Masculinity Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory
DRAFT
Andrew Strombeck
9/6/2016
The Amongst Men of Conspiracy Theory

Published over twenty-five years ago, the late Eve Sedgwick's Between Men remains a
touchstone for a wide range of queer and masculinity studies. The between men of Sedgwicks
title refers to a set of relationships that she finds dominating the social: much of the social world,
as represented by a range of literary texts from Shakespeares sonnets to Dickenss The Pickwick
Papers, is reducible in some from to struggles and attachments between men. Primarily
theoretical but grounded in a Marxist sense of history, Between Men articulates structures of
what Sedgwick famously terms male homosocial affiliation--the struggles, antipathies,
attractions, and bonds amongst men in the workplace, as friends, as romantic rivals, as family
members. These bonds depend on masculinitys others in a range of ways: women typically
serve as vehicles of male-male desire/antipathy, in, for example, the lovers triangle which serves
as Sedgwicks most famous example. Homosexuals, on the other hand serve as delimiters of
where a certain kind of male bond ends and a prohibited one begins, with homophobia providing
the often violently-imposed limit of male subjectivity. Influenced by psychoanalysis, Marxism,
and particularly Foucault, Sedgwicks book offered new ways of viewing gender, and, in
demonstrating how queer desires both regulate and are regulated by male heterosexual bonds,
established a range of questions still being answered by queer theory. Between Men continues to
be compelling in part because of the role it assigns to the imaginary and fantasy in the
determination of gender identity. Long before Judith Butler deconstructs gender as a
performative fantasy, Sedgwick demonstrates just how dependent masculine identities are on the

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imagination, and how the imagination imposes a latticework of male-male relations on the social,
a latticework which, while imagined, effects real disparities among the subjects affected by it.
The title of this project, Amongst Men, deliberately invokes Sedgwick's title and in
articulating homosociality at work in a postwar American context, this project builds upon the
foundation of her study, examining how such homosociality functions in a seemingly odd place:
the wild imaginations of the conspiracy theorist (though as a range of critics have demonstrated,
and as Ill emphasize, the wildness of conspiracy theory is often merely an illusory way of
distancing its strong passions from a proper political). The homosociality I find at work in
conspiracy theory bears many similarities with that described in Between Men: it concerns envy,
hierarchy, the centeredness of male action in political and social orders, and--most centrally-identifications, Oedipal and otherwise, amongst men. However, the realm in which such
interactions take shape is vastly different than that described by Sedgwick, a difference that I will
identify in terms of a historical shift. With some exceptions, Sedgwicks between men tends to
occur amongst men in physical proximity, in an immediate time frame: between romantic rivals,
bosses and employees, sons and fathers, brothers, friends. As Sedgwick notes, such a framework
well suits to the period of her study, which encompasses the emergence of mercantile and
industrial capitalism, and touching on colonialism. While such capitalist systems of course
depend on imagination and abstraction to function, they are arguably nevertheless rooted in
physical proximity: the discipline of the factory floor, the local disruption of the strike, the faceto-face struggles for power within industrial organizations. Indeed, in his account of the
masculinities around the steel industry, Ragged Dicks--an account owing much to the critical
paradigms established by Between Men--critic James Catano describes a landscape riddled with

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Andrew Strombeck
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face-to-face contact, describing, for example, Andrew Carnegie facing down strikers, or the
tense, face-to-face negotiations between Carnegie and a rival. While Fordism relied on massive
organizations to function, arguably such organizationsthe top offices in Detroit, the UAW
leadership, the Roosevelt administrationwere more tactile and immediate than in the postFordist world. In other words, under Fordism, the "amongst men" was "management," "the
Hoover administration," "city hall," at worst "the Jews," "the Reds"--all relatively localizable. In
part, Amongst Men will argue that conspiracy theory offers nostalgia for this immediate world,
even while pointing to a far less immediate, far less manageable world. But conspiracy theory, as
it functions under post-Fordist, late capitalist regimes, allows men to navigate and identify a
world gone vertiginously complex. The ways in which men imagine themselves and the powers
to which they are subjugated, then, shift radically under late capitalism.
In a post-Fordist time frame, key interactions between men, at least in an economic
sense, often occur across wide swathes of time and space. Moreover, the stable community and
familial bonds that frame Sedgwicks homosocial relations have been disrupted by everything
from urbanization, and later suburbanization, to an increased reliance on temporary and
outsourced labor, to rapidly-expanding consumer and media cultures. By late capitalism, I
mean the postwar period marked by systems of globalized, networked industry and fluid capital
described by Ernst Mandel and expanded upon by Fredric Jameson; by post-Fordism, I mean,
in the United States (the concept is also generally applied to Europe) the increased reliance on
outsourcing and temporary labor, the receding of the welfare state, and the decline of unions, a
combination of forces that result in a range of economic and social changes, as David Harvey
and others have demonstrated. In part a reaction to the capitalist crises of the early seventies, in

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which the economies of the United States and Europe began a painful contraction, post-Fordism
has been characterized by the increased use of contract and temporary labor, increased attacks on
the welfare state in favor of privatized solutions, and rapid shifts in manufacturing sites,
generally to the Asian and Latin American developing world. (In his recent A Brief History of
Neoliberalism, Harvey also observes that such changes has produced further concentrations of
wealth among the economic elite.) Both late capitalism and post-Fordism, I argue, transform the
homosociality of Sedgwicks study, into social realm in which relationships are far more
dispersed and distanced. In the context of late capitalism and post-Fordism, men are never quite
sure with whom theyre struggling, and conspiracy theory becomes the figure representing this
distanced struggle. If Sedgwick charts the decline of a local, artisanal masculinity and its
replacement with an industrial (wage-driven) middle class masculinity, my project seeks to
scrutinize male bonds as they exist in a globalized, late capitalist world with the destabilized
employment and privatized social services endemic to post-Fordism. Of course, in identifying
such a role for conspiracy theory, I merely reassert what others have stated about conspiracy
theory under the conditions of late capitalism. As critics from Jameson to Peter Knight observe,
under the complex, globalized conditions of late capitalism, conspiracy theory becomes a
necessary metaphor for imagining how political and economic power is organized. My interest,
though, lies in how late capitalisms social and political power shapes masculine identities and
relations amongst men: how men imagine their identities in relation to powerful men that are
always remote from their current context. Late capitalism, I will argue, opens masculinity into a
bewildering array of changes on the meaning of gender; if patriarchy historically relied on a set
of myths to propagate itself--separate spheres, the danger of the frontier, a rigid association

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between whiteness and American--such myths have degraded in a globalized, fragmented
economy, even as they have become rearticulated through the wide saturation of media and
consumer cultures.
In yoking a Marxist understanding of late capitalism with gender studies, I return to the
critical framework that produced Between Men, a work informed throughout by Marxist theory.
Writing of The Pickwick Papers, for example, Sedgwick notes:
In these male homosocial bonds are concentrated the fantasy energies of compulsion,
prohibition, and explosive violence; all are full structured by the logic of paranoia. At the
same time, however, these fantasy energies are mapped along the axes of social and
political power; so that the revelation of intrapsychic structures is inextricable from the
revelation of the mechanisms of class domination (162).
As she does throughout her book, Sedgwick offers provocative ways to conceptualize
masculinity. First, bonds between men serve as concentrations of fantasy energies: the things that
men are compelled to feel, are prohibited from feeling, and the violence that proliferates when
compulsion or prohibition is challenged. Moreover, of course, the primacy of gender--the gravity
it exerts in the social sphere--means that such fantasies will tend to concentrate around issues of
gender identity--and that gender identity shapes and organizes even those fantasies that seem
only loosely connected to gender. Gender is the magnet beneath the surface of the iron shavings
of raw fantasy, forming it into shapes that only appear to assemble on their own terms. Second,
these energies--because men are the ones who run things, who manage the social, political, and
economic realms--become mapped onto "axes of social and political power"--the power relations
writ large into the culture, particularly those of class, but likely those of race as well. That is,

