Michael Warner

Michael David Warner (born 1958) is an American literary critic, social theorist, and Seymour H. Knox Professor of English Literature and American Studies at Yale University.

He also writes for Artforum, The Nation, The Advocate, and The Village Voice.

He is the author of Publics and Counterpublics, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, The English Literatures of America, 1500–1800, Fear of a Queer Planet, and The Letters of the Republic.

He edited The Portable Walt Whitman and American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Born September 9, 1958, Warner received two Master of Arts degrees, from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Johns Hopkins University, in 1981 and 1983 respectively.

Prior to his work at Yale, he taught at Northwestern University (1985–1990) and Rutgers University (1990–2007).

Warner is highly influential in the fields of early American literature, social theory, and queer theory.

His first book, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America, established him as a leading scholar in Early American literature, print culture, and public sphere theory.

He later became a public figure in the gay community for his book The Trouble with Normal, in which Warner contended that queer theory and the ethics of a queer life serve as critiques of existing social and economic structures, not just as critique of heterosexuality and heterosexual society.

He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in English from Johns Hopkins University in 1986.

As the essay was originally published in 1989, it was written before the term queer theory had become widely used.

These laws were also critiqued in the article Warner co-wrote with Lauren Berlant in 1998, titled "Sex in Public".

The conclusion "The Politics of Shame and HIV Prevention", discusses some of the health strategies of fighting HIV/AIDS, and how the cycle of shame increases the risk of spreading the disease.

The book, according to Kirkus Reviews, argues "persuasively" against same-sex marriage.

Publics and Counterpublics is a collection of essays based around the central question "what is a public?"

Around half of the essays in the book have been published previously.

Chapter one, "Public and Private", reviews the definitions of these terms, and traces the history of debates around public and private spheres, particularly around the women's liberation, and then the gay rights, movements.

Chapter two, "Publics and Counterpublics", looks at redefining and expanding upon the term public, to introduce multiple publics.

The chapter then introduces the concept of counterpublics, initially termed by Nancy Fraser to mean a public that is subordinate to a dominant public.

Chapter three, "Styles of Intellectual Publics", considers the style of discourse in academic work and the impact this has on the type of public it creates.

It suggests that Michel Foucault might have described intellectual work as a counterpublic, and discusses this possibility.

Chapter four, "The Mass Public and the Mass Subject", responds to Jürgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere introducing some of the concepts we now regard as queer theory.

Chapter five, "Sex in Public", was co-written with Lauren Berlant, and published previously in 1998.

He also sits on a number of Advisory Boards, including that of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (since 1999), the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University (since 2003), and the Library of America Colonial Writing Project (since 2005).

Warner is, along with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Teresa de Lauretis, Lauren Berlant, and Judith Butler, considered one of the founders of queer theory.

In The Trouble With Normal, Warner critiques same-sex marriage activism and other moves more generally by the gay rights movement toward equality in normalcy.

The book has been described as a classic of the debates on normalcy as a goal for the gay rights movement, and as an important contribution to queer theory.

Martha Nussbaum, writing in the New Republic, praised the book's moral opposition to "the domination of the 'normal'": "Warner is a deft and thoughtful writer who turns his own experience of the margins into a source of genuine understanding about America and its sexual politics...what Warner's book finally demands of us is...genuine reflection."

First published in 1999 by The Free Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, it was re-published in 2000 in paperback by Harvard University Press.

Warner argues that the right to marry is an inadequate and ultimately undesirable goal for gay rights activism.

Chapter one, "The Ethics of Sexual Shame", argues that people with deviant sexualities have been shamed, as a result of American society's relegation of sex to the private domain, where it is not talked about.

It provides a list of sexual hierarchies, as well as discussion of stigma, shame, moral panics, and queer life.

Chapter two, "What's Wrong with Normal?", critiques the notion of normalcy.

In this chapter, Warner looks at the arguments of Georges Canguilhem and Alfred Kinsey to discuss issues with the concept of norms and "The Normalized Movement" within gay rights activism.

Chapter three, "Beyond Gay Marriage", takes the concepts from chapter two to argue against same-sex marriage, and marriage as an institution that reinforces privacy and diminishes the queer counterpublic.

Chapter four, "Zoning Out Sex", discusses the zoning laws put in place by New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Warner has been a permanent fellow of Rutgers University's Center for Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture since 2001, and was a director from 2006 to 2008.

In 2002, he published Publics and Counterpublics, which is a collection of essays on the politics of communication in advanced capitalistic societies, or Habermasian public sphere theory.

Warner then edited a book on the history of secularism in early America, from the early eighteenth century to the Civil War, culminating with the work of Walt Whitman, a writer on whom many of his interests converge.

Warner assumed his position at Yale University in 2007, and became Seymour H. Knox Professor of English Literature and American studies in 2008.