Pleasure and Pain in US Public Culture (Rhetoric, Culture, and Social Critique)

A critical examination of how pleasure and pain are constructed, represented, and contested within American public culture.

Mainstream news and social media often highlight presentations of pain that invite a voyeuristic, pleasurable experience, whether the result of war, disasters, crime, accidents, or other catastrophes. This collection of essays explores pleasurable pains and painful pleasures, showing how they pervade contemporary western public culture.

Deploying methodologies drawn from psychoanalysis, rhetoric and communication, political theory, and visual culture, Pleasure and Pain in US Public Culture offers insightful criticisms and theories about how pleasure and pain function in public discourse, media, and everyday communication practices.

The contributors provide a sample of fascinating range of news reportage, television, film and cinema, stage drama, comic performances, street art, and other forms of popular culture. The media cited and analyzed include Spike Lee’s films, Afrofuturism, autoethnography, and the #MeToo movement.

The collection takes up engrossing topics such as the cathartic allure of pain, ethical dilemmas surrounding public displays of suffering, and the transformative power of narratives that confront trauma. The essays also draw connections between theory and real-world outcomes, explore the implications of enjoying traumatic comedy, and link the natural world to otherwise mundane instances of interspecies violence.  Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination hearings and what they suggest about witnessing trauma is also discussed.

Pleasure and Pain in US Public Culture will change how a reader sees the world. It imparts a startling vision of western culture permeated by pain and pleasure.

Christopher J. Gilbert is associate professor of English in Communication and Media at Assumption University and author of Caricature and National Character: The United States at War and When Comedy Goes Wrong. His work has also appeared in numerous journals.

John Louis Lucaites is professor emeritus of Rhetoric and Public Culture at Indiana University. He is author, coauthor, and editor of many works, most recently, The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship, coauthored with Robert Hariman.