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gender issues shoot through the social, providing the base desires around which "social and
political power" take shape and/or are perceived as.
As men's studies authority R.W. Connell has famously argued, any give historical time and
place features a "hegemonic" form of masculinity, against which other men need measure
themselves. In the globalized world, Connell has recently noted, the hegemonic man is the man
best able to navigate global networks, the petit bourgeois who circunambulates the globe with
ease. My study will identify a tension between this hegemonic masculinity and the inevitable
position of men who can't quite achieve such dominance. While I will focus on men who envy
such hegemonic men--the men who, in my reading, function as conspirators--all men are subject
to the anxieties of believing themselves the conspiracy theorist and not the conspirator.Connell
describes masculinity's relationship to late capitalism as follows:
[T]he world in which neo-liberalism is ascendant is still a gendered world, and neoliberalism has an implicit gender politics. De-regulation of the economy places strategic
power into the hands of particular groups of menmanagers and entrepreneurs. I have
suggested (Connell 1998) that these groups are the bearers of an emerging hegemonic form
of masculinity in the contemporary global economy, which I call transnational business
masculinity (Masculinities xxiii).
Why, then, conspiracy theories? I argue that, within the context of the post-1960 United States,
conspiracy theories offer a useful site in which to examine how the fantasy energies of
compulsion, prohibition, and [] violence" described by Sedgwick take shape in the
destabilized, distanced landscape of late capitalism. As Ill emphasize, the homosocial bonds of
my study are far less immediate than those posited by Sedgwick. Such conspiracy theories create

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a sense of "amongst men" in multiple, sites: first, the site of the conspirators, where powerful
men gather and affirm one another; second, the site of the conspiracy theorist, who feels
connection with--but repulsion from--the conspirators, as well as similarly-minded conspiracy
theorists.
The dual, distanced sites here should serve to emphasize the remoteness experienced by
late capitalist subjects, as manifested in everything from suburban sprawl to increased
mediatization but also the specific detachments experienced by men, as manifested in the
increased bureaucratization of work and the destabilization of patriarchy. Conspiracy theories, I
argue, serve as an allegory for how late capitalist masculine power is organized: conspiracy
theories offer men a way to imagine how they relate to other men Out There, in the terrifying,
vertiginous world of late capitalist power, power that is, as Jameson and others have argued,
always remote from one's immediate subject position. I argue, then, that conspiracy theories map
the "amongst men" of the present moment, an "amongst men" that is always receding into some
dimly-lit room. Recent names for these rooms include: global capitalists, neoconservatives, Wall
Street, Al Quaeda, Islamofascism, the Bilderburg Group, George Soros, and ACORN. All of
these names, while of course pointing to genuine axes of critique, also indicate the distant power
organized amongst men. Conspiracy theory articulates contemporary structures of male-male
affiliation, as located in a fantasy realma social beyond the social of everyday life, reproducing
the sense of distance that Jameson finds operating in the films of The Geopolitical Aesthetic.
Conspiracy theory finds in this social beyond the social other men, talking to other men,
affirming each other, managing the world, reifying the logic of alterity, affirming the centrality of
male management, resuscitating the reassuring structures of male-male relations into a space

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paradoxically distant from (in the sense that the conspirators can never be found) and accessible
to (in the sense that one's imaginary can operate anywhere, and one need "achieve" nothing to
"encounter"--have knowledge of--the conspiracy) every man.
These positions replicate, in the media-distanced, macro context of late capitalist
subjectivity, a kind of Oedipal struggle, with the conspirators occupying the father position,
and the conspiracy theorist occupying the son position. In his study of the self-made man
trope in American culture, as manifested in the narratives circulating around the steel industry,
Catano finds the self-made man continually framing himself in terms of father-son struggle.
Grounded in both psychoanalytic theory and rhetorical theory, Catano describes how the
autobiography of Andrew Carnegie plays out in terms of Oedipal struggle. Indeed, as Catano
argues, Carnegie and other men construct their lives as products of Oedipal struggle--struggles
between men in in which meiiworkplace individualism prevails over cooperation, domesticity ,
and other feminine virtues.
In identifying these tensions, I draw on a work which in many ways expands upon and
modifies Sedgwicks model of homosocial relations. Dana Nelson's pathbreaking reading of
antebellum masculinity, National Manhood, finds relations amongst men that, while continuing
to rely on masculinitys others for their foundation, rely far more heavily on abstraction to
function: the national manhood of Nelsons title refers to a shared sense of uneven fraternity
amongst middle-class white men in the antebellum period. Such fraternity, in Nelsons reading,
relies upon what Nelson calls a broader symbolic attachment to natioanl identity and civic
organization (6). Such national manhood, in Nelsons argument, functioned at an abstract and
imaginary level: White manhood was a useful category for inventing national unity because it

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abstracted ment interests out of local issues and identity in an appeal to a nationally shared
nature (7). Nelsons work, like a range of New Americanist work from Donald Pease, Laurent
Berlant, Patricia Wald, and others, yokes the intimate material of gender identity and desire to
ideas about nation and politics, Throughout National Manhood, Nelson argues that masculine
authority is rooted in the management of masculinity's others: natives, African-Americans,
women, criminals, but also that such management never provides a secure identity, that it must
be, following Judith Butler's theories of gender, reconstituted again and again. The position of
men, then, is both tenuous and powerful, both conspiracy theorist and conspirator. The
hegemonic men--the men who run the world, then men whose behavior is to be envied by all
other men--are no more secure then those that envy them. Nelson and others describe
masculinity as a process rather than a fixed identity.
In describing late capitalist men as a group, I bear in mind that conspiracy theory offers
identifications that form only one facet of male identity. Indeed, following feminist work on the
social construction of gender, much recent work on masculinity emphasizes the constructed
nature of male identitythe extent to which masculinity is seldom one thing, but a loose
collection of attributes that cohere either loosely or by ideological force. # Many recent critics of
masculinity draw, of course on Butlers influential ideas in Gender Trouble and Bodies that
Matter. Butler's work famously establishes gender as a contingent identity that, while authorized
and inscripted by power, nevertheless requires continual reassertion to function coherently. For
Butler, gender is located squarely located within the realm of the socialand therefore,
contingent, temporary: [M]an and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male
one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one (6). For Butler, identity is a

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socially born norm, a regulating fiction. In her reading, then, there is no one masculinity,
masculinity is something to be struggled for, not achieved, and yet hetero and masculine are not
neutral players within this regime: The univocity of sex, the internal coherence of gender, and
the binary framework for both sex and gender are considered throughout as regulatory fictions
that consolidate and naturalize the convergent power regimes of masculine and heterosexist
oppression (33). Masculinites, then, must be seen as functions of larger forces instead of as an
automatically inherent feature of identity.
But while gender is not a given, gender identities within particular cultures do maintain
recognizable patterns, and my study will demonstrate that contemporary masculine identities
draw on patterns famously identified by Freud and his followers. In other words, while gender is
contingent and uneven, Western hegemonic masculinity has maintained certain orthodoxies
which can be usefully described in terms of psychoanalysis. If, as many critics have recently
argued, Freuds models are hardly universalizable across cultures, races, and classes, he
nevertheless does offer insight into the virus of Oedipus that shapes masculine self-formation
in the United States. A range of masculinity critics, from Kaja Silverman, to Butler, to Catano, to
Connell, to David Savran, to Drucilla Cornell, have articulated masculine identity in terms of
both the anxious desire to meld biological penis with cultural fount of authority Phallus and the
father-son struggle that comprises Oedipus. While such psychoanalytic patterns are by no means
universally and uniformly applied, they have a long history in shaping Western gender ideology,
and as such, continue to exert wide influence in shaping the way Western men imagine
themselves in relation to others. The Phallus, famously, is that imaginary location of male
authority identified by Lacan as associated with the continuity of the Symbolic Order and what

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Lacan calls the Law of the Father. Connell, for example, calls the Phallus point of intersection
between patriarchal dominance of culture and the bodily experience of masculinity (232).
Building on Lacans theories, Kaja Silverman describes the Phallus as a transhistorical signifier,
which ensures the wholeness of ideology, the completeness of an ideological field. Men, in
Silvermans reading, continually seek access to this Phallus, in part because they tend to confuse
the biological penis with the cultural locus of male authority. According to Silverman, the
dominant fiction situates a natural link between masculine dominance and the social fielda
link that [is] situated in a space beyond ideological causation or political interventionin a
sacred time. But, Silverman continues, far from belonging to a kind of sacred time, beyond
the vicissitudes of ideology and history, the phallus/penis equation is promoted by the dominant
fiction, and sustained by collective belief (44). The masculine subject always fears that his
mastery is slipping, whether in competition with other men or with women; as a result, the
fiction of the phallus/penis equation must be continually renewed. The Phallus should be
understood, nevertheless, as a function of ideology more than an inherent feature of the social field. In
Gender Trouble, Butler critiques the limitations of the idea. She describes a false binary set up around the
Phallus: In the Lacanian framework, identification is understood to be fixed within the binary disjunction
of 'having' [men] or 'being' [women] the Phallus, with the consequence that the excluded term of the
binary continually haunts and disrupts the coherent posturing of any one. The excluded term is an
excluded sexuality that contests the self-grounding pretensions of the subject as well as its claims to know
the source and object of its desire (66). Butler sets this binary against what she describes as multiple
identifications [that][] constitute a nonhierarchical configuration of shifting and overlapping
identifications that call into question the primacy of any univocal gender attribution (66).

