Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity 9781108779692, 9781108489911

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CONTEMP O R AR Y F E M I N I ST LI FE - W RI T I N G

Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing is the first volume to identify and analyse the ‘new audacity’ of recent feminist writings from life. Characterised by boldness in both style and content, willingness to explore difficult and disturbing experiences, the refusal of victimhood, and a lack of respect for traditional genre boundaries, new audacity writing takes risks with its author’s and others’ reputations, and even, on occasion, with the law. This book offers an examination and critical assessment of new audacity in works by Katherine Angel, Alison Bechdel, Marie Calloway, Virginie Despentes, Tracey Emin, Sheila Heti, Juliet Jacques, Chris Krauss, Jana Leo, Maggie Nelson, Vanessa Place, Paul Preciado, and Kate Zambreno. It analyses how they write about women’s self-authorship, trans experiences, struggles with mental illness, sexual violence and rape, and the desire for sexual submission. It engages with recent feminist and gender scholarship, providing discussions of vulnerability, victimhood, authenticity, trauma, and affect. jennifer cooke is Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. She is the editor of New Feminist Studies (2020, Cambridge University Press), Scenes of Intimacy: Reading, Writing and Theorizing Contemporary Literature (2013), a special issue of Textual Practice (September 2013), and author of Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory, and Film (2009). She chairs the Gendered Lives Research Group.

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cambridge studies in twenty-first-century literature and culture Editor Peter Boxall, University of Sussex

As the cultural environment of the twenty-first century comes into clearer focus, Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture presents a series of monographs that undertakes the most penetrating and rigorous analysis of contemporary culture and thought. The series is driven by the perception that critical thinking today is in a state of transition. The global forces that produce cultural forms are entering into powerful new alignments, which demand new analytical vocabularies in the wake of later twentieth-century theory. The series will demonstrate that theory is not simply a failed revolutionary gesture that we need to move beyond, but rather brings us to the threshold of a new episteme, which will require new theoretical energy to navigate. In this spirit, the series will host work that explores the most important emerging critical contours of the twenty-first century, marrying inventive and imaginative criticism with theoretical and philosophical rigor. The aim of the series will be to produce an enduring account of the twenty-first-century intellectual landscape that will not only stand as a record of the critical nature of our time, but that will also forge new critical languages and vocabularies with which to navigate an unfolding age. In offering a historically rich and philosophically nuanced account of contemporary literature and culture, the series will stand as an enduring body of work that helps us to understand the cultural moment in which we live. In This Series Joel Evans Conceptualising the Global in the Wake of the Postmodern: Literature, Culture, Theory Adeline Johns-Putra Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel Caroline Edwards Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel Paul Crosthwaite The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction Jennifer Cooke Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing

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CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST LIFE-WRITING The New Audacity

JENNIFER COOKE Loughborough University

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University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108489911 doi: 10.1017/9781108779692 © Jennifer Cooke 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. isbn 978-1-108-48991-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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CONTEMP O R AR Y F E M I N I ST LI FE - W RI T I N G

Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing is the first volume to identify and analyse the ‘new audacity’ of recent feminist writings from life. Characterised by boldness in both style and content, willingness to explore difficult and disturbing experiences, the refusal of victimhood, and a lack of respect for traditional genre boundaries, new audacity writing takes risks with its author’s and others’ reputations, and even, on occasion, with the law. This book offers an examination and critical assessment of new audacity in works by Katherine Angel, Alison Bechdel, Marie Calloway, Virginie Despentes, Tracey Emin, Sheila Heti, Juliet Jacques, Chris Krauss, Jana Leo, Maggie Nelson, Vanessa Place, Paul Preciado, and Kate Zambreno. It analyses how they write about women’s self-authorship, trans experiences, struggles with mental illness, sexual violence and rape, and the desire for sexual submission. It engages with recent feminist and gender scholarship, providing discussions of vulnerability, victimhood, authenticity, trauma, and affect. jennifer cooke is Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. She is the editor of New Feminist Studies (2020, Cambridge University Press), Scenes of Intimacy: Reading, Writing and Theorizing Contemporary Literature (2013), a special issue of Textual Practice (September 2013), and author of Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory, and Film (2009). She chairs the Gendered Lives Research Group.

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cambridge studies in twenty-first-century literature and culture Editor Peter Boxall, University of Sussex

As the cultural environment of the twenty-first century comes into clearer focus, Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture presents a series of monographs that undertakes the most penetrating and rigorous analysis of contemporary culture and thought. The series is driven by the perception that critical thinking today is in a state of transition. The global forces that produce cultural forms are entering into powerful new alignments, which demand new analytical vocabularies in the wake of later twentieth-century theory. The series will demonstrate that theory is not simply a failed revolutionary gesture that we need to move beyond, but rather brings us to the threshold of a new episteme, which will require new theoretical energy to navigate. In this spirit, the series will host work that explores the most important emerging critical contours of the twenty-first century, marrying inventive and imaginative criticism with theoretical and philosophical rigor. The aim of the series will be to produce an enduring account of the twenty-first-century intellectual landscape that will not only stand as a record of the critical nature of our time, but that will also forge new critical languages and vocabularies with which to navigate an unfolding age. In offering a historically rich and philosophically nuanced account of contemporary literature and culture, the series will stand as an enduring body of work that helps us to understand the cultural moment in which we live. In This Series Joel Evans Conceptualising the Global in the Wake of the Postmodern: Literature, Culture, Theory Adeline Johns-Putra Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel Caroline Edwards Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel Paul Crosthwaite The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction Jennifer Cooke Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing

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CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST LIFE-WRITING The New Audacity

JENNIFER COOKE Loughborough University

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University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108489911 doi: 10.1017/9781108779692 © Jennifer Cooke 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. isbn 978-1-108-48991-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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CONTEMP O R AR Y F E M I N I ST LI FE - W RI T I N G

Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing is the first volume to identify and analyse the ‘new audacity’ of recent feminist writings from life. Characterised by boldness in both style and content, willingness to explore difficult and disturbing experiences, the refusal of victimhood, and a lack of respect for traditional genre boundaries, new audacity writing takes risks with its author’s and others’ reputations, and even, on occasion, with the law. This book offers an examination and critical assessment of new audacity in works by Katherine Angel, Alison Bechdel, Marie Calloway, Virginie Despentes, Tracey Emin, Sheila Heti, Juliet Jacques, Chris Krauss, Jana Leo, Maggie Nelson, Vanessa Place, Paul Preciado, and Kate Zambreno. It analyses how they write about women’s self-authorship, trans experiences, struggles with mental illness, sexual violence and rape, and the desire for sexual submission. It engages with recent feminist and gender scholarship, providing discussions of vulnerability, victimhood, authenticity, trauma, and affect. jennifer cooke is Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. She is the editor of New Feminist Studies (2020, Cambridge University Press), Scenes of Intimacy: Reading, Writing and Theorizing Contemporary Literature (2013), a special issue of Textual Practice (September 2013), and author of Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory, and Film (2009). She chairs the Gendered Lives Research Group.

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cambridge studies in twenty-first-century literature and culture Editor Peter Boxall, University of Sussex

As the cultural environment of the twenty-first century comes into clearer focus, Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture presents a series of monographs that undertakes the most penetrating and rigorous analysis of contemporary culture and thought. The series is driven by the perception that critical thinking today is in a state of transition. The global forces that produce cultural forms are entering into powerful new alignments, which demand new analytical vocabularies in the wake of later twentieth-century theory. The series will demonstrate that theory is not simply a failed revolutionary gesture that we need to move beyond, but rather brings us to the threshold of a new episteme, which will require new theoretical energy to navigate. In this spirit, the series will host work that explores the most important emerging critical contours of the twenty-first century, marrying inventive and imaginative criticism with theoretical and philosophical rigor. The aim of the series will be to produce an enduring account of the twenty-first-century intellectual landscape that will not only stand as a record of the critical nature of our time, but that will also forge new critical languages and vocabularies with which to navigate an unfolding age. In offering a historically rich and philosophically nuanced account of contemporary literature and culture, the series will stand as an enduring body of work that helps us to understand the cultural moment in which we live. In This Series Joel Evans Conceptualising the Global in the Wake of the Postmodern: Literature, Culture, Theory Adeline Johns-Putra Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel Caroline Edwards Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel Paul Crosthwaite The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction Jennifer Cooke Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing

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CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST LIFE-WRITING The New Audacity

JENNIFER COOKE Loughborough University

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University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108489911 doi: 10.1017/9781108779692 © Jennifer Cooke 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. isbn 978-1-108-48991-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108779692

CONTEMP O R AR Y F E M I N I ST LI FE - W RI T I N G

Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing is the first volume to identify and analyse the ‘new audacity’ of recent feminist writings from life. Characterised by boldness in both style and content, willingness to explore difficult and disturbing experiences, the refusal of victimhood, and a lack of respect for traditional genre boundaries, new audacity writing takes risks with its author’s and others’ reputations, and even, on occasion, with the law. This book offers an examination and critical assessment of new audacity in works by Katherine Angel, Alison Bechdel, Marie Calloway, Virginie Despentes, Tracey Emin, Sheila Heti, Juliet Jacques, Chris Krauss, Jana Leo, Maggie Nelson, Vanessa Place, Paul Preciado, and Kate Zambreno. It analyses how they write about women’s self-authorship, trans experiences, struggles with mental illness, sexual violence and rape, and the desire for sexual submission. It engages with recent feminist and gender scholarship, providing discussions of vulnerability, victimhood, authenticity, trauma, and affect. jennifer cooke is Senior Lecturer in English at Loughborough University. She is the editor of New Feminist Studies (2020, Cambridge University Press), Scenes of Intimacy: Reading, Writing and Theorizing Contemporary Literature (2013), a special issue of Textual Practice (September 2013), and author of Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory, and Film (2009). She chairs the Gendered Lives Research Group.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108779692

cambridge studies in twenty-first-century literature and culture Editor Peter Boxall, University of Sussex

As the cultural environment of the twenty-first century comes into clearer focus, Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture presents a series of monographs that undertakes the most penetrating and rigorous analysis of contemporary culture and thought. The series is driven by the perception that critical thinking today is in a state of transition. The global forces that produce cultural forms are entering into powerful new alignments, which demand new analytical vocabularies in the wake of later twentieth-century theory. The series will demonstrate that theory is not simply a failed revolutionary gesture that we need to move beyond, but rather brings us to the threshold of a new episteme, which will require new theoretical energy to navigate. In this spirit, the series will host work that explores the most important emerging critical contours of the twenty-first century, marrying inventive and imaginative criticism with theoretical and philosophical rigor. The aim of the series will be to produce an enduring account of the twenty-first-century intellectual landscape that will not only stand as a record of the critical nature of our time, but that will also forge new critical languages and vocabularies with which to navigate an unfolding age. In offering a historically rich and philosophically nuanced account of contemporary literature and culture, the series will stand as an enduring body of work that helps us to understand the cultural moment in which we live. In This Series Joel Evans Conceptualising the Global in the Wake of the Postmodern: Literature, Culture, Theory Adeline Johns-Putra Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel Caroline Edwards Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel Paul Crosthwaite The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction Jennifer Cooke Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing

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CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST LIFE-WRITING The New Audacity

JENNIFER COOKE Loughborough University

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University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108489911 doi: 10.1017/9781108779692 © Jennifer Cooke 2020 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2020 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. isbn 978-1-108-48991-1 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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For Eva Wren and Beatrice

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Contents

Acknowledgements

page viii

Introduction: The New Audacity

1

1 Autobiography as Feminist Praxis New Audacity in the Writing of Rape

26

2 Ugly Audacities in Auto/biography Genius, Betrayal, and Writer’s Block

64

3 Stripping Off for the First Time Recasting Vulnerability in the Writing of Hetero-sex and Desire

93

4 Breaking the Binaries New Audacity in the Writing of Trans Lives

134

5 The Dangers of Audacity Vanessa Place’s Contradictory Feminism

170 202

Afterword: After Audacity?

206 222

Bibliography Index

vii

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Acknowledgements

Certain books incubate for some long time: this is such a one. I am grateful to everyone I talked to about this project over the years, from its beginnings in my fascination with theories of intimacy to its more recent focus on lifewriting. I owe particular thanks to the School of the Arts, English, and Drama at Loughborough University, especially for two stretches of research leave which provided me with time to write and think in a valuably concentrated way, and for funding various research expenses. I thank the University of Oxford’s Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW), where I was a visiting scholar for a year, and Hermione Lee, Elleke Boehmer, and Rachel Hewitt for making the OCLW such a fascinating and friendly place. Colleagues at Loughborough have sustained me in multifarious ways, intellectual and otherwise. My thanks to Nicholas Freeman, Anne-Marie Beller, Paul Jenner, Kerry Featherstone, Catherine Rees, Carol Bolton, Andrew Dix, Elaine Hobby, Deirdre O’Byrne, Mick Mangan, Mike Wilson, and Clare Hutton. I am grateful for the conversations enabled by the Gendered Lives Research Group at Loughborough. I would like to thank the students who took my course ‘The Writings of Intimacy’ over the years for the fertile discussions we enjoyed together on many of the texts discussed here. For their perceptive reading and comments upon parts of this book, I thank: Sarah Dillon, Nicholas Freeman, Edmund Hardy, Marsha Meskimmon, Paul Jenner, Samantha Walton, and Georgia Walker Churchman. For crucial conversations about the project, I thank Sophie Robinson, Nicholas Royle, Kaye Mitchell, Georgina Colby, Hazel McMichael, and Jessica Pujol Duran. I thank Frances Kruk for being Frances Kruk. I thank the feminist poets for their ferocity. For the inspiration their academic work provides, particularly in the context of this book, I am grateful to Lauren Berlant and Leigh Gilmore. I am happy to be able to thank the three reviewers who read the full manuscript of this book: they engaged generously with the project and their comments and suggestions were truly helpful. Peter Boxall, as viii

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Acknowledgements

ix

series editor, and Ray Ryan at Cambridge University Press, have been supportive of the project throughout: my thanks to them both. I have discussed work in progress from Contemporary Feminist LifeWriting: The New Audacity in response to invitations to speak at Birmingham University, the University of Cambridge, Cardiff University, the University of East Anglia, Humboldt University of Berlin, and the University of Oxford. I thank the chairs and organisers of these events, and the attendees. I am grateful to the International Auto/ Biographical Association and the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies. At their best, as these are, subject associations can be fascinating places to meet the like-minded and to test one’s ideas against others with similar expertise. I thank Austin Stoub, Reference Librarian at the LA Law Library, for advice, and Darrell Ramsey from CalInfo for his help in retrieving the court files which contribute to Chapter 5’s understanding of Vanessa Place’s work. I am extremely grateful to my immediate family – Dwee, Tony, Jimmy, Kate, and the girls – for their enduring support, and for getting me away from the screen. I am especially thankful to have Nelson Garcia Berrios, Ronnie, Nia, and the memory of Lolita in my life: you are the dear ones of my heart. My final thanks are reserved for a very special friend who has followed this project from its start, listened to me describe my emergent ideas again and again, asked the right questions, and provided endless numbers of amazing meals for me. One pivotal, hot summer’s night in North London this book became properly what it is today over a bottle of wine and a lengthy conversation with Elizabeth Brunton. I can’t thank her enough for her intelligent interest in this project, and for her guiding advice.

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Introduction The New Audacity

Arabella Donn tosses a pizzle towards the eponymous protagonist of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), hoping to attract his attention. She is successful and, perhaps unsurprisingly for a nineteenth-century man suddenly interpellated by a pig’s penis, Jude ‘seemed to expect her to explain why she had audaciously stopped him by this novel artillery instead of by hailing him’.1 Hardy’s amusing fictional encounter is illustrative of how audacity has traditionally been deployed to label women who openly flout the sexual norms of heteropatriarchy or exceed its expected propriety. Arabella may go on to temporarily secure Jude in marriage, but with this vignette Hardy neatly communicates her thorough unsuitability: she is too meaty and brazen, too literal by far for the dreamy, intellectual Jude, and their subsequent union is a predictable failure which paints Arabella in an unpleasantly coarse light. The opprobrium that frequently attaches to audacity has long cast its shadow over women who, like Arabella, are deemed shameless. In such usage, audacity is a moral judgement employed to label and often to exclude. It gets mobilised as a disapproving sobriquet for those who disobey unspoken rules, as Arabella does, and written orders, as whistle-blowers do. Audacity is used by both those swimming with and those swimming against the tide of norms: people whose sensibilities are offended by a breach in sanctioned behaviour reach for audacity as a reproach whereas those who find norms themselves an offensive constraint may audaciously seek to breach them. In questioning morality, the audacious can easily awaken and call forth moral censure. In this sense, audacity is a public challenge to conventions, characterised by boldness and a disregard for 1

T. Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895). Available at the Project Gutenberg website: www.gutenberg.org. For a brief discussion of Hardy’s edits to disguise the pizzle’s provenance after the first edition of the book was negatively reviewed for its crude language, see D. Kramer, ‘Hardy and Readers: Jude the Obscure’, in D. Kramer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 164–82, p. 167.

1

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2

Introduction

decorum, protocol, or moral restraints. As such, it is not necessarily to be understood negatively. Instead, audacity can be orientated towards the future by enacting a step away from the line and the mass of others. To be audacious is to declare that one is striking out with daring in a different direction. This future-facing boldness that takes the risk of thinking and writing in new ways is the spirit of audacity most often tracked within this book. Expressed like this, audacity appears progressive and productive, which is clearly why Barack Obama, then merely a senator, entitled his second book The Audacity of Hope (2006).2 Because of how it marks a difference from the crowd or the norm, audacity is political even when its message has no direct engagement with politics. This book identifies what I am labelling a ‘new audacity’ evident in the contemporary life-writing produced by a number of feminists, many of whom are young, towards the beginning of their publishing careers, and all of whom experiment by testing the boundaries of autobiographical conventions.3 Exhibiting boldness in style and content, new audacity writers explore difficult and disturbing experiences. For example, Kate Zambreno and Alison Bechdel shine a light on the dark corners of mental illness and, alongside Sheila Heti, write of the ragged emotions that accompany writer’s block. They refuse to glamorise writing and, in the process, challenge conventional notions of self-authorship. Then there is the work of Tracey Emin, Jana Leo, and Virginie Despentes, who write about their rapes and the men who raped them. They refuse the position of silenced victim that is so often expected of raped women: there is audacity in this alone. However, the new audacity of these authors is evident in how writing about their rapes becomes a form of feminist praxis: Emin names and shames the men who have raped and abused her while Despentes and Leo launch powerful arguments about the social ills of misogyny and the gendered implications of urban planning that is orientated only towards profitability, with no care for community security. These contentions position Despentes and Leo far beyond the script for the stranger rapes they both experienced and which, in placing the unlucky woman in the wrong place at the wrong time, still make her partially to blame. Leo and Despentes reject such premises, and with them the view of rape solely as 2 3

B. Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006). My oldest author is Chris Kraus (born 1955), who was in her early forties when I Love Dick was published in 1997. Alison Bechdel (born 1960) was around fifty when Are You My Mother? was published in 2012. The other authors I examine are under forty, some – like Marie Calloway, who was born in 1990 – considerably so.

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Introduction

3

a personal tragedy rather than also the consequence of addressable social and political problems. New audacity authors value how non-normative desires, intimacies, and lovers disrupt how they think they inhabit the world and how others react to them. They are interested in sex and they write about it. They own their urges, even if some might label them perverse. Katherine Angel and Marie Calloway chronicle their desire for submission to men, and the responses this causes both in themselves and in others. In I Love Dick (1997), Chris Kraus insists on the validity of her swift emotional fall into an intensity of feeling for a man she barely knows, a man who will continue to behave poorly towards her. Maggie Nelson begins The Argonauts with her hot enjoyment of being anally penetrated by Harry, her trans lover, and Paul Preciado describes how transformative sex is with Virginie Despentes. Considerably less ebullient are Juliet Jacques’s accounts of her sexual intimacies that turn awkward, that disappoint. Despentes and Calloway discuss their sex work and its emotional complexity. As Melissa Gira Grant says of sex workers who testify to their experiences, ‘part of telling the truth here is refusing to conform the story to narrow roles – virgin, victim, wretch, or whore – that she did not herself originate’.4 From those who sell sex to those who take sex hormones, the authors in this study tend to be impatient with binary thinking and with categories which pin them down or pathologise them. New audacity writers are experimenters in life and in the art of telling it. The ‘new’ in ‘new audacity’ thus seeks to capture how these writers offer fresh perspectives on their contemporary lives, on feminism in the early twenty-first century, and how they do so in new experiments with genre. My chosen texts are written and structured to maximise the affective impact of their feminist politics. The formal properties of these writings deliberately amplify the questions they raise and the arguments they propound, and this is often achieved through experiments with literary conventions. I closely read these texts to analyse how they create and curate affective encounters in order to unsettle assumptions about sexuality, desire, sex work, the eroticism of female submission, trans lives, mental illness, rape, and feminism itself. New audacity feminists use their writings to think from life, and this has formal implications. Preciado, Leo, and Jacques adopt an alternating structure so that primarily factual and theoretical chapters are interspersed with chapters about their lives. For others – including Nelson, Angel, Zambreno, Kraus, and Despentes – life events 4

M. Gira Grant, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (London and New York: Verso, 2014), p. 33.

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both quotidian and disruptive propel reflection, a process that repeatedly tracks from individual, personal experiences to thinking through their collective and political implications. However, this is not simply unstructured association. On the contrary, these texts are tightly structured. What might initially appear to be loose and undirected association under closer scrutiny turns out to be a deliberately deployed associative strategy. This is the case with how each of Bechdel’s chapters unfolds from a dream and unpicks its significance, with the dialogic method Zambreno uses to highlight similarities between her own life and those of the modernist women she writes of, and with Nelson’s paralleling of pregnancy and transition, her interweaving of death and the labour of birth. Sometimes the structure of a text deliberately prevents assumptions of causality, such as how Angel details her desire for sexual submission before she recounts her fall into depression following an abortion so that her masochism is not read as a consequence of trauma. Variations on the essay are favourite forms among new audacity writers, especially with those making overt interventions into politicised debates, as do Leo, Preciado, and Despentes. Other forms in evidence are the poetic layout of Angel’s precise lyrical prose, Emin’s poem and handwritten notes, Kraus’s epistles, Vanessa Place’s conceptual poetry, Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Heti’s ‘novel from life’, and the over-written photos and screenshots used by Calloway.5 Across them all, the imbrication of life with intellectual ideas, questions, and arguments is a defining feature. As is by now no doubt clear, the terrain new audacity writers occupy, even the lives they lead, can be considered interventions into long-standing but continuing debates within feminism, especially, although not exclusively, Anglo-American feminism. In these new audacity texts, trans people’s identities are not a matter for dispute; rather, they are valued contributors to feminism. Sex work is discussed as bodily labour, not as a stigmatised blemish upon a woman’s reputation. Sexual submission is explored with curiosity and does not debar one from being a feminist. New audacity writers challenge discourses of victimhood that damage women’s agency. They believe it is not just men but women – and sometimes feminists – who need to change in order to address misogyny and discrimination. They often demand large-scale social and structural change rather than place their hopes in reform, and they are determined to break with conservative thinking wherever they encounter it. These writers thus 5

Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? carried the subtitle ‘A Novel from Life’ on its front cover in one of its 2012 incarnations from House of Anansi Press.

