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Damon R Young

University of California, Berkeley, French and Film/Media, Faculty Member

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Associate Professor of French and Film & Media at UC Berkeley, and faculty in the Program in Critical Theory. Formerly, assistant professor and postdoctoral scholar in the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan.

My next project, "After the 'Private Self'," offers a media history of the subject through a study of self-representation from Rousseau's Confessions to Kim Kardashian's Selfish.

https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2020/03/25/safe-spaces/
Phone: (510) 664-7442
Address: 6224 Dwinelle Hall,
University of California,
Berkeley CA 94720

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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Queens College of the City University of New York

Texas Christian University

Geoffrey Hondroudakis

University of Melbourne

Ateneo de Davao University

William A. Terra

Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

University of Warwick

Jonathan S Carter

Georgia Southwestern State University

Susanne Ylönen

University of Jyväskylä

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Books by Damon R Young

Making Sex Public, and Other Cinematic Fantasies

Duke University Press, Theory Q, 2018

(Available at https://www.dukeupress.edu/making-sex-public-and-other-cinematic-fantasies.) Beginn... more (Available at https://www.dukeupress.edu/making-sex-public-and-other-cinematic-fantasies.) Beginning in the late 1950s, representations of and narratives about sex proliferated on French and U.S. movie screens. Cinema began to display forms of sexuality that were no longer strictly associated with domesticity nor limited to heterosexual relations between loving couples. Women’s bodies and queer sexualities became intensely charged figures of political contestation, aspiration, and allegory, central to new ways of imagining sexuality and to new liberal understandings of individual freedom and social responsibility. In Making Sex Public Damon R. Young tracks the emergence of two conflicting narratives: on the one hand, a new model of sex as harmoniously integrated into civic existence; on the other, an idea of women’s and queer sexuality as corrosive to the very fabric of social life. Taking a transatlantic perspective from the late ‘50s through the present, from And God Created Woman and Barbarella to Cruising and Shortbus, Young argues that cinema participated in the transformation of the sexual subject while showing how women and queers were both agents and objects of that transformation.

Papers by Damon R Young

Meme Aesthetics

Representations, 2024

Introduction to a special issue of Representations (issue 168, Fall 2024) on Meme Aesthetics, co-... more

The Fantasy of Pornography

Porn Studies, 2024

Introduction to the 10th anniversary special issue of the journal Porn Studies, revisiting and re... more Introduction to the 10th anniversary special issue of the journal Porn Studies, revisiting and rethinking the pioneering work of Linda Williams from a variety of new angles. The introduction examines the protean concept of fantasy and what it tells about sexuality's fundamental relation to language, theatricality, and representation, as a way of revisiting the anti-porn feminist critiques of porn --and sex. This is followed by a series of contributions by luminaries in sexuality studies reflecting on and developing concepts from Williams' oeuvre.

$Figure 13. Molly Vaughn, ‘Sizing My Breast Implants’ (25 inch x 30 inch oil painting on canvas, 2022). AN AUHIE UIE OIZITTG IVIY DICGot HITPIGTIls. THIET VWarll. A snail’s operculum? Pellucid foreskin? Light refracted into grisail mplants. Folded drops - drooled want — against the mercurial reflectio e by these viscous n of a tray. The per- pective pours the implants towards us, spilling off the tray, off the canvas, off into the hickening space between our eyes and the surface of the canvas. W' ho wants what? To vant breasts, these breasts, her body is subjected to a wish. A body wish, a body wanted. A wish for different others, their desire. But also — less bearable to know - vant’s polymorphous perversity, its anatomical mischief. Indispensab yut still, bodies are more than closures. e and compulsory cewalhess tesvaccemmew caches bese bles Ted whee tec bese heccweads 0s ie Hes eee 0c cama fmwee$

differences, 2023

From Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani, edited by Jacques Khalip and John Paul Ricco, differ... more

The Pathological Gaze

In Media Res, 2023

Is there any more use-value to film theory's concept of the "male gaze"? From In Media Res specia... more

In Defense of Psychoanalytic Film Theory (Oxford Handbook of Film Theory)