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Still, such patterns, while wide-ranging across Western history, must take shape in a
particular historical context. In scrutinizing the homosociality proffered by conspiracy theory, I
bear in mind Connell's dictum that masculinity must be understood as an aspect of large-scale
social structures and processes (Masculinities 39). The masculine rhetorics that I explore here
take shape within the specific historical circumstances of the postwarand especially postsixtiesera. The sheer number of publically visible mens movements established during this
period (each featured on the front cover of Time or Newsweek) attests to the idea that something
is happening with masculinity: Robert Blys mythopoetic movement, the Promise Keepers, the
Million Man Marchand, less visibly, the National Organization of Men Against Sexism, and
the series of Men and Masculinities conferences documented by womens studies scholar Judith
Newton in From Panthers to Promise Keepers. As in every era, masculine identities are subject
in this era to a range of challenges and changes that force recalibrations and reconstitutions of the
myths associated with hegemonic masculinity. In a macro sense, such challenges and changes are
represented by late capitalism and post-Fordism, but these sweeping changes are manifested and
augmented by a series of cultural shifts in the sixties and seventies often grouped as liberation
movements, among which I group second-wave feminism, decolonization, civil rights, and gay
rights. As with previous periods of masculine crisis, the challenges here came from a variety of
quarters: most prominently feminism and its attendant restructuring of the breadwinner model, as
well as the affirmative action programs that responded to it; the gay liberation movement, which,
as Connell argues, sanctioned alternate forms of masculinity as politically and culturally viable,
if continuing to be subject to discrimination; the civil rights movement, and the attendant
political and cultural changes that respond to it, among these affirmative action but also the

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widespread representation of minorities in popular culture; the economic crises of the early
seventies, and the set of corporate responses to these crises described above and known as postFordism. Of course, the changes in masculinity during this period are primarily symbolic:
Michael Messner describes such changes as the collapse of the legitimacy of patriarchal power;
even as men, and especially white men, continue to enjoy better wages, more wealth, and more
authority than women and minorities, patriarchical power as such is disavowed, or at least
challenged, by these historical circumstances.# Indeed, sociologist John MacInness goes so far as
to describe modernity itselfwith its Enlightenment principle of all human beings are equal and
capitalisms destabilization of patriarchal orders--as undermining patriarchy: Modernity
undermines patriarchy. []Substantial changes have taken place in the sexual division of labor,
by which I mean the process whereby males and females routinely perform different activities
and have access to contrasting amounts of power and status because of their sex. Men have lost a
great deal of their power over women (1).
Nevertheless, as Gail Bederman comments in reference to a similarly framed crisis in
turn of the century cultures, its hard to say that masculinity is in crisis when it continues to
maintain economic, cultural, and political advantages in a wide range of registers. Indeed, to
describe masculinity as in crisis is, to Bederman, to reinforce masculinity as a transhistorical,
fixed entity, instead of a social construction continually reconstituted: [T]o imply that
masculinity was in crisis suggest that manhood is a transhistorical category or fixed essence that
has its good moments as well as its bad moments, rather than an ideological contrsuct which is
constantly being remade (11). Along similar lines, in Cultures of Masculinity, Edwards looks
back on three decades of masculinity studies, in which the notion of a widespread masculine

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crisis remains under debate and concludes that no widespread crisis exists: Though there is
some evidence to support the notion of demographically or geographically specific crisis
tendencies for some men, there is very little to endorse any overall masculinity in crisis thesis
other than to say that masculinity is perhaps partially constructed as crisis. In short, there is no
crisis of masculinity as it is commonly portrayed (24). Still, the postwar era is a site of at least
changing ideologies about masculinity; even if the breadwinner role for men publicly
promoted in the fifties and early sixties was an ideological product of the Cold War (as Ellen
Tyler May demonstrates), a consumer economy, and Fordism, this public image changes
radically in the sixties and seventies. Even if, as a range of critics have demonstrated, such
ideologies seldom reflected the lived life of most American households, they nevertheless shape
masculine identities across diverse class, racial, age, regional, and ethnic contexts. And as
Edwards observes, not all of the changes in masculinities during the postwar era are ideological.
The economic changes wrought by late capitalism produce great changes in the meaning of
masculinity and work. These would include decline of manufacturing in the west, a move toward
contract and temporary work, women participating in the workplace, and other factors, the long
association between masculinity and work has broken down in a number of contexts (8). What
Bederman writes of turn of the century middle class manhood could also apply to masculinity
during this era. Using terms particularly applicable to conspiracy theory, Bederman observes,
Middle-class men worried that they were losing control of the country. The power of manhood,
as the middle class understood it, encompassed the power to wield civic authority, to control
strife and unrest, and to shape the future of the nation (14). What wide immigration

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accomplished during the turn of the century, media-visible rights movements accomplish during
the post-sixties era.
Of course, civil rights is not merely a symbolic presence in American culture, but produced
policies and programs that themselves became symbols of white decline, in particular school
busing and affirmative action, and such resentments took shape with anti-government overtones
since it was the courts and legislatures making visible decisions on these issues, even as a host
of private institutionsmany corporations and private universitiesalso adopted affirmative
action programs. As historian James Patterson describes, both issues became, for some
percentage of whites, emblematic of elitist limousine liberals forcing programs on lower-class
whites. Busing provoked such widespread dissent as to culminate in the passage of a 1974 law
that banned federal money from being used in court-ordered busing, as well as an act forbidding
the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare from requiring busing, and busing became a
vibrant issue in the 1976 presidential campaign (Patterson 22-23). Similarly, affirmative action
became a high-profile issue culminating in the Bakke Supreme Court case, in which white Alan
Bakke, denied admission to the University of California at Davis medical school despite having
higher test scores than minority applicants, sued the university for admission. These issues took
shape within an atmosphere of government distrust forged by Watergate and Vietnam, events
that, as historians argue, fomented the anti-government feelings of the past forty years as much
as any far-Right agenda.
If, then, a crisis in masculinity is always impossible to prove as empirical reality
(especially if, in Butler's view, gender is imitative and contingent), many men nevertheless
believe that theyre in crisisthat their previously-guaranteed centrality to the symbolic order is

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slowly eroding. Inevitably, these men seek ways to affirm their sense of importance. While
feminism and gay rights offer some of the crucial symbolic material against which recent
masculinities assert their sense of crisis, the gains of both women and homosexuals have been
as a number of critics point out, primarily symbolic (though in this case of middle class white
womenthe primary beneficiaries of affirmative action--this reality is slowly changing).
If, though, post-Fordist social conditions depart, in many ways, from the social conditions
under Fordism, in many other wars the social landscape is contiguous with postwar changes in
American culture, particularly the migration of whiteness to the suburbs, or, more generally, with
the shift in political importance from polyglot cities to metropolitan areas writ large, and to the
single-family suburban home as the premiere site of normative American life. suburban single
family home, which, in his study of postwar Oakland and the politics of suburbia vs. the city,
historian Robert Self calls "the preeminent site of political interest and commitment (293), a
judgment Matthew Lassiter echoes in his excellent re-evaluation of postwar anti-integration
politics, The Silent Majority. Both Self and Lassiter find in the suburbs a celebration of
individualism, and a resistance to a New Deal sense of the public good. Lassiter concludes,
The suburban realignment of American politics ultimately helped to establish an underlying
consensus in a postliberal order, a bipartisan defense of middle-class entitlement programs
and residential boundaries combined with the futuristic ethos of color-blind moderation and
full-throttled capitalism at the center of the Sunbelt synthesis (227).
For both Lassiter and Self, as well as other historians like Bruce Schulman, the suburb is the site
of the New Deals demolition, since the New Deal as a set of programs relied on the polyglot city
for its support. The sentiments that circulate on the Glenn Beck show have their origins in the

