Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, the Ob-scene

By Cara Judea Alhadeff. Penn State University Press, 2013. 

Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene scrutinizes how racial hygiene, misogyny, and anti-intellectualism configure the troubled yet vital concept of sustainability. Fusing theory and image, Viscous Expectations explores vulnerability of the body as a strategy for collaborative justice. It covers a spectrum of political, philosophical, and personal subjects woven throughout ninety-two of Alhadeff’s color photographs and video stills, 522 pages of theoretical text, and extensive footnotes that present polyvalent, overlapping narratives.

This fusion of theory and image explores the social and material body as a membrane that integrates the private and public—illuminating a recognition of difference, the familiar within the unfamiliar—a visceral, socio-political connection with the other, all increasingly urgent issues in our media-saturated age. Alhadeff engages this complex web as a process of multi-layered storytelling in which the concept of ambiguity offers a multiplicity of clarities.

An Open Access edition of Viscous Expectations is available through PSU Press Unlocked. Click here to access it.