Chapter 5 engages with a larger transhistorical discourse of female personhood, considering how the challenges that accompanied Austen’s public status are echoed in the reading and reception history of Mansfield Park. I move this discussion back to the 1772 Mansfield Decision, and forward to consider the controversy surrounding the far less momentous twenty-first century decision to place Austen on a British bank note. The open-ended, improvisatory, and uncontrollable nature of feelingly impactful speech links cultural and critical conversations to what J.L. Austin calls the perlocutionary realm of performative language. Perlocution, the dimension of language that most signals organizational breakdown, bogging down the progress of J.L. Austin’s official speech-act theory, is also the dimension or capacity of language through which paratextual literary encounters – allusions, conversations, revisions, and eventful readings – persist. This concern with doing things by our words as well as in them evokes a central feature of the enterprise of literary criticism altogether, I argue. For Cavell, the very mood and project of criticism is praise open to rebuke.

This chapter offers a Foucauldian genealogy of queer theory, which does not stabilize origins, but rather probes incommensurabilities within the field, centers the element of chance that allowed certain theories to become central, and allows for the formation of new roots to the side of those canonized for “founding” a field. Assessing the influence of three major figures – Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and Michel Foucault – as well as psychoanalytic theory, the first section asks what theoretical orientations each of these figures brought to the field of queer theory and how those orientations influenced later queer theorists. The chapter then turns to queer theorists who self-consciously sought alternative intellectual roots for the field and claimed new founding figures, largely in a bid to center racialized populations and/or geopolitical locations outside of Euro-North America. The ambition of this chapter is to simultaneously account for the generativity of particular theorists and theories – sometimes for critics whose political stakes and objects of study could not be more different – while leaving the field open to the claiming of new genealogies.

The chapter examines the Spiritual Exercises of Loyola, the foundational text for Jesuit practice, and finds there a rich psychoanalytic dynamism between satisfaction and frustration, imagination and reality, and an insistent demand for a creative, affective response to the problems it forces the exercitant to face.