Vulnerable Constitutions: Queerness, Disability, and the Remaking of American Manhood

Vulnerable Constitutions draws together queer studies and feminist disability studies to produce new visions of queercrip masculinity in twentieth-century US literature and culture. Introducing the concept of "antiprophylactic citizenship," this monograph redefines the contours of masculinity not as invulnerability, but as radical openness, revealing the transformative properties of leaky boundaries in terms of the body as well as the nation-state. Barounis's meditations on immunity, masculinity, and the viral speak presciently to a world altered by pandemics and mass debility.