Catherine Liu – författare

A denunciation of the credentialed elite class that serves capitalism while insisting on its own progressive heroismProfessional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways. Author Catherine Liu shows how the PMC stands in the way of social justice and economic redistribution by promoting meritocracy, philanthropy, and other self-serving operations to abet an individualist path to a better world. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits.Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Rethinking the importance of Sigmund Freud’s landmark book The Interpretation of Dreams a century after its publication in 1900, this work brings together psychoanalysts, philosophers, cultural theorists, film and visual theorists, and literary critics from several continents in a compilation of the best clinical and theoretical work being done in psychoanalysis today. It is unique in convening both theory and practice in productive dialogue, reflecting on the encounter between psychoanalysis and the tradition of hermeneutics. Collectively the essays argue that Freud’s legacy has shaped the way we think about not only psychology and the nature of the self but also our understanding of politics, culture, and even thought itself. Contributors: Willy Apollon, Gifric; Karyn Ball, U of Alberta, Edmonton; Raymond Bellour, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; Patricia Gherovici, Philadelphia Lacan Study Group and Seminar; Judith Feher-Gurewich, New York U; Jonathan Kahana, New York U; A. Kiarina Kordela, Macalester College; Pablo Kovalovsky, Clinica de Borde; Jean Laplanche, U of Lausanne; Laura Marcus, U of Sussex; Andrew McNamara, Queensland U of Technology; Claire Nahon; Yun Peng, U of Minnesota; Gerard Pommier, Nantes U; Jean-Michel RabatÉ, Princeton U; Laurence A. Rickels, U of California, Santa Barbara; Avital Ronell, New York U; Elke Siegel, Yale U; Rei Terada, U of California, Irvine; Klaus Theweleit, U of Freiburg-im-Breisgau; Paul Verhaege, U of Ghent, Belgium; Silke-Maria Weineck, U of Michigan.  Catherine Liu is associate professor of comparative literature and film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. John Mowitt is professor and chair of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. Thomas Pepper is associate professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. Jakki Spicer received her Ph.D. in cultural studies and comparative literature from the University of Minnesota.

What happens when an idea born of genuine suffering is weaponized as a tool of social control? Traumatized is the story of how shell shock became PTSD, how Oprah turned pain into profit, and how "authenticity" became the ultimate brand. It is a history of surveillance cap­italism's greatest coup: convincing us that wounds define us and that accom­modating each other's trauma is more important than challenging the powerful.Catherine Liu delivers an unflinching diagnosis of our current crisis, rooted as it is in the collapse of liberal politics, the ascendance of performance fragil­ity, and the rise of emotional display as a surrogate for political action. Sharp, provocative, and urgently necessary, Traumatized argues that we must re­ject a politics of permanent victimhood since it destroys solidarity and leaves us defenseless against the systems that cause real harm.

It's 1980s New York, and though the coke flows freely, money and glamour are the more powerful intoxicants. While fortunes are being made in SoHo galleries and on Wall Street, an underclass of transient drag queens and dandies, club kids and strippers, artists and actors, models and waitstaff wander the streets, providing the city's background color, cheap labor and even cheaper entertainment. The unnamed narrator of Catherine Liu's 1997 novel Oriental Girls Desire Romance--now reprinted by Kaya Press--is a young Chinese-American woman who skirts the edges of New York privilege. A refugee both from her Ivy League education and a family of Maoist ideologues, she navigates the city as a slacker, temp and exotic dancer, outmaneuvering the ever-present lure of Prozac. Liu's debut novel recalls the seedy street atmosphere of Bette Gordon's 1984 film Variety through a narrator that is perceptive, funny and unhinged.