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rough alignments these historians describe. Beyond this, though, the defend-my-home trope that
surfaces in Left Behind (the home as militia compound), coupled with the dissociation from
community that Ulrich Beck, Giddens, and others observe of the postwar era, make the suburban
home a detached (physically and psychologically) space that offers a premier site for the
imagined "amongst men" of conspiracy theory. The individualist suburban home joins with the
globalized corporation to provide the general backdrop in which white male gender identity
forms in the postwar era. The suburb is the space of the white male conceived as such, and at the
least, symbolizes the detachment--the erasure of physical proximity that Sedgwick finds
producing homosociality--that evokes a yearn to be amongst men.
I will argue that conspiracy theory offers a powerful set of metaphors for the way
contemporary men imagine themselves in relation to the global systems that pervade their lives.
Powerless in the face of increasingly complex global systems, and of shifting authority accruing
to white men, men turn to conspiracy theories in order to rhetorically construct their identities, to
resuscitate a version of themselves that is, by virtue of its proximity to raw power, authoritative,
active, and bonded to the actions of other likeminded men.In the following chapters, then, I will
repeatedly ask: how do such narratives of suspicion, about the operation of secret power, reflect,
refract, and enhance these mens sense of themselves and the world? What imaginary
relationshipsfraternity with like-minded mendo these narratives conjure?
As many critics, from Knight to Michael Rogin, have observed, conspiracy theory offers
a reassuringly simple version of the world in the context of complicated changes. In her
insightful, comphrehensive account of the origins of the recent American Right in Southern
California, historian Lisa McGirr argues that the very disorganization of the suburban

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environment in Orange Countythe lack of public space, the thin community ties, the sense of
market-driven development run amokmade the rigid, hierchizing ideas of the Right appealing,
as these ideas reinforced the stable Midwestern values that California seemed to lack, offered
connection to ones neighbors, and affirmed the value of an individualism that inevitably resulted
from the environment. For the white men of my study, set adrift by a range of social and
economic changeswhile still enjoying the fruits of hegemonyconspiracy theory and its
variants offer a stable sense of masculine importance. This book suggests that conspiracy theory
offers an appealing way of affirming this importance, even as it foregrounds the constructed
nature of male identity. Because of conspiracy theorys specific investmentsin identifying the
operation of power, in remapping who counts as victims, in fetishizing the work of men in
small roomsit provides a rich field for querying how men imaginarily recreate their identities.
In the following, Id like to suggest several valences that conspiracy theory as discursive practice
brings to bear on male identities. Some of these valences respond directly to the postwar crisis
Ive sketched here, while others respond to more wide-ranging masculine concerns.
In the following, I will argue that conspiracy theories, like detective novels, spy novels,
and other genres that primarily concern male actors, provide particularly visible examples of
narrative sites where masculinities are constructed and performed. In the face of masculinities
that have been demonstratedboth in critical literature of masculinity and popular culturesto
be less singular, universal, and unique than perceived in earlier eras---conspiracy theory offers a
place where traditional masculine values of mastery and fraternity can be affirmed. In other
words, what Phillipia Gates writes of contemporary detective films could be true of conspiracy
theory as well: Popular film reacts to changing social conceptions of masculinity in an attempt

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to re-imagine those fragmented, changing, and contradictory notions of masculinity into an
unproblematic image of masculinity for its audience (6). Catano compellingly describes
masculinity as drawing on a mythic realmwhat Kaja Silverman elsewhere calls the dominant
fictionto these social construction theories of masculinity: Mythic rhetoric, I am arguing in
the end, is a means by and through which masculinity is alwayseven though incompletely
enacted and maintained in and by society and subject so as to preserve some felt measure of
acceptable identity (6). Conspiracy theory, as a set of stories that circulate through the culture,
touches on familiar mythic ideas in American cultureincluding the self-made manwhile
casting these myths in a paranoid form that makes some of its familiar elements sometimes
unrecognizable. My interest is in conspiracy theory because of its overt focus on politics and
power, and I view conspiracy theory as a vital site in which to explore how masculine identities
imagine themselves in relation to an often-distant political realm, as well as how masculine
identities imagine power relations constituted. If exaggerated, conspiracy theory is a way of
orienting oneself in the world, but, as the recent examples of Glenn Beck, the 9/11 Truthers, and
others have repeatedly shown, such orientation proves powerfully compelling for a wide
percentage of the population. Conspiracy theory provides particular kinds of pleasuresof risk,
of mastery, of fraternity, and such pleasures have implications for the way politics is imagined
and lived in the postwar United States.
In place of zero in the system, conspiracy theory offers to its practitioners a larger,
romanticized life, associated with other heroic figures. In her study of conspiracy theory as
popular knowledge, Birchall refers to the romanticized image of the individual researcher
(46). She observes, for example, that the Internets storied associations with the thrilling world of

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the hacker augments the conspiracy theorists romanticized image of himself. Similarly, Fenster
sketches the heroic character of the conspiracy investigator, distinguishing this figure from both
the spy (James Bond) and the militaristic hero of New War military narratives (Tom Clancys
work, Rambo and its progenitors).1 By definition, Fenster asserts, this figure is alienated, because
he exists in a defamiliarized political and social order, and his everyday life is suddenly
vulnerable to extreme danger and violence. [] The character must recognize what had been
secret to him/her and what remains secret to most of the world: the truth of the social world in
which he lives (124-125). Fenster describes this conspiracy theorist as a kind of hero
examples of whom he gives as Jim Garrison, the hero of Oliver Stones JFK, Joe Turner in Three
Days of the Condor, Joe Frady in The Parallax View and the real-life conspiracy researchers
Danny Casolaro (the uncoverer of the octopus conspiracy) and Bruce Robbins (The Gemstone
File). Fenster observes that such figures rely more on cognition than physical violence, and that
through their activities they seek to recover a lost agency. Fenster observes some important
characteristics of the conspiracy researcher as a figure of identification: unlike spying or warfighting, the conspiracy theorists activitiesresearchingcan be accomplished from the
comfort of home. James Bonds world appears full-blown in the garage of the conspiracy
theorist, the small room of conspiracy that echoes, defines, and parallels the small room of the
conspirator himself. Conspiracy theory, to Fenster, knits the realm of the political to everyday
life: for the committed conspiracy theorist, [Clinton] was a part of daily life, of the affective
chronicle of the cponspiracy theorist who found Clinton everywhere (110).
Such heroism is, of course, repeatedly framed in terms of patriotism, and along these lines,
conspiracy theory often offers an identification with the nation that similarly provides a refuge

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from the vicissitudes of domesticity and the market. In her reading of masculinity on television,
media critic Rebecca Feasey observes the conflicting logics around 24s Jack Bauer: [E]ven
when Jack is seen to sacrifice his friends, family and colleagues, [] placing the public good
above his private role, the very fact that he is doing it for the safety of the American public
demands that we see the character as hard-working, disciplined, firm and fair rather than an
uncommunicative husband, distant father or rogue agent. Moreover, because Jack works
tirelessly to stamp out threats to national security and protect the status quo we are asked to see a
man of strength, bravery, integrity and honor rather than a damaged maverick or suicidal loner
(89). As in Libra or The Parallax View, the show places patriotic heroism in conflict with
domestic responsibilities; however, as Feasey argues, in contexts like 24, the logic of patriotic
heroism supersedes the domestic (as it does in a wide range of spheres for the outlaw man).
Herein lies the heroic appeal of CT. Alsotension in men like John _____ Jane Kramer profile
NYer, tension Leonard English
Conspiracy theory criticism

Since the late 1990s, a cabal of conspiracy theory criticism has surfaced, with full-length
books by Jodi Dean, Mark Fenster, Peter Knight, Timothy Melley, Robert Goldberg, Jack
Bratich, and Patrick ODonnell all attempting to interpret the cultural meaning of postwar
conspiracy theory. To one degree or another, all of these authors respond to the late historian
Richard Hofstadter, whose 1962 Paranoid Style in American Politics remains a key starting
point for understanding conspiracy theory as a cultural and political phenomenon. Using the
language of clinical psychology, Hofstadter diagnoses conspiracy theory as a disease of the

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margins, the pathological province of the extremist right-wing. Committed to a pluralist vision of
a healthy middle, Hofstadter distinguishes paranoid thinking from a common-sense approach
to the historical, one based on reason and a plurality of respectfully competing interests, and
shared by most Americans. As Fenster compellingly demonstrates, Hofstadters work takes
shape within the context of the early Cold War, where Hofstadter, a Cold War liberal and his
colleagues worked to establish the United States as a reasonable society, in which multiple
viewpoints peacefully coexist, in contrast to the totalitarian Soviet Union, whose Communist
leaders themselves subscribe to a kind of conspiracy of history in Marxism. For Hofstadter, the
conspiracy theorist believes that history is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of
almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of
give and take, but an all-out crusade (Hofstadter 29). The key phrase here is the usual methods
of give and take, which, to Hofstadter, signifies the pluralist middle. As recent critics point out,
this model, because it brackets conspiracy theory at the extremes, limits conspiracy theorys
cultural causes, obscuring the ways in which many Americans hold conspiracist beliefs, and
failing to account for, to take one example, the widely shared suspicion about the Kennedy
assassination.
Nearly all of the new conspiracy theory critics seek to break with the marginal model,
finding conspiracy theory both more widely disseminated and widely accepted than Hofstadter
and his colleagues imagined. Knight, for example, finds a (shift) in the function and format of
conspiracy thinking in recent decades [] from the deliberate promotion of single-issue
demonological doctrines to a more fluid and contradictory rhetoric of paranoia that suffuses
everyday life and culture (11). Knight argues that conspiracy theory registers widely-felt

