reading lists, a steadiness in the few voices that have risen up suggests a relatively
consistent logic for teaching the sentimental novels of male adolescence. In a defense of
the novel written just after Salinger’s death in 2010, high school English teacher Gregg
Lipkin writes of Catcher, “Most of my students felt as though they were reading a book
about themselves or somebody they knew” (Lipkin, emphasis mine). Enthusiastic about
its inclusion in the curriculum –he fought to include the novel at the expense of cutting
Huck Finn – Lipkin admits his own affinity for the narrator: “I am no Holden Caufield,
but I am a catcher in the rye.” The implication, of course, is that the novel’s value in a
classroom setting derives from the way in which readers recognize themselves in the text,
whether those readers are 16 or 36. And that recognition comes from, and engenders, an
affective connection with a narrator whose values are both intelligible and valued – a
dynamic of reading first established in the post-Brown moment.
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Indeed, while much of the literature and legacy of curricular decisions in the
1950s and 60s has been even more elusive than these 21
st
century voices, the
justifications we do have for the inclusion of these texts in the Civil Rights era remains
remarkably similar: Robert Gutwillig, in a 1961 The New York Times article on the
success of Salinger’s text, asks and then answers the very question Lipkin frames.
What was it about the novel that struck Americans so squarely ten years
ago and continues to hit the mark still? Primarily, it was, I think, the shock
and thrill of recognition. Many of my friends and this writer himself
identified completely with Holden…Salinger has, to quote Arthur Mizener,
“his own special insight into the meaning of experience.” (Gutwillig,
emphasis mine)
In this way, the turn to the logic of “recognition” becomes the governing discourse for
thinking through the novels’ use in schools. Recognition here is coded as inherently
good, an opportunity to learn about how we ought to feel from figures whom we
recognize as already in some way like us. But recognition, I would suggest, complicates
the very notion of privileging affect in curricular decisions, and allows the desire to
identify with a character to reign over the desire to empathize with one. This dynamic,
which I want to explore in the decisions to read these adolescent novels of male
sentiment in schools, is particularly interesting given the historical circumstances, and –
given the total absence of social context as justification for any curricular changes during
the Civil Rights era – offers a compelling insight into the politics of race, affect, and
education in the 20
th
century.
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As we begin to venture deeper into the logic of recognition on the lips of more
vocal educators, for instance, the resilience of these few texts at the top of the school
canon feels even more curious. Sure, teachers might truly believe in the power of
“recognition” as an important feature of curricular texts; but given the amount of
controversy that has followed these particular texts, one might assume that a less
controversial, more contemporaneous, and yet still “relatable” book might suffice. In an
educational climate in which it has become standard fare to make drastic changes in the
face of even the smallest of controversies, Huck Finn and Catcher have held fast to the
very top of most challenged books in schools for over fifty years.
13
And yet,
unequivocally, these texts have been staunchly defended with a remarkably steady hand:
The Catcher in the Rye was the single most banned book in the US from 1961 to 1982,
and teachers and administrators fought tooth and nail with school boards and parents for
its inclusion on reading lists. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a book that has been
at or near the top of the list of challenged books since it was first introduced to schools, is
still taught in upwards of 78% of public schools in the country (Applebee App. 2). This
seems like quite a bit of work to put into maintaining a rather specific set of curricular
choices, particularly considering the fact that other texts would presumably be both
widely available and feature analogously “relatable” adolescent protagonists. But
something about the choice of these novels and their resilience across a diverse cultural

13
In the contemporary moment, when incredibly drastic and sweeping changes can be made to
school systems – consider the controversial closing of schools by educational reformers like Michelle
Rhee, or the overhauling No Child Left Behind regulations of the 21
st
century – it is fascinating that
we have no interest in changing the high school reading curriculum.

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landscape speaks to a calm amidst all this social noise: No matter what happens, no
matter what hardship we face, no matter how we are asked to change the ways we think
about citizenship and belonging and difference and justice – we are always encouraged to
find and return to the simplest of truths in the emotional – and relatable – thoughts of a
young, white boy.
Herein lies, of course, the obvious problem: that from Lipkin to Gutwillig, or
Hemingway to Eliot (who remain frequently cited as evidence in their proclamations of
Twain’s “masterpiece”), the “special insight into the meaning of experience” that novels
like Catcher and Huck Finn offer is only an insight into the meaning of certain readers’
experiences. The novel of male sentiment, here, becomes a novel about growing up
privileged, and then taking responsibility for that privilege – becoming both the distinct
center of one’s own life and the benevolent caretaker of those suffering from injustice.
It’s no wonder that those whom the protagonists fight for – Jim, the runaway slave
accompanying Huck on his journey; Phoebe, Holden’s sister that he wishes to protect;
and even Tom Robinson, whom Atticus Finch defends in To Kill a Mockingbird – often
serve as literary devices to showcase changes and insights into the character doing the
defending, rather than the character being defended. And in this reflective turn back to
the reader and the protagonist as the center of “meaning” in the texts, we begin to see a
distinction in how affect can become part of a logic that serves to support structures of
privilege at least as much as one that might seek to undo it.
What I mean is this: In the sweeping defense of these “instant-classics,” educators
insisted that recognition was something that students not only needed, but deserved. But
149

in establishing “recognition” as the rubric for debating these novels’ inclusion, they
foreclosed the more complex critiques that readers might offer. Essentially, they
presumed that all teenagers, of course, wanted these books that spoke to them, as
opposed to the censoring eyes of parents and others who “didn’t get it.” And in setting up
the conflict in this way, educators effectively erased other kinds of differences –
especially race – as possible sites of contention for who “got it” and who didn’t. The shift
here is important: substituting age conflict for racial conflict represented a bizarre
redrawing of the social maps of inequality, in the midst of a cultural moment – the
process of desegregation – that had just undertaken one of the most significant
redrawings of the social map as yet seen. And this is what made the choices so curious:
why now, when we might otherwise presume a heightened awareness of social difference
in the form of racial divisions, do we make a move towards universalism and its affects?
The problem, it turns out, is what role we want “affect” to have. In The Cultural
Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed articulates emotion not as an interior force that emerges
from within, but as a phenomenon that “work[s] to shape the ‘surfaces’ of individual and
collective bodies” (Ahmed Emotion 1). While we tend to read emotion and feeling as
natural manifestations of our interior selves, she argues that emotions might be better
understood as emerging from and constituting the contact between, and not within,
different bodies. This revision is important: the presumption that educators make in the
name of “recognition” is a presumption that universal feeling inheres in the adolescent
experience, particularly as it has been set up to do so within the context of a broader
public education system. Schooling was always designed, in other words, to produce a
150

national citizen who could “feel” a certain way, and the inclusion of texts with adolescent
protagonists “felt” like it did a certain work to make those nationalist emotions more
coherent. But as Ahmed suggests, it may be that the transition towards the revised
curriculum, right at the moment of possibly fracturing the national affect produced in
public education, might best be understood as a realignment of “bodies” in real time.
Simply put, the turn to sentiment becomes a regrouping effort, a chance to
reinvest in the naturalized, normative subject, under the ostensible gesture of reaching
across party lines. That this might not have been a deliberate undertaking is beside the
point: the recentering of the white male body, emotionally intact and universally
resonant, is part and parcel of the logic of normative privilege itself. And so even the
move to compassion, which seems like one of the possible rationales for revisiting Huck
and his old pal Jim, becomes an emergent, affective technology to steady the young white
adolescent as the protagonist of his own life’s novel. As Lauren Berlant helps us to
recognize, compassion as a discourse about “the ethics of privilege” (Berlant Compassion
1) has everything to do with the nation, while it presumes to be specifically restricted to
the inward-feeling individual. “Compassion,” she writes, “[and its] attendant policies
relocate the template of justice from the collective condition of specific populations to
that of the individual, whose economic sovereignty the state vows to protect” (2). And in
turning to the sentimental adolescent novel, in a deus ex machina that averts the potential
unseating of the normative, national subject, we reinvest in a “feeling” that turns inward,
a feeling that works so well to entrench difference at the same time that it makes a claim
to look beyond it.
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Because here’s what we tend to forget: the curiosity of the decision to turn to
these novels arises mostly when we consider the timeline of their implementation. Had
the rise of Huck Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, or even Catcher come in anticipation of the
processes of desegregation, one might have assumed the decisions as preparatory in
nature – a way of opening up the minds of white adolescents who would soon be
interacting much more with students of other races. But, as we all know, the changes only
took place in the wake of the Brown decision, read and discussed in classes by white
youth and their Black classmates under a shared roof. There is a tempting reading of this
dynamic, of course: that decisions like these derive from some naiveté, some sophomoric
idea from a predominantly white population of teachers whom the text had affected and
wanted to pass on to all students because, of course, the books really were more about
growing up than they were about race. And this isn’t entirely a bad argument, particularly
given sentimentality’s rich historical association with and development from forms of
universalist humanism. But I’m not sure, in turning to the specificity of the moment, and
in linking the insights from Ahmed and Berlant above to those of Anne Cheng below, if
such an argument gets at the nuance of the post-Brown changes.
Recall the way in which we set up the climate of racial logic in the mid-20
th

century: in public discourse, wider visibility of the social injustices of racism began to
spread in the recognition of what Anne Cheng would call individual “grievances,” claims
against some specific or local injustice that needed to be rectified by the state. Cheng’s
term here complements the effort we’ve been making to articulate the distinction between
structural injustices and their local manifestation – her conception of grievance as “the
152

social and legal articulation of grief” marks the fissure between the injustices that we can
recognize and “those aspects of grief that speak in a different language – a language that
may seem inchoate because it is not fully reconcilable to the vocabulary of social
formulation or ideology but that nonetheless cuts a formative pattern”(x). And in this
way, we can begin to set up some of the latent assumptions embedded in this cultural
framework at its height in the Civil Rights era. Indeed, not only did the public circulation
of grievances like the Brown case presuppose that such grievances were isolated and
distinguishable enough (read: not commonly occurring or normal) that they could be
made legible to the public, but such injustices were in fact something the state had
already articulated as wrong and which, therefore, ought to be protected. Furthermore –
and perhaps most relevant in the case of Brown and its effects on the public school
classroom – such grievances, once addressed by the state, were assumed to have been
resolved, the climax of a narrative carrying the catharsis of its resolution.
And this, I argue, is the important logic that underwrites both the story of
desegregation and the story of Huck and his curricular fellows. The public visibility of
Brown’s grievance only further entrenched a US conception of history as a narrative with
the nation as its protagonist, and helped to establish the Brown decision as the grand
denouement to conclude the drama of racial conflict that had plagued the nation since the
19
th
century abolitionist movement. This is not to say that what legal scholar Jack Balkin
has called the “Great Progressive Narrative” of the US had not already characterized the
nation since at least the unofficial policies supporting Manifest Destiny, but it is to say
that Brown’s clearly articulated judicial support, combined with the tangible resolution of
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desegregation, had captured the story of “America’s deepest ideals…gradually realized
through historical struggle and acts of political change” (Balkin 5) like never before. The
US had experienced the great drama of racial tension, and Brown was the conflict whose
resolution righted the earlier wrongs.
14

Sidestepping the possibility that Brown was perhaps a local sign of some much
larger structure called Jim Crow, this understanding of desegregation as the resolution of
a grievance freed educators to accept the changes to their classroom as both necessary,
and – even if undesired – successful in redressing a former social problem. In other
words, as the major cultural event that both predated and led to these curricular changes,
Brown had already presupposed the success of the reform of segregation. And as the
proverbial walls of the segregated schools came crashing down, so opened the floodgates
of a post-racial future. With models for transformative protagonists in the heroes and
heroines of the Civil Rights era like Ruby Bridges, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa
Parks, educators were free to understand “narrative” as a genre amenable to the changing
nation of the 50s and 60s – on both sides of the color line. Rosa Parks had a story. The
nation had a story. And so what better way to ring in this national narrative than with the
pinnacles of the American bildungsroman, past and present?