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have a lot to say about and to contemporary feminism. This book seeks to define the shape of their feminism and in so doing to enact a feminist reshaping, especially within literary feminist scholarship and life-writing, an aim to which I return. Firstly, though, it is important to note that in Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing, I define feminism broadly as applicable to writers who critically draw attention to or analyse and thereby challenge the gender inequality and patriarchal privileges which adversely affect those who identify as women. This inclusive definition allows the book to feature the transfeminist theorising of Preciado, whose contributions to feminism are both informed and insightful. A considerable amount of Preciado’s Testo Junkie, as discussed in Chapter 4, is dedicated to exploring gender and the legacies of feminism. He demonstrates, for example, that ciswomen and trans people’s entanglements with hormones – whether to repress the reproductive cycle or to change gender – are part of the same pharmaceutical history. The inclusion of Preciado here illustrates the pragmatic dimension of eschewing the category ‘women’s writing’ in favour of ‘feminist’ for this project. Not all feminism is the same, however. Preciado warns that ‘feminism functions, or can function, as an instrument of normalization and political control when it reduces its subject to “women”’.6 He is summarising the work of Teresa de Lauretis, but theorists such as Judith Butler and Leigh Gilmore have long warned against the false universalising that the term ‘women’ can enact by flattening out differences between women and their circumstances within social structures and geographical locations.7 Not every writer studied here would categorise their work as primarily an engagement with or expression of feminism. After reading a review which characterised her writing as feminist, Calloway admits, ‘I felt uneasy to be suddenly upheld as a “feminist writer”, which I had never thought of myself as and which seemed like a tremendous burden.’8 As 6

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B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, trans. B. Benderson (New York: Feminist Press, 2013), p. 107. Since the publication of Testo Junkie, Preciado has transitioned and taken the name Paul, so I use ‘he’ throughout. Later imprints of Testo Junkie name Paul B. Preciado as the author. For all texts quoted from more than once in Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing, a full reference is provided for the initial quote in each chapter and thereafter page numbers will appear in parentheses after the quote, providing textual provenance is clear. J. Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal 40:4 (December 1988), pp. 519–31, and L. Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. x–xiii. M. Calloway, what purpose did i serve in your life (New York: Tyrant Books, 2013), p. 157.

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Chapter 3 explores, Calloway engages with questions of female submission, a topic at the heart of feminist debates about female desire, and she draws attention to the erotic power of misogyny for men. By my definition, therefore, her work is feminist, but as we will see in the reception of her writing, this is not a classification universally shared. In this study, then, feminism is an interpretative approach to a text as well as a characterisation of what the writer enacts within their pages or how they self-identify. Calloway’s comment points to an old knot of problems around the designation of work as ‘feminist’, one of which Kraus captures in her commentary upon the history of art: ‘I’m wondering why every act that narrated female lived experience in the 70s has been read only as “collaborative” and “feminist”.’9 As she highlights, ‘feminist’ can be a label to bracket and safely shunt work off down a literary or artistic sidealley, marking it as only relevant to women interested in feminist work rather than acknowledging that it raises sociopolitical questions essential to all of us. This study, of course, risks the same fate. Yet the twenty-first century has seen a resurgence of feminism, which has entered mainstream popular culture through its adoption by prominent actresses and pop stars such as Emma Watson, Beyoncé Knowles, and Jennifer Lawrence, and the visibility offered to activism by social media, evident in projects like The Everyday Sexism Project and the #MeToo hashtag.10 There are necessary critiques to be made of what Diane Negra and Hannah Hamad, in their negative assessment of this recent phenomenon, term the new ‘plutocratic feminism’, but it is undeniable that the celebrity influence of those claiming to be feminists has helped to destigmatise the term for a generation of young women.11 However breezy the media declarations claiming 2014 ‘the year of feminism’ may have sounded to academic and grass-roots feminists, it is still not culturally insignificant and a rising profile outside academia helps to make the case for feminism’s continued relevance within 9 10

11

C. Kraus, I Love Dick (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006), p. 150. The film star Emma Watson, as UN Woman Goodwill Ambassador, has made several speeches about feminism. See a transcript of one at unwomen.org, entitled ‘Emma Watson: Gender Equality Is Your Issue Too’ (20 September 2014). The film star Jennifer Lawrence has criticised how male peers are paid more. See N. M. Smith, ‘Jennifer Lawrence Expresses Anger at Hollywood’s Gender Pay Gap’, The Guardian (13 October 2015). Pop star Beyoncé Knowles has used the word ‘feminist’ in her stage shows and has quoted feminist writers in some of her songs. See O. Blair, ‘Beyoncé Explains Why She Performed in Front of the Word “Feminist”’, Independent (5 April 2016). For a feminist analysis by a scholar and unabashed fan, see U. Tinsley, Beyoncé in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018). D. Negra and H. Hamad, ‘The New Plutocratic Feminism’, in J. Cooke (ed.), New Feminist Studies: Twenty-First-Century Critical Interventions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

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it.12 Indeed, academics too are witnessing a rise in demand for feminism courses and a renewed popularity of feminist events among students. As Sara Ahmed succinctly summarises, ‘Feminism is bringing people into the room.’13 This is therefore an apposite moment to turn once more to feminists who write about their lives, especially when they are determined to shake up how we think. Feminist autobiography that experiments with the genre’s conventions is not new, it is important to acknowledge, even if the umbrella term ‘lifewriting’ has only come to prominence in the twenty-first century.14 From the 1980s onwards, feminist scholars criticised the canon of autobiography for its male focus, and addressed the lacunae through an efflorescence of studies.15 These earlier scholars of women’s autobiography fought against a doubled discrimination, contesting the relegation of women’s writing below that of men’s and the routine dismissal of autobiography as a minor genre far below narrative fiction and poetry in literary importance.16 The centrality of feminism in valorising autobiographical writing for testifying to the political in the personal cannot be overestimated: in large part, it is the body of work resulting from this insight that propelled auto/biography into sharper theoretical and literary focus in the latter decades of the twentieth century.17 As Laura Marcus writes, ‘The “confessional” text of autobiographical self-revelation was a dominant form in the 1970s, with major feminist theorists such as Kate Millett redefining autobiography in narratives which combined the close record of daily life with the thematics 12

13 14

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At the end of 2014, The Guardian, Time, Slate, The Telegraph, The Huffington Post, and others declared it was ‘the year of feminism’. For a sample of why, see The Guardian editorial by A. Rusbridger, ‘The Guardian View on a Year in Feminism: 2014 Was a Watershed’, The Guardian (31 December 2014). S. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 3. This is certainly the case in the United Kingdom: the academic journal Life Writing published its first issue in 2004; the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, was launched in 2011; and the King’s College London Centre for Life-Writing was founded in 2007. The first major study of women’s autobiography was E. C. Jelinek (ed.), Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980). A sample of others includes Gilmore, Autobiographics; L. Stanley, The Auto/Biographical I: Theory and Practice of Feminist Autobiography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); L. Anderson, Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century: Remembered Futures (London: Prentice Hall, 1997); S. A. Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998);and the impressive compendium provided by S. Smith and J. Watson (eds.), Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998). On women’s autobiography valued below men’s, see Gilmore, Autobiographics, p. 13. On autobiography’s undervaluation compared with other literary genres, see M. DiBattista and E. O. Wittman, ‘Introduction’, in M. DiBattista and E. O. Wittman (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 1–4. Smith and Watson’s Women, Autobiography, Theory testifies to this in their choice to feature so many feminist scholars.

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of feminist liberation and self-discovery.’18 This confessional style of writing is what Rita Felski analyses too in Beyond Feminist Aesthetics.19 Marcus’s Auto/biography additionally argue that biography is never free from an entanglement with autobiography, and the range of feminist writing in the 1970s and 1980s demonstrated that hybridity was central to women probing the boundaries demarking genres. As another leading scholar of women’s autobiography, Leigh Gilmore, has rightly pointed out, many of the most radical of these hybrid texts of the period were produced by women of colour: Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969); Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976); Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982); Cherrie Moraga’s Loving in the War Years (1983); Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984); and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands: La Frontera (1987).20 These texts, ‘[v]erging into autobiographical fiction, the essay and manifesto, and graphic memoir and comics’, Gilmore writes, ‘connected submerged histories of violence to contemporary trauma and brought both to view’ (p. 90). Clearly, there are close affinities in both subject matter and experimentation with genre between these earlier feminist writers and their new audacity descendants, but there is a specific twenty-first-century focus to the concerns of contemporary new audacity writers. Gilmore’s list of authors is an ethnically diverse set of second-wave American feminists. By contrast, the writers in Contemporary Feminist LifeWriting are drawn from Britain, Canada, the United States, and Europe, although it is American authors who are in the majority, a result of more small presses in the United States dedicated to nurturing, encouraging, and publishing feminist and innovative life-writing.21 As the networks among the younger new audacity life-writing cohort evince, in a digital age writers are more connected with each other than they were forty or fifty years ago, when they may have remained monadic outsiders, unaware of each other. Small presses in the past could remain unknown outside of their national 18 19 20 21

L. Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 279–80. R. Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), pp. 86–121. L. Gilmore, Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), p. 90. Of six US authors, Chris Kraus and Kate Zambreno are published by Semiotext(e), in its resolve to feature more innovative women; Vanessa Place by Blanc Press, which has a similar remit; Marie Calloway by the small Tyrant Books and Maggie Nelson by the larger Graywolf Press, both of which are dedicated to adventurous writing. Paul Preciado, Virginie Despentes, and Jana Leo are all published by the US-based Feminist Press.

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or even regional contexts, whereas contemporary websites and social media make finding, purchasing, and advertising an author’s work easy, cheap, or even free. Transnational migration is also not unusual among twenty-firstcentury writers: Leo and Preciado are Spaniards who reside respectively in New York and France. There is ethnic diversity among the writers I discuss, such as American Calloway’s part-Korean heritage, the Turkish father of British artist Tracey Emin, and the Jewishness of Bechdel, Heti, and Kraus. But when these writers comment upon their ethnicity, it is not, as it was for the earlier writers Gilmore lists, central to their writing projects or to their stated reasons for reaching for unusual or blended forms.22 Writers like Lorde, Anzaldúa, and Hong Kingston were the original audacious feminist life-writers, breaking new ground formally and shifting the parameters of feminist autobiography to include accounts of how women from minority ethnicities found and forged their identities in often racist and hostile environments. New audacity writers are similarly attempting to loosen the circumference of feminist discourse, but this time to ask for space to be made for sex workers and trans people, for conversations about ambivalent desires for sexual submission, about mental illness, and about how to survive rape without victimhood. Unlike their secondwave predecessors, they write in the wake of queer, gender, and trauma theory, post-structuralist and Derridean critiques of binary thinking, and accept that identity is both socially constructed, and thus circumscribed by norms, and that it has material and embodied manifestations and consequences attendant upon historical circumstances. Curiously, new audacity authors Zambreno, Kraus, and Despentes repeat a familiar lament the echo of which has continued to rebound from the pens of women writing about their lives from the 1970s to the present. Lorde’s 1978 essay ‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action’ is one of the classic calls for women to speak openly about their lives. It closes by claiming that ‘it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.’23 A Riot Grrrl flyer most likely from the early 1990s makes a similar claim: ‘BECAUSE we need to talk to each other. Communication/inclusion is key. We will never know if we don’t break the code of silence. BECAUSE we girls want to create mediums that speak to US.’24 Just before the turn of the millennium, Kraus writes, ‘there’s not enough female irrepressibility written 22 23 24

Interestingly, in Heti’s recent book, Motherhood (London: Harvill Secker, 2018), she discusses her Jewish family, especially the maternal side, but it does not play a part in her work until then. A. Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), p. 44. L. Darms (ed.), The Riot Grrrl Collection (New York: Feminist Press, 2013), p. 168.

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down. I’ve fused my silence and repression with the entire female gender’s silence and repression. I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.’25 As part of a programme of redress to this perceived elision, Kraus publishes Zambreno’s Heroines.26 In turn, Zambreno comments of a woman in her creative writing class, ‘The shame and guilt for writing her life, for living her life, the selfcensoring violence. A silencing campaign . . . She feels she cannot write of her breakdown, of her interior state. She is fearful of being psychologized, pathologized, placed somewhere on the DSM.’27 And at the end of King Kong Theory, Despentes writes, ‘Of course it’s difficult to be a woman. Fears, constraints, being commanded to silence, called to a long-discredited line of order – a whole carnival of pathetic and sterile limitations.’28 Together, these statements build into a curious paradox: it is apparent that women have been making a noise about being silenced for many decades now. To speak, even to encounter other feminists speaking, is evidently not sufficient to dispel the sensation of being silenced. On the one hand, there is now a considerable archive of feminist writing that documents both the repeated calls to speak and to write against silence and the evidence that feminists – authors, activists, and academics alike – have been repeatedly doing so. One obvious conclusion to draw is that a clear audience and market exists for feminist work, even if that is primarily composed of other feminists, as the ongoing success of the Feminist Press demonstrates. It is worth noting, too, that the silencing referred to by the writers I quoted earlier is variegated, pertaining to different experiences of race, class, mental health, and subcultural gender sidelining, and resultantly the strategies for dealing with it range from self-censure to zine-making. The silences they complain of are imposed by external cultural and social norms and codes of propriety. On the other hand, there is evidence that women’s literary writing – whether explicitly feminist or not – does not have 25 26

27 28

Kraus, I Love Dick, p. 210. Kraus edited the Native Agent series for Semiotext(e), the influential small press run by her husband, Sylvère Lotringer. In her quasi-autobiographical novel Torpor, the women writers she publishes in the series and the way they deploy ‘a female public I aimed outwards towards the world’ is described as a ‘philosophical intervention’ and ‘the only countercultural trend worth mentioning’ because of how different they are to the male philosophers her husband publishes through the main press. Zambreno’s book is part of the follow-up series, Active Agents. See C. Kraus, Torpor (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2006), p. 195. K. Zambreno, Heroines (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), p. 253. V. Despentes, King Kong Theory, trans. S. Benson (New York: Feminist Press, 2009), p. 136.

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pervasive cultural penetration. Statistics report that men are less likely to read and to review literary fiction written by women, and of active readers interested in popular fiction, women tend to read women and men to read men.29 Feminist conferences are attended overwhelmingly by women; academic conferences on women’s writing feature all-women participants with depressing frequency.30 The small presses favoured by many new audacity writers further limit the readership to which they are likely to be exposed. In the context of avant-garde art, Lauren Berlant rightly argues that preaching to the choir is not without its merits in sustaining solidarity among marginalised groups to hold open the potential to imagine together different political lives.31 But Zambreno, Kraus, and Despentes’s complaints about the silencing of women can be placed in the context of a culture where men routinely do not pay much attention to women’s writing, a fact which frustrates new audacity authors. Silencing, then, is not always the result of a conscious strategy of oppression but can be achieved by men simply ignoring women’s writing so that it gains less coverage and has a weaker social and cultural impact. This book calls attention to and intends to invigorate interest in contemporary feminist life-writing. Previous scholarship on women’s and feminist autobiography has had a tendency to read the formal properties of a text as symptomatic of the life that wrote it, an approach Gilmore rightly criticises in Autobiographics. She observes that ‘a critical gap still looms between anatomy and autobiographical destiny’ (p. xii). Gilmore challenges the reductive assumption in the study of women’s autobiographies that ‘sex becomes gender becomes experiences becomes book’ (p. 11). What happens in this faulty logic is that the movement from being a woman to experiencing the world as a woman to writing women’s autobiography is naturalised, as though the text is unmediated or unedited, a rendering of the ‘truth’ of women. Gilmore warns that ‘generalizations about how the organization of daily life “produces”, or even “causes”, 29

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The first statistic comes from a widely reported VIDA study in 2013 that compared what percentage of reviews, and books reviewed, were written by men and by women in publications like London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books. See A. Flood, ‘Men Still Dominate Books World, Study Shows’, The Guardian (6 March 2013). In response, the novelist Joanna Walsh began a campaign in 2014 called ‘The Year of Reading Women’. The second statistic is based on a study Good Reads did about its readership’s habits. See A. Flood, ‘Readers Prefer Authors of Their Own Sex, Survey Finds’, The Guardian (25 November 2014). My own experience of women’s writing conferences is that they frequently lack male attendees or participants (e.g. ‘Women Writing Pleasure’ at Liverpool John Moores University, 3 July 2015) or the number who do attend is tiny (as at ‘Coming Off Clean’, University of Oxford, 18 March 2014). The same is true of contributor lists for edited collections about women’s writing. L. Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011), p. 237.

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autobiographical form depend upon a kind of formalist gender logic that transcribes lived experience onto textual production and then presumes to read textual effects as experiential cause’ (p. x). This is a false suturing of gender and genre, a misleading equivalence leading to criticism that too quickly and neatly enfolds the formal properties of the text into a sign of biological sex and then gender. A good example of the conflation of gender and genre is provided in Felski’s otherwise clear and useful discussion of women’s confessional writing in Beyond Feminist Aesthetics. She characterises such writing as ‘episodic and fragmented, not chronological and linear’ with an ‘organizing principle . . . provided by the associations of the experiencing subject’ (p. 99). Felski also posits that these confessional authors are addressing readers who are assumed to relate to their positions. It is perhaps this desire for mirroring between author and audience that leads Felski to assert of these writers: ‘The “self ” which women find will continue to be marked by contradictions, schisms, and tensions, some relating to the more general problematic of subjectivity, others to the specific conditions of marginalization and powerlessness that have shaped much of female experience’ (p. 114). As these quotes exemplify, in Felski’s reading there is a confusing collapse of experience into form, which is then further proposed as the site of the discoverable self. I am not disputing that marginalisation and powerlessness shape the experience of women, although clearly such dynamics are unevenly distributed across classes, ethnicities, geographical loci, and other markers of privilege and poverty. Yet Felski’s reading is unduly naïve and resistant to understanding the authors she discusses as sophisticated stylists and adept handlers of formal literary effects. Neither am I convinced that male experimenters in autobiography are subjected to the same conflations when it comes to how they depict their subjectivity. Furthermore, the gendered history of literary reception should also be important to the theorisation of literary experimentalism. Several chapters of Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing therefore attend closely to the reception of their chosen texts. Following Gilmore, generalisations conflating gender and genre or attempts to understand how women’s writing somehow intuitively mirrors their subjectivity are not how Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing proceeds. Rather, this book seeks to join Gilmore’s work in departing from some of the presumptions that formerly underpinned the reception of women’s and feminist life-writing by demonstrating that its chosen authors are highly skilled in their use and understanding of rhetorical, literary, and structural strategies. They produce powerful prose that seeks to challenge, persuade, and reshape the thinking of their readers. As

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a corollary, Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing also makes a strong case for greater attention to life-writing in literary studies. As literary prizes and awards are won by authors studied within this book and as their reputations and influence grow, so too is their readership increasing among the general population. Scholars of contemporary literature who continue to exclude life-writing from their analyses are neglecting complex books that speak to the dark experiences of modern life to which fiction and poetry are equally drawn. Literary networks are often decisive in helping writers with shared commonality find and support one another. This is the case with new audacity authors. To give not an exhaustive list that testifies to the connections between the writers I discuss: Heti interviewed Jacques for the end of Jacques’s book Trans and reviewed Zambreno’s Heroines in London Review of Books; Angel has written about Kraus and teaches Jacques’s Trans to her creative writing students; Despentes and Preciado dated one another and both their books studied here are published by the Feminist Press, as is Leo’s Rape New York; Nelson quotes Preciado in The Argonauts; Place wrote a blurb for Leo’s book; and Kraus’s I Love Dick is published by Semiotext(e), her ex-husband’s avant-garde press, which she now co-edits and which also published Zambreno’s Heroines.32 Whilst not all these authors directly know one another, they are connected by degrees through literary friendships, reviews, and publishing circles. In particular a fidelity exists among many of them to small press publishers like Semiotext(e) and the Feminist Press. Even Heti’s How Should a Person Be? started out with the small Canadian outfit House of Anansi Press before it was republished by the global company Harvill Secker in slightly modified but far more widely read form. We might think of this preference for small press publishing among so many of these writers in the same terms Zambreno uses of herself: ‘I have begun to cultivate this status as an outsider’ (p. 292). In their exploration of unsettling topics, in their choices of form, genre, and publisher, and in the fact that their writing is not often able to fully support them financially, this book’s authors comprise a loose group of outsiders, or what might be usefully termed an ‘outsider archive’. Within the archive are surprising levels of networked links between them, testifying to supportive interconnections within this field of life-writing. If 32

J. Jacques, Trans: A Memoir (London: Verso, 2015), pp. 294–311; S. Heti, ‘I Dive under the Covers’, London Review of Books 35:11 (6 June 2013); K. Angel, ‘Desire That Dare Not Speak’, New Statesman (20 September 2012); Despentes is the mysterious lover V.D. in Preciado’s Testo Junkie, which becomes clear when the film Baise-Moi is discussed (p. 82); M. Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2015), p. 111.

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they are outsiders to mainstream literary publishing, new audacity writers are nevertheless rich in cultural capital, with various involvements in academia, journalism, reviewing, readings, literary commentary, and small press publishing. Despite their outsider archive status, in niche cultural contexts and beyond new audacity writers have received recognition for their work, even if they have not immediately been bestsellers or garnered multiple reviews. Bechdel and Nelson are both recipients of prestigious MacArthur ‘genius’ grants, won directly after the publications I discuss here.33 Kraus’s I Love Dick quickly gained a cult following, had a very successful, much later UK launch in 2015, and was recently made into a television series of the same name by Jill Soloway, starring Kathryn Hahn and Kevin Bacon.34 Despentes adapted her first novel into a controversial film, Baise-Moi (2000), while Jacques’s Trans: A Memoir grew out of her column for The Guardian newspaper. New audacity writers whose work contributes to genres distinct from life-writing generate discussion in fields beyond auto/ biography and among the academics who study them, as Bechdel’s popularity as a cartoonist, Emin’s fame as an artist, Despentes’s literary awards for her novels, and Vanessa Place’s notoriety as a conceptual poet all demonstrate. In fact, it is not unusual for reviews or commentators to link several of these writers together, further reflecting their common features.35 One such article, ‘The Semiautobiographers’ by Emily Cooke, links Kraus, Zambreno, Heti, and Bechdel, setting them against a background of New Narrative writing.36 Cooke prefers Bechdel; the others she dubs direct inheritors of New Narrative writing, but judges them to ‘invoke a repressive culture that no longer really exists, traded in for one that gorges on sex scenes and has no use for privacy’.37 I would dispute the idea that Western culture is no longer repressive: the chapter of Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing on the writing of trans lives testifies to how difficult it can be to move through the world if you are not cishet, and Chapter 3 details how women are subject to censure when they write about 33 34

35

36

Bechdel was awarded hers in 2014 and Nelson in 2016. See the MacArthur Foundation Fellows Programme website, www.macfound.org/fellows/search/all. Tuskar Rock Press, an imprint of Serpent’s Tail, published I Love Dick in 2015 in the United Kingdom. It has since released UK publications of Torpor (2017) and Aliens and Anorexia (2018). The TV series ran from 2016 to 2017, commissioned and distributed by Amazon Video. For example, Angel is referred to during the discussion of Kraus in S. Norris, ‘I Love Dick: What Makes a Feminist Classic?’, Open Democracy (28 October 2016) and Olivia Laing’s review links Jacques to Nelson, and, interestingly, to New Narrative writer Dodie Bellamy: ‘Three New Publications Intimately Concerned with Difficult Bodies’, Frieze (11 December 2015). E. Cooke, ‘The Semiautobiographers’, The New Inquiry (8 November 2012). 37 Ibid.