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changes in postwar American culture, from increased government secrecy (such as the founding
of the CIA), to economic globalization, to the breakdown of the Fordist compact, to the
collection of identity-destabilizing forces grouped under postmodernism. For Knight, these
changes constitute a conspiracy culture which encompasses both increased government
intriguethe postwar buildup of intelligence agenciesbut also Americans embrace of
conspiracy as explanation: conspiracy theory express a not entirely unfounded suspicion that the
normal order of things itself amounts to a conspiracy (3). Conspiratorial thinking has become
part of everyday life in the United States, with the ultimate manifestation of this shift being a
sense that everything is connected (241), an argument that echoes Jamesons in the first half of
The Geopolitical Aestheticwhich I discuss further below. Melley makes similar claims for
conspiracy themes in postmodern fiction, arguing that the obsession over control systems reflects
a felt loss of agency in the postwar eraan extension of 1950s concerns about an America gone
bureaucratic and organizational, the idea that whole populations are being openly manipulated
without their knowledge (3). American culture, Melley argues, is anxious about individual
agency; conspiracy theory is a symptom of this anxiety. Similarly, in a heavily theoretical
reading that draws on Deleuze and Guattaris idea of haecceity, ODonnell argues that paranoia
is a structural function of late capitalist politics, the means by which power hails its subjects:
The representations of interpellation to be found in these works compel us to consider the ways
in which cultural paranoia is a problem related to constructions of postmodern identity as
symptomatic of late capitalism, its enjoyments and its discontents (13). For ODonnell,
paranoid narratives respond to the conditions of late capitalist subjectivity. Knight, Melley, and
ODonnell, then, distinguish themselves from Hofstadter by reading conspiratorial thinking as a

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widely dispersed phenomenon; instead of the margins, these critics argue, conspiracy theory
encompasses the whole. While I find this shift compelling, and agree that conspiracy theory is
widely disseminatedone need only check polls on two recently popular conspiracy theories,
the 9/11 truther theories and the Barack Obama birther theoriesI view conspiracy theory
as functioning less evenly across different genders, races, and classes. To some degree, then, I
return to Hofstadter in identifying conspiracy theorys appeal for specific groups.
Other critics, notably Dean and Fenster, seek to wrestle conspiracy theory into the ring of
proper politics. Fenster views conspiracy theory as a kind of trace of democratic possibility-politics for the unpoliticized (an argument for which he has been criticized, by Bratich among
others, for repeated what some critics view as the patronizing mistake of Jamesons poor
persons cognitive mapping). Because conspiracy theory poses questions about power, it
provides a vehicle for a populist confrontation of power. Specifically, Fenster argues that
conspiracy provides a way to think the splintered realms of contemporary politics as a totality
frequently a goal of Marxist cultural critics--to reject the ideological divisions between social,
economic, and political realms on which a liberal democracy within monopoly capitalism exists"
(1999; 116). Only by recognizing the semiotic excess and lack of political significance of
conspiracy theory can we begin to understand its implications (2008; 109). Nevertheless, in
Fensters view, conspiracy theory always needs to be reformed to a proper politics, which for
Fenster is something like Laclau and Mouffes radical democracy. Like Knight, Fenster seems to
believe that the more distasteful aspects of conspiracy theorys genealogy can be banished by
force of will. While Fenster acknowledges that conspiracy theory draws on [] fascism,
totalitarianism, racism, and anti-Semitism these influences do little to mar conspiracy theory as

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a utopian project, a resistance to power that implicitly imagines a better, collective future (xiii).
For her part, Dean describes conspiracy theory as central to formulations of the political, posing
that it signals the dissolution of consensus in contemporary American life, an environment in
which political choices and meanings are virtually meaningless, practically impossible (7). For
Dean, clearly influenced by Foucaults ideas about discourse and power, conspiracy theory
discourse serves a number of functions, but works most effectively to break down official
notions of rationality.2 She acknowledges the role of such rationality in forming an exclusionary
American identity, especially through the space program. While Dean insightfully demonstrates
how the stories alien abductees challenge the nationalizing rationalism of the space program, her
book at times celebrates conspiracy theory uncritically. When she notes, for example, that
ufology taps into a marginal discourse of skepticism about experts (8), she neglects to
acknowledge the large role such skepticism has played in American political life, particularly in
recent identity formations on the Right from McCarthy on.3 While Dean claims that conspiracy
theoryat least in its UFO variationsserves to question consensus rationality, she neglects to
acknowledge, as she does later, that much conspiracy proceeds itself along rational lines. For
many conspiracy theorists reason is the equalizer. It's like the six-gun in the old Westreason
is a weapon to be leveled against the tyranny of the conspiracy.4 If the conclusions reached by the
conspiracy theorist often seem irrational, the methods used to reach these conclusions are not.
As a group, these studies often pose conspiracy theory as a problem of culture or politics;
to these critics, from Melley to Fenster, conspiracy theory is most important as a mode of
political belief, a symptom of cultural change, or both. These studies offer crucial rereadings of
conspiracy theory that point to conspiracy theorys changed role in the public cultures of the

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postwar United States. Critics like Knight, Fenster, and Melley argue that postwar culture,
because of the increasing complexity of its systems, the increasing secrecy of its government,
and the destabilizing effects of its economic changes, has increasingly become the culture of
conspiracy. In making such assertions, these critics have established conspiracy theory as an
object of serious (though not too serious) study, made a compelling case for conspiracy theorys
move from the margins to the center, and offered countless valuable readings and cataloging of
the diverse texts that make up conspiracy theory in the United States. In doing so, however, these
studies have often been unable to resist one of conspiracy cultures central claims about
conspiracies: that they affect everyone, that the conspiracy, though identified by few, is
something that persecutes all subjects equally. To be sure, when reading specific conspiracies,
these critics do acknowledge the role gender and racial identity may play in forming such
narratives. Of William Pierces infamous right-wing The Turner Diaries, Knight observes, In an
ironic reversal of events, the white Anglo male establishment now seeks to redefine itself as an
embattled interest group in the face of a larger conspiracy (42). Nevertheless, these critics often
return to a phrase used by both Knight and Fenster: that in the postwar era, we are all
conspiracy theorists (Knight 25; Fenster 2). Even studies that write against such claims,
showing how anxiety over conspiracy theory is more of a cultural problem than conspiracy
theory itself, tend to reinforce the idea that conspiracy theory is best understood as a cultural or
political category, as opposed to a belief system that shapes identity, and plays a role in the way
that men imagine themselves and their world.
In contrast, this study focuses on one groupwhite men, the group with whom conspiracy
theory is most often identifiedand asks what conspiracy theory does for the identities of the

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members of this group. If, conspiracy theory is, as Claire Birchall defines it, a narrative that has
been constructed in an attempt to explain an event or series of events to be the result of a group
of people working in secret for a nefarious end, or as Fenster defines it, the conviction that a
secret, omnipotent individual or group covertly controls the political and social order or some
part thereof (2), what do these secretive groups look like, and where do they operate? And why
do men (and often white men) identify with these conspiracies, finding them appealing as not
just a reassuring story about the world, but as a source of identity? In contrast to the studies that
have preceded it, this project seeks to evoke a sense of the conspiracy theorist as a living,
breathing, social figure, charting his desires, anxieties, jealousies, identifications, and disgusts.
Such ideas are hardly new, for they emerge clearly in the characterization of DeLillos Lee
Harvey Oswald, Reeds Papa LaBas, Ackers Thivai, and Denis Johnsons Leonard English.
Despite the fact that critics often establish conspiracy theorists as a category of people, on the
literary page, they are individual men, with all the messy emotions of individual men.
While recent critics of conspiracy theory have on the whole positioned conspiracy as a
problem of culture as opposed to individual identity, their arguments have engaged identity in
compelling ways that contribute to this study. In Empires of Conspiracy, Melley describes
conspiratorial beliefs as participating in postmodern transference, what he describes as
attributing qualities of motive, agency, individuality they suspect have been depleted from those
around them (13). Melley thus describes a kind of reflexivity between the conspiracy theorist
and the conspiratorial system he perceives, with the conspiratorial system deriving agency from
the conspiracy theorist and vice versa. I particularly like the way this formulation summons the
Freudian analysts room, and the reflexivity between analyst and subject. For psychoanalytic