Oxford Handbook of Film Theory, 2022

"There is a big secret about sex," Leo Bersani once wrote: "most people don't like it." What is t... more "There is a big secret about sex," Leo Bersani once wrote: "most people don't like it." What is true of sex is also true of theory, and no doubt doubly so when it comes to psychoanalytic theory, which conjoins what many would see as the worst aspects of each, specializing in claims (like Bersani's) that defy empirical verification and relentlessly turning up sex everywhere--behind every tree a phallus, behind every pack of wolves a Father. Psychoanalysis, cornerstone of the out-of-favor "hermeneutics of suspicion, " allegedly knows in advance what it is going to find, then finds it. In this chapter, I argue that cinema as a historically specific technical medium--indeed, the dominant cultural medium of the twentieth century--requires a psychoanalytic theory; which is in part because cinema and psychoanalysis emerge at the end of the nineteenth century, as part of the same techno-historical-economic assemblage. In the classical period of film theory, discussions of the "ontology" of cinema focused on its material grounding in the photographic image. While cinema's technical (i.e., photographic) realism is surely fundamental to its ontology, I propose that equally fundamental is that cinema is a technology of fantasy--which means it invites a psychoanalysis.

Melodramas of Subjectivity: James Baldwin, Lyle Ashton Harris, Ming Wong

Selva, 2022

Melodrama is one of the most expansive modes of modern culture and one of the least valued. Assoc... more Melodrama is one of the most expansive modes of modern culture and one of the least valued. Associated by definition with popular, as opposed to high, culture, the designation of an artwork as "melodramatic" functions as an aesthetic judgment that situates it outside the realm of the classic, deeming it ephemeral rather than enduring. Where the classic implies an ideal adequation of form to content, "melodramatic" evokes formal and affective excess, an indulgence in sentimentality and/or a perverse embrace of artifice. In melodrama, form puts itself at the service of affect, becoming self-conscious but never quite self-reflexive; for at the same time, melodrama is an inexorably narrative mode, one in which affect is itself enchained to narrative. In this essay, I argue that cinematic melodrama is a genre that has helped shape queer subjectivity and queer aesthetics in the twentieth century, giving aesthetic (though not often narrative) form to gender-dissident ways of being, feeling, and embodying. Far from being definitionally opposed to the classic, melodrama, in short, is a classic queer genre, a queer form of the classic.

Teorema's Death Drive

Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema, 2021

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) was not only the first film by its maker to explicitly thema... more Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) was not only the first film by its maker to explicitly thematize homosexuality, it was also (I argue in this chapter) the first ever work of queer theory. Made in 1968, Teorema appears at a moment of political upheaval, but strangely to the side of Pasolini's Communist affiliations, it focuses, perversely, on a series of sexual encounters between a handsome, unnamed stranger (Terence Stamp) and every member of a wealthy, Milanese family. While some critics have emphasized the symmetry that puts hetero- and homosexual encounters, in this schema, on the same plane, this essay argues that what is at stake here is an aesthetic inscription of what Guy Hocquenghem, a few years later, would call “homosexual desire.” Far from a socially intelligible sexual orientation, this would name a force of and desire for dissolution and revolution, both radically material and confoundingly metaphysical.

"A Man with a Mother: Tarnation and the Subject of Confession"

I Confess! edited by Thomas Waugh and Brandon Arroyo, 2019

Jonathan Caouette’s self-portrait film Tarnation (2003) was compiled on iMovie from home-recorded... more Jonathan Caouette’s self-portrait film Tarnation (2003) was compiled on iMovie from home-recorded footage collected over a twenty-year period in various formats: cassette tapes, Super-8, VHS, and digital video. Coinciding with and anticipating the rise of social media as a new “cultural dominant,” the film stages the performance/ confession/ narration of the self at a moment of transforming technological platforms. This essay argues that in so doing, the film also indexes a deeper transformation: that of the subject’s foundation in a domain of opaque sexuality.

