Calvin Thomas
Calvin Thomas works in critical theory and modern and postmodern literature and culture. His research involves feminist, psychoanalytic, and deconstructive interrogations of gender, sexuality, and the body. His study Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line (University of Illinois Press, 1996) examines repressions of the male body in social constructions of normative masculinity and the role played by writing – as material act or "bodily function"– in the disruption of gendered identity. Long interested in the relation of men to feminism, Dr. Thomas is also concerned with the implications of "straight" negotiations with queer theory, and his co-edited volume Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality (University of Illinois Press, 2000) examines this terrain, as does Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory: Essays on Abjection in Literature, Mass Culture, and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Ten Lessons in Theory: An Introduction to Theoretical Writing, was published by Bloomsbury in 2013. Adventures in Theory: A Compact Anthology, was published in 2019 as a companion to Ten Lessons. The second edition of Ten Lessons in Theory will appear in 2023.
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Books by Calvin Thomas
Ten Lessons in Theory argues, and even demonstrates, that "theoretical writing" is nothing if not a specific genre of "creative writing," a particular way of engaging in the art of the sentence, the art of making sentences that make trouble—sentences that make, or desire to make, radical changes in the very fabric of social reality.
As its title indicates, the book proceeds in the form of ten "lessons," each based on an axiomatic sentence selected from the canon of theoretical writing. Each lesson works by creatively unpacking its featured sentence and exploring the sentence's conditions of possibility and most radical implications. In the course of exploring the conditions and consequences of these troubling sentences, the ten lessons work and play together to articulate the most basic assumptions and motivations supporting theoretical writing, from its earliest stirrings to its most current turbulences.
Provided in each lesson is a working glossary: specific critical keywords are boldfaced on their first appearance and defined either in the text or in a footnote. But while each lesson constitutes a precise explication of the working terms and core tenets of theoretical writing, each also attempts to exemplify theory as a "practice of creativity" (Foucault) in itself.
In some of the ways that men have learned from feminism to interrogate the construction of masculinity, straights are learning from queer theory to interrogate constructions of straightness, to question their place in those constructions, and to make critical interventions into the institutional reproduction of the heterosexual norm. Straight with a Twist responds to the formulations of some of the leading figures in queer theory, considers demonstrations of the queer in television programs ("Seinfeld," for example) and contemporary films, and explores to what extent and in what ways literary texts from Shakespeare to Dorothy Allison are open to queer interpretation.
Committed to antihomophobic cultural analysis, Straight with a Twist aims to extend the reach of queer theory and humanize the world by making it "queerer than ever."
Book Chapters by Calvin Thomas
Papers by Calvin Thomas
Ten Lessons in Theory argues, and even demonstrates, that "theoretical writing" is nothing if not a specific genre of "creative writing," a particular way of engaging in the art of the sentence, the art of making sentences that make trouble—sentences that make, or desire to make, radical changes in the very fabric of social reality.
As its title indicates, the book proceeds in the form of ten "lessons," each based on an axiomatic sentence selected from the canon of theoretical writing. Each lesson works by creatively unpacking its featured sentence and exploring the sentence's conditions of possibility and most radical implications. In the course of exploring the conditions and consequences of these troubling sentences, the ten lessons work and play together to articulate the most basic assumptions and motivations supporting theoretical writing, from its earliest stirrings to its most current turbulences.
Provided in each lesson is a working glossary: specific critical keywords are boldfaced on their first appearance and defined either in the text or in a footnote. But while each lesson constitutes a precise explication of the working terms and core tenets of theoretical writing, each also attempts to exemplify theory as a "practice of creativity" (Foucault) in itself.
In some of the ways that men have learned from feminism to interrogate the construction of masculinity, straights are learning from queer theory to interrogate constructions of straightness, to question their place in those constructions, and to make critical interventions into the institutional reproduction of the heterosexual norm. Straight with a Twist responds to the formulations of some of the leading figures in queer theory, considers demonstrations of the queer in television programs ("Seinfeld," for example) and contemporary films, and explores to what extent and in what ways literary texts from Shakespeare to Dorothy Allison are open to queer interpretation.
Committed to antihomophobic cultural analysis, Straight with a Twist aims to extend the reach of queer theory and humanize the world by making it "queerer than ever."