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critics from Freud to Lacan, the analysts room forms a central metaphor for explaining how
individual subjects come to view themselves and their world. For Lacan when the subject gazes
at the analyst, the subject imagines the analyst as the location of the subjects desire. In the same
way, for Melley, when the conspiracy theorist gazes at power, he imagines power gazing back,
and affirming his gaze.5 In summoning the psychoanalytic notion of transference, Melley points
to a set of identifications that occur within the conspiracy theorist; the conspiracy theorist
identifies with conspirator, transferring beliefs about himself to the Other. And Melley is not the
only critic to use psychoanalysiss idea of the Other who knows as a descriptor of conspiracy
theory; Fenster describes the conspiracy theorists desire to have a truly transparent state of
relations with others as well as with the greater Other of power (100). This reflexivity is a key
element of the identifications that I find at work in texts like Libra and Resuscitation of a
Hanged Men, as well as the real-life stories of men like David Lifton (a Kennedy conspiracy
researcher), John Kramer (a Washington militia member), and, infamously, Timothy McVeigh.
ODonnell also points to the identity-forming role that cultural paranoiaa term distinct
from, but closely aligned with, conspiracy theory as a cultural practice--plays in postmodern
culture. If a number of postmodern philosophersamong them, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard,
and Baudrillardemphasize postmodern culture as producing fluid, unstable identities, subjects
variously figured as schizophrenic or intertextual or multiplicitous, ODonnell finds in
cultural paranoia a nostalgia for the subjects wholeness: Paranoia sutur[es] individuals to the
social imaginary in which crucial differences between agency and national or other identificatory
fantasies are collapsed. The representations of interpellation to be found in these works compel
us to consider the ways in which cultural paranoia is a problem related to constructions of

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postmodern identity as symptomatic of late capitalism, its enjoyments and discontents (13). For
ODonnell, then, paranoia, and by extension conspiracy theory, paradoxically serves as a means
of stabilizing identity, even as conspiracy theory would otherwise seem to participate in the very
postmodern culture that destabilizes the subject. My own assessment agrees with ODonnells,
but I would emphasize that males have most to gain from stable identities, particularly since such
postmodern fluidity has often been celebrated as destabilizing the stability of the white male
voice.6 As a number of commentators on postmodernism have observed, white men have the
most to lose from postmodernisms disruption of identity, and the most to gain from reaffirming
stable identities.
Of course, such conspiratorial beliefs can also work negatively, to define what individuals
are notor should not be. Jack Bratichs Conspiracy Panics offers a Foucauldian analysis of
how conspiracy theory works to maintain the appearance of functional, systematized thought by
serving, in Foucaults terms, as subjugated knowledge, the loser at a game of truth. Panics
over conspiracy theories serve as moments where official, rational discourse is reaffirmed and
functionalist thought re-experienced. Bratich seeks to analyze the discursive practices that
channel, shape, incite, and deploy conspiracy theories as meaningful (7). Conspiracy theory
works, for Bratich, as a way to introduce a legitimizing rationality into the discourses around
such ideas as the function of the media, race relations, the parameters of dissent, globalization,
biowarfare, medicine, shifting positions within Left and Right. In each case, Bratich argues, the
term conspiracy theory serves to regulate what can and cannot be said, policing the boundaries
of what counts as rational and what is left as irrational. Bratich thus offers a crucial account
of one aspect of the identity-forming power of conspiracy, its ability to mark whether a given

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subjects voice participates in a wider discourse of rationality or whether it remains on the
fringes. Conspiracy theory, for Bratich, serves to discipline unwieldy, unworthy, or
unsophisticated voices, relegating such voices to the margins. I am going to pose a different
interpretation of the center/margin problem implicit in Bratichs analysis, one aligned with
Melleys idea of postmodern transference. For if, from the outside, the invocation of
conspiracy theory serves to relegate some subjects to the margins, from the insidefrom the
viewpoint of the conspiracy theorist himselfconspiracy theory is more about having access to
the center, to the real story as opposed to the cover story. Conspiracy theory offers a mode of
thinking about power that affirms ones own identitylocates ones own identity at the center
rather than the margins. Using slightly different terms, ODonnell describes this phenomenon as
a way of knowing ourselves in relation to others as having the capacity to be known, to be seen,
to be objects of desire and attention (9). In Bratichs compelling analysis, conspiracy theorists
are wrongfully marked as irrelevant, but I want to focus on howperhaps as a compensatory
gestureconspiracy theorists tell stories that mark themselves as affirmatively relevant, because
they are the ones with the inside dope, an understanding of what really occurs in the elite spaces
of the conspirators. Imagining and researching conspiracies enables the conspiracy theorist to
become more than what DeLillos Oswald calls a zero in the system, a victim of larger forces.
Conspiracy theory, then, performs psychological work that sometimes seems apparent,
but nevertheless needs doing: forming connections between the realm of the political and the
realm of everyday life. The conspiracy theorist, as Fenster notes, feels the presence of the
conspiracy all around him, breathing through todays newspaper, forwarded to his inbox,
recognizable on Fox News or MSNBC. The process of interpreting the conspiracy theory

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breathes life into the conspiracy theorist, incorporating Clinton into the bland details of the
everyday, and infusing the everyday with the mystery, risk, and thrill of fighting conspiracy. Like
other critics, too, Fenster emphasizes the opposition between conspiracy theorist and
conspirator--its focus on the actions of both the perpetrators of the evil conspiracy and the
defenders of the moral order (119), and yet, for literary characters like DeLillos Lee Harvey
Oswald and Johnsons Leonard English, identification with the conspirators is just as important
as opposition. The opposition, the conspirators, may be opposed to everything, and yet they have
an enviable mastery of the world, in contrast to the disempowerment of the conspiracy theorist
(which is, again, by definition, as Fenster asserts: conspiracy theory perceives itself to be
continually dominated and manipulated by its more powerful conspiratorial adversary [104]).
My work here focuses on what Fenster calls the pleasure of control, of finding the correct
answer to the riddle of power, of mastering its desire of the political order (108), but with
emphasize on the mastery part of this formulation, and the masculine surety such mastery
affords.
Indeed, as much as Fenster and other suggest that conspiracy theory responds to a
complex reality, they often acknowledge that in offering a simplified view of the world, it asserts
a more perfectly managed world than is conventionally possible: The complex conditions under
which the state is presumed by academic and lay observers to operatemechanisms of public
accountability such as elections and the press, the rough and tumble of political parties, the
competing interests of rational private and public actors, bureaucratic dynamics, the agency of
powerful individualshave merely illusory effects on the states operations (266). The real
operations of the state, Fenster finds 9/11 conspiracy theorists asserting, are both uncomplex and

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perfecta world where every directive is followed, with no Bartlebys, a world where Sutpens
design is fully manifested without the inevitable disintegration of masculinitys aims and intents.
Perfectly managed world, functional sure, uncomplex
Of course, as Knight, Birchall, and Fenster observe, conspiracy theory can be experienced in
a wide range of ways, from the dedicated believer to the casual participant, the latter of whom
may well participate in a commodified version of conspiracy theory by viewing such films as
The Parallax View or television programs such as The X-Files. Often, conspiracy theory is
enjoyed in a knowing mode, whereby participants distance themselves from its claims through
irony or play. Knight observes, [F]or every true believer there are many more casual spectators
who are on the lookout for signs of an outbreak of popular paranoia, yet are happy to dabble with
the camp aesthetics of conspiracy in the process. There seem to be, for example, almost as many
spoof versions on the Web of the Masonic dollar bill story as there are serious ones. [] The
serious and the entertainment versions of conspiracy theories are thus caught up in a spiraling
mutual feedback loop, which, even if it doesnt produce more fully paid-up believers, certainly
makes the culture of conspiracy theory more prominent (2002; 6).And yet, as a mode of
knowledge, or what Birchall calls a particular knowledge-producing discourse, conspiracy
theory produces similar effects by the very nature of its claimsin continually insisting on a
real story behind the official story, conspiracy always exhibits a desire for access to the
center of power.
This book takes up the question posed by Knightwhy is conspiracy theory so widely
dispersed in the postwar era?and offers a different, though related answer. Knight points to the
large systems of capital and media, increasing government secrecy, and other indications of an

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impossible-to-grasp global totality. While Knights answer is compelling, it leaves out some parts
of the conspiracy theory story, in particular, why conspiracy theory has so often seemed
especially appealing for white menas is the case with both Truthers and Birthers.
Conspiracy theory as allegory