"Ironies of Web 2.0"

Post-45, 2019

From "How to Be Now," a special issue of Post-45, edited by Sarah Chihaya, Joshua Kotin, and Kino... more From "How to Be Now," a special issue of Post-45, edited by Sarah Chihaya, Joshua Kotin, and Kinohi Nishikawa. Ambiguous irony prevails across the media landscapes of the digital era, from 4chan to Instagram, SMS-speak, and contemporary cinema, modifying from within the three aesthetic categories Sianne Ngai associates with the contemporary - the zany, the cute, and the interesting. In this paper, I argue that what Kierkegaard termed the “absolute negativity” of irony -- embedded in the technological platforms of Web 2.0 -- creates transformed conditions for aesthetic judgment, authorship, politics, sexuality, and subjectivity itself.
Available at http://post45.research.yale.edu/2019/05/ironies-of-web-2-0/

"The Liberal Sexual Subject: A Conversation with Damon R. Young"

by Damon R Young and Nicholas Baer

Film Quarterly, 2018

An interview conducted by Nicholas Baer on Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies. (Film... more

Social Text: "The Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalism"

by Damon R Young and Nico Baumbach

Social Text, 2016

The introduction -- titled "For A Political Critique of Culture" -- to a special issue of Social ... more The introduction -- titled "For A Political Critique of Culture" -- to a special issue of Social Text (34.2, June 2016) co-edited by Nico Baumbach, Damon R. Young, and Genevieve Yue. Considers the stakes for theory in the humanities today, via a discussion of debates about various kinds of reading (symptomatic vs. surface) and the legacies of Marxist cultural criticism and its methods in the 21st century.

"Revisiting Postmodernism: An Interview with Fredric Jameson"

by Damon R Young and Nico Baumbach

From Social Text 34.2 (June 2016), special issue on "The Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalis... more From Social Text 34.2 (June 2016), special issue on "The Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalism". On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” in the New Left Review, Jameson and the editors look back at the essay and discuss the current state of capitalism, theory, art, and culture, the question of periodization, the meaning of "the waning of affect," and other topics.

Revisiting Postmodernism

Social Text, 2016

If you were to think through the project of defining postmodernism today, following the basic fra... more If you were to think through the project of defining postmodernism today, following the basic framework in the 1984 essay or the 1991 book, which constitutive features would you emphasize? Are there aspects you emphasized thirty years ago that seem less relevant today, and have others emerged as more significant in recent decades? If there has been a shift, how do we account for it? Fredric Jameson: The first thing I would do is to separate these terms postmodernity and postmodernism, because people have often thought that my first description of it was a sort of aesthetic inventory of stylistic features. In part it was that, but I had understood it in terms of periodization and social structure. And now I realize that it would have been much clearer

"Gag the Fag, or Tops and Bottoms, Persons and Things"

Porn Studies, 2017

Scholarly studies of pornography since the advent of Linda Williams’ Hard Core have typically ass... more Scholarly studies of pornography since the advent of Linda Williams’ Hard Core have typically assumed that pornography is a genre which pursues the secrets of sexual pleasure. But much recent online gay pornography, far from imagining a ‘pornotopia’ in which free agents endlessly pursue their mutual pleasure, stages a radical dichotomy between tops and bottoms, in which the bottom is rhetorically transformed into what Catharine MacKinnon once described as a ‘thing for sexual use’. Examining recent online French pornography and the popular US series Gag the Fag, this article argues that neither the rubric of ‘pleasure’ nor the diagnosis of misogyny provide an adequate framework for gauging what is at stake in these theatricalized and mediatized scenes of domination. At first glance, such pornography appears to confirm the most damning pronouncements of anti-pornography feminists, reducing sex to a relation of instrumentalization. But, I argue, it is not exactly clear who is instrumentalized and for whom: both top and bottom labour in the service of what appears to be something like a law, a principle of abstract differentiation not reducible to anatomical sex. At the same time, it is precisely the body’s inability to fully submit to the requirements of this law, or to the idealization it requires, that this pornography solicits, exposes, and celebrates. This dynamic cannot be reduced to confessions of the body’s ‘pleasure’, and its formalization as a genre suggests that pleasure may not be what lies at the heart of sex. (Published in Porn Studies, special issue "Gay Male Porn Now," ed. John Mercer, 2017)

"Visage/Con: Catherine Breillat and the Antinomies of Sex"