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their sexual adventures. Cooke questions the formal commitments of new audacity writers too, asking, in a comment directed to Heti’s practice in How Should a Person Be?, ‘when our main mode of communication today is the bad writing of the dashed-off email, and when sex and gossip have become as quick a route to fame as any, how avant-garde is it to incorporate an email into a novel?’38 This could easily be flipped to ask why, despite the prevalence of emails in our lives, most conventional novels and autobiographies contain so few, but more pertinently, as I argue in the following pages, new audacity writers use form to affectively amplify content, rather than to attract the label avant-garde.39 Early twentieth-century avant-gardists were keen to shock their audiences. Shock and audacity are clearly allied: Marcel Duchamp had to have the audacity to shock art audiences by installing a urinal as a museum artwork. From Dada and Duchamp in art to literature’s James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Bertolt Brecht, in the early to midtwentieth century, shock was a cultural strategy primarily practised by men, leading many later feminists to note the ‘historical misogyny’ of the avant-garde, with Felski pointing to the ‘ingrained assumptions about the masculinity of shock’.40 Redressing this balance somewhat, new audacity authors Bechdel, Angel, and Zambreno champion women writers from the modernist period, with Virginia Woolf at the apex. A rich patina of literary respectability is lent by claiming modernist precursors and it helps to position these new audacity authors as in dialogue with an established aesthetic lineage more immediately connected to literature than to feminism, while at the same time enabling them to show how major problems with gendered behaviour remain. Women artists are also referenced: Kraus draws on a history of women’s performance art dating from the 1970s onwards, especially that which took risks exploring the female body and vulnerability, such as work by Hannah Wilke and Sophie Calle. Emin also works artistically in this tradition. These artists, like the women in punk Riot Grrrl bands, were defiant in the face of art and music worlds dominated by men, and are clear antecedents in 38 39 40

Ibid. Heti includes these emails in a strange numbered format far from the ‘dashed off’ and ‘messy’ aesthetic that Cooke is exploring. E. E. Berry, Women’s Experimental Writing: Negative Aesthetics and Feminist Critique (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), p. 8. Berry’s work builds on that of other feminists. See E. Friedman and M. Fuchs (eds.), Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); L. Hinton and C. Hogue (eds.), We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001); R. Felski, Uses of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), p. 126.

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different genres to the literary and life-writing audacity discussed in this study. Another group antecedent to new audacity authors is represented by the proponents of New Narrative, a connection made in Cooke’s review, discussed earlier. Birthed in the late 1970s by Steve Abbott, Bruce Boone, and Robert Glück in the Bay Area of San Francisco, this self-identified literary group shares with new audacity writing an interest in the self, in emotions and affect, and in politics and the body. Certain early members of New Narrative, such as Dodie Bellamy, are still writing in the same mode today.41 Kaplan Harris provides a useful summary of New Narrative commitments: ‘the work is characterized by an interruptive, story-based prose that blurs the line between fiction and autobiography’.42 Important to these writers is ‘exercising a critically reflexive distance’ which risks appearing as ‘postmodern irony’, yet, Harris concludes, ‘what New Narrative ultimately seeks is a textual performance that can recognize itself as a cultural construct and simultaneously affirm the political value of a life-changing story’ (p. 806). Such faith in stories and the politicised form of self-reflexivity requiring a critical distance between the narrative and the narrator – what Harris, after Boone, terms a ‘textmetatext’ – are not usually features of new audacity work (p. 806). On the other hand, the blurring of life and fiction Harris describes occurs in the work of Heti, Kraus, Jacques, and, to a more uncertain because undisclosed extent, in Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life, which has on occasion been read as fiction by reviewers and commentators. Yet this merger of fiction and reality is exclusive to neither New Narrative nor new audacity writing, but marks both as participating in a wider fascination with extending the limits of fiction, according to David Shields’s recent identification of contemporary cultural ‘reality hunger’, which he memorably characterises, in a phrase that echoes Harris’s, as ‘the lure and blur of the real’.43 In a recent collection of essays on New Narrative, editors Rob Halpern and Robin Tremblay-McGaw argue against confining it to a historical literary moment, typifying the movement instead as a ‘dynamic, commodious and open project, one that is accessible as a contemporary practice for 41 42 43

For example, Dodie Bellamy’s The Buddhist (Berkeley, CA: Publication Studio, 2011) is drawn from her blog about a love affair with a Buddhist. K. Harris, ‘New Narrative and the Making of Language Poetry’, American Literature 81:4 (2009), pp. 805–32, at p. 806. D. Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 5.

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anyone who might feel some kinship with it’.44 Catherine Wagner’s chapter of their book innovatively addresses how Kraus, like New Narrative writers, uses real names in I Love Dick.45 Kraus does not claim affinity with New Narrative explicitly in I Love Dick, instead referencing the experimental writers Alice Notley and Eileen Myles, and the performance artists Wilke and Calle, yet Cooke and Wagner are not alone in linking Kraus to New Narrative. When Zambreno discusses discovering her ‘antecedents’, she includes Kathy Acker, Kraus, Myles, and New Narrative writers (pp. 250–1). She describes how ‘they bathed their works in theory like a mud bath, getting off on Bataille and Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, they were jacking off and defecating on the page/on their ancestors/on the establishment, the equivalent of what performance artists were doing on the stage with bodily fluids’ (p. 251). The continental theoretical interests of New Narrative listed here signal an investment in the darker energies and more abject dimensions of sexuality and corporality. New audacity writing is not devoid of such elements, as discussed in Chapter 3’s exploration of sexual submission, and Zambreno’s writing definitely reflects the ‘pages and pages of goopy intense twisted emotion’ that appealed to her in New Narrative productions and inspired her ‘to write about being excessive and toxic’ (p. 251). In general, however, when there are theoretical reference points in the work of new audacity writers – and Emin, Calloway, and Heti contain no mention of critical theory whatsoever – they constellate around Anglo-American feminism, queer, and gender theory. Audacity, as my opening vignette from Hardy and the discussion thus far have demonstrated, is frequently a gendered response to women’s transgressive behaviour. Thus, it is always important to attend to how and why work is audacious within the context of its production: what was once deemed audacious may not still be so, depending upon the audience on the one hand and wider society on the other. Intersecting with context is an accusation levelled with relative frequency at those whose work or behaviour is audacious: that audacity is a self-serving strategy to enhance the reputation of the author or artist through notoriety and the publicity 44

45

R. Halpern and R. Tremblay-McGaw, ‘“A Generosity of Response”: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice’, in R. Halpern and R. Tremblay-McGaw (eds.), From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice (San Francisco: On Contemporary Practice, 2017), pp. 7–16, at p. 9. C. Wagner, ‘Naming Names in the Fabulous Real: A Letter to the New Narrator’, in R. Halpern and R. Tremblay-McGaw (eds.), From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice (San Francisco: On Contemporary Practice, 2017), pp. 17–28.

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that accompanies it. Certainly, new audacity writers Emin, Calloway, and Place have been the recipients of such charges, as is discussed in the chapters that deal with their work. For now, it is worth noting that the nature of audacity can make the issue of intentions tricky to distinguish, and often any such judgements as to moral, aesthetic, or reputational motivations hinge upon how authentically persuasive an author’s work is in the context of their wider oeuvre and performance and publication choices. An inevitable environment which presses upon all of the works in this study is the pervasiveness of neo-liberalism as both the prevailing AngloAmerican socio-economic model since the Reagan/Thatcher era and a prevalent interpretative tool used by critics looking to classify how texts reflect the circumstances of their production. This pertains particularly to how lives are represented. As Gilmore notes, contemporary iterations of the autobiographical form are published within an environment saturated in broader cultural and social concerns with the management of the self not explainable solely as the result of neo-liberal ideas, but nevertheless in complementary alignment with them.46 At the start of The Politics of the Body, Alison Phipps states that ‘[n]eoliberalism in particular operates with an individualized model of the self which can be seen as both reflecting and producing changed models of social organization and self-identity’.47 Drawing upon current work in sociology, she characterises the present: We are now engaged in reflexive projects of the self, characterized by introspection, evaluation and alteration, within narratives of actualization and mastery. This shapes the context in which everyone is responsible for constituting themselves as an individual, and in which failure is one’s own fault rather than the result of social inequality and disadvantage. (p. 13)

While I do not wish to dispute this account, it has a complex relationship to the development of feminism, which, through consciousness-raising groups and other efforts of autonomous collective organising, encouraged women to examine and evaluate their lives and to begin to consider themselves as individuals, rather than simply wives or mothers. The flourishing of women’s autobiography in the 1960s and 1970s testified to women beginning to take ownership over understanding and expressing their lives as women and as individuals. In other words, there are points in history when collectivity has facilitated people understanding themselves as 46 47

Gilmore, Tainted Witness, pp. 92–4. A. Phipps, The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), pp. 13–14.

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individuals and there are other points, more recently, when the individual has been prioritised over the collective. As Nancy Fraser has argued, while the ends are different, the rise of feminism and of neo-liberalism have almost been contiguous and the latter co-opted strategies that the former had advocated, in the process turning such ideas against the women they were intended to aid.48 Fraser’s examples include feminism’s critique of the family wage and support for women’s equality in the workplace which have seen contemporary economies realign so that two-wage households are the norm among increased austerity, job precarity, and wage depression (pp. 215–16). Another example was how feminism’s critique of the state’s paternalism uncannily chimed with the desires of those in power to withdraw state services (p. 216). ‘The neoliberal onslaught,’ Fraser believes, has ‘instrumentalize[d] our best ideas’, although since the economic downturn she also sees the potential for radical feminist change for the better (p. 226). The point I want to make here and that Fraser’s attention – not just to the aims of second-wave feminism but how they can be subverted when viewed from a neo-liberal perspective – helps to illuminate is that what could be interpreted as a culturally neo-liberal over-attention to the self in certain new audacity writers is more complex and more politically feminist than such a simple reduction may at first indicate. When Zambreno writes of her past (if later, she claims, refuted) diagnoses of bipolar disorder and her current one of adjustment disorder, or situational depression, it is politically feminist because she criticises judgements of women’s autobiography as messy, emotional, and oversharing, pointing out that when a man makes use of the same form, he is praised for providing a profound analysis of the human condition. To class women’s autobiography as neo-liberal or even as narcissistic here because of its attention to the self and the individual misses the gendered dynamics that bedevil our reactions to writers and their work even today. Luckily, most new audacity writers are clear about their feminist commitments and certainly highly aware of the frequently gendered state of textual reception. Finally, in terms of mapping the context in which new audacity writers are working, two contemporary literary movements deserve discussion. French ‘autofiction’ writers such as Christine Angot, the majority of whose

48

N. Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London and New York: Verso, 2013), pp. 209–26.

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work remains untranslated into English, have been writing with the kind of new audacity I identify in this study.49 Angot has narrated from a child’s point of view her experiences of incest, for instance, a project that has caused considerable controversy.50 The French context is different to the Anglo-American, however: autofiction has been readily accepted as a literary form and has been understood to trouble the difference between reality and fiction, thus pointing towards the fictive and constructed nature of the self. In other words, the French understanding of autofiction is as a literary embodiment of continental post-structuralism. It helps that a leading proponent of this form, Hélène Cixous, is also a leading feminist post-structuralist thinker.51 As a French novelist whose protagonists reflect elements of her earlier life, Despentes is not unaware of this tradition but moves firmly away from fiction in King Kong Theory by incorporating her autobiography into the essay form. She does not refer to continental intellectual traditions, instead referencing American feminists and, as we see in what follows, using a blunt tone to investigate how material conditions have shaped her life and those of other women rather than employing the more abstract theoretical concepts beloved of French feminists. These choices in turn made the book a good fit for the Feminist Press. The second literary movement that deserves mention here is the new sincerity. David Foster Wallace is classed as a key proponent, having called for a new generation of writers to pit sincerity against the malaise of irony he diagnosed as saturating US culture.52 Seen as ‘post-postmodernist’ for their rejection of irony, new sincerity writers usually grouped alongside Wallace are Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Ben Lerner, Dana Spiotta, and Colson Whitehead.53 Notably, then, they are all 49

50 51

52 53

For a discussion of ‘autofiction’, as well as Angot’s work, see G. Rye and M. Worton, ‘Introduction’, pp. 10–11, and M. Sadoux, ‘Christine Angot’s Autofictions: Literature and/or Reality?’, pp. 171–81, in G. Rye and M. Worton (eds.), Women’s Writing in Contemporary France: New Writers, New Literatures in the 1990s (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002) and S. Jordan, ‘Autofiction in the Feminine’, French Studies 67:1 (2013), pp. 76–84. C. Angot, I’inceste (Paris: Stock, 1999). Angot responded to the reception of her book by writing another about the response, Quitter la ville (Paris: Stock, 2000). My journey to analysing new audacity writers began with Cixous. An example of her autofiction is H. Cixous, The Day I Wasn’t There, trans. B. Bie Brahic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006). See also H. Cixous and M. Calle-Gruber, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, trans. E. Prenowitz (Abingdon: Routledge, 1997) and J. Cooke, ‘The Risks of Intimate Writing: Loving and Dreaming with Hélène Cixous’, Angelaki 16:2 (2011), pp. 3–18. D. Foster Wallace, ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U. S. Fiction’, Review of Contemporary Literature 13:2 (Summer 1993), pp. 151–94, at p. 193. A. Kelly, ‘The New Sincerity’, in J. Gladstone, A. Hoberek, and D. Worden (eds.), Postmodern/Postwar – and After: Rethinking American Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016), pp. 196–208, at p. 204.

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US novelists and the characterisation of new sincerity writing does not encompass life-writing, despite autobiography still mostly adhering to what Philippe Lejeune terms the ‘autobiographical pact’, that understanding between reader and writer that what is told actually occurred, which could be interpreted as a marker of the genre’s sincerity.54 Instead, as Adam Kelly has outlined, ‘A renewed concern with sincerity is conceived by these writers as an answer to problems raised by the legacy of a modernist insistence on an aesthetic view of the world, and on the priority of aesthetic expression, or artistic autonomy, over sincere communication’ (p. 200). An identifiable ‘anti-modernist streak’, Kelly writes, indicates how these authors are concerned with literary fiction, its history and utility, rather than with experiences written from life (p. 200). Kelly seeks to complicate the commitment to sincerity these writers exhibit, arguing that ‘being a post-postmodernist or New Sincerity writer means never being certain whether you are so, and whether your struggle to transcend narcissism, solipsism, irony, and insincerity is even undertaken in good faith’ (pp. 204–5). Key to the dynamic Kelly describes is the power of the reader to ultimately affirm the sincerity striven for, which he summarises in closing as the way ‘these texts are ultimately defined by their undecidability and the affective response they invite and provoke in their readers, with questions of sincerity embedded, on a number of levels, into the reader’s contingent experience of the text’ (p. 206). Kelly’s characterisation of new sincerity writing illuminates how it shares with its new audacity peers a strong investment in texts as affective experiences for their readers. But undecideability and a self-reflexive interest in whether sincerity can be effectively expressed within a compromised global capitalism that values language as a persuasive profit-generator are not concerns of new audacity writers. They are frequently deeply worried, even angered, by contemporary capitalism, but they place considerable trust in the precision of language both to accurately describe and to powerfully persuade. Kelly’s is only one side of the new sincerity story, however. A different account of a literary coterie comprised not of mainstream novelists but of avant-garde poets is provided by A. D. Jameson and uncovers a connection worth comment. Like Kelly, Jameson references Wallace and agrees that new sincerity is a reaction to the prevalence of irony in postmodernism, but he locates the writer Tao Lin as someone who ‘belonged to / had attracted something of a scene’ typified by a new sincerity or what he also calls a new 54

P. Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. K. Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 3–30.

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childishness.55 Lin was instrumental in the notoriety of one of the new audacity’s youngest and most reviled writers, Marie Calloway. He was her first formal literary publisher: it was his press, Muumuu House, that brought her to the attention of the New York Observer, causing the furore she writes about in what purpose did i serve in your life and which is crucial to my reading of her audacity in Chapter 3. Lin is often hailed as a zeitgeist figure who captures the tired, depressed loneliness at the heart of twentyfirst-century living in a flat straightforward prose often directly lifted from email exchanges or instant messaging chats. His characters are charmless and solipsistic; Richard Yates is a deliberately dull novel about a confused and failing relationship between a young girl and her older narcissist boyfriend, narrated by him and full of dead hours during which – in a kind of Xanax-dampened realism – not much transpires except various forms of gaslighting.56 Characters and their conversations seem largely pointless and purposeless. Even if it is not intended to be, this feels ironic and as though Lin is ‘striking a pose’ in a way new sincerity is supposed to eschew.57 By contrast, Calloway is curious about the people she encounters and the effect they produce upon her, and the result is considerably more engaging, audacious, and thereby political.58 The point here is not to claim a writer exclusively for one rather than another literary grouping or to deny the range of influences they have absorbed. Even though the new sincerity has been connected to manifestos by poets and to a call to arms by Wallace aimed at his novelist peers, it is not a coherent identity within which a set of writers align themselves, like New Narrative, and nor is the new audacity. Instead, these are labels used by academics attempting to capture emergent literary moods or cultural trends. This study starts to do this in Chapter 1 through an examination of accounts of rape. Survivors of non-consensual sexual violence frequently stay silent to avoid public shame, stigmatisation, and the label ‘victim’, or because they want to leave their trauma in the past. Tracey Emin, Jana Leo, 55 56

57 58

A. D. Jameson, ‘What We Talk about When We Talk about the New Sincerity (Part 1)’, HTML Giant (4 June 2012). Available at: www.htmlgiant.com. For instance, she tells him she would have killed herself by now if there was an easy way and he suggests the train tracks. She tries but no train comes (p. 181). There are many such examples, and the protagonist Haley Joel Osment wears his girlfriend down with continual questioning about her food intake (she has an eating disorder). See T. Lin, Richard Yates (New York: Melville House, 2010). Wallace, quoted in Kelly, ‘New Sincerity’, p. 200. Lin’s audacity in relation to Richard Yates was extra-textual, raising money to pay for writing time in advance by selling shares to the profits. See D. B. Roberts, ‘Tao Lin: Lit “It Boy” for the Internet Age’, Salon (24 August 2010).

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and Virginie Despentes decided instead to write about their rapes, not simply to recount what happened to them and the effects it had upon their lives, but to highlight how contemporary society is failing women and men. Starting with Emin’s naming and shaming of her rapist as feminist praxis in her autobiography Strangeland (2005), the chapter continues by focusing upon the powerfully political messages about rape and its social significance delivered by Leo and Despentes. The close readings I offer in this chapter demonstrate that what may initially be recognised as factual descriptions of violence are accounts skilfully crafted to deliver maximum affective intensity. This is channelled to persuade the reader to agree with the wider societal arguments they make. The chapter pays considerable attention to the formal and rhetorical structure of what I describe as ‘body-essays’ to argue that Leo and Despentes repurpose their sexual traumas to argue against social inequality. Chapter 2 is concerned with the role of the writer as artist. It focuses on three auto/biographical texts which document the ugly difficulties of writing the self: Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (2012), Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2012), and Kate Zambreno’s Heroines (2012). None of these texts is a pure autobiography: Bechdel’s graphic memoir follows her psychotherapeutic unravelling of her relationship with her mother; Heti’s ‘novel from life’ recounts a crucial friendship between Sheila and her artist friend Margaux; and Kate Zambreno’s Heroines (2012) is part memoir, part biographical essay about female writers such as Virginia Woolf, Vivien(ne) Eliot, and Zelda Fitzgerald, who she dubs the ‘mad wives’ of modernism (p. 138). All three texts are interested in female genius and tell of the unravelling of the self from others en route to becoming an artist. Ugliness is crucial to their aesthetic projects: the ugliness of the self and its secrets; the ugliness of writer’s block; and the ugly terrain of genius. Chapter 3 focuses upon sex and desire. It examines voluntary vulnerability as desired and experienced by heterosexual women, an area which has been largely neglected because of vulnerability’s association with victimhood and sexual exploitation in feminist discourse. The audacity of expressing a desire to sexually submit to a man, not for conservative reasons but for those of sexual adventure, is exacerbated if that woman is a feminist. To publish these desires and experiences as one’s first book is more audacious still. I focus on Katherine Angel’s Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (2012), Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1997), and Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life (2013) to explore the significance of women who make themselves vulnerable to the men they

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desire. The next chapter also examines writers who give accounts of their sex lives, but this is not the main focus. Chapter 4 analyses recent writing by and about trans people with a twofold aim: to examine how they seek to challenge binary thinking, and to explore their understanding of how gender identity interacts with and is circumscribed by heteropatriarchal capitalist institutions and norms. I examine how Juliet Jacques’s Trans: A Memoir (2015), Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), and Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2013) abandon the tradition within earlier trans life-writing of focusing upon transition as the dramatic apex of the narrative. In different manners, all of these writers are arguing for an expansion of the term ‘trans’. In the case of Nelson and Preciado this extends, controversially, to name other states of flux, such as the pregnant female body or the flow of information and data. This chapter examines these audacious attempts to both naturalise and expand ‘trans’, arguing that these writers testify to a new twenty-first-century understanding of gender identity from which feminism, social behaviour, and societal organisation can be reappraised. Chapter 5 returns to the topic of rape. Like Emin, Vanessa Place is one of Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing’s more notorious authors, and, as Calloway does, she deliberately elicits strong reactions from her audience. I examine Place’s Tragodía (2010–11), a three-volume publication reproducing court reports written as part of her job as an appellant attorney for convicted rapists and paedophiles. The project has been hailed by poetry scholars as a work of audacious feminism in holding up a mirror to the ugliness of violence against women. This chapter provides careful comparisons of one of Tragodía’s cases with the original legal appeals documents from which it is drawn and another, non-poetic work by Place, The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality, and the Law. I argue that Place’s conceptual audacity complicates and works against her stated feminist politics vis-à-vis the sex workers in the trial. Place provides a highly curated encounter with traumatic material, one which raises ethical questions about audacity’s role in furthering an author’s reputation and how that interacts with her stated feminist position. All the authors featured in Contemporary Feminist LifeWriting are open to the accusation that their audacity is in service of their reputation rather than their art. Place is a writer who can easily be accused of trading on the tragedy of others in the service of an audacity which, while it attracts a great deal of attention to her as an author, fails to adhere to coherent feminist principles. I use this final chapter, then,

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to explore the complicated ambivalences and contradictions in the politics of one particularly contentious new audacity author. Taken together, these chapters provide a guide to the contours of new audacity writing, its stakes, its politics, its contradictions, and its challenges to contemporary orthodoxies.

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chapter 1

Autobiography as Feminist Praxis New Audacity in the Writing of Rape

The new audacity exhibited by the authors in this study occurs across three entwined fronts: the topics they choose to discuss, their experimentation with literary conventions and forms, and the shape their feminism takes. Thus, it is not simply the case that literary experimentation in life-writing automatically identifies an author as a new audacity writer. Instead, it is their audacity that drives their experimentation, through a desire to speak boldly and differently in the service of a new feminist future. Common and popular forms of autobiography that recount personal difficulties, trauma, and their overcoming tend to adhere to restricted and individualised conceptions of selfhood and its harm. The blending of genres seen in this chapter creatively responds to and challenges these conventions. Chapter 1’s trio of authors – Tracey Emin, Virginie Despentes, and Jana Leo – produces texts that play with traditional autobiography, the essay form, the manifesto, and the self-help guide. The traumatic experience all the writers discussed in this chapter have the audacity to testify to is their rape. Despite long being a feminist issue, the politics of rape are often understated in contrast to the personal trauma experienced by its survivors.1 Following the lead of Emin, Despentes, and 1

The first major feminist text about rape was Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975). Brownmiller took a long historical view of rape, crucially arguing that rape is an expression of power and dominance, rather than a natural and uncontrollable sexual urge. As she notes in a recent preface, the New York Public Library honoured Against Our Will as 1 of 100 books that played a defining role in the twentieth century. However, as contemporary feminist reviewer Gabriele Dietrich points out, Brownmiller ‘does not spell out these implications of her thesis’ for a wider politics which would challenge the social and political structures facilitating male dominance (p. 73). See G. Dietrich, ‘Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape by Susan Brownmiller’, Manushi 4 (December 1979–January 1980), pp. 71–3. Importantly, Alison Phipps highlights that black feminist activists campaigned against rape long before white feminists like Brownmiller articulated this argument, and with a more intersectional linking of rape to socioeconomic conditions. See the illuminating summary of feminist history in A. Phipps, ‘“Lad” Culture and Sexual Violence against Students’, in N. Lombard (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Violence (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 171–82.

