
Personal Demons
Possession Narratives of Late Liberalism
Grace Lavery(Author)
Duke University Press
Will be published approx. on 20. October 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
264 pages
978-1-4780-3909-9 (ISBN)
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.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
North Carolina
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
36 color illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Weight
445 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4780-3909-9 (9781478039099)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Grace Lavery is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She has authored multiple books, including Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom, published by Duke University Press, and Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques.