[4] Berlant wrote and taught issues of intimacy and belonging in popular culture, in relation to the history and fantasy of citizenship.
[13] In his review, José Muñoz described it as both intersectional, following Kimberlé Crenshaw, and "post-Habermassian", in the vein of work by Nancy Fraser and Berlant's frequent collaborator Michael Warner.
[13] Berlant's third book (though second in the trilogy),[14] The Female Complaint: On the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture was published by Duke University Press in 2008.
The project initially began in the 1980s when Berlant noticed striking similarities in writing by Erma Bombeck and Fanny Fern, who skewered married life for women in nearly identical ways despite being separated by 150 years.
[14] Berlant took up this project by examining especially melodramas and their remade movies in the first part of the twentieth century, such as Show Boat, Imitation of Life, and Uncle Tom's Cabin.
[14] Berlant's 2011 book, Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press) works its way across the U.S. and Europe to assess the level of contemporary crisis as neoliberalism wears away the fantasies of upward mobility associated with the liberal state.
[18]An emphasis on the "present", which Berlant describes as structured through "crisis ordinariness", turns to affect and aesthetics as a way of apprehending these crises.
[9] Berlant's papers are held at the Feminist Theory Archive of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University.