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Leo in their treatment of their own rapes, I read rape politically and pay close attention to the forms these authors craft, the strategies they use to recount their rapes, and the affective impact of how they write. My first example, Emin’s untraditional autobiography Strangeland (2005), introduces the combined new audacity practices of formal experimentation, bold treatment of topic, and committed feminist politics through a famous public figure with an existing reputation for audacity. While Emin’s feminist advice prioritises self-care, Leo and Despentes make explicit and more radically audacious arguments for socio-economic and political reorganisation. The politics of each writer, both professed and embedded in the forms and style of their self-expression, help to limn the contours of an emergent new audacity canon. Time and again, rape silences its survivors.2 In therapeutic contexts, women have been encouraged to speak about their rapes to aid recovery and, in 1990s trauma theory, Suzette Henke suggested that ‘scriptotherapy’ – the writing out of traumatic experiences – could help trauma survivors to make sense of what had happened to them.3 To publish an account of one’s rape or to speak about it publicly may well fail to have therapeutic or cathartic consequences, however. As Leigh Gilmore has explored in her important book, Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives, a woman who speaks publicly of her rape risks being subjected ‘to practices of shaming and discrediting’.4 This chapter investigates how Emin, in particular, counters this risk with her own naming and shaming practices. Gilmore examines highprofile case studies to show that women’s testimonials are frequently ‘tainted’ by judgemental responses which throw their accounts into question. ‘Women are unpersuasive witnesses,’ she explains, ‘for three related reasons: because they are women, because through testimony they seek to bear witness to inconvenient truths, and because they possess less symbolic and material capital than men as witnesses in courts of law’ (p. 18).5 When it is a case of 2 3 4 5

See, for instance, H. Littleton and C. Radecki Breitkopf, ‘Coping with the Experience of Rape’, Psychology of Women Quarterly 30:1 (2006), pp. 106–16. S. Henke, Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. xv. L. Gilmore, Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say about Their Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), p. 5. One of Gilmore’s case studies is Anita Hill’s testimony against the US Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991, a situation darkly repeated in 2018 with the testimony of sexual assault given by Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. In both cases the nominee was confirmed to the Supreme Court regardless of what the women said about the men’s behaviour, and in Blasey Ford’s case her testimony was publicly mocked by the president of the United States, Donald Trump, before the outcome of a limited investigation into the claims by the FBI.

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testifying to sexual violence, they further risk activating what Joanna Bourke has called ‘myths of rape’, the stubborn spectrum of stereotypes about gendered behaviour which continue to find women culpable for what has been done to them against their will.6 The personal shame induced by the violation of the body and the will, coupled with the social shame meted out to rape survivors, whose dress, behaviour, and motivations are frequently put on trial in both the courts and the media, ensures that many rapes remain secret, many more go unreported, and the prospect of publishing an account of one’s rape is unappealing to most.7 To risk the uncertain results of speaking out publicly about rape is thus in itself an act of audacity, a refusal of shame, a repudiation of stigmatisation, and a reassertion of agency through witnessing. As Gilmore’s book demonstrates, however, ‘the decontextualized individual who stands apart from histories of oppression to assert the right to speak and to claim political and personal freedom is a fiction’ (p. 9). Tainted Witness shows our present contexts to be not only inevitably gendered but also racialised: women of colour are more vulnerable than their white counterparts to the taint of unfavourable judgements. Class background is an additional intersecting factor in how women are publicly perceived, and it is notable that both Emin and Despentes emerge from working-class roots. Despentes and Leo benefit from the privilege accorded to white women and while Emin is now associated with the elite UK Britpop art scene, when she was a child, her Turkish father rendered her different and a minority in largely white Margate. The women discussed in this chapter who take the audacious step of writing their rapes are all in possession of a measure of cultural capital by the time they put pen to paper. All three are aware of the powerful taint of shame that can adhere to women who have suffered what they 6 7

J. Bourke, Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present Day (London: Virago, 2007), pp. 21–49. I finished this chapter just after the Harvey Weinstein allegations and the popularisation of the #MeToo hashtag, which thousands of women used to share on social media their experiences of sexual harassment, assault, and rape. Time magazine named ‘The Silence Breakers’ – the women and men who spoke out about abuse and sexual harassment – its ‘Person of the Year’ for 2017. The current president of the United States is accused of sexual harassment by several women, claims he denies. A UK Conservative politician, Michael Fallon, was forced to resign from his position as the defence secretary in 2017 after revelations of sexist remarks and sexual harassment. More than ever before, the prevalence of sexual assault and harassment is acknowledged as a wide-ranging social problem across multiple industries and institutions. These stories also show how very difficult it is for women to speak up and how scared they are for their careers if they do so. See S. Zacharek, E. Dockterman, and H. Sweetland Edwards, ‘The Silence Breakers: The Voices That Launched a Movement’, Time (December 2017). Donald Trump was second on Time’s shortlist for ‘Person of the Year’ in 2017.

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have, and how the survivor, in the words of Despentes, can resultantly ‘turn the violence inwards’, against herself.8 The writers in this chapter have found themselves repeatedly drawn to representing rape. Emin’s rape and abuse featured in her artwork long before Strangeland was published.9 Similarly, many years before Despentes wrote King Kong Theory (2006), she wrote a violent rape into her first novel, BaiseMoi (1993), later shown on screen when the film version was released in 2000.10 By contrast, Rape New York (2009) was Leo’s first representation of her rape, but it was followed by an exhibition of the formal documents generated by the crime, including police photographs and reports, in order to address the fact that ‘there are not images of the reality of rape available’.11 Later still, she wrote a one-woman play, Control Games NY, where she reenacted her rape, with the words of the rapist played on a tape recorder, in what must have been a singularly chilling performance.12 If all this makes rape rather unexpectedly look like a creative catalyst, a bleaker generative relation is articulated by Despentes, who admits: For twenty years now, every time I think I am done with it, I come back to it again. With different, contradictory things to say about it. Novels, stories, songs, films. I always imagine that one day I will be done with it. Will have gotten over the event, emptied it out, exhausted it. Impossible. It is a founding event. Of who I am as a writer, and as a woman who is no longer quite a woman. It is both that which disfigures me, and that which makes me. (p. 50)

Rape does not release its survivors, cannot be contained in one representation, and, at least for Despentes, shifts in meaning and significance over time. That rape can alter and even ruin lives is undisputed, which is why it is even more remarkable for women to write accounts of their rapes that situate their experiences as produced by specific socio-economic contexts, a wider view than is usually afforded by the lens of personal tragedy. In two of the three autobiographical texts I discuss in this chapter, authors Despentes and Leo deliberately discuss their rapes and the men who 8 9

10

11 12

V. Despentes, King Kong Theory, trans. S. Benson (New York: Feminist Press, 2009), p. 45. The text was first published in French by Editions Grasset and Fasquelle in 2006. For instance, Tracey Emin C.V. (1995), which can be viewed on the Tate website, and Top Spot, the feature film Emin made in 2004, which dramatised her rape and featured teenage actors in fictional scenes that nevertheless draw on Emin’s life in Margate. ‘Baise-moi’ translates literally as ‘Fuck me.’ The English text, published by Grove Press, carries the French on the cover, but inside adds a parenthetic and somewhat inaccurate translation, ‘Rape me,’ underneath. See V. Despentes, Baise-Moi, trans. B. Benderson (New York: Grove Press, 1999). See Jana Leo’s website, www.rapenewyork.com/ram_pages/impact.htm. Ibid. A review of this, some performance notes, and the script are available on Leo’s website.

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perpetrated them as resulting from cultural and economic factors, and they make explicit political arguments about misogyny and feminism on the one hand, and urban planning, poverty, and women’s vulnerability on the other. This is a marked divergence from the autobiographical texts in which rape so frequently appears, namely the highly popular ‘misery memoir’ genre, which tends to depict rapists and abusers as evil and beyond understanding.13 For Despentes and Leo, social change to prevent rape needs to tackle underlying social inequality and patriarchal thinking, and their rapes serve as the foundation stones upon which the rest of their sociopolitical arguments build. Emin’s approach is less committed to explicit political arguments but is equally an enactment of feminist politics and praxis in her treatment of the men who raped and abused her. How rape and the story of the self that surrounds it are written can help to shape how women who have been raped come to understand what has happened to them, a fact that clearly motivates Emin, Despentes, and Leo. Autobiographical accounts of rape are culturally and socially significant: they contribute to how women might resist the disempowering effects of being cast as a ‘victim’ and can extend the emotional range of how rape survivors are expected to react to encompass anger, intellectual curiosity, and desires for redress. Too often women subjected to male violence, especially rape, are only expected to be subsequently devastated and overwhelmed, their lives irrevocably marked. While this may well be the case, the fact that other reactions can accompany or even replace these is apparent in the writing of Emin, Leo, and Despentes. Leo’s short book Rape New York opens with her rape at the hands of an armed stranger in her own home, and goes on to demonstrate that the blame for her rape lay as much with her slum landlord as with the man who opportunistically took advantage of an insecure building and a woman living alone.14 Despentes, famous as a French novelist and filmmaker, gives an account of her gang rape as a teenager close to the start of her book of autobiographical feminist essays, King Kong Theory. Emin’s Strangeland, to which I now turn, opens in good autobiographic convention with her birth, but recounts her early life less traditionally as episodes of mostly abusive and exploitative incidents, 13

14

‘Misery memoir’ is a denigrating moniker for an autobiographical subgenre commonly thought to be inaugurated by Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It (1995), which detailed childhood abuse delivered by his mother. Misery memoirs tend to focus on the abuse of a child by parents or people in institutions such as schools and children’s homes. Leo’s text was first published in 2009 as J. Leo, Rape New York: The Story of a Rape and an Examination of a Culture of Predation (London: Book Works, 2009). The same book, with some small typographical changes and without the paratextual note which I discuss later, was published by the US-based Feminist Press in 2011, without the subtitle. I reference the Feminist Press edition.

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including her rape when she was thirteen. It is not simply in the presentation of these traumatic events that the new audacity of these writers is evident, however, but in their enactment of feminist argument and action alongside their rapes.

Tracey Emin Names and Shames Emin’s reputation for artistic audacity is well established. As Jennifer Doyle summarises, she is commonly considered ‘controversial’ for using ‘an autobiographical practice that seems unchecked by a sense of decency or shame’, a description which could be applied to several other authors in Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing.15 In Emin’s case, her audacity is usually located in the artworks which made her famous: My Bed (1998) with its littering of personal detritus, and Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), a tent featuring names appliquéd to the inside representing everyone who Emin has ever fallen asleep with, and which is often wrongly assumed to be a list of her sexual partners. Strangeland ’s opening section, ‘Motherland’, comprises a succession of chronological events drawn from Emin’s childhood and adolescence, most of them abusive, exploitative, or tinged with danger.16 The narrative proceeds as a series of fragmented dramatic episodes, some of which appear to surface with no preamble or context, as might early memories or traumatic flashbacks. Many of the same life events referenced in Emin’s artwork reappear in ‘Motherland’ in different forms.17 ‘Motherland’ is followed by ‘Fatherland’, wherein an adult Tracey visits her father in Cyprus and has an affair with a married Turkish man. Far more emotionally reflective, with joy, love, sadness, and regret, this middle section of the book moves away from the more experimental structuring of ‘Motherland’, following instead the autobiographical convention of seeking out one’s roots. Finally, ‘Traceyland’ is closest to Emin’s authorial present and largely written in a retrospective ‘warning to beware’ mode that blends personal 15

16 17

J. Doyle, ‘The Effect of Intimacy: Tracey Emin’s Bad-Sex Aesthetics’, in M. Merck and C. Townsend (eds.), The Art of Tracey Emin (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), p. 112. After starting in this way, Doyle’s essay actually goes on to explore a rather different view. See T. Emin, Strangeland (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2005) for examples which include: inappropriate touching (pp. 14–15), sex with a minor (p. 41), rape (p. 24), and paedophilia (p. 21). For instance, the rape, as mentioned earlier. Additionally, the poem ‘Why I Never Became a Dancer’ (pp. 42–6) was already a short film, Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995), recounting the same incident. It is available to view on the Artforum website. See also the monoprint Beautiful Child (1999), where a child who looks like Emin is next to a penis, hinting ominously at her rape, and also perhaps the incident of the man who called her beautiful when she was eleven and encouraged her to masturbate him (p. 21).

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reminiscence with self-help-style advice. ‘Traceyland’, in particular, addresses itself to female readers who are assumed to be, as Emin was, vulnerable to exploitation by older men, and even provides practical guidance in chapters such as ‘The Proper Steps for Dealing with an Unwanted Pregnancy’ (pp. 147–50). Emin’s artwork is often hailed as feminist, and Strangeland ’s repeated exposure and condemnation of sexually predatory men, as well as its solicitude for the welfare of young women, mark it as a feminist book even if it does not explicitly declare itself as such.18 Strangeland ’s literary creativity accords with Emin’s artistic practice, which makes use of different forms and materials.19 In ‘Motherland’, two chapters experiment with writing from a third-person perspective, allowing Emin to describe her teenage self in these disco scenes as though she is a spectator, watching herself from the outside (pp. 38–41). She includes poetry (pp. 42–6), dreams (p. 35), and handwritten notes (p. 37). In ‘Traceyland’, some of the chapters consist of lists of instructions and advice, and one is structured around the letters that spell out its title, ‘M*A*S*C*U*L*I*N*I*T*Y’ (pp. 137–43). Rather than focusing on her journey to becoming a successful artist in the Britpop scene, as might be expected, Emin instead turns an unflinching eye upon her traumatic experiences and their emotional repercussions, her family, and her romantic attachments, all delivered in her signature blunt style, and laced, especially in the final section of the book, with the sort of wry humour later deployed by the popular feminist writer Caitlin Moran.20 As we see repeatedly in this study, new audacity writers are particularly invested in challenging contemporary understandings of victimhood. In Strangeland, Emin demonstrates that she is opposed to the idea of the silenced victim. A repeated act of agency she commits to right from the start is an audacious feature common also to a number of Emin’s artworks: she names the men who abused and exploited her. We learn full or identifying names for many of them, names that would be recognisable and remembered in the Margate social circles where she grew up, such as Chris, her mother’s boyfriend, who molested her as a child (p. 14), or 18

19 20

Emin wore a ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ t-shirt in 2007 and is reported as saying, ‘I’m not happy being a feminist. It should all be over by now.’ See P. Allen, ‘In the Frame: Tracey Emin’, Bitchmedia.com (11 November 2011). For a reception of Emin’s work as feminist, see R. Betterton, ‘Why Is My Art Not as Good as Me? Femininity, Feminism and “Life-Drawing” in Tracey Emin’s Art’, in Merck and Townsend (eds.), The Art of Tracey Emin, pp. 23–39. Emin works in sculpture, printing, drawing, photography, appliqué, quilting, and video. For instance, Emin gives directions on how to line the stomach with a fish-finger sandwich before a night of heavy drinking (p. 174). For comparison, see C. Moran, How to Be a Woman (London: Random House, 2011).

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Wayne, Freddy, Tony, Doug, and Richard, who chanted, ‘SLAG, SLAG, SLAG’, ruining Emin’s participation in a dance competition (p. 46). Naming and shaming as a tactic for enacting a form of justice is not a recent phenomenon and is still used in some countries as a component of legal sentencing. In 2016 in Ohio, for instance, a judge offered a convicted man the choice of jail or standing outside the store he had stolen from with a sign proclaiming ‘I am a thief. I stole from Wal-Mart’ for ten days, an option the man preferred to incarceration.21 Legal studies scholar and moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum would not endorse this policy: she claims that shame and disgust ‘provide bad guidance for law in a society committed to equal respect among persons’ and that to use shame in punishment and lawmaking ‘seems tantamount to inviting people to discriminate and stigmatize’.22 But what about extralegal circumstances, such as a rapist named and shamed in the pages of an autobiography many years after an event that was never reported as a crime? Naming and shaming as a feminist strategy to respond to rape and sexual violence has emerged recently as a prominent and controversial tactic in the face of the failure of institutional investigation processes and poor legal conviction rates.23 It has additionally been employed as an informal and semi-private safeguarding measure, with lists of abusive or predatory men circulated between women who may encounter them in their workplace or sector.24 Such practices are underpinned by the assumption that the women sharing their accounts of abuse and sexual misconduct are telling the truth. The validity of this approach is confirmed when, as frequently happens, multiple reports are collated about similar behaviour from the same man towards different women. The arguments against naming and shaming or information sharing in this way are that such strategies undermine existing routes to legal justice, which require greater levels of evidential proof, for example the results of a rape testing kit and medical examination by a trained professional, and they deny the opportunity for 21 22 23

24

‘Ohio Man Who Stole from Wal-Mart Chooses to Wear “I Am a Thief” Sign Over Going to Jail’, The Columbus Dispatch (24 March 2016). M. C. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 337. For example, the Twitter campaign to name and shame men who were sexually harassing and violent towards Australian journalists. See L.-J. Charleston, ‘End Violence against Women: Name and Shame Abusive Men on Twitter’, The Huffington Post (15 July 2016). Available at: huffingtonpost .com.au. A prominent example was Raya Sarkar’s list of sexually predatory Indian professors, which was first shared on Facebook and which retained anonymity for the women who sent Sarkar testimonies and evidence. See Karthik Sankar’s interview with Sarkar, ‘Why I Published a List of Sexual Predators in Academia’, Buzzfeed.com (25 October 2017).

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the accused to defend himself or clear his name. On the other hand, it is commonly accepted that rape convictions are low because rape is so hard to prove when it is reduced to an argument over perceptions of consent, or what Gilmore calls the ‘he said/she said’ scenario.25 Emin’s naming and shaming in Strangeland pre-empts these recent practices and the debates they have generated by more than a decade. Emin’s first and most radical act of naming and shaming is reserved for Steve Worrell, who raped her. Early in ‘Motherland’, a thirteen-year-old Emin, sporting a new blue coat and a new pair of front teeth, celebrates New Year’s Eve at a disco, leaving early to spend midnight with her brother and mother. She is happy: ‘All the lights were on and the world looked like magic,’ she writes, ‘Margate looked like Las Vegas’ (p. 23). She is walking alone: Steve Worrell called after me, ‘Tracey, where are you going?’ He walked along with me. We passed the clock tower and turned left onto the high street. He slipped his arm round my shoulders and said, ‘How about a New Year kiss?’ We got to the corner of Burton’s shoe shop and started snogging. He put his hand down my top, at the same time pushing me against the wall. He pulled my skirt up. I began to worry. Everyone knew he had broken in girls before and I didn’t want it to happen to me. I said, ‘No. Get off, please.’ He pulled me down the alley and pushed me to the ground. As I lay on my back worrying about my new blue coat, he pushed his fingers up between my legs – and rammed himself into me. I was crying. His lips were pressed against mine but I was motionless, like a small corpse. He grunted and I knew it was over. He got up, I just lay there on the ground, my tights round my ankles. The clock was striking twelve. As he walked away, he said, ‘I’ve always wanted to do it to you. I like your mouth.’ (pp. 23–4)26

I quote at length here because it is important to highlight how Emin describes the scene of her rape. Those who lived in Margate around the time will know exactly where the rape occurred due to the precise 25

26

Gilmore, Tainted Witness, pp. 6–7. As Gilmore writes regarding the Anita Hill case, ‘the shorthand judgement “he said/she said” misrepresents a cultural bias against women’s testimony as the false equality of rational skepticism and objectivity’ (p. 45). In her film Top Spot, Emin’s off-camera voice questions a girl about her rape and the teen uses the term ‘breaking in’ and describes it occurring on her way home on New Year’s Eve. Later in the film, the girl is shown in an alley, on the floor with her tights around her ankles. The film uses parts of Emin’s autobiography to create a loose fiction set around a troubled teenaged group of girlfriends in Margate. Sometimes Strangeland repeats scenes from Top Spot, e.g. a shot of a girl eating chips from a bag and a scene of dancing in Top Spot are revisited in Strangeland ’s Hades chapter, which I discuss shortly.

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geographical locators. She states her refusal. The account is largely factual and descriptive of actions; it is remembered clearly, complete with small details such as anxiety over her coat and the position of her tights. Short, blunt sentences, finished off by the tolling of the New Year’s bell and the callous satisfaction of Worrell’s parting compliment, underline how brief and brutal the rape itself is, while the striking corpse simile breaks through the otherwise unadorned prose, bequeathing to the scene a necrophilic tinge and foreshadowing how the rape will deaden Emin. Throughout, Worrell’s actions are expressed in a series of stark verbs: pulled, pushed, rammed, pressed, grunted. His parting explanation implies that sex and the satisfaction of his desires do not require consent: he does sex to someone, not with them. The reader is left in no doubt as to what happened, the clarity of Emin’s recollection, and that it was perpetrated by Steve Worrell. In an interpretation from a legal studies perspective of Emin’s use of her abuse and rape across her whole oeuvre, Yxta Maya Murray claims Emin’s work consists of ‘audacious acts’ that offer an ‘artistic critique’ and operate through the creation of ‘imaginary justice’.27 Murray argues that Emin repeatedly puts her violators on trial, presenting her evidence, airing their testimonies by repeating their words, and finding them, and sometimes herself, guilty. This reading is persuasive, measured against Emin’s public shaming of Steve Worrell and the representation she gives of his actions. Her literary choices when presenting this scene – her primarily factual account of what occurred, her identification of Worrell, and the reproduction of his words – offer the scene up for justifiably negative judgement and extract their own specific justice by naming her rapist. Emin’s mother, by Murray’s measure, is also presented in the imaginary dock for readerly condemnation: we are told that she ‘didn’t call the police or make a fuss. She just washed my coat and everything carried on as normal, as though nothing had happened’ (p. 24). By initially, albeit temporarily, withholding any direct comment upon either Worrell’s sexual violence or her mother’s inadequate response, Emin allows events to speak for themselves and creates ample space for the reader’s judgement to fall upon both without overt narratorial encouragement. Only at the very end of her account of the rape and its aftermath does Emin conclude that her ‘childhood was over’ because she had been exposed to ‘the ugly truths of the world’ (p. 24). Even then she does not directly attribute blame, allowing the reader to do so in her stead. 27

Y. M. Murray, ‘Rape, Trauma, the State, and the Art of Tracey Emin’, California Law Review 100:6 (2012), pp. 1631–1710, at p. 1631.

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The other occasion upon which the reader is strongly encouraged to judge a man who is named and shamed for sexual misconduct is also one when Emin temporarily withholds her own commentary. The short, twopage chapter entitled ‘Hades’ is recounted in the third person, which only happens twice in Strangeland, and only in ‘Motherland’. It begins, ‘A young girl is dancing provocatively at a provincial disco – to “Wishing On A Star” – dancing in a very provocative way. It’s hard to see how old she is, sixteen or seventeen at the very most, but in a certain light she might almost seem nineteen or twenty’ (p. 40). The beginning thus indicates that this is a girl who wants to be considered a woman, but also a girl who is vulnerable precisely because she might be effective in her aims. Emin removes the narrative agency and ownership that accompanies the utterance of an autobiographical ‘I’. Instead, the third-person narration makes voyeurs of both the narrative voice and the reader, watching the young Emin dance just as we are told a man in his twenties is also watching. A police raid gives him the chance to grab the girl’s hand and lead her outside. ‘His name is Pete Smiles and he is twenty-three,’ Emin writes. ‘He’s engaged, but he’s fascinated by the girl. He asks how old she is? Sixteen? Seventeen?’ (p. 41). She tells him she is fourteen. Even though ‘[h]e says he knows it’s wrong,’ he ‘fucks her furiously’ on a mattress in the back of his van and then buys her a bag of chips before dropping her home (p. 41). There is nothing romantic here: it is a sordid scene of predatory, unethical, and illegal male exploitation. The final line of the chapter, brimming with the bravado of teenage confidence, tells us that the girl ‘puts it down as possibly the best sex she’s ever had’ (p. 41). Emin offers no commentary on this underage sexual encounter in the ‘Hades’ chapter, yet in other sections of ‘Motherland’ she is candid about her enthusiastic teenage promiscuity at this age. In the poem-chapter that follows ‘Hades’, she writes, ‘Sex for me had been an adventure / a learning, an innocence. / A wild escape from / all the shit that surrounded me’ (p. 44). But by fifteen, the poem admits: I knew the difference between good and bad. The reason why these men wanted to fuck me – a fourteen-year-old girl – was because they weren’t men. They were pathetic.

