Description
"Personal Demons offers a new theory of the relation between gender, sexuality, and personhood. Grace Lavery considers possession narratives from the past forty years-the transracial and transsexual possession of Whoopi Goldberg's character by Patrick Swayze's in the movie Ghost, the gendered spirits of the Twin Flames Universe, or perhaps ironically JK Rowling's archvillain Lord Voldemort. She uses these narratives to understand the knot of body, affect, and representation at the end of liberalism. Lavery argues that although contemporary liberal rationality broadcasts the secularity of its account of personhood-its rejection of body/soul dualism-that account can be revoked for those whose behavior exceeds a certain threshold of moral conduct ("Bob" from Twin Peaks and British television personality and prolific child rapist Jimmy Saville are two of her prime examples). In the face of the uneasy bargains queer and trans politics has made with the liberal order, and their collapse, Personal Demons challenges queer and trans people to develop modes of collective living without supposing a shared concept of interiority, taking the incompatibility of such concepts as the founding axiom for a coalition against the fascist regulation of bodies and minds"-- Provided by publisher
