UC Santa Cruz

Ambivalence in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century U.S. Literature and Culture reframes ambivalence from being a problem requiring solution to a source and force of politically and ethically significant transformative potential. Since its coinage in early-twentieth-century psychoanalysis, accounts of ambivalence, particularly those concerning stigmatized (e.g. queer, trans, racialized, disabled) subjects, typically conceive of it as a component of or catalyst for broader arguments around shame and repression and seek to resolve the problem of ambivalence resolutely through either assimilation or radical opposition. The literary works I explore chart more complex routes through ambivalence, disaggregating it from shame, understanding it as a constitutive, unavoidable, and irresolvable condition of subjectivity, and leaving the ambivalences the works explore – around gender, sexuality, race, and class – provocatively unresolved. In considering how these texts derive with (rather than from) their ambivalences the affective resources through which new resistances and worlds can begin to be built, my dissertation establishes ambivalence as an integral concept for approaching and conducting the work of ethical and political action in the troubled present.