Party with the Authors

David L. Eng

In The Feeling of Kinship, David L. Eng investigates the emergence of “queer liberalism,” the empowerment of certain gays and lesbians in the United States economically through an increasingly visible and mass-mediated queer consumer lifestyle, and politically through the legal protection of rights to privacy and intimacy. Eng argues that in our “colorblind” age the emergence of queer liberalism is a particular incarnation of liberal freedom and progress, one constituted by both the racialization of intimacy and the forgetting of race. Through a startling reading of Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark legal decision overturning Texas’s antisodomy statute, Eng reveals how the ghosts of miscegenation haunt both Lawrence and the advent of queer liberalism.

Eng develops the concept of “queer diasporas” as a critical response to queer liberalism. A methodology drawing attention to new forms of family and kinship, accounts of subjects and subjectivities, and relations of affect and desire, the concept differs from the traditional notions of diaspora, theories of the nation-state, and principles of neoliberal capitalism upon which queer liberalism thrives. Eng analyzes films, documentaries, and literature by Asian and Asian American artists including Wong Kar-wai, Monique Truong, Deann Borshay Liem, and Rea Tajiri, as well as a psychoanalytic case history of a transnational adoptee from Korea. In so doing, he demonstrates how queer Asian migrant labor, transnational adoption from Asia, and the political and psychic legacies of Japanese internment underwrite narratives of racial forgetting and queer freedom in the present. A focus on queer diasporas also highlights the need for a poststructuralist account of family and kinship, one offering psychic alternatives to Oedipal paradigms. The Feeling of Kinship makes a major contribution to American studies, Asian American studies, diaspora studies, psychoanalysis, and queer theory.

David L. Eng is Professor in the Department of English, the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America as well as a co-editor of Loss: The Politics of Mourning and Q&A: Queer in Asian America.

“Spanning psychoanalysis, law, and aesthetics, and reading richly and with passion, David L. Eng’s The Feeling of Kinship looks at transnational adoption as an exemplary scene of contemporary intimacy in the United States. This is a fearless book that knows and feels what it means to have to defend oneself from the ‘liberal’ place in which one lives; what it means racially, sexually, and legally to have to be defensive in a nation that identifies itself with freedom.”–Lauren Berlant, author of The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture

“The Feeling of Kinship is a timely examination of the persistence of racial and national differentiation within the privileged investments of ‘queer liberalism,’ in the particular focus on the rights to affective union in domesticity, privacy, and family. Here, as elsewhere, David L. Eng demonstrates his gifts of critical precision and elegant presentation.”–Lisa Lowe, University of California, San Diego

Ed Cohen

Biological immunity as we know it does not exist until the late nineteenth century. Nor does the premise that organisms defend themselves at the cellular or molecular levels. For nearly two thousand years “immunity,” a legal concept invented in ancient Rome, serves almost exclusively political and juridical ends. “Self-defense” also originates in a juridico-political context; it emerges in the mid-seventeenth century, during the English Civil War, when Thomas Hobbes defines it as the first “natural right.” In the 1880s and 1890s, biomedicine fuses these two political precepts into one, creating a new vital function, “immunity-as-defense.” In A Body Worth Defending, Ed Cohen reveals the unacknowledged political, economic, and philosophical assumptions about the human body that biomedicine incorporates when it recruits immunity to safeguard the vulnerable living organism. 

Inspired by Michel Foucault’s writings about biopolitics and biopower, Cohen traces the migration of immunity from politics and law into the domains of medicine and science. Offering a genealogy of the concept, he illuminates a complex of thinking about modern bodies that percolates through European political, legal, philosophical, economic, governmental, scientific, and medical discourses from the mid-seventeenth century through the twentieth. He shows that by the late nineteenth century, “the body” literally incarnates modern notions of personhood. In this lively cultural rumination, Cohen argues that by embracing the idea of immunity-as-defense so exclusively, biomedicine naturalizes the individual as the privileged focus for identifying and treating illness, thereby devaluing or obscuring approaches to healing situated within communities or collectives.

Ed Cohen teaches cultural studies and directs the doctoral program in women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

Ed Cohen provides a breathtakingly original exploration of the ways in which immunity, a concept defined and complicated through the strange interlocking of biological and medical with legal and political discourses, has come to explain modern bodies, both individual and collective. A brilliant, timely contribution to understanding the biopolitics of illness, contagion, and defense.”–Elizabeth Grosz, author of The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely

“Ed Cohen’s original epistemological history sheds new light on the taken-for-granted modern imperative to care for our health by tending our immune systems. This important book reveals in startling and fresh ways the philosophical groundings that made this imperative seem natural.”–Emily Martin, author of Flexible Bodies: The Role of Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS

“A Body Worth Defending will become a widely cited classic in the history of medicine, because of the range of its scholarship, the sophistication of its analysis, the significance of its findings for understandings of ‘the modern body,’ and its literary style. Ed Cohen’s voice is authoritative, engaging, and likable; by the middle of the introduction, I was hooked.”–Helen Keane, author of What’s Wrong with Addiction?