This panel scrutinizes two important conceptual terms in our contemporary critical and literary lexicons: grammar and power. In her 1987 essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Hortense Spillers asks critics to think about race and gender in terms of an American grammar book. ‘Grammar,’ under Spillers, becomes a rich metaphorical resource for thinking how slavery conditioned the meanings that Black captive bodies, genders, and sexualities could have in the US. Her innovative use of ‘grammar’ as a governing structure for the metaphoric and metonymic movements of the symbolic is now a central critical tool in anti-racist, feminist, and queer theoretical work. Similarly, Foucault’s rethinking of ‘power’ in relation to bodies, sexuality, and institutional regimes has been widely influential. His claim that power is exercised, rather than held (it is a set of relations and forces always in play, running unevenly through bodies, knowledges, and institutions) reconfigured the way in which criticism in the humanities was imagined and deployed. This panels will unpack of the grammar of power in three interlocking domains: carcerality, reproductive justice, and affect. It will ask the audience to consider how these now canonical critical terms (grammar; power) could be reworked and recalibrated so that criticism can address urgent political and theoretical impasses.

The first paper (“Ungendering, Negativity, and the Power of Grammar”) provides feminist and Afro-pessimist frames for the panel. Dr. Park considers two terms, resistance and ambivalence, and how they might be positioned in different feminist articulations. Her paper explores this through the work of Judith Butler and Hortense Spillers in their engagement with and questions on sexuality, race, and un-gendering. In doing so, it interrogates how these concerns--whether wittingly or unwittingly--also beg questions regarding the ethics and negativity of the real and the implications of blackness and trans- in language. This presentation also visits recent meditations by thinkers of Afro-pessimism who have drawn from the work of Frantz Fanon to further ruminate on these dimensions. In doing so, it stages for the audience questions concerning the power of grammar (and not just grammars of power) and the carcerality of language.

Turning explicitly to vocabularies of power, the second paper (“Revocability, Exception, Disqualification: Abortion’s Heterogeneities of Power”) examines the recent revocation of Roe v. Wade. Dr. Deutscher argues that abortion and politicized reproduction have emerged as a conjuncture of modernity’s plural and heterogeneous formations of power. The paper suggests a vocabulary for identifying a number of their hinges: in addition to revocability, this vocabulary includes exception, disqualifying qualification, and “elsewhere” and “nowhere” rights, to name a few. Since, in the post-Dobbs environment, the fraught convention of analogizing types of domination has also re-emerged, for example, in discussions of legal precedent for cross-state laws concerning rendition, and in discussions of a criminalization of the womb, this paper challenges the audience to consider why an analysis of heterogeneous, combinatory and mutually reconfiguring forms of power provides an alternative. A discussion of the latter with session participants will draw attention to the multiple roles of contemporary medical power as well as psychiatric power as a juridical auxiliary.

The final paper (“The Powers of Anger”) turns the discussion towards questions of grammar and epistolatory exchange. Dr. Wilson investigates an instance when intense focus on conventional grammatical structures (the placement of a period, the use of an apostrophe) re-ordered the formations of power that were beginning to sediment in early US feminisms. In a series of letters to a feminist newspaper in the 1970s, Valerie Solanas (already notorious for her SCUM Manifesto and her incarceration for the attempted assassination of Andy Warhol in 1968) became increasingly concerned with, and enraged by, typographical and grammatical issues in the correspondence. This paper reads for how Solanas’s grammatical fury sabotages the political ambitions of the feminists and lesbians with whom she was engaged. Spoiling the idea that feminist anger is always in the service of emancipation, Solanas’s correspondence exemplifies the internally corrosive and disfiguring effects of political anger, allowing session participants to see that anger--a negative affect of considerable psycho-social power--resists our capacities to contain and control it.

These three papers (18 minutes each) will provide multiple, overlapping frames for audience discussion about how grammar and power operate in contemporary criticism. The presider for the panel (Dr. Telò) will guide discussion (20 minutes) about how we could think of grammar, power, language, and affect in relation to the conspicuous racism, misogyny, lethal anger, and social disquiet of our current moment.