Shock and Yawn: Resisting Banal Terror Through Queer Storytelling
Autor Megan Sibbetten Limba Engleză Paperback – 23 mar 2026
In Shock and Yawn, Megan Sibbett confronts state-sanctioned, mundane violence committed in the name of protection and argues that queer storytelling is an ideal avenue for recognizing, theorizing, and subverting it: Through queer stories, we have a direct window into the real-world ramifications of violence that purports to be for the public good. This violence, reinforced and normalized through surveillance campaigns, failure-to-protect laws, border policies, and government messaging, is obscured by both its banality and its benevolent veneer, in which children, or imagined children, are central to its logic of protection.
Building on queer theorists’ critiques of intimate and administrative violence, especially Gloria Anzaldúa’s “intimate terrorism,” Sibbett develops methodologies for conceptualizing and subverting violence aimed at queer, racialized, and gendered bodies in this era of surveillance and increasing authoritarianism. Sibbett addresses book bans, anti-trans legislation, idealized histories of westward expansion, and more, examining materials that include public service announcements, advertising, social media, news reports, poems, interviews, and novels. In so doing, she demonstrates the crucial role queer testimonies—and queer histories and queer futures—play in revealing systemic violence and illuminating the transformative potential of everyday resistance.
Building on queer theorists’ critiques of intimate and administrative violence, especially Gloria Anzaldúa’s “intimate terrorism,” Sibbett develops methodologies for conceptualizing and subverting violence aimed at queer, racialized, and gendered bodies in this era of surveillance and increasing authoritarianism. Sibbett addresses book bans, anti-trans legislation, idealized histories of westward expansion, and more, examining materials that include public service announcements, advertising, social media, news reports, poems, interviews, and novels. In so doing, she demonstrates the crucial role queer testimonies—and queer histories and queer futures—play in revealing systemic violence and illuminating the transformative potential of everyday resistance.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814259795
ISBN-10: 0814259790
Pagini: 164
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814259790
Pagini: 164
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“Sibbett’s expansive theory of queer storytelling is a quiet and potent antidote to the mundane, ubiquitous state violence that has shaped our daily lives from 9/11 to Trump 2.0. A timely and important book.” —Carol Mason, author of From the Clinics to the Capitol: How Opposing Abortion Became Insurrectionary
“Sibbett’s framing of ‘mundane violence’ and ‘intimate terrorism’ through queer and decolonial storytelling offers a much-needed intervention to gender studies, critical ethnic studies, critical prison studies, and more. Her choice to center queer grief, childhood, and futurity as part of a storytelling archive is both intellectually rich and emotionally powerful.” —Anita Tijerina Revilla, coeditor of Marching Students: Chicana and Chicano Activism in Education, 1968 to the Present
Notă biografică
Megan Sibbett is Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of Oklahoma. Her teaching and scholarly fields include queer and trans feminist theory, LGBTQ movements, and children’s culture.
Extras
To better frame the mundane violence of protection that is the product of the benevolent protection of the state and the ways such violence intersects with the queer other, I turn back to the post–September 11 See Something, Say Something campaign. The urgency of protection and the need for daily surveillance by citizens is captured in the campaign slogan as well as its origin, imagining communities of surveillance and suspicion as something at once always benign and potentially lethal.
Following the attacks on September 11, 2001, an advertising executive came up with the slogan “if you see something, say something” for the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). The MTA trademarked it. A decade later, the US Department of Homeland Security licensed the slogan to drive a campaign to raise awareness of the “indicators of terrorism” and emphasize the importance of law enforcement (“About the Campaign”). Over the last two decades, DHS has distributed the ideology of the slogan through various campaigns and associated slogans about everyday life in the US.
DHS’s current website offers both business and academic tool kits that include See-Say branding rules, promotional images, video tutorials, and minigames to build skills for recognizing “suspicious” activity. Materials include a downloadable pocket guide, with cutting and folding instructions, to keep the information readily available to “Protect Your Every Day” (“Partnership and Campaign Materials”). The guide features icons for more easily remembering what suspicious activity entails: a cell phone icon for “eliciting information,” a book with a trefoil for “acquisition of expertise,” and a broken window for “sabotage/tampering/vandalism.”
On September 25, 2018, the PSAs, pocket guide, tool kits, and other materials were a central part of the nation’s first If You See Something, Say Something Awareness Day (“If You See Something, Say Something® Awareness Day”). Announced by Kirstjen M. Nielsen, then Secretary of Homeland Security for the Trump Administration, the purpose of the day was to remind the public what suspicious activity was and share the importance of being “vigilant” on social media by using printable speech bubbles with the hashtags #WhyISeeSay and #SeeSayDay (“Department of Homeland Security Launches”).
While the “Protect Your Every Day” toolkit and the PSA focus on a theme of the everywhere threat and the urgency of constant vigilance, they deploy the important paradoxes that keep the campaign relevant: Daily life is benign and threatening; terrorism is everywhere and nowhere, obvious yet hidden. At first the message of protecting your every day seems to resonate with Anzaldúa’s observation that intimate terrorism is within the mundane, but Anzaldúa’s argument, as well as this book’s argument, is not a doubling down on the everywhere threat of terrorism. The purpose is not to add to the catalog of terrorism in order to increase the surveillance, incarceration, punishment, and exile of others. Her theorization of intimate terrorism shows how the surveilling of others, particularly queer, nonnormative others, is found within the projects of the casual, colonial state and its associated structures like patriarchy, racism, classism, and nationalism.
