Abstract
When Chelsea Manning, a transgender military intelligence analyst, leaked classified U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks in 2013, it signalled a weakness in the nation’s ostensibly impenetrable defensive capabilities. For Manning, however, the security compromise and supposed risk to others was justified in the name of transparency. According to Barounis, Manning exemplifies “antiprophylactic citizenship”, a model of citizenship based on openness and vulnerability. Through a queer-crip reading of different twentieth-century writers who have attempted to reinvent American manhood, Barounis argues that queerness and disability are central to these reinvented understandings of masculinity and antiprophylactic citizenship. As Barounis articulates, “against the traditional view that the masculine body (and nation) should remain impermeable and impenetrable, antiprophylactic citizenship imagines the possibilities of a masculine body that shows little regard for physical boundaries or national borders. Porous and permeable, it is defined by its receptivity to potentially contaminating outsiders” (7).
Dominant understandings of masculinities (and nation) tend to emphasize impermeability, invulnerability, and able-bodiedness/mindedness while aiming to contain forms of “embodied deviance,” including queerness and disability. Barounis’s book speaks directly and fruitfully to current queer-crip discussions about vulnerability and resistance. Indeed, within the field of critical disability studies, recent debate has crystallised around this notion of vulnerability. While some disabled people’s movements have noted that labelling certain groups as ‘vulnerable’ justifies their exclusion and marginalization, others in the movement suggest the need to acknowledge and embrace vulnerability and interdependence. Some disability studies scholars would go as far as to say that vulnerability is a shared human trait.
Vulnerable Constitutions applies the concept of antiprophylatic citizenship to various social events, such as the eugenics practices of the 1920s and ‘30s and the depathologization of homosexuality. In chapter two, "Love or Eugenics?,” for example, the author turns our attention to eugenics as a body of knowledge and practices aimed at containing social groups deemed to be “degenerate” (29). Speaking to the writings of Faulkner and Fitzgerald, the author takes a closer look at the role women’s reproduction on the construction of antiprophylatic citizenship in the context of eugenics. More specifically, the chapter examines three groups: “the perversely sexualized teenage mother, her potentially “defective” child, and the male doctor who, weakened by his sentimental attachments to women, fails to maintain properly eugenic personal and national boundaries” (29). In this chapter, one can see instances of how writers have challenged forms of medical authority, as well as eugenicist (and ableist) ideals around health, independence, and bodies. To further demonstrate the potential for thinking about vulnerability differently, in the following chapter, “‘Not the Usual Pattern’: James Baldwin and the DSM,” Barounis turns to Baldwin’s work on racial politics during debates focused on the depathologization of homosexuality. Baldwin’s writing sheds light on the connection between the stigmatization of queer intimacies and forms of racial discrimination. Barounis suggests that to invite coalition across racial, gender, sexuality, and disability lines, Baldwin’s work encourages white liberal allies to “relinquish those defenses— physical, psychological, and political— whose danger lies in the promise of safety” (131, emphasis added). Baldwin, instead, “marshals love as the glue of a just society” (128), seemingly suggesting that openness and vulnerability are important ingredients for meaningful coalitions.
Barounis’s work is laudable in that it can be intuitively applied to other contexts and recent events. For example, former U.S. president Donald Trump’s decision to close the country’s borders to particular social groups, notwithstanding his calls to build a “big, beautiful wall” along the southern border, demonstrates the hyper-defence and closedness critically questioned in Vulnerable Constitutions. In the contemporary political context, the notion of nation and citizenship have been deliberately entangled with ideas of defence and strength; in contrast, as Barounis’s work suggests, genuine connection requires a level of openness, letting our defences down, and a willingness to take risks. Antiprophylactic citizenship is also about being open to each other’s vulnerability, debility, and interdependence. One must resist the impetus to reject vulnerability. Vulnerable Constitutions is an important book, one that is sometimes quite dense, but that also brings theory to life through various “real-world” examples. Scholars in masculinity studies, critical disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, and literary and cultural studies, especially, will appreciate this book.
