Creep: A Life, A Theory, An Apology

Published: 08/29/2017

Creep Listed as a Finalist for a 2018 Literary Lambda Award (Gay Memoir)! Creeps surround us, seemingly everywhere. People creep up on each other both on the streets and online, with digital technologies vectoring a lot of cyber-stalking. It’s so easy to spy on people that “creep catching” has even become a form of news[…]

Luminol Theory

Published: 08/24/2017

Representations of forensic procedures saturate popular culture in both fiction and true crime. One of the most striking forensic tools used in these narratives is the chemical luminol, so named because it glows an eerie greenish-blue when it comes into contact with the tiniest drops of human blood. Luminol is a deeply ambivalent object: it[…]

Kill Boxes: Facing the Legacy of US-Sponsored Torture, Indefinite Detention, and Drone Warfare

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Published: 03/02/2017

Kill Boxes addresses the legacy of US-sponsored torture, indefinite detention, and drone warfare by deciphering the shocks of recognition that humanistic and artistic responses to violence bring to consciousness if readers and viewers have eyes to face them. Beginning with an analysis of the ways in which the hooded man from Abu Ghraib became iconic,[…]

Helvete 3: Bleeding Black Noise

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Published: 12/14/2016

Not to be confused with metal studies, music criticism, ethnography, or sociology, Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory is a speculative and creative endeavor, one which seeks ways of thinking that count as Black Metal events — and indeed, to see how Black Metal might count as thinking. Theory of Black Metal, and Black[…]

A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler

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Published: 12/16/2016

A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler uses the chance synchronicity of the 2013 Israeli parliamentary elections and literary theorist Judith Butler’s controversial Brooklyn College address calling for the boycotting of Israeli academic, cultural, and economic institutions as an occasion for examining possible relations between Jewishness and state-centered forms of self-governance.[…]

The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness

Published: 11/04/2017

Is it possible to conceive of a Hello Kitty Middle Ages or a Tickle Me Elmo Renaissance? The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first reference to “cute” in the sense of “attractive, pretty, charming” to 1834. More recently, Sianne Ngai has offered a critical overview of the cuteness of the twentieth-century avant-garde within the context[…]

The Republic of Cthulhu: Lovecraft, the Weird Tale, and Conspiracy Theory

Published: 11/07/2016

If parapolitics, a branch of radical criminology that studies the interactions between public entities and clandestine agencies, is to develop as an academic discipline, then it must develop a coherent theory of aesthetics in order to successfully perform its primary function: to render perceptible extra-judicial phenomena that have hitherto resisted formal classification. Wilson offers the work[…]