Qui Parle, May 2016

"I cannot accept the proximity of my face and my vagina." So says Alice, the teenaged protagonist... more "I cannot accept the proximity of my face and my vagina." So says Alice, the teenaged protagonist of Catherine Breillat's 1976 debut film, Une vraie jeune fille (A Real Young Girl). And yet face and sex are made constantly proximate in the montage and camerawork of Breillat's films, which oscillate between the two as if trying to enframe their incommensurability, to distill it into visual form. This essay unpacks Alice's conundrum, one that recurs in the later Romance (1999), and explores the philosophy of sex at work across Breillat's oeuvre, considering its relation to other 1970s feminist images of the female body, to theories of the close-up, and to a longer tradition of thinking about sex as incompatible with equality, from Kant and Sade through Andrea Dworkin. Are film technologies themselves implicated in the conundrum they also document? A revisionist reading of some of the legacies of the 1970s.

"The Vicarious Look, or Andy Warhol's Apparatus Theory"

Film Criticism, 2015

Film Criticism 39.2 (Winter 2015), special issue, "New Approaches to Cinematic Identification," e... more Film Criticism 39.2 (Winter 2015), special issue, "New Approaches to Cinematic Identification," eds. Elizabeth Reich and Scott C. Richmond
1970s film theory was obsessed with sex and desire, but have we ever had a *queer* theory of the cinema? Not really: a heterosexual presumption was built into apparatus theory's key formulations, but on the other hand, yes: it is latent within apparatus theory's analysis of the structural conditions (technological, social and psychic) of the cinema. In order to make this clear, the essay turns to Metz's contemporary Andy Warhol, approaching him not as a gay iconoclast but as a theorist of the cinema, and putting him as such in conversation with Metz and Baudry, as well as Stanley Cavell and Linda Williams. Against those critics who have (for good reasons) sought to defend Warhol's films from the charge of "voyeurism," the essay argues that what is indeed voyeuristic in those films discloses the voyeurism structurally inherent to the cinema and reveals it to be, if not always specifically sexual, fundamentally queer. Finally, it argues that even as apparatus theory describes a set of technological and spectatorial conditions that are no longer paradigmatic, its signal achievement was to lay bare the relation of technological elements to psychically dense modes of subjectivity, and as such it provides a crucial foundation for asking in what ways post-cinematic media produce a new orientation of, and technical infrastructure for, desire.

"Queer Seriousness"

World Picture 9, Jul 2014

Is the Internet the medium of an "ironic free-fall," as some theorists have argued? Does the muc... more Is the Internet the medium of an "ironic free-fall," as some theorists have argued? Does the much-commented transition from modernism to postmodernism correspond not only to the rise of digital media (supplanting cinema as dominant cultural medium of the twenty-first century) but also to the erosion of the possibility of any critical position or perspective, any "'outside' to power"? Turning to an unlikely source of authority on these questions -- the web series Falling In Love... With Chris and Greg -- this paper examines a mode of contemporary queer aesthetics that, in elevating irony to an overarching formal principle, demonstrates its fundamental (albeit queer) seriousness.

"The Living End, or Love Without a Future"

Queer Love in Film and Television: Critical Essays, eds. Pamela Demory and Christopher Pullen, 2013

Queer theory has had plenty to say about sex, but very little about love, which for its part has ... more Queer theory has had plenty to say about sex, but very little about love, which for its part has seemed too inexorably linked to narratives and institutions of the “normal” to be available for “queering.” This paper turns to The Living End (Gregg Araki, 1992), a film from the short-lived moment of the New Queer Cinema in which the challenge to futurity posed by the AIDS crisis opens up a profound and original reflection on the possibilities and limits of the notion of queer love. The film stages a number of “romantic” narratives — including the romance of a transgressive rejection of the social— only in order to exhaust each in turn. Irony works here both negatively, as a critique of the liabilities of these narratives and, unexpectedly, positively, allowing us to imagine a love that fails to correspond to any existing formal structures in which we might seriously attempt to elaborate it.

