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By Phillip Harper

In deepest Affairs, Phillip Brian Harper explores the social and cultural importance of the non-public, offering that, faraway from a common correct, privateness is restricted through one's racial-and sexual-minority prestige. Ranging throughout cinema, literature, sculpture, and lived encounters-from Rodin's The Kiss to Jenny Livingston's Paris is Burning-Private Affairs demonstrates how the very idea of privateness creates own and sociopolitical hierarchies in modern the USA.

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Extra info for Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations (Sexual Cultures Series)

Sample text

By this I mean that the very existence not only of Iola, but of the light-skinned Negro generally, destabilizes the conventional link between socially constituted racial identity and the apparent bi­ ological fact of skin color. Indeed, since Iola’s skin color does not cor­ respond to her racial identification (once she learns of her Negro “blood,” Iola fully identifies with black people), that racial identifica­ tion remarkably takes on the status of a secret—one whose revelation will always come as a shock precisely because it disrupts the standard association between skin color and racial identity.

This engineered comparability of the soccer players’ kiss and characteristic practices from other cultural contexts suggests the de­ gree to which such practices—for all their publicness in the contexts under consideration—nonetheless derive their significance from a highly pervasive and influential logic of privacy. For, indeed, one of the defining characteristics—I am tempted to call it one of the chief beauties—of the private domain in capitalist society is precisely that anything in it can be rendered equivalent to, and thus exchangeable for, any other private interest.

S. context—neatly implicates foreignness so as to manage the potential homoeroticism of the players’ kiss in two di­ vergent and yet complementary ways. S. professional sports and thereby rendering the kiss similarly void of recognized homoerotic import. This engineered comparability of the soccer players’ kiss and characteristic practices from other cultural contexts suggests the de­ gree to which such practices—for all their publicness in the contexts under consideration—nonetheless derive their significance from a highly pervasive and influential logic of privacy.

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