The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Series Q)

It needs to be acknowledged that this underrated book will not please the reader who has done no serious engagement with the scholarship on a) popular culture, or b) sexuality and gender. It is evocative and deeply insightful, but precisely because it is methodologically sound it is not really as accessible to the casual reader as popular "non-fiction". I hope this - rather than knee-jerk cultural conservatism - accounts for the negative reviews on the site. As an investigation of the complex dynamics of culture and citizenship, this is might be the best going. Even as a non-American, and noting the "dated" nature of the sources, I still gained many insights into contemporary nationalism from this book. It's also very funny in parts. Other reviews have gone into more detail about how useful the book is. I'll just say that if you compare the arguments of the negative reviews against the arguments of the positive reviews, it will be clear to you that this book generates a polarised response of extreme satisfaction or dissatisfaction, and you should be able to work out which camp you fall in. I bought it second-hand, but would have felt that it was a bargain at the new cost. A tremendous piece of scholarship.

On the face of it, the Queen of America is a book about family values and the fetish of innocence in the conservative citizenship ideology of the last few decades. But it is so much more than that. It is a brilliant work of cultural theory, but in the language of story telling. It considers why people have feelings about nationality and how they get that way, which couldn't be more important now. It challenges all sorts of norms about proper sexuality, knowledge, and politics, without being condescending. A slow, careful reading is powerfully well-rewarded.

Berlant's book is a gem. It is brilliant, clarifying, fresh -- a real stand-out. I'm not an academic and not into theory tomes, but I picked this book up on a recommendation from a friend and was really surprised. This book explains how the right wing has privatized citizenship, systematically destroyed the value of government and how they have 'publicized' and universalized their warped morality. For any feminist, racial justice activist, queer activist or other politically engaged person, Berlant delivers truly original insights and wonderfully sharp analysis. The other thing I love about the book is its author is so clearly (and intelligently) a feminist -- how refreshing in this boring, misogynist era. Final advice: read the book as if you were having a conversation with someone, without being intimidated by its big theory packaging.

This is a wonderful book about the contemporary imaginary of American citizenship. Discussing an extraordinary variety of cases ranging from television series, to film, to popular magazines to juridical testimony, Berlant traces the fantasies and structures of feeling that have given form to the American nation as an intimate space of increasingly infantalized subjects. Berlant eloquently analyzes the sexual, racial and class anxieties underlying the modeling of the public sphere on the privacy of the heterosexual, white family to the exclussion of other forms of intimacy and political presence. Through her discussion of American citizenship, Berlant writes clearly and insightfully about candent debates such as abortion and immigration. This is one of the best books I have read about nationalism and citizenship, and a pleasure to read as well.

This book masters the art of doing politics and cultural critique at the same time and it does it with an honesty and pedagogical clarity I have never seen before. Ranging across archives from mass culture to political rhetoric, Berlant does the very hard work of thinking things through in all their complexity (things like the mutual imbrications of nationalism, gender, class, and race)and she does it with writing that has both the stunning beauty of the perfect description and the too-true turn of phrase and the cutting clarity of thoughts that reverberate through the everyday sensibilities of current life in the USA.