Gender: Love (Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks), ed. Jennifer Nash, 2017

A teaching text on the concept of queer love, for the Gender: Love (Macmillan Interdisciplinary H... more A teaching text on the concept of queer love, for the Gender: Love (Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks) series, edited by Jennifer Nash. Topics covered include gay marriage, Brokeback Mountain (2006), and the queer visions of love in two historically disparate texts: Tennessee William's short story, "Mysteries of the Joy Rio" (1941), and Sebastien Lifshitz's film Wild Side (2004)

Making Sex Public, and Other Cinematic Fantasies

Duke University Press, Theory Q, 2018

(Available at https://www.dukeupress.edu/making-sex-public-and-other-cinematic-fantasies.) Beginn... more (Available at https://www.dukeupress.edu/making-sex-public-and-other-cinematic-fantasies.) Beginning in the late 1950s, representations of and narratives about sex proliferated on French and U.S. movie screens. Cinema began to display forms of sexuality that were no longer strictly associated with domesticity nor limited to heterosexual relations between loving couples. Women’s bodies and queer sexualities became intensely charged figures of political contestation, aspiration, and allegory, central to new ways of imagining sexuality and to new liberal understandings of individual freedom and social responsibility. In Making Sex Public Damon R. Young tracks the emergence of two conflicting narratives: on the one hand, a new model of sex as harmoniously integrated into civic existence; on the other, an idea of women’s and queer sexuality as corrosive to the very fabric of social life. Taking a transatlantic perspective from the late ‘50s through the present, from And God Created Woman and Barbarella to Cruising and Shortbus, Young argues that cinema participated in the transformation of the sexual subject while showing how women and queers were both agents and objects of that transformation.

Meme Aesthetics

Representations, 2024

Introduction to a special issue of Representations (issue 168, Fall 2024) on Meme Aesthetics, co-... more

The Fantasy of Pornography

Porn Studies, 2024

Introduction to the 10th anniversary special issue of the journal Porn Studies, revisiting and re... more Introduction to the 10th anniversary special issue of the journal Porn Studies, revisiting and rethinking the pioneering work of Linda Williams from a variety of new angles. The introduction examines the protean concept of fantasy and what it tells about sexuality's fundamental relation to language, theatricality, and representation, as a way of revisiting the anti-porn feminist critiques of porn --and sex. This is followed by a series of contributions by luminaries in sexuality studies reflecting on and developing concepts from Williams' oeuvre.

$Figure 13. Molly Vaughn, ‘Sizing My Breast Implants’ (25 inch x 30 inch oil painting on canvas, 2022). AN AUHIE UIE OIZITTG IVIY DICGot HITPIGTIls. THIET VWarll. A snail’s operculum? Pellucid foreskin? Light refracted into grisail mplants. Folded drops - drooled want — against the mercurial reflectio e by these viscous n of a tray. The per- pective pours the implants towards us, spilling off the tray, off the canvas, off into the hickening space between our eyes and the surface of the canvas. W' ho wants what? To vant breasts, these breasts, her body is subjected to a wish. A body wish, a body wanted. A wish for different others, their desire. But also — less bearable to know - vant’s polymorphous perversity, its anatomical mischief. Indispensab yut still, bodies are more than closures. e and compulsory cewalhess tesvaccemmew caches bese bles Ted whee tec bese heccweads 0s ie Hes eee 0c cama fmwee$

differences, 2023

From Syntax of Thought: Reading Leo Bersani, edited by Jacques Khalip and John Paul Ricco, differ... more

The Pathological Gaze

In Media Res, 2023

Is there any more use-value to film theory's concept of the "male gaze"? From In Media Res specia... more

In Defense of Psychoanalytic Film Theory (Oxford Handbook of Film Theory)

Oxford Handbook of Film Theory, 2022

"There is a big secret about sex," Leo Bersani once wrote: "most people don't like it." What is t... more "There is a big secret about sex," Leo Bersani once wrote: "most people don't like it." What is true of sex is also true of theory, and no doubt doubly so when it comes to psychoanalytic theory, which conjoins what many would see as the worst aspects of each, specializing in claims (like Bersani's) that defy empirical verification and relentlessly turning up sex everywhere--behind every tree a phallus, behind every pack of wolves a Father. Psychoanalysis, cornerstone of the out-of-favor "hermeneutics of suspicion, " allegedly knows in advance what it is going to find, then finds it. In this chapter, I argue that cinema as a historically specific technical medium--indeed, the dominant cultural medium of the twentieth century--requires a psychoanalytic theory; which is in part because cinema and psychoanalysis emerge at the end of the nineteenth century, as part of the same techno-historical-economic assemblage. In the classical period of film theory, discussions of the "ontology" of cinema focused on its material grounding in the photographic image. While cinema's technical (i.e., photographic) realism is surely fundamental to its ontology, I propose that equally fundamental is that cinema is a technology of fantasy--which means it invites a psychoanalysis.