14
Public opinion on the court’s decision, at the time, was of course quite critical – from nationwide
political protests to active refusals to desegregate on behalf of state legislators, many were up in arms
at what they perceived to be a great abuse of judiciary power. But with the attending enforcement of
the “all deliberate speed” clause, which demanded that such changes towards desegregation were
made as soon as possible, the process may have become for educators an administrative change that,
whether agreed with or not, became a new normal for the classroom. As such, desegregation as a
specifically enforced process and policy encouraged public opinion on racial inequality as a “civil
rights” issue, a problem potentially solved through some form of state redress.
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Vetted by the nation’s (white, heterosexual, male) literary elite, Huck Finn was
the “greatest” American tale of adolescence yet told, championed again and again for its
redeeming coming-of-age moment when Huck decides he would rather go to hell than
turn in Jim. Catcher was the inheritance of that text, an “instant classic” touted for its
relatability, embraced with aplomb in post-Brown classrooms everywhere. Eventually
joined by Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in the coming years, this triumphant trio of
American texts became the shorthand reference not only for what it meant to be an
American, but what it meant to feel like an American. Each text’s arching sentimentality
privileged its championed moments of coming-of-age maturity – Huck’s infamous
Chapter 31 defense of Jim, Scout Finch’s realization of Boo Radley’s humanity, and
Holden Caulfield’s decision to reject the ideal of being a “catcher in the rye” – as
emotionally wrought episodes that required a certain amount of affective labor from the
reader. And the process of going through that labor, wrapped up and tidily packaged into
a series of lessons in a public school classroom, concludes so easily with the final test on
the material, forgotten by the next school period.
* * *
That these mid-century curricular changes turned toward the coming-of-age novel
shouldn’t necessarily be understood as an entirely counterintuitive gesture, then: often, as
we have seen, has the US attempted to rewrite its narratives of social change as
sentimental narratives of a nation growing up. This should sound familiar from the
characterization of abolitionist and post-abolitionist novels in Chapter Two – the
personalization of a structure like racial inequality, often bound up in the form of a
155

character arc, encourages us to map the specific tensions of social inequality as “pre-
adolescent,” some history from which we’ve moved on. With a bit of heavy-handedness,
the Civil-Rights-movement-as-personal transformation imbued into Twain, Lee, or even
Salinger’s tales allows – even demands – that we characterize “old” structures of
inequality as something that we’ve “grown out of,” in much the same way that the
sentimental novel of male adolescence relies on a character arc that “develops” the
protagonist at the beginning of the tale into the protagonist with which we are asked to
identify at the end. And so the reliance in the bildungsroman on the specific and definite
change – think here of anything from Catcher to its interlocutory text, David Copperfield
– presupposes the ability to leave the past behind, to write our own way beyond the limits
of the narrative’s first half.
The problem with this narrative, as bears repeating, is that the reduction of social
inequality to a problem that could be solved with some affective changes had some fairly
devastating, though perhaps unintended, consequences. Whether in the context of
desegregation, or even in the context of these curricular choices to read certain novels,
the transformation of social inequality away from being a structural problem made it
nearly impossible to alleviate the inequalities originally intended to be addressed: Fifty
years after the Brown decision, schools are still remarkably segregated by both race and
class, and, as any contemporary reflection on Brown will attest, the results of the Clark
Doll tests continue to resonate with scholars and students invested in social justice
15
. In

15
Though the Clark tests have become questioned in their scientific soundness, new thinkers have
found ways to engage the work throughout the years. Most recently, Robin Bernstein’s work at the
WEB DuBois Institute has traced the history of black dolls in the years leading up to and after the
156

this way, the slip that occurs when a structure like racial inequality becomes a problem
righted – with “all deliberate speed” even, as the process of desegregation was
16
–
challenges our notion of what it means to experience injustice. For many normative
subjects, like the protagonists of coming-of-age novels, to experience injustice is to feel
it, a phenomenon that links all hurting people with others who have been unjustly hurt.
But to reduce injustice to a feeling ignores, of course, “those aspects of grief that speak in
a different language.”
In rewriting the narrative of Civil Rights era curricular changes here in “Teaching
Feeling,” I’ve characterized the implementation of the male sentimental novel as a story
without an ending, a tale with no resolution. And this ought to resonate with
contemporary readers who see the continued after-effects of a public education system
still sharply divided by race and class. But as I make a move back towards the
sentimental adolescent reader in the last section, “’Nothing Ever Happens the Way You
Imagine It Will,’” I ask what happens when we stop presupposing that students have
simply accepted the texts they have inherited. In other words, just because the curriculum
becomes normalized doesn’t mean the readership does. As any teacher will tell you, just
because the text was assigned, doesn’t mean anyone did the reading.

Clark tests, and high school student Kiri Davis has compiled a short documentary repeating the
experience in Harlem, 2005 (A Girl Like Me).

16
In what would be referred to as the Brown II case, the emendation of “all deliberate speed” to the
original Brown case insists upon the timeframe (however ambiguous) for desegregation to occur. It
was contradictory for this reason, because it attempted to make the transition quickly, but was vague
enough that some districts abused the ambiguity to find loopholes and delays to desegregation.
157

N O T H I N G E V E R H A P P E N S T H E W A Y Y O U I M A G I N E I T W I L L

“Nothing ever happens the way you imagine it will.”

– Margo Roth Spiegelman in Paper Towns, 2008.
“That was perfect, I thought: you listen to people so that you can imagine them, and you
hear all the terrible and wonderful things people do to themselves and to one another, but
in the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you’re trying to
listen to.”

– Quentin Jacobson in Paper Towns, 2008.

In the introduction to this project, I argued that, at the risk of undermining the
genre of the dissertation, I wanted to forego my obligation merely to archive the history
of male sentimentality, as a keeper of its records, in favor of a concerted effort to
investigate its bigger logics, and even, its futures. An investment in political futures,
especially, can seem naïve at best and ignorant at worst, given major trends in cultural
and queer studies over the past decade – but something about the nature of male
sentimentality, the limited project of normative critique from the normative subject,
seems open to this avenue of rhetorical exploration in ways that other projects might
not.
17
And so while I have continued to ask what male sentimentality has meant as an
affective, political, and cultural force at some key historical moments in the development

17
I am of course referring here to what we might call the backlash to futurity that emerged in queer
theory of recent years, with Lee Edelman as its avatar (No Future 2004). Under the assumption that
the logics of futurity are entirely normative logics, Edelman’s work has prompted a fairly widespread
disavowal of futurity and its utopian counterparts. And yet, in a project that, on some level, has much
less to lose politically, I want to take a risk in thinking through and out of male sentimentality.
Perhaps it is to reveal my hand to suggest that I want male sentimentality to do something, and
thinking to male sentimentality’s futures helps develop that point.
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of the US, I have also pushed to think about those forces in the context of the
contemporary moment as a way to frame each investigation.
It might be easy to regard the curricular decisions under consideration here as an
exception to that rule – as I’ve argued above, the overwhelming stability of texts like
Huck Finn and Catcher at the center of the reading curriculum suggests that we haven’t
yet created a point from which we might be able to think about an inheritance or future.
In other words, we can’t yet think about the afterlives of the mandatory reading
curriculum when it has produced such a longstanding official archive for students in US
public schools. At the same time, however, an increasingly audible response to Huck and
Holden at the turn of the 21
st
century has emerged in counterarchives that have engaged,
but not embraced, their sentimental tales. Don’t get me wrong: the direct import of Huck
and Holden into vast arenas of popular culture - widely circulated in films (Igby Goes
Down, Rushmore), music (Piebald, The Wonder Years), and books (King Dork, My Jim)
since the 1950s – has mostly given evidence of the reproduction of these sturdy pop
heroes at the center of a cultural canon. But the specific counterarchive to which I refer
here – exemplified in Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower and John
Green’s Paper Towns – is more about responding to, and less about recirculating, the
characters and their spirit. With adolescent male protagonists specifically identified as
products of the high school reading curriculum, Chbosky and Green’s novels form a
counterarchive in their critique of a male sentimentality that privileges the inward turn.
Instead, the high school protagonists of these books do a certain work to move away from
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the privileged subject to other nonnormative bodies, providing a curious space of
thinking about inheritance in an altogether different kind of way.
And so in the final section of this chapter, we make a big turn – and not only to
the future, and not only to the counterarchive. Our turn is a turn against the logic of
normativity that underwrites the iterations of male sentimentality we see in Huck Finn
and Catcher, a departure from the inwardness that they represent to something more
capacious, something more peripheral. If I’ve set up the high school reading curriculum
as a normative response to difference, a capitalizing on difference that uses the Civil
Rights moment as an opportunity to redefine, and recenter, the privileged subject, then
the counterarchive of the wallflower stands specifically in conversation with, and in
opposition to, that iteration of male sentimentality. And in doing so, it allows us to begin
parsing out the various ways that sentimentality has worked with masculinity to shore it
up – the turn to Huck and Holden in the face of desegregation – from the ways in which
sentimentality has worked against masculinity to begin unraveling it. The protagonists of
Chbosky and Green’s books, Quentin and Charlie, are straight white male suburbanites,
and in this sense, they come from what I’ve been referring to as very normative spaces.
But instead of becoming the center of their respective texts and turning inward – both
attributes of the logic of bolstering the male sentimentalist in novels like Huck Finn and
Catcher – they move back over to the periphery, explicitly criticizing the high school
canon as readers who are still forced to encounter these narratives decades after they were
first introduced.
* * *
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Though the novels are somewhat different in structure and plot, The Perks of
Being a Wallflower and Paper Towns remain affectively and ethically resonant. Perks is
an epistolary coming-of-age narrative that argues that the only thing worse than the
punishment for not being normal is, in fact, the punishment built into being normal.
Normativity, it suggests, is a logic that runs through all sorts of bodies, and regulates in
all sorts of violent ways. Paper Towns, on the other hand, is a road trip story which
begins in the fantasies of a teenage boy and ends with the realization that the normative
privilege of imagining others is often one of the more “treacherous” things young men in
particular can do.
18
Separated only by a decade and some tonal changes, together they
remain buoyed by a feverish demand that to truly be there for others – and the resonance
here should echo the imagining of “Others” that permeates this project – requires a
careful critique of the privileges and logics of normative masculinity, and the recognition
that the limit of listening to others lies in one’s own privileged access to controlling the
narrative.
Perks begins with an emotional appeal to readers on the sidelines: in his first-
sentence invocation to “you…Dear Friend,” Charlie writes, “I am writing to you because
she said you listen and understand and didn’t try to sleep with that person at that party
even though you could have” (Chbosky 2). And it moves through the devastating
repercussions of normativity, which seem to affect everyone from closeted gay
quarterbacks, to Rocky Horror outcasts, to the most unremarkably “normal” youth.
Chronicling Charlie’s first year of high school in letters, Perks finds trouble brewing all

