Duke University Press
Personal Demons: Possession Narratives of Late Liberalism
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Title: Personal Demons: Possession Narratives of Late Liberalism
Author: Grace Lavery
ISBN: 9781478039099
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2026
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Number of Pages: 288
Condition Note: New from the publisher
Publisher Description: Personal Demons offers a new theory of the relation between sex, desire, and personhood, asking what we should make of the many contemporary instances when bodies seem to want different things from the consciousnesses within them. Grace Lavery maps the negative energies--demonic, incoherent, resistant--through which liberalism produces and disciplines its scapegoats. Through an examination of modern possession narratives, from racialized spectacles of bodily transformation and disguise to the liturgy of the Church of Scientology, Lavery unspools the knot of body, affect, and representation at the end of liberalism. In the face of the uneasy bargains queer and trans liberal organizations made with the phobic state, Personal Demons elaborates a vision of queer collective living that does not assume a shared concept of interiority, taking the incompatibility of such concepts as the founding axiom for a coalition against the ideological regulation of bodies and minds.
Author: Grace Lavery
ISBN: 9781478039099
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2026
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Number of Pages: 288
Condition Note: New from the publisher
Publisher Description: Personal Demons offers a new theory of the relation between sex, desire, and personhood, asking what we should make of the many contemporary instances when bodies seem to want different things from the consciousnesses within them. Grace Lavery maps the negative energies--demonic, incoherent, resistant--through which liberalism produces and disciplines its scapegoats. Through an examination of modern possession narratives, from racialized spectacles of bodily transformation and disguise to the liturgy of the Church of Scientology, Lavery unspools the knot of body, affect, and representation at the end of liberalism. In the face of the uneasy bargains queer and trans liberal organizations made with the phobic state, Personal Demons elaborates a vision of queer collective living that does not assume a shared concept of interiority, taking the incompatibility of such concepts as the founding axiom for a coalition against the ideological regulation of bodies and minds.
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