Melodramas of Subjectivity: James Baldwin, Lyle Ashton Harris, Ming Wong

Selva, 2022

Melodrama is one of the most expansive modes of modern culture and one of the least valued. Assoc... more Melodrama is one of the most expansive modes of modern culture and one of the least valued. Associated by definition with popular, as opposed to high, culture, the designation of an artwork as "melodramatic" functions as an aesthetic judgment that situates it outside the realm of the classic, deeming it ephemeral rather than enduring. Where the classic implies an ideal adequation of form to content, "melodramatic" evokes formal and affective excess, an indulgence in sentimentality and/or a perverse embrace of artifice. In melodrama, form puts itself at the service of affect, becoming self-conscious but never quite self-reflexive; for at the same time, melodrama is an inexorably narrative mode, one in which affect is itself enchained to narrative. In this essay, I argue that cinematic melodrama is a genre that has helped shape queer subjectivity and queer aesthetics in the twentieth century, giving aesthetic (though not often narrative) form to gender-dissident ways of being, feeling, and embodying. Far from being definitionally opposed to the classic, melodrama, in short, is a classic queer genre, a queer form of the classic.

Teorema's Death Drive

Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema, 2021

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) was not only the first film by its maker to explicitly thema... more Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) was not only the first film by its maker to explicitly thematize homosexuality, it was also (I argue in this chapter) the first ever work of queer theory. Made in 1968, Teorema appears at a moment of political upheaval, but strangely to the side of Pasolini's Communist affiliations, it focuses, perversely, on a series of sexual encounters between a handsome, unnamed stranger (Terence Stamp) and every member of a wealthy, Milanese family. While some critics have emphasized the symmetry that puts hetero- and homosexual encounters, in this schema, on the same plane, this essay argues that what is at stake here is an aesthetic inscription of what Guy Hocquenghem, a few years later, would call “homosexual desire.” Far from a socially intelligible sexual orientation, this would name a force of and desire for dissolution and revolution, both radically material and confoundingly metaphysical.

"A Man with a Mother: Tarnation and the Subject of Confession"

I Confess! edited by Thomas Waugh and Brandon Arroyo, 2019

Jonathan Caouette’s self-portrait film Tarnation (2003) was compiled on iMovie from home-recorded... more Jonathan Caouette’s self-portrait film Tarnation (2003) was compiled on iMovie from home-recorded footage collected over a twenty-year period in various formats: cassette tapes, Super-8, VHS, and digital video. Coinciding with and anticipating the rise of social media as a new “cultural dominant,” the film stages the performance/ confession/ narration of the self at a moment of transforming technological platforms. This essay argues that in so doing, the film also indexes a deeper transformation: that of the subject’s foundation in a domain of opaque sexuality.

"Ironies of Web 2.0"

Post-45, 2019

From "How to Be Now," a special issue of Post-45, edited by Sarah Chihaya, Joshua Kotin, and Kino... more From "How to Be Now," a special issue of Post-45, edited by Sarah Chihaya, Joshua Kotin, and Kinohi Nishikawa. Ambiguous irony prevails across the media landscapes of the digital era, from 4chan to Instagram, SMS-speak, and contemporary cinema, modifying from within the three aesthetic categories Sianne Ngai associates with the contemporary - the zany, the cute, and the interesting. In this paper, I argue that what Kierkegaard termed the “absolute negativity” of irony -- embedded in the technological platforms of Web 2.0 -- creates transformed conditions for aesthetic judgment, authorship, politics, sexuality, and subjectivity itself.
Available at http://post45.research.yale.edu/2019/05/ironies-of-web-2-0/

