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Notes Preface 1. About male privilege and anal sex, see Christopher Castiglia, "Rebel Without a Closet," in Engendering Men: TheQuestion ofMale Feminist Criticism , ed. Joseph Boone and Michael Cadden (New York: Routledge, 1990); D. A. Miller, "Anal Rope," in Inside/ Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991); and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990). 2. My favorites from among the several dozen cop action studies include : Christopher Ames, "Restoring the Black Man's Lethal Weapon: Race and Sexuality in Contemporary Cop Films," Journal of Popular Film and Television 20 (1992): 52-60; Kwame Anthony Appiah, "'No Bad Nigger': Blacks as the Ethical Principle in the Movies," in Media Spectacles, ed. Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge , 1993); Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997); Cindy Patton, "What Is a Nice Lesbian Like You Doing in a Film Like This?" in Immortal, Invisible: Lesbians and the Moving Image, ed. Tamsin Wilton (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Fred Pfeil, White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference (New York: Verso, 1995). 3. See Ames, "Restoring the Black Man's Lethal Weapon"; Pfeil, White Guys; and Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995). 4. A subgenre ofthe literature takes on the sci-fi elements ofsuch movies as Blade Runner, Robocop, and Total Recall, articulating the relations between cinema technology, psychoanalytic theory, political fantasy, and individual subjectification. That I do not engage this aspect ofthe literature very much probably says more about the disciplinary divide between humanists and social scientists than anything else. At least it gives a sense ofwhere I call home. Chapter One 1. When I use the phrases "lost ground" and "losing ground," I am referring to a time when the con:up.tion of privi)eged groups wrecks people's Copyngnted Matenal 251 252 Notes to Chapter One lives and makes them fear for their nation's health. Publicity given to "identity " politics and nationalisms, maintenance ofaffirmative action, movements of minorities and women into professional turf and the popular media, overpaid and factory-closing CEOs, and worries over the nuclear family, as well as a perceived slide in standards of living, add to this sense of "losing ground." Charles Murray locates our problems in "the culture of poverty" in his book Losing Ground (New York: Basic Books, 1984). But people find lots to blame: the military industrial complex, the drift from Victorian family values, the feminist and lesbian/gay rights movements, the exportation of blue-collar jobs, a secret organization of Jews, and so on. Many people, whomever they blame, can relate to "losing." From all corners of a society, people hurl accusations of mismanagement and corruption at those whom they regard as overly privileged, particularly as they feel their own entitlements slipping away. 2. By "corruption," I mean the abuse by those in positions of authority who keep resources from circulating in legal, rational, and meritocratic manners and keep them instead to themselves. The privileges in question result from the discriminating distribution of resources, which include esteem, freedom, authority, and wealth-all that we used to get somewhere in life. Anyone can define anyone else as privileged by perceiving some inequalitybelieving that someone else has more resources. 3. See, for instance, Jerry Adler, "Taking Offense," Newsweek, December 24, 1990, pp. 48-54; David Gates, "White Male Paranoia," Newsweek, March 29, 1993, pp. 48-53; John Taylor, "Are You Politically Correct?" New York, January 21, 1991. 4. Williams writes of structures of feeling: "This is a way of defining forms and convention in art and literature as inalienable elements of a social material process ... which may in turn be seen as the articulation (often the only fully available articulation) of structures of feeling which as living processes are much more widely experienced." See Raymond Williams, Mal'xism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 132. 5. See Robert Hughes, The Culture ofComplaint: The Fraying ofAmerica (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 6. See David Ashley, "Postrnodernism and the 'End of the Individual': From Repressive Self-Mastery to Ecstatic Communication," Current Perspectives in Social Theory 10 (1990): 195-221; Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life ofthe Middle Class (New York: Harper, 1989); James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991 ). 7. See Marc Cooper, "Queer Baiting and the Culture War," The Village Voice...