The Space of Conspiracy Theory

One of the issues I struggle with is how historically-rooted to make my project; in the last post, I questioned whether my model of gendered conspiracy theory is salient for only the past fifty years, or whether it applies to a range of historical periods. Sedgwick's Between Men, a text I finished today, does a nice job of splitting the difference--it's primarily theoretically-informed close readings (the richest close readings one could imagine) but still points regularly to the readings' historical context. But of course, that book emerged at a different time for the field, when, perhaps, both close readings and pure theory were more readily accepted.

Still, towards historicizing my conspiracy theorists, it may be possible to locate them in the 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).

What about this, though, locates a conspiracy theory sense of "amongst men" in these suburbs? Certainly, they celebrate meritocracy, certainly, the foment anti-government feeling, undoubtedly, the sentiments that circulate on the Glenn Beck show have their origins in the 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. Doubtless, the suburb is the space of the white male conceived as such (the famed "white flight," though both Lassiter and Self take pains to challenge the simple logic of this concept), 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. (Ford's Richard Bascombe could well join the list of detached males of my study.)