The entanglement between fantasies of love and power occupied Berlant for the rest of their career.Īs a professor in the English department at the University of Chicago, where they worked for 37 years, and an editor of the influential journal Critical Inquiry, Berlant shaped generations of scholars, transforming the way we speak and write about gender and sexuality, in both academia and more public-facing criticism. As an English graduate student at Cornell University in the early 1980s, Berlant absorbed the influence of theorists and cultural-studies scholars like Benedict Anderson, Raymond Williams and Michel Foucault and wrote a doctoral thesis on Nathaniel Hawthorne and “the romance of power” - or how stories of love are always also stories of domination. Their mother was an interior designer and, later, a real estate agent whom Berlant once described as having “died of femininity.” We might read Berlant’s work as both an interrogation and a loving recuperation of an investment in a restrictive concept: gender. Through it all, they taught us to think of mass culture as a site where the intimate and public merge.īerlant, who used the pronouns “she” and “they,” was raised in the affluent Philadelphia suburb Penn Valley. Berlant was a critic and scholar of gender and sexuality whose remit stretched from 19th-century American literature to Monica Lewinsky to BoJack Horseman. This might be unusual for a contemporary academic, but the strangeness, even surrealness, of the occasion also felt appropriate: As a scholar, Berlant helped us understand how popular culture and everyday civic life are driven by some of our most private - and often painful - desires. Over the subsequent days, remembrances ran through my feed in waves of grief that felt tantamount to the passing of a celebrity.

On the morning of June 28, I learned from Twitter that the literary critic Lauren Berlant had died.

They pioneered a theory for our messy emotional lives.

Kiss of Death by Joseph Locke