Calvin Thomas

Calvin Thomas is Professor of English at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where he teaches literary theory and cultural studies. His research involves feminist, psychoanalytic, queer, and deconstructive interrogations of gender, sexuality, and the body. His first book, Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line (University of Illinois Press, 1996), examines repressions of the male body in social constructions of normative masculinity and the role played by writing – as material act or "bodily function"– in the disruption of gendered identity. Long interested in the relation of men to feminism, Thomas is also concerned with the implications of "straight" negotiations with queer theory, and his co-edited volume Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality (University of Illinois Press, 2000) examines this terrain, as does the book called Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory: Essays on Abjection in Literature, Mass Culture, and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). His latest book, Ten Lessons in Theory: An Introduction to Theoretical Writing, was published by Bloomsbury (formerly Continuum) in 2013. His next book,on Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, will be called Adventures in American Abjection.