Vulnerable Constitutions: Queerness, Disability, and the Remaking of American Manhood

Amputation need not always signify castration; indeed, in Jack London’s fiction, losing a limb becomes part of a process through which queerly gendered men become properly masculinized. In her astute book, Vulnerable Constitutions, Cynthia Barounis explores the way American writers have fashioned alternative-even resistant-epistemologies of queerness, disability, and masculinity. She seeks to understand the way perverse sexuality, physical damage, and bodily contamination have stimulated-rather than created a crisis for-masculine characters in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literature.

Barounis introduces the concept of anti-prophylactic citizenship -a mode of political belonging characterized by vulnerability, receptivity, and risk-to examine counternarratives of American masculinity. Investigating the work of authors including London, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, and Eli Clare, she presents an evolving narrative of medicalized sexuality and anti-prophylactic masculinity. Her literary readings interweave queer theory, disability studies, and the history of medicine to demonstrate how evolving scientific conversations around deviant genders and sexualities gave rise to a new model of national belonging-ultimately rewriting the story of American masculinity as a story of queer-crip rebellion.