While these critics differ in their conclusions, they share a common approach to conspiracy
theory; they tend to read conspiracy theory allegorically. In these readings, conspiracy theory
really means something else; when people imagine conspiracies, they are really trying to
imagine, to take one example, systems of global capital. These readings seem propelled in part
by a sense that conspiracy theory cannot really mean what it says it means, that conspiracy
theory is insufficient unto itself, that it requires an allegorical supplement in order to participate
in a rational public sphere. Conspiracy theory cant be itself, the argument goes, it must be
something bigger: postmodernity, late capitalism, the global system. As a result, even
while propelling themselves as far as possible from Hofstadters conspiracy theorists are
extremists reading, in mapping an allegorical meaning onto conspiracy theory, these critics
perform a similar move, implying that an un-allegorized conspiracy theory is not fit for critical
consumption. Instead of reading conspiracy theory as allegory, I consider the rhetorical function
of conspiracy theory, how it positions its speaker within a social realm.
In proceeding, I will consider one such allegorical readingJamesons in The Geopolitical
Aesthetic in detail, show how it is useful, and then suggest where it is limited. For Jameson, the
vastness of the global totality is impossible to imagine--and yet something that late capitalist
subjects inevitably, unconsciously try to imagine (2). Conspiracy theory helps because, in its

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assertion of mysterious, clandestine forces at work, it allegorizes a world system that is otherwise
inaccessible to the subject. Conspiracy theory works as an allegory because of the type of
thinking it evokes in the subject; it creates a "cognitive mapping" effect by demanding that the
subject imagine a cartography of the world system, whose forces are clandestine in their very
inaccessibility. Jameson provides useful tools for an analysis of conspiracy theory. He
approaches conspiracy theory structurally, without regard to its content. The truth value of
conspiracy theories matters little; what matters is the move that conspiracy theory makes, the
function of conspiracy theory. Jameson writes, "Nothing is gained by having been persuaded of
the definitive verisimilitude of this or that conspiratorial hypothesis: but in the intent to
hypothesize, in the desire called cognitive mapping--therein lies the beginning of wisdom" (3).
By focusing on conspiracy theorys form, Jameson avoids arguments about whether or not
conspiracy theory is a pragmatically useful tool for politics, progressive or otherwise. But
Jameson's use of the word "wisdom" here also points to the problem with using conspiracy
theory: conspiracy theory drags with it a whole genealogy, a genealogy fraught with the
domination that inevitably springs from the assertion of absolute truth. What Jameson neglects to
acknowledge is that conspiracy narratives, like all narratives, are deployed unevenly across
different subjects, privileging some subjects over others. The "wisdom" that Jameson claims for
conspiracy theory, even if this wisdom functions through allegory, mirrors the truth claims made
by the conspiracy theorist himself. His assertion that conspiracy theory is the last contemporary
narrative type in which the lone intellectual can still win heroic dimensions has a curious
circularity (39). It seems impossible that Jameson does not project himself, if only a little, into
the position of Joe Frady in The Parallax View. Conspiracy theory produces heroism even in its

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critics; its self-proclaimed access to truth exerts an irresistible seductiveness even among readers
who approach it with a prophylactic criticism. (This study is no exception.)
In reading conspiracy, I argue that Jameson ignores his own theory of the ideology of
form, neglecting to consider what ideologies the conspiratorial form might drag with it into the
present moment. In the United States, at least, conspiracy theory has long functioned to
demonize the white males others, as Michael Rogin and David Bennett both observe.7 This
tradition inevitably substitutes women and minorities for the more mysterious forces of the
Illuminati or Freemasons. While this history of conspiracy theory does not disqualify its
possibility for reformation, it necessarily qualifies any easy adoption of it for allegory. This is the
set of problems that I see with conspiracy theory, a set of problems that I will develop by reading
conspiracy theory as a narrative with a particular, acute relationship to the white male subject. I
bear in mind the useful potential that Jameson and others see in conspiracy theory. Moreover,
conspiracy theory is an inextricable part of the American political scene. But as such, it cannot be
interpreted simply.
If, in considering the limitations of an allegorical reading of conspiracy theory, it is
important to read the extremism back into readings of conspiracy as universalist, it is equally
useful to consider the universalist readings possible within right-wing extremist conspiracy
theory. Published in 1971, Gary Allens None Dare Call It Conspiracy ran to five million copies,
becoming a major text of post-Goldwater conservatives, especially those who identified with the
John Birch Society.8 None Dare Call It Conspiracy expands the more narrowly anti-Communist
agenda of his predecessors (such as John Storms None Dare Call It Treason) into a moreencompassing indictment of an all-powerful, transhistorical secret group. Originating with Adam

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Weishaupts Illuminati, this group emerged in the twentieth century as Cecil Rhodess
Roundtable and later, the Council on Foreign Relations. Whatever its manifestation, the goal of
this group has been the same: absolute control of world politics. Allens book, then, seems to fit
Hofstadters mold exactly, as an extremist text that views history itself as the product of a
conspiracy. And yet Allens work is more complicated than it first appears. As a work diagnosing
a global conspiracy, Allens book could itself fit into Jamesons analysis of conspiracy theorys
cognitive mapping. Moreover, though Knight dismisses right-wing extremist conspiracy as
limited in value, Allens thesis also gels with Knights reading of conspiracy theory as
evidencing a sense that everything is connected. Moreover, Allens book nods, at least, to
postmodern ideas about truths relativity. He notes, for example, the relativity of any particular
historical viewpoint: Is it possible to write a history book without a particular point of view?
(36). Of course, Allens text is postmodern in the way that Big Brothers propaganda in
Nineteen Eighty-Four is postmodern; truth is relative, but only on the surface. Nevertheless, the
ability of such an extremist text to serve the same allegorical function as do The X-Files for
Knight or Three Days of the Condor for Jameson points to a tight connection between right
wing extremist conspiracy theory and a more widely dispersed conspiracy culture.
Bracketing a work like None Dare Call It Conspiracy from a more apolitical, universal
strain of conspiracy theory has two negative functions in formulating a critical model for
conspiracy theory. First, it implies that extremist conspiracy theory has no relationship with a
larger politics, obscuring the way that even the furthest right-wing conspiracist thinking can find
its way into a more mainstream discourse (Fenster does endorse this point). To take one example,
the Christian fundamentalist Left Behind novelswhich, although fictional, clearly mark

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themselves as contiguous with contemporary politicsbuild their narrative upon conspiracist
ideas traditionally associated with the far right, such as the idea that the United Nations plans to
take over the U.S.. The astounding sales of this seriessome 60 million books sold
demonstrates the at least tacit acceptance of such conspiracy theories. As Fenster argues using
the example of Idaho Congresswoman Helen Chenowith, it makes more sense to think of such
ideas as on a continuum with mainstream ideas. Recent conspiracy theory criticism does well
to distance itself from Hofstadters dualistic model of a pluralist, non-conspiracy-theory middle
set against conspiracist margins. But the claim that Hofstadters model was correct for certain
kinds of conspiracy theory, while incorrect for others, should not follow. Second, and more
important for this study, defining conspiracy theory too widely, dividing conspiracy theory into
extreme and widespread categories masks the characteristics common to conspiracy theory,
those tropological, structural elements that, I argue, makes conspiracy theory particularly suited
to the male subject (and even more suited to the white male subject). As chapter 3 argues, Allens
didactic, right-wing diatribe shares narrative tropes with a playful postmodern version of
conspiracy theory like that found in Ishmael Reeds Mumbo Jumbo. None of this is to suggest
that these formal characteristics automatically make Reeds work reactionary by default. Instead,
I hope to show that conspiracy theorys long association with political demonology is not easily
discarded, and its narratives produce blind spots even when reworked as irony. As Jameson and
others argue, conspiracy theory is an inevitable part of approaching a complex world; but this
does not mean that one should adopt it without considering the exclusions it produces.
The patterns I outline here are shared, to some degree, among all conspiracy theories that
concern hidden, colluding, powerful forces, from the many-headed hydra that Andrew Jackson

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campaigned against in the nineteenth century to the Illuminati that Robison preached against to
the Reds that Hoover fought in the early twentieth century. I situate these concerns within the
transition from the sixties to the preset because 1) the cultural dynamics established during these
years continue to shape public discourse and 2) limiting the time frame allows for a greater
consideration of the social, cultural, and economic context in which these conspiracy-driven
male identities take shape. 3) Finally, while suspicion has driven public discourse in a number of
periods in American history, the period of the sixties, seventies, and eighties seems marked by a
particularly wide distrust of government. As historian James Patterson summarizes, such distrust
was wide-ranging: Conditioned to expect progress [Americans] were impatient, and they
resisted leaders who asked them to sacrifice. Suspicious of authority figures, they were quick to
direct their wrath at Ford, congressional leaders, big businessmen, lawyersanyone in a position
of power. No leadersno institutionsseemed immune in the 1970s from criticism, a great deal
of which flowed from the media, whose leaders had become considerably more skeptical and
confrontational as a result of the travails of Vietnam and Watergate, and which questioned if any
authorities could be trusted (Patterson 10-11).9 Such distrust of government was bolstered by
strains of both Left and Right thought. The New Left, in focusing on individual rights,
particularly those of students, women, and minorities, positioned itself against the New Deal
consensus that held sway in American politics from the forties through the late sixties. The Right,
on the other hand, had long fomented against big government, shaped by both the geographical
context of the recent Rightthe Sunbeltand a longer-running agenda that conflated
communism with the liberal state. Given all this anti-government rhetoric circulating in the