"The Liberal Sexual Subject: A Conversation with Damon R. Young"

by Damon R Young and Nicholas Baer

Film Quarterly, 2018

An interview conducted by Nicholas Baer on Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies. (Film... more

Social Text: "The Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalism"

by Damon R Young and Nico Baumbach

Social Text, 2016

The introduction -- titled "For A Political Critique of Culture" -- to a special issue of Social ... more The introduction -- titled "For A Political Critique of Culture" -- to a special issue of Social Text (34.2, June 2016) co-edited by Nico Baumbach, Damon R. Young, and Genevieve Yue. Considers the stakes for theory in the humanities today, via a discussion of debates about various kinds of reading (symptomatic vs. surface) and the legacies of Marxist cultural criticism and its methods in the 21st century.

"Revisiting Postmodernism: An Interview with Fredric Jameson"

by Damon R Young and Nico Baumbach

From Social Text 34.2 (June 2016), special issue on "The Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalis... more From Social Text 34.2 (June 2016), special issue on "The Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalism". On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” in the New Left Review, Jameson and the editors look back at the essay and discuss the current state of capitalism, theory, art, and culture, the question of periodization, the meaning of "the waning of affect," and other topics.

Revisiting Postmodernism

Social Text, 2016

If you were to think through the project of defining postmodernism today, following the basic fra... more If you were to think through the project of defining postmodernism today, following the basic framework in the 1984 essay or the 1991 book, which constitutive features would you emphasize? Are there aspects you emphasized thirty years ago that seem less relevant today, and have others emerged as more significant in recent decades? If there has been a shift, how do we account for it? Fredric Jameson: The first thing I would do is to separate these terms postmodernity and postmodernism, because people have often thought that my first description of it was a sort of aesthetic inventory of stylistic features. In part it was that, but I had understood it in terms of periodization and social structure. And now I realize that it would have been much clearer

"Gag the Fag, or Tops and Bottoms, Persons and Things"

Porn Studies, 2017

Scholarly studies of pornography since the advent of Linda Williams’ Hard Core have typically ass... more Scholarly studies of pornography since the advent of Linda Williams’ Hard Core have typically assumed that pornography is a genre which pursues the secrets of sexual pleasure. But much recent online gay pornography, far from imagining a ‘pornotopia’ in which free agents endlessly pursue their mutual pleasure, stages a radical dichotomy between tops and bottoms, in which the bottom is rhetorically transformed into what Catharine MacKinnon once described as a ‘thing for sexual use’. Examining recent online French pornography and the popular US series Gag the Fag, this article argues that neither the rubric of ‘pleasure’ nor the diagnosis of misogyny provide an adequate framework for gauging what is at stake in these theatricalized and mediatized scenes of domination. At first glance, such pornography appears to confirm the most damning pronouncements of anti-pornography feminists, reducing sex to a relation of instrumentalization. But, I argue, it is not exactly clear who is instrumentalized and for whom: both top and bottom labour in the service of what appears to be something like a law, a principle of abstract differentiation not reducible to anatomical sex. At the same time, it is precisely the body’s inability to fully submit to the requirements of this law, or to the idealization it requires, that this pornography solicits, exposes, and celebrates. This dynamic cannot be reduced to confessions of the body’s ‘pleasure’, and its formalization as a genre suggests that pleasure may not be what lies at the heart of sex. (Published in Porn Studies, special issue "Gay Male Porn Now," ed. John Mercer, 2017)

"Visage/Con: Catherine Breillat and the Antinomies of Sex"

Qui Parle, May 2016

"I cannot accept the proximity of my face and my vagina." So says Alice, the teenaged protagonist... more "I cannot accept the proximity of my face and my vagina." So says Alice, the teenaged protagonist of Catherine Breillat's 1976 debut film, Une vraie jeune fille (A Real Young Girl). And yet face and sex are made constantly proximate in the montage and camerawork of Breillat's films, which oscillate between the two as if trying to enframe their incommensurability, to distill it into visual form. This essay unpacks Alice's conundrum, one that recurs in the later Romance (1999), and explores the philosophy of sex at work across Breillat's oeuvre, considering its relation to other 1970s feminist images of the female body, to theories of the close-up, and to a longer tradition of thinking about sex as incompatible with equality, from Kant and Sade through Andrea Dworkin. Are film technologies themselves implicated in the conundrum they also document? A revisionist reading of some of the legacies of the 1970s.