(p. 44)

Pete Smiles, regardless of how Emin had felt at fourteen about their fleeting sexual encounter, is therefore swiftly classed as one of these pathetic men,

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having been deliberately named and shamed. The third person and lack of name for the girl makes her an ‘every girl’ of teenage inexperience, not of sex but of the role it plays in the life of men who seek it out with young girls. If at the time Emin felt no shame, her treatment of the incident in ‘Hades’ and Strangeland ’s appraisal of adult men who seek out sex with underage girls implies that Pete Smiles certainly should. Emin’s naming and shaming are audacious feminist strategies to deploy after sexual violence and misconduct have occurred. Her celebrity is entwined with what she refuses of celebrity life: the assumption that one should keep one’s private life largely sequestered from public view, with tight control over what is permitted to emerge. As an artist famed for her audacity in testifying to her past and making artwork from it, Emin offers a model for other women to follow, one in which her naming and shaming strategies anticipate tactics deployed in the #MeToo movement. Strangeland stays closer to traditional autobiographies and further from the essayistic than either King Kong Theory or Rape New York. Nevertheless, the book’s feminism, its more innovative literary elements, its naming and shaming, and advice for girls in predicaments similar to those Emin had encountered all combine to create a political text, even if this politics is not produced through argumentation. In contrast, Leo and Despentes provide audacious answers to the question of why sexual violence against women occurs in much broader social and economically structural terms. In so doing, they too shift the focus away from victimhood, without denying the long-lasting damage that rape inflicts. Unlike Emin, their works are explicitly political and produce discourses where rape, while personally traumatic, prompts them to propose that our social structures, the inequalities they disguise, and the beliefs about women that underpin them are culpable for sexual violence.

Audacious ‘Body-Essays’ Leo and Despentes recount their traumatic rapes and launch far-reaching arguments about social ills. These texts could be thus rather difficult to classify – they are not straightforward essays but neither are they simple autobiographies – except that they exist within a feminist tradition whose landmark writings have long employed the personal to make their points and wherein feminist autobiographies have frequently argued for the importance of women’s experience in learning about their oppression.28 28

For a good selection, see S. Smith and J. Watson (eds.), Women, Autobiography, Theory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).

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Hugely influential feminist thinkers of the past century like Audre Lorde wrote autobiographically informed essays; popular feminist writing continues to use the author’s personal story to illustrate wider political points; and even within contemporary academic feminist writing it is not unusual to find discussions that draw upon the personal experience of the author: all of these examples can be said to fall under the broad umbrella of feminist life-writing.29 Rita Felski points out that, ‘Through the discussion of, and abstraction from, individual experience in relation to a general problematic of sexual politics, feminist confession thus appropriates some of the functions of political discourse.’30 While Rape New York and King Kong Theory do not quite conform to Felski’s definition of ‘feminist confessional’ because they make much more explicit political arguments than the texts Felski discusses, and importantly stretch their thinking of social dynamics beyond the prism of sexual politics alone, it is nevertheless little wonder that both texts were published by the Feminist Press. What distinguishes Leo and Despentes further as new audacity feminist lifewriters is the nature of the arguments they make, especially in how they shift the focus away from victimhood, and how they add affective force and intensity to those arguments through drawing directly upon their experiences of rape. Not all new audacity writing advances explicit arguments from bodily experiences, as Despentes and Leo do, although it is a recognisable feature of the work of others in this study, including Chris Kraus, Katherine Angel, Juliet Jacques, Maggie Nelson, and Paul B. Preciado. Preciado uses a curious and useful neologism, ‘body-essay’, to refer to his own book Testo Junkie, in place of the label ‘memoir’.31 A multifarious response to the death of a friend, falling in love, and a period of using testosterone outside of a medically prescribed context, Testo Junkie makes sense of this heady mixture of physiological and psychological experience through an extensive engagement with contemporary theory and the intertwined histories of gender and medicine. This unique venture is discussed in greater depth 29

30 31

See, for instance, A. Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Crossings Press, 1984); R. Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays (London: Little Brown Book Group, 2014); E. O’Toole, Girls Will Be Girls: Dressing Up, Playing Parts and Daring to Act Differently (London: Orion Publishing, 2015); S. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2017); C. Hemmings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 222–6. R. Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), p. 95. P. B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, trans. B. Benderson (New York: Feminist Press, 2013), p. 11.

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in Chapter 4 of Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing, but it is worth noting that Preciado and Despentes likely discussed the limitations of the lifewriting forms they were both pushing at the boundaries of: Despentes is the mysterious V.D. with whom Preciado falls so addictively in love in Testo Junkie. Preciado was invited on the writing retreat that enabled the completion of King Kong Theory, and Despentes showed him chapters in draft form (p. 321). Preciado reports that Despentes had wanted to write ‘about her rape, about the period when she was a prostitute, [and] on why the twenty-first century will or won’t be feminist’ (p. 259), a neat precis of King Kong Theory’s key topics. In Testo Junkie, Preciado begins with his body as the experimental site from which to advance theoretical insights and arguments about sex and gender. Despentes and Leo similarly ground the arguments of their texts in their own bodily experiences, although for them, unlike Preciado’s self-applications of testosterone, these were circumstances over which they had no control. Recognising the project as innovative, Preciado describes King Kong Theory and its author as ‘proof that geneticopolitical and literary recombinations are possible’ (p. 321). Yet Despentes has received more attention for the film version of Baise-Moi (2000) and for the novels that followed, especially from Anglo-American academics.32 However, Natalie Edwards has recognised King Kong Theory as transgressive, describing it as ‘a provocative, materialist, non-academic discussion of the female condition’.33 For Edwards, it is significant that Despentes does not follow the traditionally psychoanalytic trajectory of French feminism, but rather offers an anti-essentialist analysis attentive to socio-economic and class inequality, presenting ‘a much-needed voice of protest’ in an idiom that avoids academic abstraction (p. 16). Lynne Huffer discusses King Kong Theory and Baise-Moi in her queer feminist work on sex, highlighting Despentes’s rage as a third-wave and more successful incarnation of what propelled the writing of second-wave feminist outlier Valerie 32

33

See, for example, N. Fayard, ‘The Rebellious Body as Parody: Baise-Moi by Virginie Despentes’, French Studies 60:1 (2006), pp. 63–77; H. Sicard-Cowan, ‘Le feminisme de Virginie Despentes a l’etude le roman Baise-Moi’, Women in French Studies 16 (2008), pp. 64–72; G. Bridet, ‘Le Corps à l’oeuvre des femmes écrivains: autour de Christine Angot, Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes et Catherine Millet’, in B. Blanckeman, A. Mura-Brunel, and M. Dambre (eds.), Le roman français au tournant de XXie siècle (Paris: Presse Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2004), pp. 439–47. N. Edwards, ‘Feminist Manifesto or Hardcore Porn? Virginie Despentes’s Transgression’, Irish Journal of French Studies 12:1 (2012), pp. 9–26, at p. 17. See also N. Edwards, ‘Virginie Despentes and the Risk of a Twenty-First Century Autobiographical Manifesto’, in A. Rocca and K. Reeds (eds.), Women Taking Risks in Contemporary Autobiographical Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013), pp. 87–102.

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Solanas.34 Huffer deems Despentes ‘iconoclastic’ (p. 25), and King Kong Theory ‘her quasi-theoretical Bildungsroman’ (p. 161), noting how the book tracks from Despentes’s rape through her sex work and on to the rocky reception of Baise-Moi. ‘It is not porn per se, or even rape,’ Huffer claims, ‘that is the object of this feminist outrage [in King Kong Theory], but rather the grinding, repetitive, systematic, never-ending thwarting of life as eros’ (p. 174). This reading is in service of Huffer’s desire to identify an illustrative utopian potential beyond the violence and hopelessness of Baise-Moi and the anger of King Kong Theory. Despentes shares Huffer’s desire, offering a glimmer of ‘the potential for ultra-powerful, polymorphous sexuality’ towards the end of King Kong Theory, but the object of her outrage is the misogyny and patriarchy that shape and curtail behaviour and sexuality, and that lead to rape, discrimination against sex workers, and restrictive conceptions of gender and sexuality (p. 107). To call this a ‘thwarting of life as eros’ rather too quickly and mystically glosses over the very real material effects women encounter in their everyday lives, as Edwards highlights in her reading of the text, and at which Despentes keenly aims her ire throughout King Kong Theory. Even if the final conclusions of Huffer’s analysis of Despentes are not ones I share, her work and Edwards’s herald a welcome attention in AngloAmerican scholarship to this robust feminist writer. Unlike her French counterpart, Spanish-born Leo did not have a well-known public profile when she first published Rape New York and, even though she is now an established New York artist and curator, her slim volume has yet to receive the attention it deserves, especially in literary and feminist circles.35 The feminists, academics, and publishers whose endorsements adorn the back of the Feminist Press copy rightly make large claims for Rape New York and stress its movement beyond the boundaries of conventional memoir. Beatriz Colomina claims that in Rape New York ‘memoir becomes urban manifesto’, while Jennifer Baumgardner hails it as ‘so much more than an extraordinary memoir’ because of its ‘crucial analysis, screed, and feminist theory’.36 Several names with later roles in Contemporary Feminist Life34 35

36

L. Huffer, Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. 161–76. Some reviews and interviews appear online. See Leo interviewed by R. Marshall, ‘Rape New York: Jana Leo’, 3:AM Magazine (27 July 2009); Y. Friedman, ‘Rape New York by Jana Leo’, Urban Omnibus (9 March 2011); E. Dwoskin, ‘Jana Leo’s Rape New York: Scary Tale about What Happens When a Bad Landlord Won’t Fix Your Front Door Lock’, The Village Voice (3 February 2011); A. Salario, ‘Rape New York by Jana Leo’, Bookslut (June 2011). These articles are available on the websites for these publications. Back cover of J. Leo, Rape New York (New York: Feminist Press, 2011).

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Writing also appear on the back cover of Rape New York, such as Chris Kraus’s ex-husband, Sylvère Lotringer, who deems the text, somewhat mysteriously, ‘exhilarating’ but also ‘harrowing’.37 Intriguing too is a blurb from Vanessa Place, whose work is the subject of Chapter 5. She writes, ‘the best that can be said about this book is that it is true, which is the only measure of real art, and honest existence’, a sentiment devoid of the usual conceptual caveats which tend to pepper Place’s literary commentaries.38 Thus, even a writer moving in the milieu of East Coast conceptual art, as Leo does, reveals through these reviews tentacular connections that curve towards the literary scene inhabited by other new audacity writers.39 Responses to both Rape New York and King Kong Theory recognise the radicality of the rape arguments they make. Both writers shift the focus so it falls more sharply upon the conditions that produce and facilitate rapists rather than upon themselves as raped women. There is audacity in refusing to stop at one’s own story of rape, in travelling past it to the larger socio-economic and political conditions that make rape prevalent. For Leo, this route also productively redirected her energy. Plagued by questions about the rapist’s proximity and probable return, she ‘translated [them] into others that refocused the thesis’ (p. 49): her experience of gendered violation became her feminist research project. One of the prominent arguments she advances in her book is that rape is always related to the misconception of home as a safe and normal space: Less violent or ‘nonviolent’ rape often occurs when the objective for the rapist is ‘being at home’: both sex and self-affirmation are sought. The sex appears consensual, something earned through negotiation or seduction; the rapist seeks approval. Violent rape is a challenge to this idea of home: excitement comes from the violation of norms, and from the other person being reduced to their difference, appearing as an enemy or an inferior. In other words, nonviolent rapes place an emphasis on the search for home, whereas violent rapes emphasize revenge, destroying the body and home of the other. Rapes outside or apart from the home are perceived as a form of punishment, as if the victim deserved the rape for venturing away from parents, partner, or house. (p. 89) 37 39

38 Ibid. Ibid. Vanessa Place is not a surprising choice of reviewer: she has an increasing profile in the conceptual art world, has performed in venues like the MoMA, and has written about rape in her three-volume Tragodía (2010–11), The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and the Law (2011), and You Had to Be There: Rape Jokes (2018), all discussed in Chapter 5.

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The analysis Leo provides here is academic, without personal inflection even while obviously applicable to her own experience, and firmly trained on understanding the motivations of rapists rather than the behaviour of the women they target. Leo offers a theory of the rapist’s psychological investment which makes rape impersonal insofar as the needs driving rape are not met by any personal attributes of the woman raped, but rather by what she comes to represent. Clearly, such writing cannot simply be classed as a contemporary iteration of Felski’s feminist confession, for it is precisely the mechanism of confessing to transgression that Leo refuses here through her focus on the man as violator. Gang raped while hitchhiking, Despentes later comes to understand her rape in these terms as punishment for leaving the domestic space. She encounters this argument in an article by the controversial American feminist Camille Paglia in 1991.40 This, then, is not a new argument that Leo presents and Despentes repeats, at least as it pertains to rape as a patriarchal punishment for women being in public places, but it is one that has failed, thus far, to gain much traction in public and media discourses, which remain stubbornly dedicated to victim-blaming when it comes to a circumstance like hitchhiking. Even though Paglia’s wider sentiments on masculinity are anathema to both Despentes and Leo, what the young Despentes learns from her is to reject casting her rape as simply a life-altering and tainting trauma. No longer is it an ‘absolute unspeakable horror, that which must never happen’ but, instead, Despentes follows Paglia in casting rape as ‘what you have to expect you may endure if you’re a woman and you want to venture into the wild’ (p. 40). The discourse of trauma is, for Paglia and Despentes, limiting, participating in a wider containment strategy to pin women into feminine propriety and the ‘safety’ of the domestic, out of the way of public harm codified as male. As we have seen, neither Despentes nor Leo denies the impact rape has had upon them. Yet for Despentes, rejecting the language of trauma allowed her to recognise her rape as a response to the agency and autonomy she had shown in transgressing the ‘good girl’ rules of staying home and not 40

For the original Paglia article Despentes encountered, see C. Farber and C. Paglia, ‘Antihero’, Spin (September 1991), pp. 86, 88, 102, 104, and C. Farber and C. Paglia, ‘Antihero’, Spin (October 1991), p. 84. Paglia states, ‘We cannot regulate male sexuality. The uncontrollable aspect of male sexuality is what makes sex interesting. And yes, it can lead to rape sometimes,’ going on to claim that unlike middle-class white families, black and Spanish cultures have not tried to repress this understanding (p. 104). Even in 1991, such views were shocking, as the interviewer acknowledges at the start of part two in the subsequent October edition of the magazine. It is notable that Despentes states the exact opposite about male sexuality in King Kong Theory (p. 47) but does not bother to argue with Paglia, taking only what she needs from her.

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hitchhiking. This understanding of rape as ‘a political circumstance’ develops into King Kong Theory’s feminist stance against the patriarchal policing of women and girls’ behaviour (p. 40). If Leo resists the personalising of the one who suffers rape, refusing to indulge the familiar rhetorical investments in victim-blaming, she also, far more remarkably, views her rapist not as an individual evildoer but a symptom. He is the product of a wider social problem, one that feeds the prison industrial complex:41 The assumption that if someone commits a crime they have to go to prison is based on the idea that crime is a deviant form of behaviour, and criminals should be separated from the rest of society. I understood crime as a process not an isolated action, or a deviance from correct behaviour, but rather the consequence of a system that produces a criminal class, and also benefits from it. (p. 101)

It is audacious for a woman to try to understand her rape as the by-product of a systemic injustice which produces criminals like her rapist. This is not to exonerate him: Leo pursued the case against him and testified in his trial. She felt safer when he was imprisoned. Rape New York documents these facts, and her analysis of how the criminal class is produced does not forestall the justice she sought. Within the system, the individual is punished for the crime they commit, but their turn to crime was primed by their position in the system long before they committed a criminal act. Leo understands her rapist as the product of the poverty of Harlem, and how that crucially interacts with town planning and real estate investment in an area beginning to gentrify. She describes the process she calls the ‘principle of corruption’ thus: [I]ntroduce crime into an area to decrease real estate value, buy up land when the prices are down and then develop the neighbourhood. Taxpayers bear the cost of the crime, while the revenue created by real estate speculation remains in the hands of corrupt officials, slum landlords, and developers – with a payoff tax benefit going to city and state government. (p. 44)

Crime is encouraged through a laxity in security: the front door to Leo’s large apartment block had a permanently broken lock, as did the door leading to the roof where the rapist took up temporary residence. The roof door, in turn, gave access to an adjoining building and made these blocks easy and accessible places to commit crimes, to escape the notice of the 41

For discussion of the prison industrial complex, race, and crime, see A. Y. Davis, The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2012), pp. 35–86.

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authorities, and even to illegally inhabit. Her slum landlord was well aware of these problems but did not fix them; after her rape, when Leo starts legal proceedings against him, she discovers that many tenants had complained about the lack of security, and some, like her, had suffered crime as a result. Leo’s point is not that the occupants of her building are simply unlucky tenants with a dodgy landlord, but that there is a systematic exploitation of tenants’ vulnerability at work for the landlord’s financial gain: because of the unsafe environment there is a high turnover of tenants, which earns the company extra revenue through the excessive administration fees they charge for processing paperwork. In the even longer term, he will be able to sell the building at huge profit for redevelopment. Audacity arrives in the midst of this situation in the form of a civil legal proceeding that demands Leo’s landlord take responsibility for his failure to protect her as a tenant: had he provided a secure building, her case argues, she would not have been raped. He has profited millions from his negligence, but it is not socially legible as part of the same system that produced her rapist. Rape New York audaciously sets out to uncover their consanguinity. If the rapist played his part in Leo’s story as a member of the criminal class, it is her landlord who financially gains from her ordeal, and from other tenants like her. Her attacker’s individual motives for raping her are less important to her argument than his poverty in a system wherein ‘the prioritizing of wealth affects all social relationships’ (p. 91). In this respect, even though her rape cannot but have personal affects, Leo deliberately views it through a wider, societal lens attuned to the impersonality of structural damage: ‘The fact that rapes relate to poverty, especially the perpetrator’s poverty, makes it, to a certain extent, a default effect of capitalist exploitation and not simply the result of mental illness’ (p. 91). Again, the audacity of her position here is unmissable: this is not a common view of rape to encounter from a survivor. She is additionally at pains to stress that it is his poverty – he is unemployed, unskilled, and homeless – rather than the fact that he is black which determines his likelihood to commit crime, just as she also points out that women in Harlem from all ethnic backgrounds are more likely to be raped than women in wealthier neighbourhoods. Furthermore, she emphasises that when poverty and ‘gender devaluation’ combine to produce machismo, then gendered violence is considerably more likely, and will be visited upon those perceived as lacking male protection (pp. 95–6). Leo’s is thus an intersectional diagnosis of how ‘The American Dream has sacrificed equality and fraternity on the altar of liberty and profit’ (p. 101). ‘Gender devaluation’, the idea that women are worth less than men in the social hierarchy, is not unrelated to the fiscal sense of value, and this is

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crucial to both Leo’s and Despentes’s discussions of rape.42 In another audacious turn, Leo points to ‘the economic element in rape’ (p. 91). This she identifies not simply in the poverty of her rapist and the area he resided in but equally in ‘the celebration of wealth as the only social value’ (p. 85). Within such a social system, ‘being poor is not only a condition, but also a qualifier. Poor defines a person as less valuable’ (p. 59). This applies to her as much as to her rapist: Leo lived in an immiserated area because, despite being rich in the cultural capital provided by her education, she was materially and financially poor. Rape and violent crime are more prevalent in Harlem than in the prosperous areas of New York, and carry fewer consequences, she suspects: ‘To rape a rich person is certainly more risky to the perpetrator since not only is the act more likely to be reported, it will probably be investigated more thoroughly’ (p. 93). If not being valued highly in society makes you more likely to be raped, as the statistics suggest, there is further cruelty in the fact that rape often makes a woman feel personally devalued. Leo states her ‘need to reclaim [her] own value’ as the reason for bringing a lawsuit against her landlord over the insecure state of her building (p. 59). Her compensation claim is a fiscal recognition of his wrong and an indication of her worth ‘in his language: money’ (p. 59). Despentes too discusses a transactional revaluation in the wake of her rape, in her case achieved through sex work, a fact that audaciously flies in the face of many who have decried prostitution, including leading feminist voices.43 Often denigrated as a financial last resort, a degrading encounter with men who value women only as sex objects, and as carrying a high risk of sexual assault, sex work might initially appear to offer little in the way of compensation for a woman who has suffered rape.44 Despentes’s account of the sex work she undertook after her rape provides a counter narrative to these popular assumptions. She initially took on sex work because it paid considerably more than her dull shop job but discovered it delivered a further, unexpected reparation: In my case, prostitution was a crucial step in rebuilding myself after the rape. A business of dollar-by-dollar compensation, for what had been taken from 42

43 44

For a Marxist approach on how women are socially and economically devalued that complements the politics of Despentes and Leo, see J. Gibson, ‘The Fire This Time? Notes on the Crisis of Reproduction’, LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism 2 (August 2015), pp. 143–56. Most famously, Catharine McKinnon. See C. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). For an example of these views, see J. Bindel, ‘Why Prostitution Should Never Be Legalised’, The Guardian (11 October 2017).

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Autobiography as Feminist Praxis me by brute force. I must have kept intact whatever I could sell to each client. If I could sell it ten times in a row then it wasn’t something that could be destroyed by use. My sex belonged to me only, it didn’t lose value through being used, and it could be profitable. (p. 67)

As discussed in Chapter 3 in relation to Marie Calloway and sexual worth, a strange economy is attached to women and the sex men have or desire to have with them. To take sex from a woman against her will transforms her into ‘damaged goods’, in Despentes’s phrase, a devaluation reflected in the language used by both Despentes and Leo (p. 45). By depicting the men who buy sex from her as paying her back for what the rapists had taken, Despentes makes men in general collectively responsible: for what three took for free against her will, she will make other men pay. The financial value she rendered from sex work both compensated for sex forcibly rendered from her, through which she had felt devalued, and restored her sense of bodily autonomy, her feeling that her body is her own and valuable. Yet the social devaluation of sex workers so prevalent in public discourse directly results from the extraction of financial value from sex. For Despentes, there is a complicated intertwining of the phallic and fiscal economies of power. The phallic power the rapists wielded to devalue her is deflated by the vulnerable fragility of clients for whom she has value: ‘The experience [as a sex worker] of seeing men in a childlike, fragile, vulnerable light made them seem nicer, less intimidating, more endearing’ (p. 68). As sex worker Pluma Sumaq writes, ‘Prostitution is loaded with the battle of power and the audacity of fallen women to claim empowerment.’45 Despentes’s account expresses the same audacity, then amplifies it through admitting openly to it and discussing its complex relationship to her rape.46 Both Leo, in her understanding of her rape as a consequence of poverty and urban planning, and Despentes, with an analysis more attuned to the exercise of patriarchal power, blame capitalism for the protections it provides to those who benefit from dominating and exploiting others. For Despentes, rape is not a by-product of capitalism’s promotion of profit, but ‘a well-defined political strategy: the bare bones of capitalism, 45 46

P. Sumaq, ‘A Disgrace Reserved for Prostitutes: Complicity and the Beloved Community’, LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism 2 (August 2015), p. 20. Despentes’s account of sex work is not utterly laudatory, even though it was important for her at one time. Sumaq similarly cautions against polarised views of prostitution as either unqualified good or appalling ill, seeing it instead as a symptom of structural societal forces that shape our opportunities for labour and our understanding of sex and sexuality. Sumaq, ‘A Disgrace Reserved for Prostitutes’, pp. 18–19.