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postwar moment, conspiracy theory offers a widely-available mode of identity, one continually
dispersed to the margins, but re-emerging again and again.
Why literature
Sedgwick outlines a universe of male-male relations, as manifested in literature: he holds up
literature as a more or less direct site for the scrutiny of such ideas, presuming that literature
reflects, or at worst refracts, the social relations that shape its emergence. Of course, in the
current historical moment, literature has nowhere near the privileged and central cultural position
that it occupies in the time frame of Sedgwick's study (1550-1870). But literature, or at least the
novel, by its very project of attempting to recreate the social, necessarily carries some vestige of
its historical moment's conflicts and struggles, and the texts of my study engage with the present
moment on simultaneously a micro and macro level, attempting to imagine simultaneously the
grand systems that determine subjectivity and the subjects who imagine these systems. The fact
that conspiracy theories are culturally significant over the past thirty years is nearly inarguable,
and has been cogently articulated by critics like Peter Knight, Mark Fenster, Jodi Dean, and
others. So to some degree, the literature I study assumes cultural significance merely because of
the material it takes up. (I say all this to make the likely unnecessary point that literature retains
some privilege among texts that scrutinize conspiracy theory; by virtue of its project, literature
seeks to understand how conspiracy theory integrates into the social.)
I argue that the literary texts of my study offer particularly rich critiques of conspiracy theory's
identity-forming role. In wrapping a social realm around a conspiracy theory--say, that expressed
by Oswald or by Oscar Wao--literature examines conspiracy theory's integration with other texts,

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its position amongst other social actors, and the role it plays for an individual subject in
integrating them into--or alienating them from--a social realm. Indeed, literature is particularly
good at bridging (often violently) social spaces otherwise distinct in terms of power, class,
gender, and region. In Libra, Don DeLillo articulates a relationship amongst men that is
essentially impossible in actual social space: a tie between the disempowered Lee Harvey
Oswald and high-powered operatives in the CIA. Literature itself, by virtue of its insistent
intertextuality, studies and critiques the circulation of conspiracy theory in a social realm. Like
the texts of Sedgwick's study, it manifests a matrix of male-male relations, though such relations
are less inscribed in the social as in an adjacent imaginary realm that floats above the social-what Zizek and others call fantasy. Fantasy interweaves into the social, determining the relations
of social actors, but in particular, how such actors imagine themselves in relation to real and
imagined others. Fantasy, of course, intertwines with the constructedness of the subject, the
forces that (to use Sedgwick's words) antedate the subject, often described in terms of class,
gender, and race, though these are categories to which power, status, money, work, and
institutions adhere meaning. Conspiracy theory likely works on the interface of ideology and
fantasy, offering a means for the subject to resist (or presume to resist) the forces constructing
him, but simultaneously replicating and reinforcing the heft of such forces.
theory, the sense that one may be threatened by the conspiratorsenclosing such risk in a neat
narrative makes this risk all the more manageable
Sociologist Michael Kimmel observes of the turn of the century, a cultural moment
which, like nearly every other era in American history, witnessed a crisis of masculinity, this
one related to the decline of the artisan/farmer and the rise of the organization man. Amongst

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other masculine pastimesbaseball, boxing, exercisingKimmel notes the appeal of reading:
Men could also retrieve the heroic masculine virtues without ever leaving their living rooms or,
at least, their dens. The frontier might be too elusive, the world of sports too corrupt, but
literature could help promote savagery in even the most timid man's breast (95). Fantasy,
Kimmel explains, substitutes for reality. Doubtless, too, the fictions that Kimmel describes, most
prominently the Western, present a landscape of American political life as much as they do a
landscape of gender roles. Conspiracy theories offer a similar kind of fantasy, one related to spynovels anddistantly, perhapsthe Western itself.
Judith Newton, in her survey of mens movements since the late 1960s, argues that the leaders of the New Left
found excitement and risk in what they described as a revolution: Although not all the men we interviewed
identified with Black Power, they did describe their political involvement in the antiwar movement in ways that
evoked the genre of revolutionary autobiographya form of writing in which Panthers like Huey Newton, Bobby
Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver had all engaged. Thus, the antiwar movement was thrilling and scary, a high
adventure, a revolutionary moment that justified sacrifice, a time that exposed them to danger, changed their
lives and other peoples and involved them in struggle with the evil and horror of the war (109-110). The
emergence of feminism within the New Lefta contentious emergence, as Newton demonstrates through such
examples as speech by Marilyn Salzman Webb where Webb was greeted with misogynist jeers and male New Left
leaders did little to ameliorate it. Ultimately, too, feminism offered little of the heroism that had captivated white
male revolutionaries in the civil rights and antiwar movements:
Feminist politics, moreover, did not offer
white activist men the heroic, political roles to which many had become accustomed. The civil rights movement
had been situated within the context of a long legacy of national shame and organized protest, including that of
civil war. It had also been characterized by dramatic encounters and mass demonstrations, and, though led by black
men and women, had initially offered white men and women both historically familiar and sometimes dramatic
roles to play. [] The womens movement, however, relied upon a mode of organizingintimate, emotionally
revealing, consciousness-raising groupsthat was not easily compatible with earlier, and especially antiwar,
cultures of politically heroic manhood (114)
2
Dean is followed in her Foucauldian approach by both Bratich and Claire Birchalls Knowledge Goes
Pop, a work that also examines the ways that conspiracy theory both shapes and enables the production
of popular knowledge, a realm that Birchall locates in opposition to both academic and official realms
of knowledge.
3
One of the problems with Deans book is that she isnt always talking about conspiracy theory, per
se; if accusations of a government coverup around Area 51 describe conspiracies, other branches of
ufologyparticular abductee narratives, fall less easily into this category, and are better characterized
as alternative science. I define conspiracy theory more narrowly, as discourse about conspiracies.
4
The quotation comes from Josiah Thompson, a prominent Kennedy assassination researcher. Hes
describing the venerable Sylvia Meagher, former World Health Organization employee and tireless
indexer of the Warren Commission report.
5
I am interpreting Melleys idea strongly here, and emphasizing merely one strain of his argument;
elsewhere, he takes pains to emphasize that conspiracy is a powerful and obscure entity so dispersed
that it is the antithesis of the traditional conspiracy (8), not a singular godlike agent, who might
provide a source of identification.
6
In his chapter on Engendering Paranoia, ODonnell does acknowledge this idea, when he observes
the bond between heterosexuality and specific social formations such as the family or state has
become less determining and determinate, and because the marketplace in which women are trafficked
has become affected by transformation in the nature of capital and commodities, that we can observe
everywhere today paranoid reactions to the recognized fragility of male identity (79).
7
See Bennett, David H. The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American
History. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988; Rogin, Michael Paul. Ronald
Reagan the Movie. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987.
8
It went on to serve as a key text organizing the militia imaginary, and setting the terms for later
descriptions of what Allen is the first to term the New World Order. This phrase was famously used
in a speech by George Bush I, a reference taken by many of the conspiratorially-inclined as a signal to
Bushs fellow Insiders. Allen also uses Carroll Quigleys Tragedy and Hope as a major reference, a
name that achieved its own conspiratorial significance when Bill Clinton mentioned it in his acceptance
speech. (Quigley was Clintons professor at Georgetown.)
9
Willenz summarizes the political effect of Fords anti-busing stance, arguing that busing played a key role in fostering
white working class support for the Reagan right: By feeding the hurt and outrage of conservative northern whites, Ford
deepened their alientation not simply from liberl Democrats, but from what had long been the Republican mainstream on
civil rights. [] And by further agitating instead of calming racial tensions, Fords policies would, ironically, end up
helping to push many ex-Democrats as well as longtime conventional Republicans into the political camp of the pro-Reagan
right (46-47)

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Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

The Amongst Men of Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Conspiracy theory criticism

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Conspiracy theory as allegory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

Amongst Men: Masculinity and Conspiracy Theory

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