"The Vicarious Look, or Andy Warhol's Apparatus Theory"

Film Criticism, 2015

Film Criticism 39.2 (Winter 2015), special issue, "New Approaches to Cinematic Identification," e... more Film Criticism 39.2 (Winter 2015), special issue, "New Approaches to Cinematic Identification," eds. Elizabeth Reich and Scott C. Richmond
1970s film theory was obsessed with sex and desire, but have we ever had a *queer* theory of the cinema? Not really: a heterosexual presumption was built into apparatus theory's key formulations, but on the other hand, yes: it is latent within apparatus theory's analysis of the structural conditions (technological, social and psychic) of the cinema. In order to make this clear, the essay turns to Metz's contemporary Andy Warhol, approaching him not as a gay iconoclast but as a theorist of the cinema, and putting him as such in conversation with Metz and Baudry, as well as Stanley Cavell and Linda Williams. Against those critics who have (for good reasons) sought to defend Warhol's films from the charge of "voyeurism," the essay argues that what is indeed voyeuristic in those films discloses the voyeurism structurally inherent to the cinema and reveals it to be, if not always specifically sexual, fundamentally queer. Finally, it argues that even as apparatus theory describes a set of technological and spectatorial conditions that are no longer paradigmatic, its signal achievement was to lay bare the relation of technological elements to psychically dense modes of subjectivity, and as such it provides a crucial foundation for asking in what ways post-cinematic media produce a new orientation of, and technical infrastructure for, desire.

"Queer Seriousness"

World Picture 9, Jul 2014

Is the Internet the medium of an "ironic free-fall," as some theorists have argued? Does the muc... more Is the Internet the medium of an "ironic free-fall," as some theorists have argued? Does the much-commented transition from modernism to postmodernism correspond not only to the rise of digital media (supplanting cinema as dominant cultural medium of the twenty-first century) but also to the erosion of the possibility of any critical position or perspective, any "'outside' to power"? Turning to an unlikely source of authority on these questions -- the web series Falling In Love... With Chris and Greg -- this paper examines a mode of contemporary queer aesthetics that, in elevating irony to an overarching formal principle, demonstrates its fundamental (albeit queer) seriousness.

"The Living End, or Love Without a Future"

Queer Love in Film and Television: Critical Essays, eds. Pamela Demory and Christopher Pullen, 2013

Queer theory has had plenty to say about sex, but very little about love, which for its part has ... more Queer theory has had plenty to say about sex, but very little about love, which for its part has seemed too inexorably linked to narratives and institutions of the “normal” to be available for “queering.” This paper turns to The Living End (Gregg Araki, 1992), a film from the short-lived moment of the New Queer Cinema in which the challenge to futurity posed by the AIDS crisis opens up a profound and original reflection on the possibilities and limits of the notion of queer love. The film stages a number of “romantic” narratives — including the romance of a transgressive rejection of the social— only in order to exhaust each in turn. Irony works here both negatively, as a critique of the liabilities of these narratives and, unexpectedly, positively, allowing us to imagine a love that fails to correspond to any existing formal structures in which we might seriously attempt to elaborate it.

Gender: Love (Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks), ed. Jennifer Nash, 2017

A teaching text on the concept of queer love, for the Gender: Love (Macmillan Interdisciplinary H... more A teaching text on the concept of queer love, for the Gender: Love (Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks) series, edited by Jennifer Nash. Topics covered include gay marriage, Brokeback Mountain (2006), and the queer visions of love in two historically disparate texts: Tennessee William's short story, "Mysteries of the Joy Rio" (1941), and Sebastien Lifshitz's film Wild Side (2004)

Queer Bonds: A Special Double Issue of GLQ (2011)

by Damon R Young and Joshua Branciforte

GLQ 17.2-3, 2011

Queers do a kind of practical social reflection just in finding ways to be queer.

Review Essay: Orgasmology/ Love and Money: Queers, Class and Cultural Production/ Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives?

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2015

(Film Quarterly) Book Review: Un-American Psycho: Brian de Palma and the Political Invisible