Post Week 2



Dear Professor Brubaker, 

I liked your book a great deal. It was insightful, provocative, and timely. I wonder though that for a book so focused on the liminal, you might have chosen a less straightforward methodological approach. You write excellently. Your style is impeccable and the structure of the book is lucid and easy to follow, but in this straight progression of arguments I found myself aching for something less constrained. As you write about the boundaries, the messiness of individual lives fitting into arbitrary categories, mightn’t it have been useful to approach the writing itself with some of the same intentional messiness? Couldn’t your analysis have chased down your elusive concepts with riffs, and jagged diversions, moments of improvisation, floated thoughts. I felt somehow that you felt the need to tame in your book. You wished to break down, to classify, to give a taxonomy of things that puzzled and intrigued you. But in those constrained abstractions you lose as much understanding as you gain. I hope that we can talk in the future about these methodologies and how to apply them. Until then keep up the good work! 


Yours,
Elsa Barkley Brown

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