18
As Quentin notes, “What a treacherous thing it is to believe a person is more than a person” (282).
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around, and refuses to believe that the actions of its protagonist could do anything to stop
it. Instead, he is characterized, and at times praised, for simply being a “wallflower,” a
figure that echoes the first-sentence invocation almost word for word: “You see things,”
says Charlie’s newfound friend, Patrick. “You keep quiet about them. And you
understand.”
The proclamation here follows one of Charlie’s peripheral intrusions: at a party,
he accidentally stumbles upon Patrick and Brad, the popular high school quarterback, in a
“stolen type of kissing” (36). Brad’s nervousness at being discovered is quickly met with
Patrick excusing himself from the room to talk with Charlie, explaining that Brad
“doesn’t want people to know.” And with a simple “Okay,” Charlie accepts the situation
for what it is, in the subtlest of responses:
With that, Patrick turned around and went back into the room. I heard
some muffled voices, and Brad seemed upset, but I didn’t think it was any
of my business, so I went back to the kitchen. (37)
Though initially the response reads as unremarkable, something about Charlie’s turn back
to the kitchen captures a certain tension in male sentimentality that I want to draw
attention to. In the context of the book, this is one of his earliest encounters with someone
different from himself, an exchange which of course presents itself as the center of every
sentimental novel from MacKenzie to Twain. But where Huck and Holden use their
thoughts and critiques of others in extensive ways to discover their own priorities and
subjectivities, Charlie simply walks away with the recognition that “I didn’t think it was
any of my business.”
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And Chbosky follows him away from the moment. It’s this kind of narrative
refusal that makes the gesture so sincere, and which allows for an exploration of this non-
participatory masculinity throughout the text. In fact, the scene above follows, by just a
few pages, another voyeuristic bedroom moment: the recollection Charlie has of his older
brother’s party several years prior, in which Charlie, sitting alone in his room, is barged
in on by a “very popular and in love” couple. What follows is a scene that, at the time,
didn’t make sense to Charlie – the boy, Dave, continuing to push further sexually despite
his girlfriend’s repeated “no”; the girlfriend’s crying and coerced oral sex with Dave; and
the empty responsibility of Dave once the two had been found out. When Charlie’s sister
comes in to check on him, discovering Dave and his girlfriend, Charlie remarks: “My
sister was very embarrassed, but not as embarrassed as the girl. The boy looked kind of
smug. He didn’t say much” (31). The girls are expected to be embarrassed, the boy is
expected to look “kind of smug,” and Charlie simply observes. Again, that’s the
conclusion of the tale, and Charlie seems to do nothing beyond “seeing, keeping quiet,
and understanding,” the qualities for which he is subsequently praised.
But this wallflower moment resonates in a much different way than the one with
Patrick and Brad – in his retelling of the story to Patrick and Sam (Patrick’s half-sister),
Charlie offers his first reading of the events: “He raped her, didn’t he?” The difference
here is important: While Charlie’s tacit acceptance of Patrick and Brad as none of his
business seems to be about accepting otherness, his anger over Dave’s rape of his
girlfriend engages more directly with critiquing normativity. After his query to Sam,
Charlie adds, “We should tell someone, shouldn’t we?” but quickly learns a lesson in
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normativity’s effectiveness and consistency. “Sam just shook her head this time,” Charlie
tells the reader. “She then explained about all the things you have to go through to prove
it, especially in high school when the boy and girl are popular and still in love” (32). It
becomes a lesson in what we might call the wallflower’s “peripheral ethics,” particularly
as it loops back to that first-sentence call: that occupying the place of privilege allows, by
definition, access to normativity. And perhaps the best that one can do in that position is
to recognize that privilege, recognize the terrible wrongs of normativity, and try to
“understand.” Understand, that is, with the realization that you are part of that very fabric
of normativity, even as you critique it. And this is what makes it a peripheral ethics: you
did the right thing because “you didn’t sleep with that person.” But the point of
normativity, and the point of your own implication, is that “you could have” (2).
And in this, the novel, in all the ways one might expect, may seem unable to fully
deliver on its premise: because while much of the value of reading Charlie as a
wallflower is in the possibility this creates to recognizing, articulating, and critiquing
privilege, the limits of the coming-of-age genre threaten to compel him out of his
position. Not coincidentally, the conceit that most succinctly marks Charlie’s
development throughout the text is in the form of the novels he reads with his English
teacher, Bill: a veritable blueprint of the US high school reading curriculum including, of
course, The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird. At first, Charlie is said to
simply accept the novels for what they are: each new book, he remarks, becomes his
favorite. But increasingly, Bill asks him to “try to be a filter, not a sponge” (165),
particularly as he hands him the last book of the year, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.
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Perks seems to suggest that what Bill wants, and that what is best for Charlie, is to
become increasingly “participatory,” an injunction repeated again and again by others to
Charlie. And Charlie’s reading of The Fountainhead may in fact confirm his ability to
make this a priority: “I think,” he tells the reader, after finishing the book, “the idea is
that every person has to live for his or her own life and then make the choice to share it
with other people. Maybe that is what makes people ‘participate’” (169). It’s a curious
moment, if only because it may suggest that the “perks of being a wallflower” are more
complicated than either the privileged life, or a critique of the privileged life, would lead
us to believe.
Indeed, Charlie follows his claims immediately with a second guessing of his
reading:
I’m not really certain. Because I don’t know if I would mind living for
Sam for a while. Then again, she wouldn’t want me to, so maybe it’s a lot
friendlier than all that. I hope so anyway. (169)
And in what becomes perhaps the most ambiguous moment of the novel, Chbosky either
refuses to let Charlie grow out of being a wallflower, or he suggests that he should, and
we can’t really tell which one wins out. Just a few days later, Charlie suffers a mental
breakdown, finally comes to discover some childhood abuse from his aunt, and finds
himself in the hospital for two months. As he begins his letters again back to the reader,
he seems intent on moving forward, departing from his earlier insight that it was
important to recognize that “some people really do have it a lot worse than I do” (6). He
writes,
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I think if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won’t tell them that people
are starving in China or anything like that because it wouldn’t change the
fact that they were upset. And even if somebody else has it much worse,
that doesn’t really change the fact that you have what you have. Good and
bad….Maybe it’s good to put things in perspective, but sometimes, I think
that the only perspective is to really be there. Like Sam said. Because it’s
okay to feel things. And be who you are about them. (212)
This pull between two readings leaves us uneasy, whether as critics of Charlie’s
peripheral ethics, or as supporters of them. It certainly feels that, in the turn to
“participating,” Charlie essentially lets normativity off the hook, and the flattening of
feelings towards all subjects – starving in China versus upset in suburbia – presents the
possibility that Charlie’s turn is to a humanism that has difficulty finding social
difference as a real effect of normativity. On the other hand, the radical claim that “it’s
okay to feel things…[a]nd be who you are about them” may in fact be a capacious
invitation for an equality that normativity doesn’t typically encourage. A flattening of
difference via the recognition of difference in others.
It’s an uneasy ending, to be sure. But I wonder if that unease simply means that
Chbosky refuses to let us, the readers, off the hook.
* * *
Paper Towns, written a decade after Perks, begins with something of a bit more
stable – mentally, academically, socially – protagonist, though Quentin manages his own
tentative relation to those around him. On the one hand, he’s a nerd, a video-game
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obsessed honors student who hangs out with the band geeks even though he isn’t in band;
on the other hand, he demonstrates a degree of confidence in standing up to bullies,
sneaking out of his house, and taking the initiative to ditch his high school graduation to
try saving someone’s life. It’s this kind of angular, peripheral relation to those around
him that characterizes “Q,” as his friends call him, best: He isn’t in the popular crowd,
and yet his group of friends clearly has its own normative pecking order. He fawns at a
distance over his neighbor Margo Roth Spiegelman, but they used to be good friends
when they were younger. He is a suburban Jewish kid from Orlando who likes to imagine
things as he’d like them to be, but often falls far short of seeing things for what they
really are.
And so when we see Q in the novel, a simultaneously meditative and adventurous
tale that begins and ends with a road trip, these contradictions flourish in ways that echo
Perks, but which allow for a different kind of narrative trajectory. Where Perks sketched
out a wallflower who saw things, kept quiet, and understood; Paper Towns gives us the
messiness of “seeing things,” or people, differently than they want to be seen. Like
Charlie, Q spends much of his time imagining others, particularly Margo, after whose
disappearance Q remarks, “I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so
much that she became one” (Green 8). Unlike Charlie, however, Q’s imagining is rooted
in a confident sense of knowing who others are and what they are about, rather than
Charlie’s more naïve sense of wonder at who others might be. This dangerous sense of
confidence – bookended between Q’s fantasy-fulfilling midnight escapade with Margo at
the beginning of the novel and his graduation-ditching road trip to find her at the end –
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soon becomes the guiding thread of the novel: What if, Green seems to push, those about
whom we are most confident in imagining are in fact much different than we assumed
them to be? And in leading us to answer that question, Green demands we understand its
relevance in the context of other high school novels, which circulate throughout the novel
in the background.
19
Paper Towns remains a bildungsroman, to be sure, and its frequent
literary allusions place it firmly in conversation with the novels and poems Quentin reads
in school. But it’s also a coming-of-age story that leads its protagonist into a state of
unknowing in ways that set it apart from the kinds of books that the high school
curriculum cherishes so unapologetically.
After a flashback Prologue, the book is organized into three parts: The Strings,
The Grass, and The Vessel. And each of these serves as a potential metaphor for
understanding the subjective experience of another person’s interior life. The first relies
on Margo’s conjecture that people are inherently fragile, and that if enough of “the
strings” inside a person snap, then the person might be, as Q later says, “irreparably
broken” (301). The second is inspired by Whitman via Leaves of Grass, and it assumes
the possibility that, like “grass,” “we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use
these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another.” The
last – which Q and Margo seem to settle on as being more ethical than the others –
proposes that we are all like “vessels,” which, when cracked from the times “we lose and
fail and hurt one another” (302), enable us to see other people in their – and through our –

19
For much of the novel, Quentin is explicitly reading Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” though
more peripheral references are made to the curriculum throughout. Q works on a Gatsby paper for
his English teacher, for instance, whose name just happens to be Dr. Holden.
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flaws. Only then can we retain a distance between ourselves and others, whose
experience we can never fully understand. The development of each of these metaphors,
which Q continually revisits and reconsiders over the course of the book, marks his
coming-of-age not as a singular, confident decision; but rather as an ethics of unknowing,
an ambiguous consideration of others that remains ethically open to difference, humility,
and the “treacherousness,” as Quentin calls it, of “think[ing] that a person is more than a
person” (282).
In interviews following the release of the book, Green repeatedly emphasized
what he understood to be the lesson he wanted readers to learn from Q’s development:
that despite our inclinations towards finding ourselves absolutely and inextricably the
“center” of our own worlds, we ought to make a conscious, even ethical decision to try to
“imagine others more complexly.” One of his interlocutors here is David Foster Wallace,
particularly in his 2005 commencement address to Green’s alma mater, Kenyon College,
titled “This is Water.”
20
But he turns what Wallace proposes as an ethics of recognition –
“freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care
about other people” by getting outside our “kingdom-sized skulls” – into a particularly
gendered, racialized gesture inextricably linked to the kinds of subject formations that
happen in schooling, articulated most saliently in the high school reading curriculum. In
other words, Green’s novel makes the complex recognition of others an imperative for