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it is the crude and blunt representation of the exercise of power’ (p. 46). Gender relations are thoroughly political, pitting one gender against another: ‘Rape is civil war, a political organization through which one gender declares to the other, I have complete power over you. I force you to feel inferior, guilty, and degraded’ (p. 47). For Leo, how gender and economic inequality operate in twisted tandem can obscure the latter’s relationship to the former. Rape New York makes plain how circumstances which do not at first appear gendered, such as the property development potential of a poor neighbourhood like Harlem, nevertheless have gendered and criminal consequences. Even though Rape New York depicts a clear socio-economic hierarchy, with white male billionaires at the top and poor women of colour at the bottom, the motivation of slum landlords like Leo’s and others who benefit from Harlem’s gentrification is represented as profit-driven rather than patriarchal per se. By contrast, Despentes has a more class-inflected understanding of how power, gender, and capitalism interact: ‘Family, warlike virility, modesty – all the traditional moral values are intended to keep the genders in their assigned role. . . . In the end we are all enslaved, our sexualities confiscated, policed, and normalized. There is always a social class which has an interest in maintaining things as they are, and which does not tell the truth about its deeper motives’ (p. 101). Capitalism, Leo and Despentes agree, is a system that creates and sustains gendered violence and inequality, a view widely shared among feminist thinkers, many of whom also point to how this is racialised.47 The centrality of anti-rape campaigns to second-wave feminist discourse and activism was announced by Susan Brownmiller’s groundbreaking study, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975), and was manifested in the many rape crisis centres and women’s refuges that were set up during this period. Despite decades since of feminist activism, campaigning, and research, Leo and Despentes lament the lack of progress achieved. For Leo, her rape makes this failure stark and she too employs the language of degradation: ‘Centuries of struggle for women’s liberation, and all the battles in my life for independence, have been diluted. Regardless of theoretical equality, in practice women are disadvantaged. They are considered inferior, less than fully human, degraded by their gender’ (pp. 96–7). Despentes shares her despondency: ‘Things have not changed 47

See R. Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2000); LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism 1 (2012); LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism 2 (August 2015); ‘The Logic of Gender: On the Separation of Spheres and the Process of Abjection’, End Notes 3 (September 2013).

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much, these last forty years. The only obvious progress is that we can support [men] financially’ (p. 121). She is disappointed that the ‘feminist revolution of the ’70s’ did not solve the major material obstacles in the path of women’s progression into the public sphere: ‘Why didn’t anyone invent the equivalent of Ikea for childcare or Mac for housework?’, she asks pointedly (p. 22). For these new audacity writers, as for others featured in this study, second-wave feminism did not deliver the radical and optimistic future glimpsed in the demands of thinkers like Valerie Solanas, who called in the SCUM Manifesto for ‘the total elimination of the money-work system’ to liberate women, or Shulamith Firestone, who believed childhood and family life were destructive and should be abolished.48 If feminism has failed to live up to the more audacious dreams and demands made by the second wave, however, this may not be entirely the fault of its feminists: as Rita Felski cautiously concluded, writing towards the end of the twentieth century, the women’s movement ‘may prove unable to articulate a systemic challenge to the increasing hegemony of neoconservatism in Western societies in the late 1980s. The significant ideological gains made by feminism in the last twenty years’, she warns, ‘do not by any means provide grounds for unqualified optimism’ (p. 182). In the twenty-first century, repeated waves of social and media attention and protest rise periodically over systemic misogyny and sexual harassment in the workplace and the public sphere, as well as to object to the continuing prevalence of widespread violence against women, and yet there are still few in the public eye who, like Leo and Despentes, will audaciously advance a feminism thoroughly critical of contemporary capitalism and call for more radical solutions than reform.

Affective Audacity: The Phenomenology of a Rape How both authors structure their books influences the impact the accounts of their rapes have in framing and informing their later arguments. Rape New York presents the visceral event of Leo’s rape in its opening chapter, ‘A Nonviolent Rape’, before the arguments about rape and poverty which comprise the majority of the text. The chapter title grates: the phrase ‘nonviolent rape’ is police and legal nomenclature, a confusing but striking contradiction when every rape is a violation and thereby a form of violence, 48

V. Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (London and New York: Verso, 2015 [1967]), p. 43; S. Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), pp. 65–112.

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even if Leo, unlike Despentes, was not physically hit or beaten. Although Leo’s rape occurs at the very start of the text, it has the structural function of a stone thrown into water, so that the rest of the book’s other three sections contain chapters that ripple out from that initial shocking start to points in time before and after the rape.49 For instance, the final section of the book, ‘Defeated by New York’, contains a chapter detailing the eventual fate of her wealthy slum landlord and another giving her reasons for initially moving to the capital. The latter closes the book with the first drive she takes into the city and the first sight of her new neighbourhood, Harlem, where she will later be raped, so that the book ends at the location from which it also begins. The rape becomes the relentless lens through which even the time before it happened is seen. Yet the book does not immediately appear to be a polemic: chapter titles such as ‘How an Uneventful Day and Place Became Eventful’ and ‘How the Assailant Was Caught’ appear to promise descriptions of facts and processes without any clue as to the audacity of the arguments Leo will make about rape, social inequality, and urban development. Nevertheless, Rape New York’s structure, particularly the fact that it opens with a stark and visceral description of Leo’s rape, is crucial to its efficacy as a persuasive document. This is what I am calling the text’s affective audacity: the fact that the reading encounter with the rape is so impactful that it carries over and lends affective force to the related arguments the book makes about rape, poverty, and property development. ‘The ghost of rape is attached to being a woman,’ writes Leo (p. 91). To read of rape is, in general terms, to confront and have to acknowledge the power one person has to deliberately hurt another, and our shared vulnerability to each other’s violence. More specifically, because rape is primarily a crime by men against women, to read of rape is to encounter women’s vulnerability to male power and this has an inevitable affective charge for the woman reader. Judith Butler writes about shared vulnerability to the other in her book Precarious Life, suggesting it could be the basis for a politics of recognition whereby each party could strive to avoid harming the other.50 Leo’s and Despentes’s texts track the opposite response: how vulnerability can elicit violence and exploitation in the service of bolstering masculinity and patriarchy. As stories of harm, transgression, and trauma, they exert a strong fascination that these authors harness for political ends. 49 50

Leo planned the book carefully. See the images in Marshall’s interview with Leo, ‘Rape New York by Jana Leo’. J. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004).

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Violence and rape are understood as ‘experiences of extremity’ in Anne Roth’s account of why autobiographies of extremely abusive childhood treatment are so popular.51 This point is discussed in far more theoretical detail by Helen Hester in her book Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex. What horrifies also captivates and fascinates. Extreme scenes, disgusting sights, car accidents, the hanging of Saddam Hussein: people want to look. What, then, are the effects of reading about a real rape, like Leo’s? Are these accounts compelling because they provoke what Hester terms a ‘queasy jouissance – horror, anger, sorrow, and a certain nauseated fascination’?52 In Hester’s discussion of how the term ‘pornography’ has migrated from naming only adult entertainment to becoming widely used to describe interests as varied as ‘travel porn’ and ‘food porn’, she draws attention to more disturbing forms of consumption, such as the torture images from Abu Ghraib and accounts of abuse in misery memoirs (p. 188). The ‘queasy jouissance’ these provoke stems, Hester argues, from a ‘lascivious curiosity regarding war, for example, or abuse, or torture, or any other type of representation that depicts authentic scenes of psychic or bodily intensity in a culturally denigrated fashion’ (p. 188). I think useful but not complete parallels can be drawn between what Hester is discussing and how Leo and Despentes write about their rapes. As texts that embed their rape narratives within detailed and thoughtful arguments about poverty on the one hand, and feminism on the other, Rape New York and King Kong Theory cannot be classed as operating in ‘a culturally denigrating fashion’, to use Hester’s somewhat cloudy phrase. Nor are the readers the books are marketed to through the Feminist Press likely to be motivated by the kinds of ‘lascivious curiosity’ Hester describes. Nevertheless, these are books that in describing the rape of their authors very much feature ‘scenes of psychic and bodily intensity’. Crucially, they do so in order to amplify the sociopolitical and feminist arguments that accompany them. Western feminism has a history of mobilising visceral reactions, according to Clare Hemmings, and not always admirably. Hemmings explores certain feminist reactions to the defence or advocacy of female genital cutting, religious covering, and trans surgery. When feminists condemn a practice, Hemmings observes, their writing tends to rely upon an affective structure of the shudder. In the place of empathy there is instead this 51 52

A. Roth, Popular Trauma Culture: Selling the Pain of Others in the Mass Media (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2011), p. 84. H. Hester, Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), p. 185.

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‘bodily shudder, the experience of horror’ (p. 217). Hemmings is arguing that feminism needs to be more inclusive and to challenge its frequent reliance upon a conception of subjectivity invested in models of agency and otherness that tend to exclude women who embrace cultural, ethnic, and religious practices and environments at variance with a certain brand of white mainstream Western feminism. Notable for my argument is her identification of a ‘bodily knowledge as the basis of judgement’ or, more prosaically, ‘gut reactions’ (p. 217), and how the encounter with a description of a practice condemned by white Western feminism can provoke a ‘visceral reaction’ in the white Western feminist reader (p. 223). Hemmings’s attention to the shudder makes an important point for feminism, but also for what it means to read of rape. Hemmings, Hester, and Roth are all characterising an embodied reading which is agitated by descriptions of the body. As bodily creatures, perhaps that is an inevitable human reaction, but for women readers, whose bodies are so often the target of sexual harassment and worse, descriptions of rape are likely to be particularly disturbing. We should expect to be shaken, perhaps to even feel a physical shudder, by what happened to Emin, Leo, and Despentes. It has become an acceptable truism that trauma may evade its telling, that it may even be defined as that which cannot be told, evident only through the symptoms it produces.53 Rape was undeniably traumatic for all three authors discussed in this chapter. For Leo, it inaugurated intimate phenomenological and ontological alterations in the fabric of her reality and her experience of time: as she told the court at the trial of her rapist, ‘my perception of life changed: I no longer looked forward to the future, I didn’t enjoy my present and often thought about death’ (p. 109). In spite of the trauma of what happened to her, Leo demonstrates that rape can be voiced very precisely, and with considerable affective power. The opening chapter of Rape New York, ‘A Nonviolent Rape’, is an immersive and disturbing reading experience which renders her rape phenomenologically. In her book Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed’s list of why phenomenology is useful to her illuminates what Leo’s writing achieves: ‘[phenomenology] emphasizes the importance of lived experience, the intentionality of consciousness, the significance of nearness or what is ready-to-hand, and the role of repeated and habitual actions in shaping bodies and worlds’.54 Classic philosophical phenomenology usually proceeds by paying extremely close 53 54

C. Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 2.

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attention to an object as it is given to consciousness. In Queer Phenomenology, this is explored by Ahmed’s own attention to the various descriptions of writing environments that appear in classical phenomenological philosophy. From these traditional beginnings, a more recent psychological connection has been made between phenomenology and the understanding of trauma, which, broadly speaking, applies terms developed by philosophers of phenomenology to describe certain trauma states or reactions to traumatic events.55 Even though Leo, by the definitions provided in these kinds of studies, displays symptoms of trauma, I want not to offer a diagnosis but instead to read ‘A Nonviolent Rape’ as a phenomenological piece of writing. To use Ahmed’s terms, it gives an account of the lived experience of being raped in one’s home, the significance of nearness and of what is ready-athand during a rape, and the rape’s role in reshaping what was once the habitual. To think of rape phenomenologically is hugely unconventional, it could be objected. Yet, as Ahmed shows, classical phenomenology frequently begins, like Leo’s rape, in the home. Their phenomenological project of making familiar objects unfamiliar through attentive examination to how they are in the world and how we use them takes on a far more sinister dimension when, as happened with Leo, the familiar home is made unfamiliar and unsafe through the presence of an unwanted stranger. Rape New York opens dramatically, in shocked accusation: ‘YOU SCARED ME!’ (p. 3). A man is standing in Leo’s doorway with a gun. The whole first chapter of the book is dedicated to recounting what happened next, and provides a detailed, phenomenologically intense account of Leo’s rape. As readers, we know more than the self Leo represents at this stage in the narrative: we know, from the title of the book and the chapter, ‘A Nonviolent Rape’, that the outcome will be rape. The palpable accumulation of tension as the scene unfolds is exacerbated by this. Leo’s confusion and initial lack of understanding of what the man wants is made repeatedly apparent. She is slow to realise it is not a robbery, since he asks for money. Her attempts to make sense of the situation result in a series of rapid reactions: ‘For a moment I thought . . . ’; ‘I couldn’t believe . . . ’; ‘My first response was . . . ’; ‘My second reaction was . . . ’ (p. 3), presenting the quick cycle of explanatory ideas moving through her mind. The prose races, like the mind it represents. 55

For instance: M. J. Larrabee, ‘The Time of Trauma: Husserl’s Phenomenology and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’, Human Studies 18 (1995), pp. 351–66; G. Gusich, ‘A Phenomenology of Emotional Trauma: Around and about the Things Themselves’, Human Studies 35 (2012), pp. 505–18; R. Stolorow, ‘The Phenomenology, Contextuality, and Existentiality of Emotional Trauma: Ethical Implications’, Journal of Humanistic Psychology 51:2 (2011), pp. 142–51.

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The dramatic tension is further increased by the tissue of rhetorical questions laced throughout the chapter: during the twenty-five pages recounting the rape, there are fifty such examples. They tend to cluster, as when the man steps on a comforter and apologises: Why was he so polite? What did it mean? Was this the first time he had done something like this? Did his awkwardness come from having a gun, a weapon that can be used from afar and that gives a certain distance in perceiving the victim as real? Was he trying to make a good impression, as if we were on a first date? Was he trying to disorientate me? (pp. 8–9)

The short, sharp questions, the anaphoric ‘was he trying’, the piling of question upon question, all index Leo’s rising panic and create the feeling of entrapment. What we learn phenomenologically about this experience is that the precursor events to a rape may be very confusing, and that a rapist may not immediately reveal his intentions. Like Leo, the reader is kept guessing as to the next movement of the intruder. The narrative propulsion towards the rape combined with the anxious questions creates a textual tension familiar from fiction writing. While a testimony is different in fact to fiction, the narrative powers of anticipation, suspense, and revelation are functionally similar to those activated within a novel or a short story, here intensified by having real referents. The reader desires, alongside Leo in the text, to know what is happening and what is going to happen, and is thus inexorably moved towards the rape in a deliberately uncomfortable, visceral, and phenomenological reading experience.56 Leo’s reality became, she says, an ‘absurdity’, the domestic space transformed into what we could call the everyday surreal, wherein actions which would ordinarily be considered normal are not so any longer.57 Firstly, the mundane act of returning home with groceries becomes extraordinary. Her home with the armed man in it has undergone a phenomenological transformation to become, she writes, ‘a world unknown to me, regulated by rules I had no knowledge of, a world in which I felt completely foreign’ (p. 4). The stranger in her home estranges her from the familiar, reconfiguring it: ‘I too became a stranger, strange to myself,’ she writes (p. 4). More unexpected is the awkwardness of the rapist, and how the encounter elicits inappropriate flashes of politeness from him and reflexive hospitality 56

57

This is as true for tightly written life-writing as it is for literature. For an influential discussion of the power of plotting, see P. Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design, Intention & Narrative (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1992). Leo, ‘Notes about the Performance’. See rapenewyork.com/notes.htm.

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from her. Leo’s rape does not happen straightaway, and the exchanges before and after it phenomenologically highlight how the everyday surreal subtends in crisis situations, compelling normal routines, manners, and actions to be carried out automatically, even while they are no longer appropriate. After asking permission to get a drink, Leo finds herself offering the intruder one too (p. 6); he asks whether he may smoke before he does so on both occasions, even though he is in her house with a gun (pp. 5 and 9); he apologises after stepping on a domestic item by mistake (p. 8); she asks him to flick his ash away from her architectural model and into the ashtray – he complies and, once again, apologises (p. 10). Home is full of grooves of behaviour into which we naturally fall even when the situation has become unnatural. The encounter is drawn out along these lines of prevarication, the awkward uncertainty of these interactions always underwritten for the reader by the rape they know will have to come. In an unsettling and surreal manner, the flashes of politesse point forward to the moment when civility and small examples of domestic propriety will give way to brutality. Eventually, he rapes her. He forces her to strip and lie down. Much like Emin, Leo describes what happens in factual, precise prose: ‘He held me by the waist and licked my right breast. I tried to relax in order to make things easier and less painful. His penis wouldn’t go in so he pushed harder, helping himself with his hand to penetrate my body. It hurt. It had never hurt that much before. I felt my flesh was about to break’ (p. 19). Factual language is usually considered neutral and impersonal in contrast to literary language, with its emotive ornamentation of tropes, similes, and metaphors. Accounts of rape reveal an under-acknowledged dimension of literary writing: factual language can also deliver a considerable affective punch. In Chapter 5, I discuss Vanessa Place’s use of ‘the simple declarative sentence’ to convey the way that violence ‘feels inevitable as it’s happening, and also inescapable’.58 The phrase ‘it hurt’ has a declarative and powerful brevity in Leo’s account of her rape. ‘Hurt’ names both a feeling and the action which causes that feeling. With a breadth that covers physical, emotional, and psychological pain, it is frequently employed metaphorically too. ‘It hurt’ can be descriptive or an accusation or a complaint; it can compress these together, as is the case for Leo. She uses it standing alone, simultaneously informative and inadequate, a statement of fact and a compaction of pathos. As this demonstrates, Leo’s account of her rape 58

V. Place, ‘Vanessa Place: An Interview in Paris’, interviewed by M. Charret-Del Bove and F. PalleauPapin, Transatlantica 1 (2012), pp. 1–16, at p. 8. See Chapter 5 for a fuller discussion.

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gathers emotional force not simply through what was done to her but in combination with her careful economy of language to describe it. All narrative writing, even that which strives to remain factual, is the result of choices of style, of framing, and of perspective, a fact that the UK publication of Rape New York specifically acknowledges from the start in a rather curious paratextual note, later expunged from the Feminist Press edition: ‘This book is a work of fiction because, like all texts, it is constructed. It is also fictional because it is self-consciously subjective: the reflections it contains are my personal thoughts and the narrative form I use is episodic. However, the core of the book is a detailed account of something that actually happened. It is the truth.’59 Leo’s conception of a text as capable of conveying the truth whilst being a work of fiction because it is constructed resonates with plenty of authors studied in Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing.60 Her further claim, that the first person is necessarily a fiction, is not unusual either, although the reason she gives – that it is deliberately subjective – strikes an odd and defensive chord. A first-person account or testimonial is by definition subjective, the view of only one person, filtered through their consciousness and experience, but this does not thereby constitute it as a fiction. In fact, it is the constituent for phenomenological thinking, and the seat of its value. In Ahmed’s use of phenomenology, ‘The body provides us with a perspective: the body is “here” as a point from which we begin, and from which the world unfolds’ (p. 8). This is why Leo begins her book with her body, and her rape.

The Mendacity of Rapists As is evident from Rape New York, compositional structure and prose style both matter in creating and accentuating the affective impact of rape accounts, which in turn powers the arguments of these new audacity writers. Structurally, King Kong Theory differs from Rape New York, opening with a short dedicatory chapter that outlines the non-heteronormative people for whom Despentes declares she is writing. The second, similarly short, chapter briefly surveys feminism past and present, staking out the text’s primary terrain. It is with the considerably longer third chapter that 59 60

J. Leo, Rape New York: The Story of a Rape and an Examination of a Culture of Predation (London: Book Works, 2009). The note is paratextual, placed before the main text and contents page. The text was produced in negotiation with Leo’s editor at Book Works, who made some substantial alterations. For a discussion of this and a sample of the editing, see Leo interviewed by Marshall, ‘Rape New York by Jana Leo’.

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the main book then gets under way. In it Despentes recounts her rape and its repercussions, with the remaining two-thirds of the book framed by and unfolding from these foundations. We learn that her rape brings Despentes to feminism and, as Ahmed writes, ‘where we find feminism matters’.61 Specifically, for Despentes, it is a friend’s rape three years after her own that finally allows her to confront and give voice to her experience. The feminism she encounters at this point helps her to resist the position of victim so frequently reserved for women who have suffered sexual assault.62 Despentes’s account of her rape is guided less by a desire to provide phenomenological detail, as Leo’s was, and more by a focus upon exposing how the men who raped her deceived themselves as to what they were doing. If, as is so often the case when it comes to rape, it is usual for the focal point to be the woman violated, in King Kong Theory Despentes deliberately shifts the focus onto the men who violate. ‘For years I was far from being a feminist,’ Despentes admits of her early life (p. 17). The gains of feminism were invisible to her younger self: she took for granted the opportunities she had and the relative freedom that accompanied them to earn her own money and make her own sexual decisions. The first mention of her rape is buried among a list of intrepid activities that index her sexual and artistic autonomy at this stage of her life. Unlike most of her other experiences, it is done to, rather than by, her: I slept with hundreds of men without ever getting pregnant, and anyway I knew where to get an abortion without anyone’s permission and without putting my life at risk. I became a prostitute and walked the streets in lowcut tops and high-heeled shoes owing no one an explanation, and I kept and spent every penny I earned. I hitchhiked, I was raped, I hitchhiked again [J’ai fait du stop, j’ai été violée, j’ai refait du stop]. I wrote a first novel and published it under my own, clearly female first name, not imagining for a second that when it came out I’d be continually lectured to about boundaries that should never be crossed. (p. 17)63

Recounted in three curt words as a brief interruption to her hitchhiking, the rape is a disturbing violence presented as a kind of blip we are invited initially to skim over. It is listed as though it is just another experience, one 61 62

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Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, p. 5. Despentes’s resistance to victimhood is recognised by V. Sauzon in ‘Ni victim ni coupable: Virginie Despentes, de la practique littéraire à la théorie’, in A. Damlé (ed.), Aventures et expériences littéraires des femmes en France au debut de vingt-et-unième siècle (Amsterdam and New York: Rodolfi Press, 2014), pp. 145–59. For the French, see V. Despentes, King Kong Théorie (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2006), p. 19. In parenthetic references this is marked with an F.

