Home / Books / Personal Demons

Personal Demons

Possession Narratives of Late Liberalism

Cover of Personal Demons features a painting of a beige cat-like creature caught in branches against a painted black background.

Book

Pages: 288

Illustrations: 36 color illustrations

Release Date: October 20, 2026

Author: Grace Lavery

Personal Demons offers a new theory of the relation between sex, desire, and personhood, asking what we should make of the many contemporary instances when bodies seem to want different things from the consciousnesses within them. Grace Lavery maps the negative energies—demonic, incoherent, resistant—through which liberalism produces and disciplines its scapegoats. Through an examination of modern possession narratives, from racialized spectacles of bodily transformation and disguise to the liturgy of the Church of Scientology, Lavery unspools the knot of body, affect, and representation at the end of liberalism. In the face of the uneasy bargains queer and trans liberal organizations made with the phobic state, Personal Demons elaborates a vision of queer collective living that does not assume a shared concept of interiority, taking the incompatibility of such concepts as the founding axiom for a coalition against the ideological regulation of bodies and minds.

Praise

“A thrilling and utterly original book. Propulsively readable; Lavery’s luminous prose carries us through a captivating archive to reveal the surprising centrality of the trope of transsexual demonic possession to contemporary debates over embodiment, consciousness, agency, and the possibility of shared reality. When liberal rights claims have so spectacularly failed to defend trans kids (or trans adults), we need this book and Grace Lavery’s singular voice.” - Ann Pellegrini, coauthor of Gender Without Identity

“Grace Lavery is a daring, daunting, and dazzling writer. In Personal Demons she offers an utterly mesmerizing account of how transsexual subjectivity challenges neoliberal reason. Lavery writes a captivating and archly critical voice, and reads with uncanny sensitivity to both generic genealogy and textual detail. This is essential, urgent reading for anyone inhabiting the death throes of liberalism.” - Bill Brown, Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture, University of Chicago

Buy

Availability: Loading...

Price: Loading...

Request a desk or exam copy Spring 2026 Web Sale

Information

Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

Back to Top
Grace Lavery is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She has authored multiple books, including Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom, published by Duke University Press, and Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques.

Table Of Contents

Back to Top
Introduction. What of Ziz? Liberalism and Demonology  1
Part One. On Demonology  43
1. A Little Dualism  45
2. The Ghost in the Sheet  65
3. The Paedophile’s Complaint  85.
Interlude. Fragments on Waking  111
Part Two. What Lives Us?  137
4. Dianetics of Enlightenment  139
5. Leland Palmer Retracts His Confession  161
6. Vicissitudes of the Asshole: Tickling, Bottoming, Prolapsing  183
Epilogue. Encore un effort, psychotiques, si vous voulez être « Death Eaters »!  207
Notes  221
Bibliography  239
Index

Rights

Back to Top

Sales/Territorial Rights: World

Rights and licensing

Additional Information

Back to Top
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3909-9 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-3414-8 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6270-7 /