“Are we in a new Cold War?” Since Russian interference in the 2020 US elections, the rise of cybercrime by Russian hackers, and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, this question has made its way from the dinner table of regular American households to the headlines of major newspapers worldwide and to the agenda of international forums and scholarly volumes. The piling evidence of transnational networks between the American Christian Right and conservative Christian groups in Russia, however, prevents us from drawing a clean split between Russia and the West. With my background in Linguistics, English, and Gender and Women’s studies, I am uniquely positioned to contribute to the growing body of research on the current US-Russia relations by applying my knowledge of the Cold War cultural narratives to the analysis of the geopolitics and rhetorics of the “second Cold War.”

 

My research interrogates the historical and contemporary relationship between media, advertisements, political discourse, and cultural narratives with respect to the intersection of citizenship, race, and sexuality. Building on the recent work of feminist and cultural scholars, my research departs from a traditional interpretation of citizenship as a legal category determined by the judicial, legislative, and governmental institutions. Instead, I focus on citizenship as a process of subject-production that regulates and delimits social belonging through the reproduction of historically specific economic, sexual, gender, and racial patterns (what Aihwa Ong and Toby Miller call “cultural citizenship”). These conditions of subjectivity circumscribe the ability to exercise formally guaranteed rights and to be recognized by other national subjects as fellow citizens in everyday context (what Evelyn Nakano Glenn and Lauren Berlant, respectfully, call “substantive citizenship”). Combining literary analysis with rhetorical analysis, in historically specific contexts, my research contributes to the fields of rhetoric, new citizenship studies, socio-cultural geography, transnational American studies, and gender and women’s studies.

 

My dissertation, Spaces of Citizenship: Negotiating Belonging through Cold War Literature and Culture examines how and why the white middle-class suburban household emerged as both the pinnacle of American citizenship and the main condition of national security in the aftermath of World War II. At the height of Cold War containment culture, when fears of Communism and nuclear warfare overlapped with anxieties about homosexuality, gender inversion, miscegenation, and juvenile delinquency, formal citizenship—narrowly defined as one’s legal status—did not provide all American citizens with a sense of national belonging, equal access to civil liberties, and a reasonable degree of safety. Instead, spatialized identity, rather than civic responsibilities and legal rights, came to define the boundaries of proper citizenship. As the city became associated with sexual transgression, black poverty, and crime due to the Lavender Scare, the urban renewal program, and public housing program, highly exclusionary suburbs, which sprang up outside major metropolitan areas in the late 1940s-1950s, emerged as a cornerstone of the cultural narratives defining American citizenship. My dissertation focuses on the mechanisms of suburban citizenship, an affective dynamic produced through suburban homeownership that symbolically integrated individuals into the nation and created a middle-class suburban identity central to the United States’ imagined community during the Cold War. To understand how literature and film contributed to the rise of suburban citizenship, I turn to fiction, films, and advertisements produced between 1945 and 1964 that, instead of focusing solely on postwar suburbia, prioritize the relationship between property ownership, subject formation, and community-belonging. The fictional narratives that inform these works criticize, expand, and at times comply with the dominant narratives about citizenship by rendering (in)visible the practices I identify as the mechanisms of suburban citizenship: 1) whiteness as property, 2) middle-class belonging through family-oriented consumption practices, and 3) mediation of the first two conditions through nostalgia for a mythic small-town citizen. 

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Member of the Wedding (1946), Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) evoke plantation mythologies to challenge the image of the South as the nation’s periphery at a time when Washington attempted to present American racism as a regional rather than systemic issue. When read against the ongoing suburbanization and the “race problem” films such as Pinky (1949), these works by Southern writers suggest that citizens’ equality would remain an unachievable ideal as long as the nation continues to cling to racially contingent forms of property and ideas of personhood. Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1946), The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), and No Down Payment (1957) and their film adaptations and advertisements not only reveal the many fractures in the industry’s portrayal of the middle class but also demonstrate how and why the middle-class homeownership has shifted from the tool of consumerism into the measure of citizenship with the rise of suburban developments. Finally, It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Peyton Place (1956), respectively, evoke and fracture the small-town ideal at the same time as middle-class suburbs tried to legitimize and preserve the notion of white purity through the imagined return to the New England village. 

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My interest in cultural narratives about citizenship also motivates my broader scholarly agenda. I have published in Adaptation and the edited collection Post45 Vs. The World and have publications forthcoming in New Review of Film & Television Studies (NRFTS) and Literature/Film Quarterly, with another article under review in Contemporary Literature. My forthcoming article in NRFTS, for example, suggests that Elia Kazan’s Pinky must be separated from the 1949 cycle of “race problem” films (e.g., Home of the Brave, Lost Boundaries, and Intruder in the Dust) to examine how the film speculates on the possibilities and limitations of Black citizenship in relation not only to the postwar moment but also to the legacy of the plantation—the film’s primary setting and source of conflict. Drawing on critical race theory, queer studies, and New Southern studies, this article argues that in attempting to reconcile the sensibilities of the “Old South” and the demands of the Cold War containment culture, Pinky reveals the inadequacies of both citizenship models. My Adaptation article examines the role that marketing played in shaping the audience’s reception and interpretation of Eric Hodgins’ Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House and its 1948 film adaptation. I argue the film adaptation and its paratexts blurred the enormous disparity between Blandings’ dream and the suburban reality of baby boomers by creating new sites of middle-class identification. My publication in the edited collection uses a transnational approach to examine how Soviet filmmakers transformed the protagonists of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into a metaphor for interracial working-class alliance at the precise moment when Huck was embraced as a quintessential American hero by American critics. Focusing on the questions of canonicity, cross-cultural exchange, and the social and cinematic construction of race, this article offers new insights into the intersection of comparative rhetoric, postcolonial studies, and American studies.

 

After completion of my Ph.D. studies, I will continue my active research agenda by applying my knowledge of Cold War cultural narratives to the analysis of right-wing transnational rhetorics today. Given the timeliness of my research, I will devote the next year to preparing my dissertation for publication by adding a chapter on how contemporary American films (Pleasantville, Vivarium), TV shows (Desperate Housewives, Why Women Kill, Them), and literature (Housekeeping, Typical American) evoke and rework the Cold War narratives of suburban citizenship to define what constitutes a modern family, neighborhood, and the nation. Once the book is under contract, I can devote full time to my second project preliminary titled From Cold War Enemies to Populist Collaborators: Gender, Sexuality, and Shared Media Strategies of Right-Wing America and Russia. Started during my time as Carol Mason’s research assistant for her upcoming article “Opposing Abortion, Protecting Women, and Transnationalizing US Populism,” this book-length project will trace the development of international media strategies of American and Russian conservative groups from the founding of the World Congress of Families (WCF) in 1995 to the establishment of the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute in 2015 to the launch of Tsargrad public movement in 2020. Combining cultural analysis with rhetorical analysis, this study will examine various forms of right-wing pronatalist propaganda, including billboard campaigns, memes, social media posts, and documentaries, such as Demographic Winter (2008), Demographic Bomb (2009), and The New Economic Reality (2010). Focusing on the shifting notions of the “enemy” and “citizen,” my project will explore how American and Russian conservatives evoke and (re)articulate Cold War notions of nuclear family, domesticity, and nation to further their current political agenda.