20
Though, as I note, Wallace originally delivered the address as a speech at commencement, the text
was reprinted later in the Wall Street Journal, which is where this and subsequent quotes derive from
(Wallace “This is Water”).
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white, suburban, adolescent males – and he does so in suggesting that this problem of
privileged interiority is amplified and produced via a high school education.
Like those other novels’ protagonists, Q’s narrative arc serves as a literary device
to mark his personal development. In Paper Towns, this means that, for most of the
novel, Q spends his time trying to decipher clues that will lead him to Margo, who has
disappeared early on in the story. And his journey, characterized by Q’s ability to figure
out where and who the “real Margo” is, leads him to make these other, more personal
discoveries along the way. When he starts hanging out with Margo’s best friend Lacey
Pemberton, for instance, he notices that though she is from a much different social clique,
she isn’t as different from him as he initially supposed; “Lacey Pemberton,” Q says, “was
not Lacey Pemberton. She was just – like, a person” (119). And when the clues to find
Margo begin to be incongruous with his fantasies of her, he starts seeing the myriad ways
she might be understood:
“Who is Margo Roth Spiegelman?” Like a metaphor rendered
incomprehensible by its ubiquity, there was room enough in what she had
left me for endless imaginings, for an infinite set of Margos. (173)
Many of the discoveries revolve around particular kinds of imagining just like these –
they seem to come from white male fantasies about what difference is and means, and
they resolve into these ambiguous pronouncements that suggest a steady crumbling of
Q’s own interior world. Green chips away at the idea that the wallflower is meant to
orient inward, and forces him instead to look outward, outside his “kingdom-sized skull.”
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And the brilliance of Green’s novel is this: that, after finally locating the elusive
Margo after a heroic road trip that leads to their reunion, she turns out to be an absolutely
realistic, faulty, and terrible person, just like Quentin. It’s a gesture that, at the height of
the book’s crumbling male fantasy, might be read as regressive, a latent nod that winks
with the reader as if to say, “See, girls really are like that.” But if we read carefully,
Green does no backtracking, and he favors opening everyone’s responsibility over just
pointing out Q’s misreadings. And this, in the end, is why the novel seems to attempt the
work of untethering the tenets of normative masculinity and normative privilege that it
critiques – it engages these behaviors as logics, written beyond and between the bodies
that circulate them. The novel may begin and end with Q’s misimaginings – and insist
that these are its primary concerns – but it is also careful to insist that everyone is
implicated in these discourses and logics, regardless of the fact that they privilege certain
bodies and render others as somehow less.
* * *
That Paper Towns uses the figure of the metaphor – strings, grass, vessels; and
later, windows and mirrors – to explore the privilege of imagining others ought to serve
as an appropriate link to the three sections of this chapter: because, when it comes down
to it, the US public continues to insist on using texts to explain, explore, and educate a
nation. Indeed, to form the citizenry of the nation itself in ways that really, as Quentin
would say, “matter” (301). And so while this chapter retains as its focus a critical
moment in US culture when we turned to certain texts in the wake of unprecedented
social changes, the repercussions, and resonances, of that action in both directions reveal
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much about the contours of privilege and normativity as they function in the nation. This
normative logic becomes, as David Foster Wallace would say, “the automatic,
unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and
feelings are what should determine the world's priorities”; and the steady reification of
this unconsciousness becomes written into our youth with the absolute belief that its
metaphors “matter,” its stories shape, and we learn how to feel about the world around us.
Chbosky and Green’s texts of course have their faults. Because though they seem
to push against these dominant logics of privilege and masculinity in their slide to the
periphery, we have to realize that the periphery is in fact in an important, and perhaps
mutual, relationship with normativity. After all, Charlie and Quentin can only make the
critiques they do because they come from privileged positions, and their supposed
critique of normativity belies the point that Sara Ahmed would make – that “to be against
something is, after all, to be in an intimate relation with that which one is against”
(Ahmed, “Declarations,” 47). And yet, the fact that these texts have continued to circulate
as a counterarchival response to the narratives that the nation wants to tell in the high
school reading curriculum demands that we take a closer look at what it means for
normative subjects to become uncomfortable in their normativity. They insist, in other
words, that this was always more complicated than the stories let it seem: privilege is
always about a logic that gets reproduced in systems that stretch far beyond the local
claims of injustice. Privilege has everything to do with masculinities that masquerade
behind the universal stories of Huck and Holden. And privilege can orient anything to
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reproduce itself – just as it transforms the emergent wallflower and its critique of
privilege into a sentimentality that turns inward instead of out.
Because my hope is that it is obvious why this project takes its namesake from
Chbosky’s book, and why it resonates with Green’s book as an analog: the wallflower is
doing some work – though it isn’t necessarily the work of social transformation, and a lot
of it does end up in the ambiguities that leave the peripheral wallflower in our field of
vision. But it is a work nevertheless, and it promotes a recognition of others that comes
from listening and the realization that we might reconsider our social hierarchies.
Hierarchies that presume much about nonnormative others, promote certain bodies at the
expense of the rest, and remain strong even after we can recognize their logics.
As Quentin learns – in his turn away from Whitman and the curriculum – “I must
ask the wounded man where he is hurt, because I cannot become the wounded man. The
only wounded man I can become is me” (Green 298).
As Charlie insists:
I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never
know most of them. But even if we don’t have the power to choose where
we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still
do things. And we can try to feel okay about them. (Chbosky 211)
Each is so disappointing in our realization that the wallflower remains unalterably
tethered to normativity. But this is the only language of resistance we have, and what it
tells us about normativity and privilege might help us chart new ways of looking at old
invisibilities.
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– 4 –

N O H A Y U N M O V I M I E N T O: The Peripheral Public of Emo

Emo is a joke. What is emo? It is something for 15 year old girls
that are barely growing pubic hair. They get emotional over the
lea d si nge r, not the music. Tha t’s number on e . Nu mber two: I s it necessary to create another genre just to express emotions? Is
Death Metal not enough? Is Punk not enough? Are pop acts like
Camila, Sin Bandera, and José José not enough? Is it necessary to
c re a t e a ne w g e nr e that s a y s, ‘D ude , e ve r y on e e ls e is m ist a ke n –
e mot ionall y , the y don’ t f ulfill us’ ?

Fucking Bullshit, kids. There is no movement. There is no new
way of thinking. There are no musicians. You confuse Punk, Hard
Rock, and Screamo. And combine them all just to give significance
to your stupid, idiotic movement. It is not a movement.

-- Telehit VJ Kristoff, on Emo (translated from the original Spanish), 2008

In an upcoming special issue of Social Text on “ P u nk a nd it s Af ter li ve s,” a peculiar division appears to take place, separating a seemingly coherent movement –
“ punk” – from the messiness that followed in its wake. Indeed, both the specific division
in the title and the impetus for compiling a special issue some four decades after the fact
suggests that punk, if nothing else, has a particular way of generating a call for response,
a particular way of encouraging us to think about what it means to listen to punk from a
distance. This peripheral posturing, of course, has resonated throughout this project:
beyond the VFW halls and basement shows, the periphery has emerged as an important
site for thinking about responses to normativity from the normative subject, an
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ambivalent space to think through the social dynamics of a subculture and its sidelined
participants. In this chapter, I consider the possibilities that such a space has for forming
its own public, a community marked by its ambivalent relation to privilege, a subculture
defined by its affective critique of both the mainstream and the underground.
And so, in many ways, this chapter belongs to what might be considered the
latter ha lf of the sp e c ial i ssue’ s investm e nt, m or e i nter e sted in t ur nin g it s cr it ica l e y e away from the stage, the pit, and the pogoing masses to, instead, the back of the room.
What would it mean, I wonder here, to think about punk from the periphery?
* * *
The e mer ge nc e of e mo s ubc ult ur e a s an “ e mot ion a l” a lt e rn a ti ve to t he a gg r e ssi ve hardcore punk scene in Washington, D.C. coheres in this intersection, in both senses of
punk’ s afterlives. As a de riva ti ve ge nr e in which “ e mo” is short for “ e mot ional ha rdc o re punk,” a nd a s a n a f fe c ti v e r e sponse to the no rma ti ve masc uli nit ies c irc ulati ng in punk’s
supposed countercultural stance, emo, I suggest, stands in as both periphery and response.
But how do we begin to think about a movement that, in the words of Telehit VJ Kristoff,
just da y s be for e wid e spre a d a tt a c ks on e mo ki ds b y punks i n Que ré ta ro, Me x ico, “ is no
moveme nt”?
1
Ephemeral, derivative, and peripheral – the stuff of pu nk’s “ a f ter li ve s” –
emo deserves an equally peripheral methodology of reading that begins and ends in the
margins of culture. Here, I propose that an appropriate reading of emo lies not in the form

1
This quote (and the essay’s epigraph, from which it is derived) is a combined translation of myself
and one of the many copies of a now infamous online video in which television VJ Kristoff
denounces emo kids in Mexico, months before the March attacks on emo youth in Querétaro,
Mexico. One of the more popular circulations of the video in the U.S. (which can be found with a
cursory Google or Youtube search) was featured on MTV Online, and was accompanied by an article
by James Montgomery. See “Behind The Emo Attacks: We Head To Mexico City To Talk To The
People Involved.”
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of a history or genealogy,
2
methodologies that often recirculate rather normative
conceptions of culture and time, but rather in a structural reading that posits emo as a
particularly peripheral critique of normativity, and which hears normativity circulating
just as easily through punk countercultures as it does the mainstream against which those
countercultures are opposed. Curiously enough, that peripheral critique of normativity,
here in the context of emo, comes largely from otherwise normative subjects: straight,
white, middle- c lass male s at the e d g e s of punk ’s c oun tercultural stances and the fringes
of the ma inst re a m’s p rivilege d li ve s.
A side wa y s c ritiqu e f rom a sidew a y s st a n c e , e mo pr e se nts on e of pu nk ’s most fascinating effects: an opportunity for us to think about what a criticism of normativity
looks like when it comes from the normative subject. And so while this chapter will
attempt to address the overwhelming question that has haunted the subculture – “ W ha t is
e mo? ” – it is also interested in thinking less about emo as subculture, and more about
emo as a kind of structure: the critical periphery of normativity, from which we might
begin to develop new insights into what it means to identify normative masculinity as the
dominant logic of privilege, and to identify affect as the appropriate idiom for critiquing
normative masculinity. In the spirit of this alternative genealogical approach, I will begin
by unpacking what it means to say that emo functions as a periphery, and then turn to
thre e e ssentiall y e mo “ mom e nts” o f the last three decades – its juxtapolitical emergence

2
Within the context of emo, both biographies of the scene have relied on fairly chronological
accounts that trace emo’s D.C. emergence to its 21
st
century iterations: see Andy Greenwald, Nothing
Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003). See also Leslie
Simon and Trevor Kelley, Everybody Hurts: An Essential Guide to Emo Culture (New York: Harper
Entertainment, 2007). In contrast, and inspired by the work of critics like Ann Stoler and Jack
Halberstam, I argue that the periphery might allow us a new rubric that resists the normative
conceptions of time reproduced in these formal genealogies.
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from the DC hardcore punk scene, circa 1985; its anti-public dissembling in the late
1990’ s; and it s post -mainstream spread across the US-Mexico border in the early 21
st

century – proposing that in considering emo always in relation to normative trajectories,
we can begin to unpack the very contours of normativity itself.
With hoodies up and headphones on, emo kids did more than just look inside
themselves to find the logics of privilege they had found so repulsive. They rerouted the
“ moveme nt” of punk int o the sim ple a c t of “ b e ing moved, ” a pa ssi ve nod to a polit ics of self-reflection that wanted to sit this one out and listen from the sidelines. Between the
“ F uc k You” nihi li sm of ha rdc or e punk a nd the c o wbo y poli ti c s unde r wr it ing R e a ga n’ s
e x c e pti ona l Amer ica , e mo eme r g e d a s a f ra g il e , in c ohe re nt st rivin g f or som e thi ng “ re a l ” amidst all the noise. It opened its ears to a dissonant world, and in all that dissonance
found the same logics of privilege on both sides of the table.
And so who could fault them for shedding a few tears? Grab your own set of
headphones, open a full box of tissues, and get ready to listen along.

S T R U C T U R E S O F F E E L I N G S

I can't take anymore of all the scum in this place.
Shitty dudes with tribal tattoos all around me,
Lining up cheap beer and roofies for a party at their place.
Trying to convince freshmen they're somebody
By spending all of their parents' money on kegstands
And Ma tt sa y s, “ I don ' t fi t i n.”

All these fake-tan girls laughing at art school kids
Getting mocked in return for being substance-less.
177

You're too caught in semantics to see it,
But you're no fucking different.

-- fr om “M y L a st S e meste r” b y Th e W onde r Y e a r s, 2010

“ W ha t i s emo, a n y w a y ? ” S ince the te rm’ s e a rliest usage in t he mid to late 1980s,
this most basic of questions has haunted participants, dominating the discourse
surrounding the subculture to an extent that few other subcultures have had demanded of
them. As Spin magazine senior contributor Andy Greenwald writes in his 2003 book,
Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo:
Emo m e a ns di ff e r e nt t hing s to d iff e re nt peopl e . Ac tuall y , that’ s a m a ssi ve understatement. Emo seems solely to mean different things to different
pe ople…N ot onl y c a n no one a g re e on wha t i t m eans, there is not now, nor
has there ever been, a single major band that admits to being emo. Not
one. (Greenwald 1-2)
Gr e e n wa ld’s h y pe rbolic int roduc ti on mi g ht be a bi t t ong ue -in-cheek for a book that
makes such a claim, only to be followed by several hundred pages of defining the
indefinable. But something about emo has always carried with it an aura of ephemerality:
in the US, the label can refer to any of three distinct, heterogeneous music scenes that
have flashed in and out of existence since the mid-1980s, each with a separate set of
social concerns, varying levels of relation to the mainstream, and a shifting listening
public – and each composed in sonic palates so distinct that one would be hard-pressed to
otherwise associate the various manifestations. Some critics and musicians have vouched
178

for it nostalgically as the “ lost labe l of [ our] y outh ” ( “What is Emo? ”), while others have
mocked it dismissiv e l y a s “a socia l sc e ne …not a rt ” (Davey von Bohlen, as quoted in
Kuipers). Out magazine attempted to frame it slightly more specifically as having a
“ punk-pop aesthetic with a queer fabulousness factor that approaches those of beloved
80’s ge nde r b e nde rs li ke Boy George and Annie Lennox ” (Walters 28). A subculture that
pr ivi leg e s a lan g ua ge of “ fe e li n g s” a s a se nti ment a l re sponse to a h y p e rma sc uli ne alternative; a musical genre marked by on-stage crying and intense, emotive vocals; and
a n a ndro g y nous st y le tha t has most r e c e ntl y f a vo r e d “ swoop y ba n g s, ” ti g ht “ g irl j e a ns,”
a nd lot s of “ g u y li n e r” e y e make up – all primarily for its significant straight white-boy
following – emo is tremendously ambivalent, and, given its reception, maybe a bit
embarrassing.
3

