“Sibbett’s expansive theory of queer storytelling is a quiet and potent antidote to the mundane, ubiquitous state violence that has shaped our daily lives from 9/11 to Trump 2.0. A timely and important book.” —Carol Mason, author of From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary
“Sibbett’s framing of ‘mundane violence’ and ‘intimate terrorism’ through queer and decolonial storytelling offers a much-needed intervention to gender studies, critical ethnic studies, critical prison studies, and more. Her choice to center queer grief, childhood, and futurity as part of a storytelling archive is both intellectually rich and emotionally powerful.” —Anita Tijerina Revilla, coeditor of Marching Students: Chicana and Chicano Activism in Education, 1968 to the Present
In Shock and Yawn, Megan Sibbett confronts state-sanctioned, mundane violence committed in the name of protection and argues that queer storytelling is an ideal avenue for recognizing, theorizing, and subverting it: Through queer stories, we have a direct window into the real-world ramifications of violence that purports to be for the public good. This violence, reinforced and normalized through surveillance campaigns, failure-to-protect laws, border policies, and government messaging, is obscured by both its banality and its benevolent veneer, in which children, or imagined children, are central to its logic of protection.
Building on queer theorists’ critiques of intimate and administrative violence, especially Gloria Anzaldúa’s “intimate terrorism,” Sibbett develops methodologies for conceptualizing and subverting violence aimed at queer, racialized, and gendered bodies in this era of surveillance and increasing authoritarianism. Sibbett addresses book bans, anti-trans legislation, idealized histories of westward expansion, and more, examining materials that include public service announcements, advertising, social media, news reports, poems, interviews, and novels. In so doing, she demonstrates the crucial role queer testimonies—and queer histories and queer futures—play in revealing systemic violence and illuminating the transformative potential of everyday resistance.
Megan Sibbett is Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of Oklahoma. Her teaching and scholarly fields include queer and trans feminist theory, LGBTQ movements, and children’s culture.
Contents
Introduction Everyday See Say
Chapter 1 Benevolent Protection and the Criminality of Failure
Chapter 2 Shock and Coffee: The Cultures of Mundane Violence, Kids, and Queer Thinking
Chapter 3 Decolonial Histories: Normalized National Terrorism in Emma Pérez’s Forgetting the Alamo, or, Blood Memory
Chapter 4 Dogged Progress: Domestic Warzones in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Works Cited
Index
