Description
Book SynopsisAmputation 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 alternativeeven resistantepistemologies of queerness, disability, and masculinity. She seeks to understand the way perverse sexuality, physical damage, and bodily contamination have stimulatedrather than created a crisis formasculine characters in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literature. Barounis introduces the concept of anti-prophylactic citizenshipa mode of political belonging characterized by vulnerability, receptivity, and riskto 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