The reluctance of participants to identify with the scene may in part derive from
an acknowledgment of this fact, that what makes emo sincere for some listeners renders it
silly for others. But it also could derive from the ambiguous aesthetics of the genre which
have even made it difficult to distinguish emo from its peers. Often emerging from the
margins of other genres, emo was less about sonic rebellion and more about affective
rebellion: an unpoliced commitment participants could make with themselves, outside of
those ideological scenes from which they would articulate their dissent as listeners,
consumers, participants, and critics. While fiercely self-regulated subcultures like

3
I’m curious how this claim might resonate with some rather different types of readers: On the one
hand, emo’s “embarrassment” comes from its slightly “gender-bending” take on masculine
performance, which has met significant derision from outsiders in both national and international
contexts. On the other hand, emo’s ambiguous politics and potential co-optation of feminine and
queer practices stands out as potentially embarrassing for critics who read emo as simply another co-
opting facet of normativity. This contrarian dynamic reveals yet again the peripheral locating of emo
as ephemeral, affective subculture.
179

hardcore punk (which demanded commitment to its aggressive DIY market politics),
straight-edge (which regulated against those who drank, smoked, or had premarital sex),
and goth (which refused anything outside its distinct aesthetics) found coherence in the
cl e a r line s the y d re w a ro und themse lves, e mo’s e phe mer a l, a ff e c ti ve l y -oriented devotees
were often only peripherally distinguishable from these other scenes. Even the most
cherished emo records, from bands as various as Rites of Spring (Rites of Spring, 1985),
The Promise Ring (Nothing Feels Good, 1997), and Dashboard Confessional (Swiss
Army Romance, 2000), sound remarkably similar to tangential genres circulating at the
time. And yet, for emo listeners who heard in these records a poetic, vulnerable response
to the mainstream, their identification as distinctly emo is unequivocal among their
listening publics. Between counterculture and the mainstream, between the personal and
the polit ica l, emo’ s rh y th ms s c or e d the life of kids on the pe riphe r y , th e wa l lflo wers
watching the dance from the sidelines.
Framing emo as peripheral and ambivalent may seem evasive, enabling us to
produce the subculture as only tenuously available for critique. But I would suggest that
this framing actually helps us to draw out the historical significance of the man of feeling
as a very particular kind of response to normativity that comes from the normative body.
I nd e e d, both emo’ s p rod uc ti on of a ff e c ti ve e a rne s tness a nd it s cr it ique of n or mative
masculinity from within the space of the normative body have their roots in larger
narratives about male sentimentality that first emerge in 18
th
century British philosophy
180

and culture.
4
Like the 18
th
century man of feeling, which arose in response to the widely
circulating logics of racial, gendered, and class privilege characterizing the expansion of
the British Empire, the contemporary emo kid articulates his dissent from other
normatively privileged bodies through the expression of an excessively affective
performance. In contrast to the stalwart forms of normative masculinity that require both
composure and a sense of deferment from the body – always directing his stoic gaze
elsewhere – both iterations of the man of feeling turned inward, ascribing authenticity to
the “ e mot ional” de li ve r y a nd l y ri c s con tra sti n g the ha rd, a pa th e ti c p erformances of
norma ti ve masc uli nit ies c irc ulatin g a round th e m. I n e x ploring their own “ f e e li ng s, ” e x pr e ssi ng their most since re thou g hts and a nx ieties, e mo bo y s c ould be “ r e a l” w it h
themselves, unlike their macho counterparts.
B ut emo’ s ambivale nt re c e pti on mimics the typically hostile historical response to
male sentimentality as well: Frequently derided by critics on both sides of the political
spec trum, e mo’s a mbi g ui t y invi tes une a siness i n r e sponse to it s inabil it y to c ohe re in a clear ideological posi ti on. C onser va ti ve poli c ing o f r ig id ge nde r no rms se e s in emo’ s fe y ambiguities and feminine style a threat to normative logics of privilege, threats serious
enough to merit violent responses, both physical and otherwise.
5
Critics from the left see

4
Though there is a wide critical tradition attentive to male sentimentality and empire in the 18
th

century, the work of Julie Ellison and Lynn Festa has been particularly illuminating. See especially,
Julie Ellison, Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (1999). See also, Lynn Festa,
Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France ( 2006).

5
I will detail this later within the specific context of Mexico, though several international reports of
violence against emo youth continue to circulate. After a wave of attacks in Latin America circa 2008
– from Chile, to Argentina, to Mexico – this past year (March 2012) saw mild attention come from
attacks on emo youth in Iraq. Interestingly, in coverage of the events online and in official
proclamations against the violence by the US Embassy concerning the Iraq killings, conflations and
181

in emo’ s sentimental posturing the very logic of privilege itself, the well-wrought tear to
counterbalance the stoic gaze.
6
It appears that much of this tension comes down to the
c e ntra l cont ra diction of s e nti menta li t y g ove rnin g e mo’s a mbi va lent st a nc e : t ha t t he affective language it speaks to articulate its critique of normativity is precisely the same
language normativity adopts to secure itself.
In other words, we have reason to be hesitant to embrace emo with open hearts
and flowing tears. Critical studies in race and gender have long articulated the ways in
which certain forms of male sentimentality, though they felt critical of privilege, often
simply accrued a complexity and depth to the already privileged subject. As Gail
Bederman would say, these forms of masc uli nit y h e lped to “ re m a ke ” th e c o mpl e x man of empire, ensuring that the logics of privilege and normative masculinity intertwined to
secure and stabilize the civilized male subject.
7
While scholars like Julie Ellison and
Lynn Festa have articulated this dynamic within the context of early British imperialism,

confusions abounded regarding the blurred lines between participants in emo subculture and
allegations of homosexual or non-normatively gendered behavior. Even when addressed directly,
commentators, politicians, and local “experts” have difficulty articulating the blurred lines between
gender, sexuality, and emo, and inquiries into motivations for the violence seem equally blurred as a
result. For a moderate-length Al-Jazeera report on the events, see “The Stream: Emo Youth Targeted
in Iraq” (2012). For the US Embassy in Baghdad’s official condemnation of the attacks , see “U.S.
Embassy Condemns Attacks on ‘Emo’ Youth in Iraq” (2012).

6
My description of the stoic figure shedding a single tear derives here from the work of Julie Ellison
in Cato’s Tears.

7
See esp., Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization ( 1996).

182

Ann Cheng, Tania Modleski, and others have frequently drawn out the inevitable
inheritance of these structures today.
8

And so w e ’r e lef t wit h a subj e c t t ha t, i n so m a n y wa y s, has never really been the
starting point for a progressive critique of normativity – among the various disciplines
engaged in the work of critical cultural studies, we tend to critique the privileged subject
from outside the realm of privilege. But the possibility of articulating a space – what I
call the periphery – from which to generate a different kind of critique of normativity
may in fact challenge the social hierarchies of privilege that tend to reproduce themselves
in polemic approaches. Recent work in affect and queer theory has attended to this
possi bil it y : B oth Ev e S e d g wic k ’s c onc e ptual f i g ur i ng of the “ be side ” a s a ki nd of c ritica l
g e stur e that pe rmits a “ spac ious a g nost icism a bout s e ve ra l of th e li ne a r lo g i c s that
influe nc e dua li sti c thi nking ” (Sedgwick Touching 8)

a nd L a ur e n Ber lant’s a rticula ti on of the “ a mbi va lenc e ” o f se n ti menta li t y ge sture towa r ds m or e c a p a c ious wa y s of r e a din g contradictory or peripheral objects.
9
Following their lead, I want to open up the periphery

8
Anne Cheng and Tania Modleski both speak to the 20th century rise of a certain iteration of
sentimental masculinity which, though ostensibly seeming to be distanced from privilege, in fact
simply accrued a complexity and depth to the already privileged subject. See Anne Cheng, The
Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (2001); and Tania Modleski, Feminism
Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a Postfeminist Age (1991). Julie Ellison is perhaps the most
significant scholar to trace this phenomenon to its roots in 18th century culture and literature in
Britain, and stresses the importance of this history as an essential component of post-Enlightenment
masculinity.

9
See also, Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American
Culture (2008). These alternative methodological approaches seem to respond, in a way, to some of
the more forceful lines drawn in the sand by classic queer studies texts like Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking
Sex,” which I would suggest reifies certain normative hierarchies in its spatial figuring of privilege in
the “charmed circle” and its “outer limits.” Rubin goes so far as to sketch figurative walls to illustrate
boundaries between those occupying the space of normative privilege and those resisting
normativity. See Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality”
(1984).
183

a s a f r a mew or k th a t ac kn owle dge s bot h e mo’s critique of and implication in normative
logics, but then uses that contradiction to look at the boundaries of normativity itself.
I nd e e d, w e mi g ht ev e n c onsi de r e mo’s “ w a ll flow e r ma sc uli nit ies” not s o much oppose d
to normative masculinity as they are beside it, with the full understanding that, as Sara
Ahmed writes:
…to be a g a inst som e thi ng is pre c isel y not t o be in a posit ion of
transcendence: to be against something is, after all, to be in an infinite
re lation wit h that whic h one is aga inst …The mes s y wo rk o f “ a g a inst ne ss”
might even help remind us that the work of critique does not mean the
transcendence of the object of our critique; indeed, critique might even be
dependent on non-transcendence. (Ahmed “Declarations ” 47, italics in
original)

A N D I F I S T A R T E D C R Y I N G ; W O U L D Y O U S T A R T C R Y I N G ?
Emo’s Or ig in S torie s

“ W e a re h a rdc o re kids th a t couldn' t qui te c ut i t as ha rdc or e kids. ”
-- Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy, 2006

The exploration of emo as a particularly peripheral phenomenon helps to illustrate
the larger gestures that I want to make in this paper, helping us to sketch the contours of
184

normativity from the perspective of the critical normative subject. But it is important to
remember that, when the genre first became legible to the public at the turn of the 21
st

c e ntur y , ther e didn’t see m t o be a n y thi n g spe c ific a ll y critical, let along political, about
emo at all. With a popular e t y mol o g ic a l ex plana ti on of e mo as, sim pl y , the “ e mot ional” subcu lt ur e ( e li din g it s more a c c ur a te de riv a ti on fr om “e mot i ona l har dc o re ” ), c omm on
readings of the genre elided any ties to the punk scenes from which it had emerged.
10

Something about emo, it seemed, had made it particularly illegible to understand in
re lation t o other g e nr e s, de spit e the f a c t t ha t emo’ s ti e s to t he punk, hardcore, straight
edge, queercore, and riot grrrl movements should have been quite obvious. And so in this
section, I want to open up the possible reasons why emo often became shorthand for
“ e mot ional” a t t he c ost o f e li ding it s re lation t o th e p olitical urgency and
hypermasculinity of hardcore punk. And in doing so, I will argue that it had become
difficult for the public to understand what seemed in emo to be an impossible conflation:
the political immediacy of hardcore punk; the white, middle class, male body; and an
affective excessiveness characterized by rumors of public crying, lyrics rife with poetic
imagery, and withdrawn, wallflower masculinities that preferred staying in to going out.
On the one hand, there is something familiar about the unsteady alliance of
politics and affect: in the early 21
st
century US, we tend to see political critique and
affective labor as mutually exclusive categories. And we can certainly find historical
reasons for this, as many might point us to the historical roots of this division via the

10
The truncation of emotional hardcore into “emo” belies its association with other hardcore
spinoffs, including queercore, grindcore, and, less linguistically, the riot grrrl and straight edge
movements. It also presents an interesting figure of castration and diminutiveness that would be
interesting to unpack elsewhere. (I owe these insights to Heather Lukes).
185

separation of a domestic, private sphere from the political public sphere emerging in 18
th

century British thought and culture.
11
But as we recall that it was precisely this division
which helped to produce the initial emergence of the man of feeling, we would do well to
consider the possibility that the anxiety produced in this conflation of affective and
political labor is more complicated than it seems.
In fact, I wonder if this contradiction occludes the other contradiction at work in
the conflation I articulated above. Curiously, it seems that the more acerbic ways in
whic h “ e mo” b e g a n to be e mpl o y e d in publ ic disc ourse , stre tchin g f rom sc hool y a rd
taunts t o “ spec ial re po rts” on loca l t e levisi on ne w sc a sts , wa s as a ve c to r of anxiety
produced in the juxtaposition of unregulated affect and the white, middle class, male
body.
12
F rom c a ll ing som e one “ e mo” a s a for m of insul t t o pro duc ing pa r e n tal wa rnin g s
of possible suicide attempts, something about male sentimentality was making people
nervous. That I am trying to make a distinction between these two sets of conflations is
not to suggest that one is more important to producing a better reading of emo; rather, it
is to suggest that at their intersection lies the particular combination of anxieties that
re sult f rom e mo’s pe riphe ra l r e lation t o both counte rc ult ur e a nd the ma inst re a m. And
thi s, ul ti mate l y , is wha t I wa nt t o e stabli sh i n thi s s e c ti on: t ha t i f w e c a n re re a d e mo’s
g e n e a lo g y be y ond th e “ e mot ional,” a rticula ti ng it s e mergence from hardcore punk, then

11
Though there is contention among the specifics of this oft-cited formulation, they tend to gravitate
towards and respond to the work of Ju rgen Habermas. See esp., The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1989).

