How to Do Things With Words (but Without an Essentialist Subject): Free Speech, Affect, and a Performative Case of the Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist

• In Event: Queerness and Queer Issues in Public Address

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that there is a large domain of free speech that concerns not language but the affect associated with that language. Through a close textual analysis of Diane DiMassa’s feminist cartoon, Hothead Paisan, I argue that trauma as the basis for a public culture vis-à-vis speech articulates a performative strategy for coping with the inequalities in access and resources characteristic of the traditional public sphere that pose affect against the signifier.

Author

• Adria Battaglia, University of Texas, Austin