Antiprophylactic Citizenship

Abstract

Antiprophylactic Citizenship Ian Funk (bio) A Review of Vulnerable Constitutions: Queerness, Disability, and the Remaking of American Manhood by Cynthia Barounis. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019. Pp. 209. $39.95 paper, $99.50 hardback, $39.95 ebook. A new subfield that situates itself at the often uncomfortable intersection of disability and masculinity studies has been taking shape for some time. The discomfort that this intersection can cause sometimes arises because the two fields take seemingly antithetical figures as their objects of study; on the one hand, disability studies and crip theory seek, in part, to analyze and theorize the discourses around the disabled body and the material lives of disabled people while, on the other hand, masculinity studies has consistently concerned itself with the able-bodied man and male psyche. Cynthia Barounis's Vulnerable Constitutions attempts to occupy this intersection, to find common cause between the two fields. She does this through nuanced readings of a range of American authors who, throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, engaged with contemporary scientific, medical, sociopolitical, and cultural investments of both masculinity and disability to envision alternative, sometimes radical, new possibilities. Barounis not only commits to working in and through the tensions and contradictions at the intersection of disability and masculinity studies, Vulnerable Constitutions is also a deft, imaginative exploration of radical forms of democratic community and biosociality brought about by taking seriously the vulnerability, the [End Page 99] "generative receptivity to the other" (28), of crip/queer forms of embodiment and identity that take shape in and against hegemonic regimes of masculine able-bodiedness and American citizenship. Barounis disrupts what might be considered traditional understandings of the masculine body as something that guards against potential disability through an ethos of impermeability. While the text is somewhat organized around an historical trajectory of medical sciences, Barounis rejects narratives of teleology and progress. Instead, she follows changes in medical sciences as they, themselves, gradually, discursively, and materially produce disabled populations of American men with queer masculine embodiments: early sexology's invention of the invert; the eugenic mission of regulating some women's fertility; midcentury psychiatry's explanations of male homosexuality; the post-AIDS era's contagious gay man; and today's medicalization of low sexual desire and transmasculine gender identities and embodiments. Barounis understands these historical moments as discursive flash points that reveal the machinations of normative, prophylactic citizenship, which is a form of citizenship that insists upon and rewards able-bodiedness in American men and, in turn, the nation-state itself. In addressing this, Barounis theorizes what she calls "antiprophylactic citizenship," or instances of adamantly permeable crip/queer masculinities that are receptive to, even inviting of, potential contamination from the outside world. Antiprophylactic citizenship, in its categorical receptivity to potential contagion, functions as a crip refusal of the scientific and medical regimes of diagnosis and treatment, as well as an analytic lens through which to view radical crip/queer paradigms of embodiment and gender identity that are often misread or overlooked in discussions of biopolitics and American citizenship. Barounis provides a handful of antiprophylactic citizenship's central features, which arise and take shape throughout the text. On the most basic level, Vulnerable Constitutions assumes from the start the centrality of antiprophylactic citizenship's continual engagement with both queerness and disability, particularly as they are historically constituted by, and contingent upon, official scientific and medical epistemologies from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. Her eclectic choice of texts demonstrates the extent to which modern and postmodern masculinities were intimately bound up in these discourses and material practices. For instance, Barounis shows how Jack London's work sifts through the tensions between the growing foothold of scientific authority's regulatory "prophylactic power of diagnosis" and a [End Page 100] crip/queer, antiprophylactic "ethics of corporeal vulnerability" (4). London, she argues, uses an antiprophylactic worldview, not only to imagine alternative, working-class, crip/queer masculine embodiments and identities that celebrate the potential of some physical impairments, but also to wage powerful critiques of what was then seen as the feminized, ineffectual bourgeoisie. Additionally, Barounis's treatment of James Baldwin's work, which she situates within the context of Cold War psychoanalysis...