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among various transgressions of the ‘good girl’ norm, like promiscuity and hitchhiking. In fact, as we shall see, her rape is more akin to a punishment for Despentes’s audacious assumption as a young woman that she could transgress boundaries with impunity. Nor does its brief entry here reflect the impact it had upon her life, as the following chapter shows. Recounting Despentes’s rape and subsequent journey to feminism, King Kong Theory’s third chapter is shockingly entitled ‘She’s So Depraved, You Can’t Rape Her’. A note identifies its provenance as a song lyric by a French 1980s heavy metal band with the unlikely name Trust, but this is merely one cultural iteration among many of the problem Despentes continually challenges throughout the chapter and the book: that rape is an act steeped in and reactive to social fallacies about women, including the one that marks sexually adventurous or unconventional women as inviting their own violation (p. 31). The chapter’s start adds trepidation to the already ominous tone of the title, and, like Leo, Despentes opens dramatically, in the present tense: ‘July 1986, I’m seventeen, there are two of us, both wearing miniskirts. I have on stripy tights and red Converse. We’re on our way back from London, where we’ve spent all our money on records, hair dye, and a mass of studded accessories, so we are broke. Not a penny left for the journey home’ (p. 31). These are adventurous teenaged girls, travelling to another country to shop for punk products, hitchhiking back, accepting a lift with three guys who seem nice enough. The conditions are ripe for a familiar brand of moralistic victim-blaming that accuses women and girls of deliberately behaving unsafely, views men’s sexuality as inherently dangerous and appropriative, and implies that women and girls who expose themselves to it bring their rapes upon themselves. Another interpretation of the scenario Despentes describes, however, is to read it as an example of teen audacity by girls defying the strictures usually imposed upon them. In the place of demure femininity, they boldly follow their desires away from the domestic space, across the water to a different capital and back, and then suffer the consequences in line with Leo and Paglia’s understanding of rape as punishment for such audacious infringements of young female propriety. If, to her readers, the scene Despentes paints is one of female adolescent vulnerability and naïveté – one where rape seems unsurprising or even inevitable – it is because Despentes deliberately wants her readership to appreciate how automatically and immediately the spotlight of judgement falls upon girls, not upon predatory men. Establishing the scene takes time, but Despentes does not then linger on details or interactions once the three men and two girls are in the car. She does not lead her readers up to the rape. In fact, King Kong Theory skips

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abruptly from the car to a new paragraph which begins in medias res of the rapes themselves, still in the present tense: While it is going on [Pendant que ça se passe], they pretend not to know exactly what’s happening. Because we are wearing miniskirts, and one of us has green hair and the other orange, we must ‘fuck like rabbits’ and so the rape they are carrying out is not actually a rape [donc le viol en train de se commettre n’en est pas tout à fait un]. As with most rapes, I suspect. I don’t imagine any of those three guys now considers himself a rapist. Because what they did was something else. Three of them with a gun, against two girls they had beaten to the point of drawing blood: not rape [pas du viol ]. (pp. 32–3; F, p. 37)

Decoding the beginning of this paragraph in either English or French takes time since the ‘it’ [ça] that is ‘going on’ [se passe] does not immediately have a referent until ‘the rape’ [le viol ] is finally mentioned towards the end of the second sentence. The prose, here, performs the reluctance of the men to give what is happening its proper name. Such disingenuousness is shocking, and Despentes underlines it with the blunt use of apophasis in the final sentence’s ironic definition of their violence as ‘not rape’. Her focus remains on the men, what they do, say, and mendaciously think, rather than on the girls. The phrase ‘fuck like rabbits’ stands out, encased in speech marks, falsely attributing to the girls an active role in the sexual violations being committed against them. It is a term Despentes has used before: in her first novel, it similarly falls from the lips of a rapist during a rape. Early into Baise-Moi, and all too similarly, three men who have driven up in a car violently rape the protagonist and her friend, beating the latter particularly brutally for resisting them: ‘She hears Karla getting hit, protesting twice in between. She’s afraid that they’re banging too hard, really breaking her to pieces. She’s afraid Karla will die from it. She shouts to her, “Let go, goddamn it, don’t ask for it.” It cracks the boys up: “I’ll tell you one thing, these bitches fuck like rabbits.”’64 As in Despentes’s own rape, the men speak as though what they are doing is not rape, and as though the resistance presented by the women is instead a sign of their compliance. In Baise-Moi the rapes are described in detail over several pages. By contrast, in King Kong Theory Despentes provides very few details of how the rapes proceeded, and the information she does give is interspersed among much longer discussions of rape’s cultural understanding. The textual result in King Kong Theory is akin to memory flashbacks: fleeting 64

V. Despentes, Baise-Moi, trans. B. Benderson (New York: Grove Press, 1999), p. 49.

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impressions from the scene are surrounded by analysis. King Kong Theory is far more interested in the cognitive dissonance of rapists than in lingering over the visceral elements of the rapes themselves. In this, Emin and Leo differ considerably from Despentes. While Leo is committed to a phenomenological documenting of what happened to her, and how it made her feel, Despentes omits a great deal. Instead, she discusses the perpetrators, positing that their skewed thinking means they believe that ‘if it ended up happening, then the girl must have, at some level, consented’ (p. 34). This is confirmed for her own case when, after her rape, one of the men discovers Despentes was carrying a switchblade throughout and concludes, ‘She liked it, then’ (p. 44). From the deliberately self-deluding logic such a comment betrays to the still habitual suggestion that women’s risky dress and behaviour invite rape, King Kong Theory sets out to systematically dispel rape fallacies and expose the mendacious thinking of rapists. As Despentes suspects, cognitive dissonance is a trait common among rapists. Leo’s perpetrator was the same, which led him, incredibly, to ask permission to kiss her as he painfully violated her. She is astonished, conjecturing, ‘Is this the fantasy? That he is my boyfriend, or that we are having a first date and a first kiss?’, but she consents in fear (p. 20). After the kiss and while still raping her, he asks, ‘Do you like it?’, to which she carefully responds, ‘It is not too bad’ (p. 20). This is an extreme manifestation of the everyday surreal: the conversation of an awkward date transplanted into the midst of a rape, as if there is no rape, as if consent had been given freely, as if the man did not have a gun. This is the most shocking and unexpected element of Leo’s experience, one the reader is unlikely to have anticipated, for brutality is usually conceived of as solely the exertion of physical power by one person over another rather than the forced physical and psychological enactment of a normative fantasy. Leo concludes, not unreasonably, that the ‘guy is crazy’ (p. 20), while his denial of her lack of consent continues to the end: ‘“I had some fun,” he said, with a smiling, happy face,’ after ejaculation (p. 21). This has a complex relationship to victimhood, for it denies the victim is a victim by trying to make her complicit. The same reality-denying dynamic is at work in Steve Worrell’s parting compliment to Emin after he rapes her. By writing this scene, as Emin wrote hers, and through the presentation of her own incredulity and fear, Leo wrenches her narrative back, and in the process exposes his methods of truth distortion. Emin, Leo, and Despentes were forced to participate in charades to cloak the reality of their rapes from the men committing them: these situations were surreal and obscene, but not anomalies. As Joanna

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Bourke has demonstrated in her study of rapists, pretence is a common component of how men who rape later ‘narrativise’ what they have done: Through recitation, [an] act of sexual violation is given meaning, including pleasure and pain, guilt and shame. Rape narratives [by the rapist] may ultimately always fail, but they are an attempt to grasp something profoundly significant for the perpetrator. The insistence on recitals of consent (‘she was wearing a tight red dress’) and pleasure (‘she was begging for it’), for instance, are attempts by sexual abusers to integrate their actions into a bearable narrative of the self. They are integral to the process of enabling the perpetrator to assimilate his (or her) acts into a non-violating/nontraumatizing ‘self ’. (p. 14)

Leo’s rapist may be unusual in the extent to which he maintained his fantasy narrative and demanded her participation in it during the crime but, as Bourke shows, from the point of view of the rapist his cognitive dissonance is an entirely legible and rational act of meaning-making for it spins a fiction of legitimation. Bourke notes that in the twentieth century, ‘with the development of a “dating culture”, rapists began attempting to fit their actions into romantic frameworks’, and she draws upon the example of a hitchhiker whose rapist afterwards offered to buy her dinner (p. 14). Such a man, Bourke says, seeks not to trick the women he rapes, but to trick himself in order ‘to shore up his identity as a man capable of giving as well as receiving sexual pleasure and companionship’ (p. 15). When Leo, Despentes, and Emin audaciously expose this logic in all its mendacious obscenity, the rapist emerges as at once a deeply horrifying and utterly pathetic figure. The prose of these new audacity writers of rape thus enacts upon their perpetrators an appropriately phallic deflation. Despentes’s writing also combats the strictures of victimhood on behalf of women. When the film of her novel Baise-Moi is banned, she attributes this to the fact that when the women are raped, they ‘didn’t weep runnynosed on the shoulders of men who would avenge them’ (p. 115). When the novel is criticised as ‘wailing’ about rape and lacking in dignity, she comments, ‘I am too noisy a victim,’ before aiming a decisively crude ‘fuck you’ at the reviewer (p. 115). Significantly, she does not defend the text on the grounds of its fictionality or deny that her own rape foreshadows its fictive realisations. Instead, she receives the attack upon her novel and film as an attack upon herself as a woman speaking out about her rape. Her life and her fiction are not discrete from each other, or easily separable; just as in King Kong Theory her autobiography combines with her theorisation of feminism’s current needs. This outright rejection of meek and quiet victimhood is also enacted through her polemical prose style, which

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pointedly encourages a resistance to shame. Like Emin, Despentes employs a frank, informal language, often with a blunt edge, as with her riposte to the reviewer of Baise-Moi, quoted earlier. While it is only in the third part of Strangeland that Emin begins to address her readers, Despentes strikes out straightaway in dedicatory mode: ‘I am writing as an ugly one for the ugly ones,’ begins King Kong Theory trenchantly, continuing by listing the types of people who ‘don’t get a look in the universal market of the consumable chick’ (p. 7). King Kong Theory’s opening chapter addresses those who do not fit in, those whom contemporary culture ignores, mocks, or tries to shame. Claiming she would not write what she does were she beautiful, Despentes explicitly rejects the shame attached to not conforming to the norms of ‘the femininity stakes’ (p. 8). Her body-essay starts from the position of having the ‘wrong’ body and the ‘wrong’ attributes to attract the ‘right’ heterosexually desiring look: ‘I am writing as a woman who is always too much of everything – too aggressive, too noisy, too fat, too rough, too hairy, always too masculine, I am told’ (p. 9). She positions herself as an audacious woman, one who wants what men are supposed to want, who refuses what men ask of her and who values the power of refusal, a woman who will not conform to socially prescribed gender roles, and who prizes her autonomy: I am writing therefore as a woman incapable of attracting male attention, satisfying male desire, or being satisfied with a place in the shade. It’s from here that I write, as an unattractive but ambitious woman, drawn to money I make myself, drawn to power, the power to do and to say no, drawn to the city rather than the home, excited by experience and not content with just hearing about it from others. (p. 9)

The chapter spends paragraph upon paragraph creatively and exhaustively listing the women and men Despentes says she is writing for, using at one stage a sentence which stretches to more than a page long and encompasses a diverse range of women, from the weak to the strong, from those who exceed what women are supposed to be or do to those who fall short: those who don’t like perfume shops, whose red lipstick is too red, who haven’t got the figure to dress like hookers and yet desperately want to, women who want to wear men’s clothes and a beard in the street, those who want to show it all, those whose shyness is due to their hang-ups, those who don’t know how to say no, those who are locked up in order to be controlled, women who are scary, pitiful ones, women who don’t turn men on, those with flabby skin and a face full of wrinkles, those who dream of plastic surgery. (p. 10)

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Shame is deliberately constructed in this opening as a socially induced emotion, consequent upon the judgement of others, but therefore possible to resist: instead of shame, Despentes encourages lividity; instead of social isolation, solidarity with others who are similarly judged to fall short of the norm or fail through excess. Given the prevalence of social shame, especially in responses to women’s appearance and sexuality, and given the book’s main topics of rape, sex work, and pornography are all heavily associated with shame, establishing a shame-resistant tone is a strategic opening, more universal than it might initially seem, and gathering all women and many non-gender-conforming men under the umbrella of those with the audacity to ask for a different world, one where they are valued and not punished for refusing to conform. Women are writing with new audacity about their rapes. Emin, Leo, and Despentes demonstrate this by blending genres to their own purposes and writing boldly and without shame about their ordeals. As Emin does most powerfully of all three in her naming of the men who raped and abused her, shame in these texts is turned back against male perpetrators. The affective forces of these texts differ: as we saw with Emin, her naming and shaming offers the men who harmed her up for public judgement, especially by the community within which she spent her youth. The politics here is performative rather than argued. Yet Emin and Leo share a similar focus on the details of their rape scenes, reinforcing how sexual violation imprints upon those who suffer it and rendering highly visual, affective accounts of the scenes. All three writers highlight the mendacity of rapists and their delusional insistence that what they have done is not rape. As we have seen, affective audacity is at work in all three texts, albeit differently in each case. If Emin lays out the evidence but largely leaves her reader to judge the social, economic, and structural conditions that made her vulnerable to rape and abuse, Leo and Despentes take the audacious step of using their autobiographical body-essays to argue directly against capitalism and the patriarchal relationship it consolidates and protects. While not denying the personal consequences rape has had upon their lives, they refuse to see the fact they were raped as personally targeted, instead placing what happened to them within contexts of socio-economic poverty and misogyny. For them, rape is not an isolated tragedy, but produced and permitted by a culture and economic distribution of resources which accords women less value than men. This is a distinct diversion from how much feminist writing uses affective personal testimonies. When Wendy Brown describes ‘wounded attachments’ as the basis for a dysfunctional politicised identity

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too attached to the site of its identified harm and pain and paradoxically reliant upon the political structures which marginalised it in the first place, it is clear that what Despentes and Leo are doing is markedly different, by critiquing the structure which has permitted harm to be done to them.65 They also offer a hopeful dimension to the phenomenon Alison Phipps has observed in contemporary feminist discourses which deploy personal experience. For Phipps, looking at case studies of feminist debates over sex work and women-only spaces, ‘experience is a form of capital invested to generate feeling and make political gains. This politics is quintessentially neoliberal, abstracting experience from its social context and deploying it in a competitive discursive arena in which historical dynamics, social contexts and structural power relations are obscured.’66 Leo and Despentes show that, unlike the case studies Phipps presents, experience can indeed be deployed affectively in service of an intersectional political critique that accounts for socio-economic and historical factors. Emin takes this in a different direction, turning her experiences into feminist art and thus quite literally into capital. These three new audacity writers offer an invigorated feminist critique and engage in feminist strategies of naming, shaming, and thus claiming their stories. They expose the fallacies that shame and berate women for non-normative behaviour, challenge the assumption that victimhood entails silence, and redirect blame towards the men who rape and the socio-economic environment which structures our present and facilitates sexual violence. 65 66

W. Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 52–76. A. Phipps, ‘Whose Personal Is More Political? Experience in Contemporary Feminist Politics’, Feminist Theory 17:3 (2016), pp. 303–21, at p. 312.

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chapter 2

Ugly Audacities in Auto/biography Genius, Betrayal, and Writer’s Block

What does it mean to be a writer of the self ? This question is asked by the authors to whom I now turn, and answered through an audacious revelation of their own ugly behaviours and desires. Their concerns are less directed to the structural political change demanded by Jana Leo and Virginie Despentes, as examined in the previous chapter, but their feminist convictions are evident in their challenge to notions of traditional authorship, even now still frequently coded as male when it comes to ‘serious writing’, which they achieve in part through the unflattering exposure of themselves on the page. Nobody, it is probably safe to say, wishes to be deemed ugly, yet in revealing the ugly facets of themselves that emerge when they write, Sheila Heti, Kate Zambreno, and Alison Bechdel risk precisely such a judgement. A person’s physical ugliness, William K. Miller proposes, inspires disgust because ‘we know how we see them and could not bear to be thus seen’.1 However, ugliness is not always physical or only a question of the visual, despite a long history in aesthetics of discussing it as a subset of beauty.2 Diverse forms of social and moral ugliness stretch along a spectrum from violent crime, like the rapes discussed in Chapter 1, to far milder but still offensive breaches of courtesy and etiquette. If, as Miller suggests, the sight of physical ugliness provokes a comparison between the disadvantaged ugly other and the self, then forms of moral and social ugliness admitted to in autobiographical writing risk initiating 1 2

W. I. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 82. For a long, broadly defined examination of ugliness with extracts by writers from the classical period to the present with surprisingly beautiful photographs of ugly artwork, see U. Eco, On Ugliness, trans. A. McEwen (London: Harvill Secker, 2007). An idiosyncratic examination of ugliness, again with images, is designer and journalist Stephen Bayley’s Ugly: The Aesthetic of Everything (London: Goodman Fiell, 2012). The fact that both books are full of images underlines how ugliness has been primarily conceptualised as visual. Featuring more scholarly but still visually informed discussions is the edited collection by A. Pop and M. Widrich, Ugliness: The Non-beautiful in Art and Theory (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2014), covering late nineteenth-century thinkers to modernist poets. See also L. Higgins, The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

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a similarly comparative process between the reader and the self thus exposed in print. Publicising one’s ugly misdeeds exacerbates the potential for provoking repulsion or censoriousness – both of which can coexist with voyeurism – in readers who from a safe distance can believe they would adhere to a different moral or social compulsion, and if they failed to do so would certainly never advertise the fact. As we shall see, however, these texts work with their readers in a rather different manner, more feminist by far. The ugly acts of Chapter 1 were atrocities committed against the authors, who then named and shamed their rapists or wrote of them in angry and polemical body-essays. By contrast, the ugliness discussed here is that of the writers themselves: their desires for greatness; their anxieties, failures, and struggles; their betrayals of those close to them; their mental health problems, poor choices, and excessiveness. Truly, these are the women Despentes was addressing when she started King Kong Theory: ‘I am writing as an ugly one for the ugly ones.’3 It is audacious to reveal all the ugliness entailed in writing the self, and doing so challenges the romanticised image of the author effortlessly pouring himself out onto the page. Instead, Heti, Zambreno, and Bechdel place the authorship of themselves as women at the heart of their projects, laying bare the making of a writer and her work. Life-writing is life-changing, these books assert. In Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2010), Sheila desperately wants to write but cannot complete her commissioned play. Through a friendship with the artist Margaux, she eventually learns how to have the courage to write her ugly self. Zambreno’s Heroines (2012) is a hectic meditation on her favourite women writers from the modernist period, many of whom existed in the shadow of their more famous husbands, and with whom Zambreno claims commonality. At the same time, Heroines tells the turbulent tale of Zambreno’s relationship with herself as a writer, and functions as an encouraging exhortation to emerging women autobiographers to bare all. Zambreno documents the ugliness of writing: her writer’s block, her anxiety, and her anger at how women writers are overlooked, and their work dismissed or trivialised, even in the twenty-first century. Finally, Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? (2012) is a multilayered graphic memoir about her childhood, her complex relationship with her mother, the therapy she has undergone for many years, and her difficulties with writing and drawing.4 In both her first memoir, Fun Home and Are You My 3 4

V. Despentes, King Kong Theory, trans. S. Benson (New York: Feminist Press, 2010), p. 7. Fascinatingly, although outside my remit here, Heti and Zambreno have since followed Bechdel in writing about their mothers. Zambreno’s Book of Mutter (Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2017) is an experimental text about memory, writing, and mourning her mother. Heti’s Motherhood (London:

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Mother? Bechdel’s drawings are particularly invested in copying from life, with ‘painstakingly’ reproduced photographs, maps, newspaper clippings, the handwriting in letters and her childhood diary entries, ‘all very carefully traced and redrawn’.5 She even copies passages of the books she is reading and ‘highlights’ sections so they stand out. This fidelity to detail is not simply a deep artistic commitment to ‘reminding the readers, these are real people. This stuff really happened’, as she says in an interview.6 It is also a problem, as her therapist observes: ‘you often talk about wishing you could draw more spontaneously’.7 Unlike the texts explored in Chapter 1, which recounted dramatic assaults, these three books do not detail a singular life-changing event but focus on the self, how it can be expressed, and how its expression by necessity includes other people in the enterprise. To write one’s life, in these texts, entails confronting and trying to find a place within a tangle of personal history and literary legacies. This is achieved through the slow understanding and teasing apart of different aspects of one’s identity, emotions, and motivations. It means unpicking one’s life from those of other women without disavowing social bonds and responsibilities. And, as Zambreno alludes to, in a more disconcerting manner writing can unravel an author’s stability, even threaten to tear her apart. The results are self-portraits of writers who are not necessarily likeable because they refuse to hide the ugliness involved in not just their lives but also the process of writing about them. There are strong literary precedents for ugly admissions and they are central to the fascination we have long held for autobiography. From the genre’s inception with Saint Augustine’s Confessions, wherein he admits to thieving fruit as a child, the ugly act has been a key signifier of the autobiographer’s honesty and authenticity, assuring readers that their narrator is confessing all, the bad alongside the good.8 With Augustine,

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Harvill Secker, 2018) explores its narrator’s ambivalence about motherhood while musing on her maternal legacies and lineage, and her role as a writer. For all three, then, writing involves a reckoning with the mother at some stage. Bechdel’s title echoes that of the illustrated children’s book by P. D. Eastman, Are You My Mother? (New York: Random House, 1960), wherein a newborn chick whose mother has gone to find food falls from the nest, then asks other animals and objects whether they are its mother before being reunited. H. L. Chute, ‘Alison Bechdel (2006 and 2012)’, in H. L. Chute (ed.), Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 155–76, at p. 161. Ibid., p. 163. A. Bechdel, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012), p. 251. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin Classics, 2002), p. 47. Augustine refers, in Pine-Coffin’s translation, to ‘ugly sin’ on page 177. According to Pop and Widrich, Augustine’s ‘proportion theory of beauty is rounded out by a treatment of ugliness as its complement, serving to make beauty whole as silence does sound and darkness light’, but that is not

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the confession is of a sin and is made in the service of advancing religious doctrine; one translation renders him referring to the ‘audacious’ sinseeking soul.9 In a later yet still religious age on the cusp of embracing more secular ideas, Jean-Jacques Rousseau also admits to a theft. This incident Paul de Man describes as ‘a truly primal scene of lie and deception’ and, his analysis shows, one where the sin of theft is far less ugly than Rousseau’s subsequent lying, which loses a maid her job and leads to an even uglier example of the autobiographer’s ingenious but weaselly selfjustification.10 Ever since these fathers of confession set the model for the form, autobiography has traditionally entailed the admission of ugly moral or social transgressions: even in the tragic tales rather dismissively termed ‘misery memoirs’, where the primary focus is upon eliciting readerly condemnation for extreme and unjust abuse suffered by a child, authors nevertheless include examples of youthful misdemeanours.11 In a broad and historical sense, then, autobiographies have long trafficked in the audacity of ugly acts, just to differing extents and with different aims in view. Conversion narratives are by definition didactic, modelling a moral rejection of the ugliness of a sinful life, but in a secular present autobiography suffers suspicion. Since the twentieth century, indulging in autobiography has attracted accusations of profit-seeking, self-promotion, or sheer narcissism.12 The authors studied in this chapter are incapable of avoiding the taint of these charges completely, even though none of them has written straightforward autobiographies. Their work moves beyond the sphere of simple self-interest, however, through its investment in unravelling the shape, significance, and ethical pitfalls of relationships with other women, from the mother and the best friend to literary reflected in the dichotomising of sin and God’s goodness and beauty which runs through the Confessions. See Pop and Widrich, Ugliness (p. 276), where they provide an annotated bibliography of theories of ugliness and from where this summary is drawn. 9 ‘Audacious’ is used by E. B. Pusey, who translated the version of Augustine’s Confessions available on the Project Gutenberg website. It is used at the end of Book VI. See www.gutenberg.org. PineCoffin provides more modern diction, using ‘rashly’ (p. 132). 10 P. de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 278. 11 For classic examples of ‘misery memoirs’, see D. Pelzer, A Child Called It (London: Orion Books, 1995 [2000]) and K. O’Beirne, Kathy’s Story: The True Story of a Childhood Hell inside Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2005). 12 The classic study making this accusation is C. Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978). This charge is discussed in R. Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), pp. 106–8. Neither has Felski’s defence quelled criticism: similar accusations of the self-indulgence of autobiography are made by Laura Kipnis, as discussed in Chapter 3. Feminism and self-promotion are not necessarily inimical, as explored in Chapter 5’s reading of Vanessa Place.

