– The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny (2016)
Many people in these overlapping communities arranged their political, social, and emotional affinities not around ideas of a “left” or a “right” political wing but always around ideas of invisible centers of power (cf. Dean 2009). In this specific structure of feeling and imagination, the margins oppose that occult, sinister center, a black hole that invisibly sucks people into its gravitational pull. My closest friend in the UFO support group eventually drifted into a social world that actively sympathized with the militia movement. It was sometimes difficult to understand her support for right-wing militias along with her intense championship of gay rights and gender nonconformity. Many UFO believers plucked stances from both traditional right- and left-wing ideologies, relating not to traditional activist political lines but instead to a sense of distance from the powers that be (see Dean 2009, 1998). The “prepper” bookstore I visited in Nevada displayed militia manifestos and apocalypse-preparedness handbooks next to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.
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Dean, Jodi. 1998. Aliens in America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Dean, Jodi. 2009. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press