David Alderson

In recent years, I have written extensively on gender, sexuality and the transition to neoliberalism in relation to literature, film and television. My monograph, Sex, Needs and Queer Culture: From Liberation to the Postgay (2016) represents an attempt to grasp that period through a critical engagement with Herbert Marcuse's work, though it is also methodologically indebted to Cultural Materialism and engages especially with the work of Alan Sinfield. As all of this suggests, my relation to mainstream, poststructuralist Queer Theory is therefore a critical one. That critical relationship is perhaps most evident from my contributions to the collection I recently edited with my colleague, Robert Spencer: For Humanism: Explorations in Theory and Politics (2017).

I am now working on a project on the novel and the political economy of the family. This will certainly look at postwar fiction, but it also has the potential to take me back to the late eighteenth century, since at the heart of it are preoccupations with Hayek's indebtedness to Edmund Burke, with familial inheritance as a crucial vector of inequality, and with the novel as one of the principal discourses that examines familial morality, relations and exclusions.