12
Though the language is fairly common, these specific references are made to a WDAZ News 8
newscast widely circulated online, along with an article in UK newspaper, The Telegraph. For the
former, see “Emotional: Fad Can Turn Deadly,” (2007). For the latter, see Richard Alleyne, “Popular
Schoolgirl Dies in ‘Emo Suicide Cult,’” (2008).
186

we can better draw out the seemingly contradictory dynamics at work in the scene: its
political saliency, its affective logics, and its utter indebtedness to the normative body.
And so in this sense, if we really want to understand emo as a peripheral
movement, then we first need to understand the scene from which it emerged: hardcore
punk. Exemplified by the polemical, politically-inclined stances of bands like Black Flag,
Minor Threat, and Dead Kennedys in the early 1980s, hardcore punk cohered in its
a ggre ssi ve “ h a tre d for m a inst re a m norma lc y ” a nd the “ pa r a dig m shi ft…r e i nstati ng the
white ma n’ s orde r”

that began the decade (Rachman American Hardcore). It was a
fiercely oppositional movement, and it found coherence in its clear enemy: newly elected
President Ronald Reagan. He served, according to scene historian Steven Blush, as:
…the ga lvaniz ing f or c e o f ha rdc o re …a n e ne m y of the a rts, mi noriti e s,
women, gays, liberals, the homeless, the working man, the inner city, etc.
All ‘outsi de rs’ c ould a g r e e they hated him. (Blush 20)
F ig u rin g it se lf in t his po sit ion of “ outsi de r,” a ll ied with a c re dibi li t y -boosting list of
“ mi noriti e s,” ha rdc o re ’s opposi ti ona l pol it ics de c l a re d that it wa s “ us -versus- them,” a nd
its aggression was too visceral and pronounced to accept any nuance to that dichotomy. It
flattened the distinctions between its largely normatively bodied participants and the
“ oppre ssed ” g roups w it h whic h it soug ht t o identif y , a nd it used that a ll ianc e to establish
that it s membe rs, too, we re outsi de the “ w hit e m a n’ s orde r ” of pr ivi le g e a n d nor mativi t y .
Not surpr isi ng l y , ha rdc or e ’s r e lation t o “ mi noriti e s, women, ga y s, li be ra ls, e tc.” was tenuous at best – it s socia l cr it ique w a sn ’t of ten a ssocia ted with ac ti vist or
community impulses, and its politics, thou g h a gg r e ssi ve , we r e n’ t re a ll y int e nde d to
187

circulate beyond its esoteric boundaries. Such deliberate policing of its borders allowed
for the c ir c ulation of son g s li ke Mi nor T hr e a t’s “ Guilt y of B e in g W hit e ” – a frustrated
c r y of “ re ve rse discr im in a ti on” f ro m frontman Ian MacKaye, who, having grown up in
predominantly African- A mer ica n W a shin g ton, D. C ., fe lt unfa irl y tre a t e d a s the “ white
mi norit y ”
13
:
I ’m so rr y – fo r some thi ng I didn’t do
Lynched somebody – but I don ’t know who
You blame me for slavery
A hundred years before I was born
Guilty of being white. (Minor Threat “Guilty ”)
I f the soc ial g e o gr a ph y o f ha rdc o re ’s c laims r e l y o n the spli t betwe e n insi de r a nd
outsi de r, Ma c K a y e ’s a br a sive tra c k mi x e s up i ts m e taphor s. W hil e the polit ica l cla im s of
the scene functioned by positi ng R e a g a n a nd the “ white ma n’ s orde r” a s w holl y dist inct
fr om t he shar e d sen sibi li ti e s of ha rdc o re kids a nd “ mi noriti e s,” he re M a c K a y e ’s c ritiqu e reifies the boundaries between its white narrator and its black addressee, a gesture all the
more suspect given the likelihood of a predominantly white audience. This is not to say
that hardcore was only something for white males to participate in – it would be unfair to
e ra se wome n’ s, que e rs’ , a nd pe ople of c olor’ s pa r ti c ipation i n the sc e ne – but it is to say
that hardcore reproduced a normative logic that was heavily circulated by its mostly

13
As further evidence of this sentiment, see also Black Flag’s “White Minority,” from the album
Jealous Again (1980).
188

normatively bodied audience.
14
Not only does MacKaye anticipate the sweeping
conservative backlash to affirmative action and political correctness in the mid-90s, he
refuses to se e the c ontr a d iction, and sti ll maintains that the tr a c k is “ a really direct anti-
racist song ” (as quoted in Blush 30).
That emo could have initially emerged from such a politically vocal scene might
surpr ise those w ho r e a d “ e mot ional” a s it s primar y r e fe re nt. Ar g u a bl y , Ri tes of Spring –
the oft- c it e d “ fir st” e mo ba nd – sounded very much like their peers in the D.C. scene; the
songs were perhaps slightly more melodic, but the arrangements and delivery fit well
with their peers. But recollections of openly public displays of crying on stage and
int rospe c ti ve song s with t it les lik e “ De e pe r than Inside ” ga ve voic e to a pe riphe ra l
e leme nt of ha rdc or e that disi de nti fie d with ot he r ba nds’ a gg r e ssi ve post ur in g , insi sti ng that the outward critique turn back in on itself.
15
C o nsider “ R e mainde r,” a tr a c k off of
R it e s of Spring ’s e pon y mous de but, which c onde nsed thi s int e rior poli ti c a l st a nc e :
And I've found things in this life that still are real
a remainder refusing to be concealed

14
There is a noted attention to certain elements of hardcore that did not neatly fit in with the
normative logics underwriting hardcore and the narratives that characterize hardcore “history.”
Bands like Bad Brains and Dead Kennedys had entirely or partial African-American lineups, and
Husker Du’s two openly gay frontmen point us towards investigating these sites. Still, largely
hardcore’s arching normative logics dominated the scene.

15
The term “disidentify” owes much to the work of José Esteban Muñoz, who uses it to articulate a
peripheral relation that queers of color might have in their engagement with the mainstream. I have
an anxiety about simply adapting queer of color critique for straight white males, but Muñoz’s
articulations have helped me to think about the political relation of the wallflower figure to
normativity. See José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics
(1999).
189

And I've found the answer lies in a real emotion
Not the self-indulgence of a self-devotion.
16

Ly r i c ist a nd fr ontm a n Gu y P icc iot o’ s ins ist e nc e on a voc a bula r y of “ finding” r e c a ll s the
spatia l ec onom y of “ Guilt y of B e in g W hit e ,” but whe re M a c K a y e ’s n a rr a tor dr e w
distinctions between his feelings and those blac k b odies that e nge nde re d the m, P icc iot o’ s
na rr a tor is s olel y “ t a lki ng to [ him ] se lf” be c a use “ ther e ’s no on e that [ he ] know[ s] a s
we ll .” The “ re a l emoti on,” f or P icc iot o, is i nside, posit e d in contr a st t o the “ se lf -
indulgence of a self- d e vo ti on” that c ha ra c ter iz e s Mac Ka y e ’s c ompl a int s. W hil e Mac Ka y e wa s sar c a sti c a ll y “ g uil t y of be ing white,” P icc iot o pe rha ps f e lt g uil t y for being white.
For many hardcore youth, Rites was just another punk band – Piccioto and
bandmate Brendan Canty went on with MacKaye to form DIY darlings Fugazi, and the
scene moved on. But for some who recall their experiences at the only fifteen shows
Rites ever played, there were a handful of listeners who felt differently. Jenny Toomey, a
teenaged participant at the time who went on to start her own record label and eventually
work in media advocacy for the Ford Foundation, notes:
…a t a Ri tes show y ou c o uld ac tuall y b e in t he maj or it y be c a use y ou didn’t
dr ink, we re n ’t a n idi ot, a nd c a re d a bout emoti ons. I t w a s g re a t, l ike
flipping a coin, reversing the norms. When you went to a show you felt
like you could be who you liked to be. (as quoted in Greenwald 14)

16
Rites of Spring, “Remainder” (1985). Readers should note that the second section title (“And if I
started crying…”) is a lyrical reference to another song from the album, “Theme (If I Started
Crying).”
190

Toome y ’ s ac c ount does ha ve a n e leme nt of nostal g ia in it ( to which she re a dil y a dmi ts),
but one c a n’ t help but feel like something about emo held a particular saliency. If the
logic of the normative mainstream was to affect a kind of self-righteous pride – a
performance of privilege – then surely this specific claim to emotions, at a specific time
and place in hardcore, signaled a sea change for a new generation of wallflowers.
Certainly, we have reason to be careful in resuscitating the political saliency of
e mo’s a ff e c ti ve c ritiqu e – after all, feeling diff e r e nt doesn’ t nec e ss a ril y p r oduc e the kinds
of structural transformation that would change the way that normative logics of privilege
circulate in culture. But our desire to acknowledge the ways in which emo helps to push
a ga inst these domi na nt m a sc uli nit ies doe sn’t ne c e ssar il y h a ve to be muted i n the f a c e of
this fact. This, after all, is the particular dynamic o f w ha t L a ur e n B e rla nt m i g ht c a ll e mo’s
“ jux tapolit ica l” r e lation t o nor mativi t y . As a senti menta l, per ipher a l subcul ture – what
B e rl a nt m ig ht c a ll a n “ int im a te public” – e mo’s a ff e c ti ve labor “ flour ish[ e s] in prox im it y to the political because the political is deemed an elsewhere managed by elites who are
interested in reproducing the conditions of their objective superiority ” (Berlant Female
3). In other words, because the language of politics is always understood to already be
complicit in reproducing normativity and normative privilege, the turn to affect presents
an opportunity to move against, along, and beside the normative logics that emo critiques.
For many listeners growing up in these scenes, emo gave them a space not often
found in our culture: a site critical of normativity that acknowledged its own complicity
and shortcomings. But perhaps, in this acknowledgment, emo was always prepared to be
reabsorbed into the scenes it came from, a critical moment rather than a critical
191

moveme nt. Af ter D.C.’s small set of e mo bands broke up, there was nothing much left to
gravitate towards, and participants either grew up or got out. And so the first flourishing
of emo, which emerged in what ha d be c ome know n a s “Re volut ion S umm e r ,” f a d e d
away as quickly as it had appeared, refusing to cohere as its own emergent public. But
wha t soun ds he re li ke the c losi ng of f of e mo’s pos sibi li t y would soon prov e to be the opposite: in resisting these certain coherences, the marginal movement had become
something more like a structure that, in refusing the public, was able to continue to
emerge from the periphery over the course of the next two decades. Lonely kids
everywhere, without ever having to leave their bedrooms or computers, would have their
own chance at a summer revolution.