While the campaign materials seem to make no discrepancies of who or what is suspicious, the See-Say sprawl is constrained by focusing it on the queer other. Like the minigames, the training is seemingly suited for everyone and anyone to spot the violence that is purposely not tethered to a suspicious person—a bag becomes a metaphor for a violent outcome. Indeed, during September 2018 of the nation’s first Awareness Day, the game of suspicion seemed to saturate everything. This first Awareness Day occurred during the same month of several major media events of the year—the Kavanaugh Senate hearing and FBI investigation, Paul Manafort’s trial in Washington, DC, and Trump’s proposal to alter the Family Separation Policy to allow the imprisonment of children for more than twenty days. These events are laden with themes of suspicion, crime, patriotism, reporting witnesses, and trending hashtags. Yet these are not the national contexts of the month’s tumultuous events, contexts that might enable a sidelong critique of the particular directions of See-Say sprawl.
Following the attacks on September 11, 2001, an advertising executive came up with the slogan “if you see something, say something” for the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). The MTA trademarked it. A decade later, the US Department of Homeland Security licensed the slogan to drive a campaign to raise awareness of the “indicators of terrorism” and emphasize the importance of law enforcement (“About the Campaign”). Over the last two decades, DHS has distributed the ideology of the slogan through various campaigns and associated slogans about everyday life in the US.
DHS’s current website offers both business and academic tool kits that include See-Say branding rules, promotional images, video tutorials, and minigames to build skills for recognizing “suspicious” activity. Materials include a downloadable pocket guide, with cutting and folding instructions, to keep the information readily available to “Protect Your Every Day” (“Partnership and Campaign Materials”). The guide features icons for more easily remembering what suspicious activity entails: a cell phone icon for “eliciting information,” a book with a trefoil for “acquisition of expertise,” and a broken window for “sabotage/tampering/vandalism.”
On September 25, 2018, the PSAs, pocket guide, tool kits, and other materials were a central part of the nation’s first If You See Something, Say Something Awareness Day (“If You See Something, Say Something® Awareness Day”). Announced by Kirstjen M. Nielsen, then Secretary of Homeland Security for the Trump Administration, the purpose of the day was to remind the public what suspicious activity was and share the importance of being “vigilant” on social media by using printable speech bubbles with the hashtags #WhyISeeSay and #SeeSayDay (“Department of Homeland Security Launches”).
While the “Protect Your Every Day” toolkit and the PSA focus on a theme of the everywhere threat and the urgency of constant vigilance, they deploy the important paradoxes that keep the campaign relevant: Daily life is benign and threatening; terrorism is everywhere and nowhere, obvious yet hidden. At first the message of protecting your every day seems to resonate with Anzaldúa’s observation that intimate terrorism is within the mundane, but Anzaldúa’s argument, as well as this book’s argument, is not a doubling down on the everywhere threat of terrorism. The purpose is not to add to the catalog of terrorism in order to increase the surveillance, incarceration, punishment, and exile of others. Her theorization of intimate terrorism shows how the surveilling of others, particularly queer, nonnormative others, is found within the projects of the casual, colonial state and its associated structures like patriarchy, racism, classism, and nationalism.
While the campaign materials seem to make no discrepancies of who or what is suspicious, the See-Say sprawl is constrained by focusing it on the queer other. Like the minigames, the training is seemingly suited for everyone and anyone to spot the violence that is purposely not tethered to a suspicious person—a bag becomes a metaphor for a violent outcome. Indeed, during September 2018 of the nation’s first Awareness Day, the game of suspicion seemed to saturate everything. This first Awareness Day occurred during the same month of several major media events of the year—the Kavanaugh Senate hearing and FBI investigation, Paul Manafort’s trial in Washington, DC, and Trump’s proposal to alter the Family Separation Policy to allow the imprisonment of children for more than twenty days. These events are laden with themes of suspicion, crime, patriotism, reporting witnesses, and trending hashtags. Yet these are not the national contexts of the month’s tumultuous events, contexts that might enable a sidelong critique of the particular directions of See-Say sprawl.
Cuprins
Contents
Introduction Everyday See Say
Chapter 1 Benevolent Protection and the Criminality of Failure
Chapter 2 Shock and Coffee: The Cultures of Mundane Violence, Kids, and Queer Thinking
Chapter 3 Decolonial Histories: Normalized National Terrorism in Emma Pérez’s Forgetting the Alamo, or, Blood Memory
Chapter 4 Dogged Progress: Domestic Warzones in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Works Cited
Index
Introduction Everyday See Say
Chapter 1 Benevolent Protection and the Criminality of Failure
Chapter 2 Shock and Coffee: The Cultures of Mundane Violence, Kids, and Queer Thinking
Chapter 3 Decolonial Histories: Normalized National Terrorism in Emma Pérez’s Forgetting the Alamo, or, Blood Memory
Chapter 4 Dogged Progress: Domestic Warzones in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Works Cited
Index
Descriere
Builds on theories of Gloria Anzaldúa and others to argue that queer storytelling is an ideal avenue for recognizing, theorizing, and subverting state-sanctioned, mundane violence committed in the name of protection.