D O Y O U R P A R T T O S A V E T H E S C E N E A N D S T O P G O I N G T O S H O W S
Refusing the Public

“ B et w ee n one J u n e a n d Sep tem b er y o u ’ r e all I r e m e m b er . ”
-- f r o m “Fo r g et Me ” b y The Promise Ring, 1997

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to trying to think through emo – what it was, what it
sounded like, and what it stood for – was the fact that, after its initial emergence in the
D.C. hardcore scene, it disappeared from the musical and subcultural map entirely, only
to reappear several years later under a completely different sonic and aesthetic template.
(Indeed, it would eventually go on to repeat this cycle, disappearing in the late 90s to
again reemerge in the early part of the 21
st
century.) These sine waves of emergence and
192

disappearance, alongside and through other genres circulating at the time, made it
particularly difficult to develop a vocabulary and system for framing emo. And so for
every attempt Andy Greenwald makes in Nothing Feels Good to chart a coherent
genealogy of the scene, for instance, he ends up relying on ambiguous platitudes to
de sc ribe it : at va rious poi nts, h e r e fe rs to e mo as “ se e king a tan g ibl e c onn e c ti on out of
intangible things ,” “ re me mber e d…more for it s bri ll iant pr omise than its re a li z a ti on,” and
“ so ur g e nt, so spec i fic in i ts l y ric s that t he r e wa s v e r y li tt le r oom for move ment or growth ” (Greenwald 5, 32, 44). I t ’s this kind of va g ue ge ne a log y th a t ul ti m a tel y l e a ds
Greenwald to later propose emo as less a movement than a series of moments, and that
characterization allows him to link what otherwise might seem a disparate grouping of
artists and scenes.
That emo relies on the ambivalent discourse of unregulated affect is partially
responsible for these incoherences: As the lingua franca that connects disparate sets of
listeners across more normative conceptions of time and space, affect became a malleable
way in which individual listeners could collectively cathect to music that otherwise
seemed so personal and specific. But as I want to stress here, this incoherence is made
possible precisely when emo retains its peripheral stance: always speaking to the same
kinds of normativities in the same affective language, regardless of the time or location.
I t’s the re a son wh y we c a n look at testi moni e s of e mo listeners from early D.C. kids to
Hot Topic millenials and notice the same patterns and logics for gravitating towards the
musi c . As F a ll Out B o y l y r icist P e te W e ntz ’s r e fl e c ti on on latter da y ha rdc o re a nd his ba nd mate s’ de c isi on to l e a ve their s c e n e de mo nstrates, these tales and their circulation
193

help produce an archive that is much less genealogical than affective,
17
a structure rooted
in emotional authenticity as a response to privilege:
I t’s int e re sti ng th a t har d c or e in Amer ic a c a n kind of be a mi c ro c o sm of
America in general. When America slid right with Bush, I feel that
hardcore – at least in the Chicago scene – did as well. It went from being
really thought-provoking to bands getting on- sta ge a nd g oin g , ‘ W e don’ t
want to talk about all that shit any more . Now mos h, y ou f a gg ots.’ S o it be c a me somethin g that I didn’t l ove a n y mo re . (as quoted in Usinger)
18

Replace Bush with Reagan, 2003 with 1985, and this story could be that of any D.C.
ve ter a n. Emo’s e bb a nd f low, swe ll ing a nd re c e di ng a ga inst the tides of no rma ti ve masculini t y , isn’t, i t t ur ns out , a bout a hist or ica l c ohe re nc e a t all: it ’s sim ply a re sponse to
normativity that only makes sense in its reliance on the very thing it responds to.
That twisted definition borders on the evasive and the incoherent: two things that,
as I am arguing in t his s e c ti on, a re so t otall y e mo. I n tr a c in g the a rc s of e m o’ s eme r g e n c e and disappearance as they began to coincide with attempts by labels to market and codify

17
The idea of an “affective archive” owes much to Ann Cvetkovich’s conception of an “archive of
feelings.” Her reconstruction of the ephemeral lesbian archive is quite differently politically situated –
she is attending to a public whose narrative isn’t recast in normative retellings – but her rearticulation
of what might compose an archive has very much influenced my work here. As she writes:
In insisting on the value of apparently marginal or ephemeral materials, the collectors of gay
and lesbian archives propose that affects—associated with nostalgia, personal memory,
fantasy, and trauma—make a document significant. The archive of feelings is both material
and immaterial, at once incorporating objects that might not ordinarily be considered
archival and at the same time resisting documentation because sex and feelings are too
personal or too ephemeral to leave records. (Cvetkovich “Lesbian Feelings” 112)

18
Indeed, it would be startling for many to discover the poppy emo band’s roots in the hardcore
scene, where they played in bands like Racetraitor, a Chicago hardcore act dedicated to a political
critique of white privilege and colonial nationalism. The epigraph attributed to Fall Out Boy lyricist
Pete Wentz illustrates this ambiguous, peripheral relation as well: See Charlotte Cripps, “Fall Out
Boy: This is Hardcore,” (2006).
194

the sc e ne , I wa nt t o dra w out t he wa y s in whi c h e mo’s a mbi va lent r e spons e to becoming
a distinct, coherent public actually tells us quite a bit about the work that a critique of
normativity from the normative subject does. By looking at some of the local trajectories
that bands and listeners made in the mid-90s in response to promoters hoping to
c a pit a li z e on the “ ne x t bi g thi n g ,” I wa nt t o a c c e nt the othe r side of the p e ri phe r y : i ts
a bil it y to be, a s Dic k He b dig e mi g ht sa y , “ dif fuse d ” a nd “ d e fuse d, ” incor po ra ted ba c k
into the normativities against which it was positioned.
19
Though this may seem a rather
innocuous point – that, in the e nd, e mo ki ds ca n ’t r e a ll y e ve r t ra nsc e nd the n or mative
structures from which they derive – I suggest that it actually encourages us to think of
other models for a c ritiqu e of no rma ti vit y th a t don’t r ely on the heroic or anti-heroic
narratives that we tend to desire.
* * *
Less of a proclamation and more of a response, emo has, from its inception,
always felt in dialogue with the publics from which it came. Its sentimental aesthetics
tended to fold wallflowers into themselves, of course, but its insular fashion statements
(bangs swept over the eyes, hooded sweatshirts pulled up) and public displays of affect
were meant to reveal at least as much as they were intended to cover up. Far from its
reception as a potentially dangerous and lonely subculture – the terror of its queerness or
its apparent links to suicide
20
– e mo’s mela n c holi c r e lation t o the w or ld alwa y s put t he
19
Dick Hebdige refers to diffusion and defusion as “two forms of incorporation” in his seminal
Subculture: The Meaning of Style, a work whose influence cannot be stressed enough in this article (or on
punk in general). See Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979).

20
See fn. 12.
195

emphasis on relation, not phenomenon. And so in the mid-90s, as bands like Jimmy Eat
World, Mineral, Sunny Day Real Estate, and The Promise Ring began to develop an
increasingly distinct set of aesthetics (with increasing attention from markets searching
for a tidy commodity), something unsettling began to happen: for the first time, emo was
being asked to cohere on its own.
At first, many of these bands responded with an uneven anxiety, often
dissembling in the spotlight as it moved from the front of the stage to the back of the
room. It became something of a joke in the scene: no group could last past two albums
without breaking up or changing their sound, and many bands refused to acknowledge
not onl y their pr e se nc e in t he “ sc e n e ,” but t he e x ist e nc e of s a id sce n e in t he fir st pl a c e .
21

In being asked to stretch beyond the limits of one of punk’ s “a fte rlives,” in the
diminution of emotional hardcore to emo, the mid-90s bands were forced to negotiate
what it would really mean to emerge as a distinct phenomenon. From the periphery,
e mo’s jux tapolit ica l re lation t o nor mativi t y h a d a ll owe d it t he temporary possibility of
negotiating the margins of the cultures to which it belonged, ambivalently resting in the
spac e of E v e S e d g wic k ’s “ be twe e n.” As it c onti nu e d to bec ome le g ibl e to t he mainstream, however, the scene felt the tug of normativity in its continual quest to
expand the range of possibilities for the privileged subject.
Eventually, of course, the temptations of coherence and the rewards of
normativity became much more difficult to resist. As Jenny Toomey, who earlier spoke
longingly of her affection for the scene, claims:

21
This circulated “fact” was at the center of the plot of a heavily circulated online “Emo Game,” that
made its rounds in the scene. See “The Emogame Classic Games,” (Starving Eyes 2002-2004).
196

Once punk and hardcore had swelled nationally to hundreds of thousands
of people, only then did people start grading what was punk and what
wa sn’t. W ha t wa s onc e a hug e l y dive rse spa c e qui c kl y c odifie d int o the
sound of a white boy singing and crying. (as quoted in Greenwald 18).
Codification, as Toomey puts it, drags a coherence to emo that we might see as
wrenching it from the periphery. With an aesthetic turn from interiorized, nostalgic
longing to sad songs about mean girls, a familiar hierarchy of bodies soon began to form
withi n the inc re a sin g l y int e ll ig ibl e a nd c oh e re nt sc e ne . As J e ssi c a Hoppe r wr it e s, “E mo
[became] just another forum where women were locked in a stasis of outside observation,
obser ving ou rse lves thro ug h the e y e s of othe rs… On a pedestal, on our backs. Muses at
best. Cum rags or invisible at worst ” ( “Where the Girls Aren ’t ”). In other words, the
scene so easily began to slide back into the logics it had once appeared to situate itself
against; we need not look any farther than the latent misogyny brewing in its acerbic
break- up son g s (“ I c ould di ssec t y ou / and g ut y ou on thi s st a g e / not a s eloq ue nt as I ma y ha ve im a g ined / but i t wil l g e t t he job done ” ),
22
the insularity of its aggrandized self-pity
(“ I t onl y hurts whe n I bre a the” ),
23
and the complacency o f its ut opian impul s e s (“ I f I could I would shrink myself and sink through your skin to your blood cells and remove
wha teve r m a ke s y ou hur t but I a m t oo w e a k to be y o ur c ur e ” ).
24
The more that emo came

22
Fall Out Boy, “My Heart is the Worst Kind of Weapon,” from My Heart Will Always Be the B-Side to
My Tongue, (2005). The title of this section is a reference to another Fall Out Boy song, “Get Busy
Living or Get Busy Dying (Do Your Part to Save the Scene and Stop Going to Shows)” (2005).

23
Atreyu, “Someone’s Standing on my Chest” (2001).

24
Brand New, “Guernica” (2003).
197

away from the periphery into something that could be identified, that had a sound and a
look, the more it came to form its own normative public.
This i s not to off e r a r e du c ti onist r e a ding o f how e mo “w e nt bad” whe n it eventually went public, but it is, rather, to stress the tenuousness of the periphery in its
proximity to normativity. In many cases, as emo increasingly became a marketing tool
that labels and bands used to sell records, it gave license for these boys to perform the
excessively affective masculinities everyone expected of them. Without regulation,
thoug h, e mo’s ins ular tur n stayed insular, simply recirculating increasingly one-
dimensional narratives to an audience that looked and acted just like them.
I t’s e a s y to su ppose that t he purists r e fusin g thi s publ ic sta y e d t rue to emo’ s
egalitarian ideals and critiques of normativity. B ut don’ t be f ooled – ther e a re n’ t an y heroes on either side of the periphery: those bands and listeners that withdrew from
e mo’s more visible publics often ended up in heteronormative normalcies all on their
own. As the c onc ludi n g s ong to The W onde r Ye a r s’s The Upsides album put it:
So everyone moved in with their girlfriends
In one bedroom apartments
In the town that we grew up in.
And all my friends are in bar bands
I don ’t know how it happ e ne d; I hope it pays the rent. ( “All my Friends ”)
Packed up and ready to move on, well-prepped for the narratives against which they were
always positioned, listeners ambivalently felt the tug of what normativity would call
“ gr owin g up.”
198

A F T E R T H E A F T E R L I V E S Affect Sin Fronteras

Fucking Bullshit, niños. No hay un movimiento.

-- Telehit VJ Kristoff, on Emo (in its original multilingual iteration)

The e mo kids don ’t bot he r me. W ha t bother s m e is that the y t a ke a pla c e a s if it w e re theirs...It also bothers me a bit that they look more like girls than boys.

-- Anonymous Anti-emo Youth, after the March 7, 2008 riots at the Plaza de
Armas in Querétaro, Mexico (translated from the original Spanish)

As emo gradually succumbed to the beck and call of major label contracts and
corporate-sponsored summer tours after the turn of the 21
st
century, its coherence as a
public became more firmly delineated. With distinct sartorial aesthetics, a limited range
of sonic palates, and the codification of white male sadness at the center of it all, emo had
fully detached itself from the periphery, now ready to embrace its time in the national
eye.
The only problem, it seemed, was that disaffected white youth were no longer
really listening. On summer Warped Tours, at local clu bs l ike A na h e im ’s Cha in R e a c ti on
or P omona’ s Gla ss Hous e , the a udien c e s unde rtook y e t a nother major shi ft, movi ng f rom
a diverse D.C. subculture to a lonely set of mid-90s males and finally here, to
overwhelming numbers of mixed-gender crowds, most frequently comprised of working
or middle class youth of color. It was easy, of course, to consider these iterations of emo
“ de riva ti ve ” b y thi s poi nt – a c laim t o im pose a no rma ti ve ge ne a log y th a t er a se d e mo’s
peripheral past – but as it turned out, these listen e r s g e n e ra ll y c ouldn’t c a r e less a bout
199

previous generations that, in all likelihood, were now white dude dads in their mid-30s.
With an increasing departure from normative gender performances, an emerging alliance
with queer youth communities,
25
and a newfound association with nonnormative bodies,
emo regained its political saliency as a politics emerging from the periphery once more.
At the margins of white subcultures that embraced feeling different, and family
and school cultures that demanded normative conformity, a new crowd of emo kids
negotiated the terrain of affective rebellion. On some level, we might want to consider
thi s a ne w f a c e t t o e mo’s a ff e c ti ve a r c hive, the n a tura l deve lopm e nt of a na t ional sc e ne .
But the scope of influence and severity o f r e spons e to emo’ s thi rd w a ve a ls o a sks us to
speak to the specificity of normative policing in the 21
st
century. In this final section, I
want to look at the ways in which a new generation of peripheral listeners negotiated not
only the terrain of local music scenes, and not even only the terrain of normative
masc uli nit ies, but i nde e d the te rr a in of th e na ti on it se lf. Emo’ s mov e ment to wor king class communities of color, and its eventual emergence among las tribus urbanas de
México, help us to unpack the periphery as a structure that speaks in the 21
st
century to
the ways in which certain normativities circulated well beyond the limited borders of the
nation.
This shift in subject merits a shift in perspective. Instead of continuing to figure
the periphery as a space for emo to respond, a strategy which helped to articulate its
nuanced critique of normative structures, here I want to look at the ways in which 21
st

25
See, for instance, the consideration of queer youth communities and emo subculture in Brian
Peters, “Emo Gay Boys and Subculture: Postpunk Queer Youth and (Re)thinking Images of
Masculinity” (2010).
200

century emo was increasingly being responded to, scrutinized by politicians and punks
alike. As the scene began to garner an overwhelming public visibility, its critiques of
normativity no longer went unnoticed, and it was soon met with a more aggressive
backlash. In the US, for instance, social media sites circulated innumerable videos
documenti ng bull y in g , f i g hts, and p a rodie s of e mo ki ds, an d “ Na ti ona l Em o B e a tdo wn
Da y ” ha d b e e n info rma ll y e stabli shed onli ne a s a c oordina ted r e sponse to t he sce ne .
26
In
the spring of 2008, across numerous public plazas from Chihuahua to Chiapas, a series of
coordinated physical assaults on emo kids spread throughout Mexico as well. The
increased normative policing of bodies across cultural and geopolitical lines may have
looked different – domes ti c scho ol y a rd bu ll y in g v e rsus the w idespr e a d “ rio ts” r e porte d in
Mexico – but, as I would suggest here, these strategies were much more alike than the US
in particular would like to have conceived.
I nd e e d, US cov e ra ge of t he e ve nts i n Me x ico ( omi nousl y dubbe d a s the “ e mo
riots”) sig n a led its own c ompl ica ted c ombi na ti on of total indifference and subtle moral
outrage. For mainstream magazines like Time, emo in Mexico was, on the one hand, just
a nother de riva ti ve NA F T A e x port, “ one of the c ol or ful y outh c ult ur e s popu lar in t he US
and Europe that have swept over the Rio Grande as the nation opens up its economy and
politics and a new generation grows up with the Internet and cable TV ” (Grillo). At the
sa me tim e , howe ve r, Me x ico’ s re a c ti on wa s de e m e d too s e ve r e , unthi nka ble in the
c ontex t of the “ c ivi li z e d” US: late r in the a rticle , Ioa n Gr il lo wr it e s, “[ T] he a ssailants

26
The ubiquity and proliferation of these memes is typical of material circulating in online youth
cultures. A simple search on YouTube or Google for any of these phrases yields many of the residual
artifacts (posters for National Emo Beatdown Day) that were widespread at the time.
201

target the emos for dressing effeminately, still a provocative act for many in a macho
Mex ico.” That there is some truth to this latter claim, most widely evidenced by the
circulated video of an anonymous Mexican youth c laimi ng that “ it a lso bo t he rs me a bit that the y look m or e li ke g irls t ha n bo y s,” should not dete r us f rom r e a din g the sa li e nc e o f
“ pr ovoc a ti on” a nd “ ma c h o” in a U S c ontex t as w e ll .
27
Af ter a ll , e mo’s ini ti a l per ipher a l
emergence in Washington, D.C. was precisely in response to these same normatively
masculine logics, just iterated in distinctly US formations. And so in acknowledging the
coherence of similar normative logics circulating on both sides of the border, is there a
way, I wonder here at the end of this article, in which we can begin to think about a
periphery that can listen to normativity even in the transnational present?
28

Admittedly, it seems disingenuous in this final section to combine two very
different kinds of listeners – US youth of color and los jóvenes de México. But if we are
to l ist e n c a re full y to t he wa y s in whi c h Me x ico’ s emo r iot s ec hoe d quit e si mi lar responses to emo in the US, then I would suggest we can also find a way in which these
two seemingly disparate groups might sound mor e a li ke than w e im a g ine. I f thi s doe sn’t

27
This quote is an English translation of a youth interviewed in the widely circulated Azteca Trece
news report on the Querétaro attacks. This translation is taken from Daniel Hernandez’s coverage of
the event in Flaunt magazine. See “The Emo Wars: Dispatch from Mexico City,” (2008). Hernandez
would go on to write more at length about the specific events as part of his later book-length project
on subculture and politics in Mexico City. See Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in
the Twenty-First Century (2011).

28
Besides general press circulating in Mexico at the time, many of my insights here derive from a
series of formal reports commissioned by La Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos, a human rights
organization independent of the government which reports on potential right violations in Mexico.
In 2009, the CNDH issued an “Informe Especial de la CNDH sobre el Grupo Juvenil Conocido como Emo.”
It includes a specific and thorough account of the 2008 riots, but it also has a wealth of historically
accurate information about the specific origins of emo in Washington, D.C., ethnographic interviews
with Mexican youth in the scene, and even psychological reports on the social, affective, and
behavioral tendencies of its participants.
202

seem like something that the US actively tried to delineate, look no further than the
c irc ulation of Te l e hit VJ Kr ist of f’ s mi sog y nist ic r a nt as it be c a me a n e a s y sc a pe g oa t i n
the eyes of the US media for the incitem e nt of the e mo riot s: t he media ’s insi stenc e on
blaming Kristoff for the attacks helped to chart a distinct line between a progressive US
a nd a “ ma c ho Mex ico,” hig hli g hti n g our sta rk na t ional “ diff e r e nc e s” much li ke contemporaneously circulating accounts o f “ M e x i c o’ s dru g w a rs.”
But born Kristoff Razcinsky to Polish parents in Moscow, 1974, Kristoff might
serve as a much more complicated interlocutor for the transnational normative policing of
third wave emo than the US would like to think. His now-famous rant
29
coheres as an
e x e mpl a r y tr a nsnational it e ra ti on: deliver e d on a s ubsi diar y o f L a ti n Ame ri c a ’s la r ge st
media conglomerate (Televisa, which also has a strategic alliance with Viacom/MTV),
Kr ist of f’ s r a nt ca ptur e s the c ritiqu e of on e US ex port – emo – with the defense of another
– punk. It goes on to circulate via YouTube and MTV, easily circulated media for
internet-savvy youth on both sides of the border. And it culminates in Kr ist of f’ s swit c h
int o Eng li sh at the p re c ise mom e nt of his ra nt’s a p e x – Fucking Bullshit, niños – spilling
over across national borders, spoken in the transnational language of normative policing.
Maybe these fronteras are more complicated after all.
Soon, of course, the sensational news reports lost interest, and the riots were
written off as the sad symptoms of some backwards neighbor to the south. Emo’s hold on
the public’ s atte nti on c ou ld onl y last so l ong , a nd b y then the US m e dia ha d a lre a d y mad e its point clear. And yet, I think there may be a way in which, at the peripheral end of this

29
The multilingual rant is translated into English and can be seen at the beginning of this article. See
also fn. 1.
203

article, perhaps we could stand in as peripheral listeners to hear something different
among these tenuous borders. In the 21
st
century, after all, no time could be more salient
for us to listen carefully to those instances when the US chooses to draw its lines – we’re
not macho Mexico – a nd whe n it doe sn’t – the North American Free Trade Agreement.
At the margins of these cultures, at the periphery of a changing transnational topography,
perhaps we too can hear coherences in these normative contradictions.
* * *
No hay un movimiento: There is no movement.
I wonde r, in the e nd, if K ristoff wa sn’t pa rtiall y rig ht af t e r a ll . P erhaps no hay un
movimiento has always been the peripheral logic of emo – committed only to a response,
free to emerge against the tangled webs of normativity in the language of unregulated
affect. Always shifting, forever ambivalent in the margins of changing cultures. It ought
to r e mi nd us, onc e more , to re c a ll the e t y mol o g ica l potential of “ e mot ion” i n the sim ple
a c t of “ b e ing mov e d” : moved, that is, to other bodies, other politics, other normativities,
unraveling.
No longer the periphery – periferia.
No longer the wallflower – el marginado.

204

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract One need not strain to find examples of male sentimentality in contemporary US popular culture: From frequent news stories on "Weeper of the House" John Boehner, to the success of Judd Apatow’s poignant "bromance" movies, to last year’s film adaptation of Stephen Chbosky’s celebrated adolescent novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999), the man of feeling seems more present and popular than ever. With an unsettling display of excessive emotion emanating from the male body, each iteration provokes in viewers, listeners, and cultural critics any one of several disparate responses: Whether committed to the transgressive potential of a male who feels different because he offers vulnerability where others offer hardened restraint, or whether insistent in the claim that these texts simply add to what Gail Bederman would call the "remaking" of a continually complex normative subject, we find in the man of feeling an ambivalent subject for the public sphere. ❧ The initial question for readers, listeners, or viewers is often a simple one: is male sentimentality transformative and progressive, or is it pathetic and self-serving? But the presumption that we must answer one way or another belies the historical and cultural complexity of the man of feeling, and merely reinforces a kind of political approach to reading that simply replicates our own attitudes and relation to normativity and its privileges. This dissertation – under the impulse of recent work in queer theory and affect to reach closer to, rather than further from, normativity – takes up the counterintuitive position that we might draw this unlikely subject of the wallflower out from the sidelines and use him to interrogate normativity not from outside, but rather beside, its unsteady borders. It asks a central question – What does it mean for a critique of normativity to come from the normative subject? – and argues that the "peripheral" reading of normativity he helps enable might serve to render the logics of normativity in different ways than we can with more traditionally oppositional forms of critique.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Carrillo-Vincent, Matthew (author)

Core Title The work of being a wallflower: the peripheral politics of male sentimentality

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 07/30/2013

Defense Date 05/07/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag affect,curriculum,emo,emotion,gender,male sentimentality,OAI-PMH Harvest,periphery,public,Race,sentimentality,wallflower

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Halberstam, Jack (committee chair), Anderson, Emily Hodgson (committee member), Gordon, Michelle (committee member), Kun, Joshua D. (committee member)

Creator Email matthew.carrillovincent@gmail.com,mdcarril@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-306189

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Identifier etd-CarrilloVi-1889.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-306189 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-CarrilloVi-1889.pdf

Dmrecord 306189

Document Type Dissertation

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Rights Carrillo-Vincent, Matthew

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Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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