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antecedents and other women writers. There is danger here too, though, warns Leigh Gilmore, especially for the feminist critic: unlike traditional criticism of autobiography, which treats the authorial self as an expressive individual, Gilmore thinks that ‘much feminist criticism of autobiography has sought thematic, formal, and even broadly epistemological coherence among all women’s autobiography, claiming that women represent the self by representing others because that is how women know and experience identity’.13 The result, Gilmore argues, is that feminist criticism of autobiography reflects the ideological commitments of individualism, producing readings wherein: [M]en are autonomous individuals with inflexible ego boundaries who write autobiographies that turn on moments of conflict and place the self at the centre of the drama. Women, by contrast, have flexible ego boundaries, develop a view of world characterized by relationships (with priority frequently given to the mother-daughter bond), and therefore represent the self in relation to ‘others’. (p. xiii)

Gilmore’s Autobiographics, published in the early 1990s, deliberately departs from these interpretations, reading women’s self-representation for how agency is established. In attending to female relationships in the work of Bechdel, Heti, and Zambreno, I appear to risk reproducing the failings of feminist criticism Gilmore identifies. Yet this is not the case, for these texts do not follow the patterns she describes. Bechdel and Heti betray mother and friend respectively as a necessary component of forging their own artistic autonomy, and all three writers place themselves firmly at the centre of their stories but also acknowledge the importance of relationality, extending it to think beyond relationships with the living to how they also relate to past literary and theoretical figures. Two of the books, with question marks in their titles, are presented as quests for knowledge; all three provide models of authorship and its travails, and, as we see in what follows, they deliberately do not break with autobiography’s earlier didacticism. By showing how they have overcome obstacles in writing their auto/biographies, they implicitly – or explicitly, in the case of Zambreno – offer their stories up as examples of what can be achieved. This involves grappling with what is inherited, sometimes through the family, as with Bechdel’s mother, sometimes from literary genealogies, as in Zambreno’s Heroines, and sometimes, as all three explore, with what it means for the self who wants to be her own author and authority. 13

L. Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. xiii.

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The ‘auto/biography’ of this chapter’s title reflects the ambitious experimentalism of these texts. They all provide portraits of other women as well as of the writers themselves. As literary theorists and practitioners often agree, neither autobiography nor biography can claim to be a pure form untouched by the other.14 Laura Marcus’s detailed study, Auto/biographical Discourses, one of the first to employ the now-familiar neologism that imbricates the two generic terms, takes a different tack to Gilmore by celebrating the influence of feminist criticism. Marcus argues that feminism had a determining role in the dual recognition, now accepted within the practices of biography and autobiography, that ‘recounting one’s own life almost inevitably entails writing the life of an other or others; [and] writing the life of another must surely entail the biographer’s identifications with his or her subject, whether these are made explicit or not’.15 This is confirmed by the women writers featured in this chapter, whose manner of writing prevents clear unravelling of the genetic distinctions governing autobiography and biography, and whose commitment to writing about themselves detaching from other women and forging their identities as artists drives the formally innovative aspects of their texts. For example, in her graphic memoir, Are You My Mother?, Bechdel writes not only about her own mother but also the women and men she wishes had been her mother, including two of her counsellors and the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott. Zambreno’s Heroines draws upon the lives of Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivien(ne) Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and other female writers and modernist wives who are routinely interpreted through a pathologising lens, in order to think through her own position as a burgeoning writer and wife of an academic. In the third book I discuss, Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, Sheila sets out to answer the question of her title by first asking it of her friends and observing what their behaviour reveals. Styled, and initially subtitled, ‘A Novel from Life,’ How Should a Person Be? was published by Heti as fiction, or what James Wood calls a deliberately ‘ugly novel’.16 Wood is referring to the dialogue Heti has 14

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This is explored in Richard Holmes’s lyrical meditations on being a biographer in his autobiography, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (London and New York: Harper Perennial, 2005). L. Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 273–4. J. Wood, ‘True Lives: Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?’, The New Yorker (25 June 2012). Wood is referring to the text’s ‘rapid prose’. The book was first published by the small Canadian press House of Anansi in 2010. In 2012, the same press issued the book with a cover that carried the subtitle ‘A Novel from Life’. When published by Henry Holt, a US imprint of Macmillan, in 2012,

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included that is drawn from life, based on transcripts of recorded conversations. The text also includes emails and refers to real people and to artworks they have made. Thus, the narrator shares her author’s name and her best friend shares the name of Heti’s friend Margaux Williamson. In life as in the text, Williamson is a Toronto-based artist; in the book, her paintings of herself as a Buddha and of Sheila in House for a Head play important roles, and real-life versions of these can be found in her back catalogue.17 Because of these elements, and because new audacity writers regularly play at and across the boundaries of genres, I read How Should a Person Be? as life-writing, even in the face of Heti’s sometime claim that it is a ‘novel’.18 Heti admits that How Should a Person Be? contains conversations, emails, and scenarios drawn from her life, as well as pivoting on her experience of failing to write a commissioned play. There is a writing of life performed in the text but also, perhaps of equal importance, a recognition that lives written are lives represented, and thus at a distance from whatever real events are their reference points.19 Most reviewers agree that the book challenges the novel form through its inclusion of autobiographical material.20 Moreover, in recent decades new terms have emerged, such as ‘autofiction’, ‘faction’, and ‘reality literature’, to name writings like Heti’s which refuse to respect genre distinctions and deliberately fail to signal clearly the difference between what is real and what is imagined.21 Yet these

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the subtitle was dropped, and remained so for the 2013 UK publication by Harvill Secker. The Picador cover carries the subtitle ‘A Novel’. For an article which tracks the publication history and how it affected the book’s reception, see J. Barber, ‘How Should a Novel Be? Don’t Ask Sheila Heti’, The Globe and the Mail (13 April 2013). Interestingly, each publication saw Heti revise the novel slightly. Joanna Biggs in London Review of Books calls the first version ‘uglier’. See J. Biggs, ‘It Could Be Me’, London Review of Books 35:2 (24 January 2013), p. 32. The paintings can be viewed on Williamson’s website: www.margauxwilliamson.com. House for a Head can also be seen. In an interview, Heti states that the paintings from the book’s Ugly Painting Competition really exist. See T. La Force, ‘Sheila Heti on How Should a Person Be?’, The Paris Review (18 June 2012). In Chapter 5, I similarly insist on reading Vanessa Place’s Statement of Facts as life-writing, even though it was published and received by critics as conceptual poetry. S. Heti, ‘Preface’, All Our Happy Days Are Stupid (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2015), p. v. This is the play that Sheila fails to write in How Should a Person Be? In a strange twisting together of reality and fiction, the play was eventually staged after a theatre writer and director read How Should a Person Be? and wrote to Heti ‘to see if the play was real’ (p. vi). In the forward to All Our Happy Days, he states he asked for her first draft, ‘before the countless revisions it was subjected to in its decade of dramaturgical purgatory’. See J. Tannahill, ‘Foreword’, in All Our Happy Days Are Stupid (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2015), pp. ix–xi, at p. ix. Tannahill staged All Our Happy Days in 2011. Wood, ‘True Lives’; Biggs, ‘It Could Be Me’; Barber, ‘How Should a Novel Be?’. See also the interview with Heti in The Paris Review in which she talks about how when writing herself she becomes intertwined with the first person in the work: La Force, ‘Sheila Heti’. O. Conolly and B. Haydar, ‘The Case against Faction’, Philosophy and Literature 32 (2008), pp. 347–58. They discuss Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965), considered the first ‘faction’

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new designations are awkward, and their very proliferation points to the fact that the entanglement they name cannot be clarified into different compositional categories. One response to new mergers of autobiography and fiction, and the one I am pursuing by including Heti’s book, and, in a later chapter, Juliet Jacques’s autobiographical fiction ‘Weekend in Brighton’ in Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing, is to interpret them as participating in a wider cultural desire to move beyond debates that seek to clearly delineate the inevitably sticky line between ‘pure’ autobiography and the fictionalising of life.22 This accords with what David Shields, in his Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, identifies as ‘a new artistic movement’, one characteristic of which is ‘a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real’.23 At root, as Shields’s book explores, this is driven less by a pursuit of formal innovation for its own sake and more by a wider recognition of what Nicholas Royle, following the insights of deconstruction and post-structuralist thinkers, has summarised as ‘a certain literality or possibility of fictiveness at the heart of bearing witness’, even when it comes to bearing witness to the self.24 An inveterate transcriber of conversations, Bechdel, like Heti, neatly captures how what was once seen as a tension between fiction and reality is now a creative resource, claiming, ‘I can only make things up about things that have already happened.’25 Bechdel, Zambreno, and Heti display little discomfort or anxiety within their work over whether their readers will be troubled by its truth-status, although they do express concern for how those close to them view their projects. They insist that they are writers first and foremost, and the story of how they came to write what they did is

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publication. ‘Autofiction’ is commonly associated with French writers such as Marguerite Duras or Christine Angot and is discussed in P. Gasparini, Autofiction: un adventure du langage (Paris: Seuil, 2008). ‘Reality literature’ is introduced in an afterword to Nicholas Royle’s novel Quilt (Brighton: Myriad Editions, 2010) to name ‘a new attention to realism’ (p. 158) and is further discussed in N. Royle and J. Cooke, ‘A New Literary Intimacy: An Interview with Nicholas Royle’, in J. Cooke (ed.), Scenes of Intimacy: Reading, Writing and Theorizing Contemporary Literature (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 31–2. Juliet Jacques confirms this, writing ‘maybe the only places for the novel to be now are where autofiction is taking it,’ in an interview on her top five autofictions, which features Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick at number three and Heti’s How Should a Person Be? at number four. See J. Jacques in an undated interview with B. Wilford, ‘The Best Books on Autofiction’, available at: www .fivebooks.com. D. Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 5. Shields’s book is composed of numbered points, many of which are quotes from other writers or academics. Their influence is acknowledged in endnotes, but this section (point 3) has no such note, so it can be assumed to be his own opinion. Cooke and Royle, ‘A New Literary Intimacy’, p. 32. 25 Bechdel, Are You My Mother?, p. 28.

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central to each text. Like all the authors studied in Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing, their writing is non-traditional and pushes genre boundaries in new directions, whether through Bechdel’s masterly employment of graphic memoir, Zambreno’s mixing of personal testimony and the essay format, or Heti’s blending of fiction and life, but the greater audacity these texts exhibit is in what they refuse to hide about the ugliness involved in writing the self.26

Ugly Betrayals in Bechdel and Heti As de Man highlights in his reading of Rousseau, betrayal is one of the ugliest acts and it plays a complex central role in both Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? and Heti’s How Should a Person Be? as a necessary failure en route to artistic autonomy. There is danger in the compulsion to write one’s life – as Bechdel puts it, ‘for better or for worse, I can’t seem to stop making my private life public’ – because it entails the inclusion of others, which can be deeply discomforting for them, and even lead to legal proceedings.27 Are You My Mother? is a book about the writing of books, referring frequently to its own composition and that of Bechdel’s first memoir project, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, about her father, his secret sexual life, and his mysterious death. In an interview following Fun Home’s publication, Bechdel admitted it was ‘in many ways a huge violation of my family’.28 She describes how, during the researching and writing of her father’s life, her mother ‘felt betrayed – quite justifiably so – that I was using things she’d told me in confidence about my father’.29 This first betrayal makes an appearance in Are You My Mother? but the book’s primary betrayal, in several senses of the phrase, is Bechdel’s relentless exploration of her mother’s failings as a parent. Readers learn that during Bechdel’s childhood her mother could not breastfeed (pp. 60–3); was cold and inattentive 26

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As Jared Gardner demonstrates, graphic memoirs are not new within the world of comics, which has seen, since 1972, ‘a torrent’ of such forms. See J. Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), p. 141. However, Bechdel, following Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking Maus, is one of few who has a wider public. Bechdel discusses this in relation to Fun Home, which, extremely unusually for a graphic memoir, hit number one on The Times literature list. See L. Emmert, ‘The Alison Bechdel Interview’, The Comics Journal 282 (April 2007), n.p. Chute, ‘Alison Bechdel’, p. 172. Bechdel’s mother is uncomfortable with her writing about their family and Heti’s friend Sholem, who appears in How Should a Person Be?, does not enjoy the experience. In Chapter 3, I discuss Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, at the heart of which is Dick’s betrayal of Kraus, and hers of him and, at least to an emotional extent, of her husband. Dick legally tried to prevent the publication of I Love Dick, details of which I give in Chapter 3. Chute, Outside the Box, p. 162. 29 Ibid., p. 159, and Bechdel, Are You My Mother?, p. 200.

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(pp. 129, 136, 219); too busy (pp. 13–14); depressed (pp. 98, 111); more affectionate towards her male children (p. 85); and incapable of affirming Bechdel as a girl (p. 169). Even in adulthood, the mother is uncomfortable with her daughter’s sexuality and wishes her lesbian cartoons, Dykes to Look Out For, could be published pseudonymously (pp. 182, 228). Given all this, the book’s title functions as both a question and a form of accusation, as though her mother were not recognisably a parent. Bechdel admits, ‘I know she wishes I weren’t writing this book about her,’ but pushes on with the project regardless (p. 234). Instead of revealing our family’s failings to the public, the acceptable stranger to whom we are supposed to turn in confidence with our ‘mother troubles’ is, of course, the therapist, yet Bechdel prises open this door too, with numerous scenes of therapy conversations that attempt to unravel what her mother’s actions have meant for her. There is value in betrayal for Bechdel, who understands its importance psychoanalytically: the writing and publication of Are You My Mother? is presented as a deliberately destructive act which finally enables her to separate from her mother. In a remarkable moment a few pages from the end of the book, Bechdel’s mother, despite her misgivings, gives her daughter positive feedback on the first four sections of Are You My Mother? Bechdel writes joyously in response, ‘At last, I have destroyed my mother, and she has survived my destruction’ (p. 285). This is resolutely Winnicottian: in a neat summary of the ‘vital core’ of D. W. Winnicott’s theory, Bechdel glosses, ‘The subject must destroy the object. And the object must survive this destruction’ (p. 267). The mother-object has survived the audacious betrayal represented by the auto/biography, which traces the subject’s tortuous journey through psychoanalytic literature and psychotherapeutic conversations to an understanding that, as the final double-page spread asserts, ‘there was a certain thing I did not get from my mother. There is a lack, a gap, a void’ (p. 288). How the ugliness of detailing her mother’s failures and the impact they have had upon Bechdel’s emotional life is finally mitigated is through the recognition that her mother taught her ‘a way out’, as the very last panel depicts (p. 289). This Bechdel links to writing and creativity through a series of childhood memories of fantasy play between mother and daughter wherein the former aids and mends the latter, who pretends to be disabled or ill. In these scenes, her mother’s enabling play acknowledged and gave space for the development of the imagination: Bechdel actually calls it ‘the moment my mother taught me to write’ (p. 287). In these closing pages, Bechdel attributes to her mother the provision of a difficult enough upbringing that

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her daughter has the material to pen an in-depth graphic memoir about it. The cartoonist has commented upon this paradoxical gift in an interview: ‘It’s kind of a circular logic: If I’d had different parents, I would probably not have needed to write these books about my parents. But I’m glad I had the parents I did, I’m grateful for all the ways they both oppressed and nurtured me as an artist, and I’m glad I have been able to climb out from under their thumbs.’30 The audacious daughter refuses to keep quiet about the failings of her family but in the process of writing about them finds they are the wellspring of her vocation. Thus it is that through betraying her mother Bechdel hopes to unravel her own story from that of her remaining parent so that she is free – one book expunging the legacy of the father, the other that of the mother – to be autonomous. Like for Virginia Woolf, whose To the Lighthouse is a reference point throughout, writing Are You My Mother? is supposed to mark the end of her obsession with her mother and her mother’s failures to parent. An act of betrayal is similarly at the heart of Heti’s How Should a Person Be? and its protagonist’s gradual increase in self-understanding and development as a writer. The ugly self that Sheila eventually finds the audacity to write is depicted as the redress to her betrayal of Margaux. At many levels, the mistakes she makes in her friendship with Margaux are metaphors for the missteps on her journey to writing How Should a Person Be? At the start of the book Sheila states that for years she had asked its titular question of everyone she met, desirous of finding someone whose answer she could imitate: ‘I was always watching to see what they were going to do in any situation, so I could do it too. I was always listening to their answers, so if I liked them, I could make them my answers too’ (p. 1).31 Thus the search for how to be begins with how to be like someone else, and it is Margaux, the book soon convinces us, that Sheila admires the most. While imitation is not de facto betrayal, it threatens the individuality of the person imitated and so risks being perceived as a betrayal of the silent good faith bond that decrees recognition of and respect for the autonomy of friends. Where betrayal becomes more explicit is in Sheila’s plans to use Margaux to help her finish the play she is struggling to write, by recording their conversations. The first time she uses the tape recorder, Sheila asks Margaux’s permission, and her friend replies: ‘Don’t you know that what I fear most is my words floating separate from my body?’ (p. 59). Margaux’s initial refusal is retracted with this caveat, ‘Just promise you won’t betray me’ 30 31

Chute, Outside the Box, p. 172. S. Heti, How Should a Person Be? (London: Harvill Secker, 2012), p. 1.

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(p. 61). Tellingly, Sheila replies, ‘I don’t even know what that means’ (p. 61). A temporary paradox is produced here, what I have elsewhere called the performance of a text’s own perversity, for at the moment the reader encounters this conversation, they encounter the act of betrayal which Margaux fears and Sheila thinks she was promising she would not make: the taped conversations are in a public book and Margaux’s words are floating separate from her body.32 In her quest to discover how to be, Sheila continually fails to discern the difference between admiring emulation and ugly appropriation. In an adolescent moment during a shopping trip, she deliberately purchases the same yellow dress as Margaux, which upsets and disturbs her friend (pp. 115–16). Locating the problem as Sheila’s infringement upon her autonomy but using a non-threatening lower-case pronoun, Margaux writes, ‘i really do need some of my own identity’ (p. 116) and later points out, ‘I’m doing a lot, what with letting you tape me, but – boundaries, Sheila. Boundaries. We need them’ (p. 133). The tension between the women is caused by Sheila’s desire not simply to mimic her friend, as with the dress, but also to incorporate Margaux by writing her words and her life into her play – although also, of course, into How Should a Person Be? – and in so doing to threaten to efface her and her artistic autonomy. She will no longer be Margaux Williamson by the artist Margaux Williamson but Margaux Williamson by the writer Sheila Heti. Intra- and extra-textually, Heti is audaciously pushing up against the limits of the friendship which she nevertheless highly values, dragging Margaux into her projects. Margaux is reluctant to read the transcripts of their taped conversations, but after she does she paints and exhibits a self-portrait entitled Margaux Souvenir of herself as a Buddha, and removes the paints and canvasses from her home studio. Sheila, knowing her friend’s view on religion, interprets the painting in the following way and leaves Toronto as a consequence: I had come too close and hurt her – killed whatever in Margaux made art, whatever allowed her to tell herself that it was alright to be a painter in the face of all her doubts [about the social and political functions of art]. I knew why and how it had happened. Instead of sitting down and writing my play with my words – using my imagination, pulling up the words from the solitude and privacy of my soul – I had used her words, stolen what was hers. I had plagiarized her being and mixed it up with the ugliness that was mine! (p. 180) 32

J. Cooke, ‘The Risks of Intimate Writing’, Angelaki 16:2 (2011), pp. 3–18. In this article, I discuss how Hélène Cixous writes about betraying her brother by including him in her writing after promising she will not.

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In a reaction laced with narcissism, Sheila understands what she has done as an act of ugly audacity. She sees the portrait as a gesture of Margaux’s despair and resignation at being enrolled in Sheila’s writing project, and therefore deems the painting ‘ugly’ (p. 176) and ‘utterly grotesque’ (p. 175). A different interpretation might see the self-portrait as a deliberate restatement of Margaux’s skill and identity as an artist: having been Sheila’s object, she immediately produces a work for which she is both subject and object. While Sheila is convinced her betrayal is her plagiarism of Margaux, in the chapter fittingly entitled ‘What Is Betrayal?’ Margaux spells it out for her: she feels betrayed because Sheila befriended and recorded her, but then, ‘as soon as you’ve learned how a person should be, you’re done with me’ (p. 242). The ugly betrayal is to instrumentalise a friendship for artistic ends, and then leave Toronto without farewell or explanation, abandoning Margaux once the manuscript is complete. In fact, Margaux is wrong in her assumption that Sheila has completed her play. For Sheila to become a writer after this, for her to be worthy of Margaux’s friendship, and win her friend’s approval for a book within which she will be a key character, Sheila must unravel herself from relying upon only Margaux’s words and write the ugliness of her betrayal of their friendship into How Should a Person Be? Betrayal haunts auto/biographers. Bechdel and Heti make the ugly audacity of betrayal central to their projects, but in so doing they convert it eventually to more salutary ends. Much as we see with Marie Calloway in the next chapter, disclosure can close off access to an author, who recedes from public grasp through the paradoxical process of making themselves public. We might consider this the courting and curation of a public intimacy deliberately crafted to protect the private individual. At the end of Are You My Mother? Bechdel and her mother discuss memoir writing, as they have done intermittently throughout the project. However, there’s a new, almost conspiratorial tone, with Bechdel’s mother approvingly quoting Dorothy Gallagher, who suggests the memoirist’s primary commitment is to the story they are telling, ahead of family or even truth (pp. 284–5). This recognition, her mother’s final acceptance that betrayal is necessary to the art of the auto/biographer, delights Bechdel. By contrast, in How Should a Person Be? Margaux writes a final email to Heti accepting the recordings and suggests that ‘maybe we can be honest and transparent and give away nothing’ (p. 286). What is refused here is an economic model of the self whereby self-disclosure entails self-diminution. Instead, having one’s words float free of one’s body, as Margaux expresses it, is eventually affirmed as a creative practice. In an interview between Heti, Williamson,

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and Sholem Krishtalka, whose artwork is disparaged in comparison with Williamson’s in How Should a Person Be? and who, in the interview, declares his discomfort at being ‘utilised’ in the book, Williamson reflects on how her experience of being represented has given her a different sense of self: At one point during the last four years, I suddenly thought, ‘Oh, no one can steal my soul – it’s all just fragmentation.’ For me, being in Sheila’s book, it really felt like that. I don’t even understand the concept of a soul so well, and never thought I had one, let’s say. But after Sheila’s book, I thought, ‘Oh, I have to have something.’ After all of this, there’s one thing that’s remaining that can’t be in a book.33

Being made public actually creates for Williamson an internal and completely private sense of self. Krishtalka’s far less enthusiastic response to Heti’s experiment with the lives of her friends – reading her first chapter, entitled ‘Sholem Paints’, makes him ‘shudder’ – demonstrates that her audacity is not automatically beneficent and the risk she takes has real consequences.34 That this group of friends understands what they do as art, however, allows them to transform the ugliness of the project into a point of interest, so that they can retain their friendship ties in spite of Sheila’s audacity.

The Ugliness of Writer’s Block Betrayal is a socially ugly act, but there are other kinds of ugly audacity in How Should a Person Be?, Are You My Mother?, and Heroines. Hannah Sullivan diagnoses autobiographical writing as suffering from ‘the problem of finishing’, a conclusion based upon the ongoing life that does not end when the writing does and supported by her research into the propensity for revisions that many autobiographers in her study exhibit. Yet the writers of this chapter suffer from a different kind of problem with finishing, evidenced by their struggles with writer’s block, an ugliness which arrives unbidden but originates within the self.35 Sullivan’s study opens with the confident assertion that ‘early twenty-first-century writers believe in revision’ (p. 1), noting that it tends to ‘become an indicator of 33 34 35

S. Krishtalka, ‘You and Me and Her and Us and Them: A Conversation on Using and Being Used’, C Magazine 109 (Spring 2011), pp. 4–13, at p. 7. Ibid. H. Sullivan, The Work of Revision (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 207.

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authorial integrity and the difficulty and seriousness of the revised artwork’ (p. 2). With Zambreno, Heti, and Bechdel, however, the situation is not so composed. Instead of indicating authorial integrity, their writer’s block exposes a darker dimension of the writing process, one often involving a struggle with mental health. Testifying to this audaciously bares the reality of writing for these authors and provides a different kind of compositional narrative to the one many authors cultivate. In a somewhat delirious and claustrophobic chiasmus, the story of their writer’s block unblocks the writing of their story. Zambreno insists that even the scene of successful writing does not present a pretty picture: ‘when I write I am an ugly woman, I am rude and crabby, I am braless, my breasts knocking up against each other, I don’t wear deodorant or makeup, don’t leave the house for days’.36 Far worse and more annihilating is when writer’s block descends, which occurs, she confesses, on ‘more days than I’d like to admit’ (p. 50). Describing this as a physical sensation of ‘heaviness’, she claims several times that ‘when I don’t write I don’t feel I deserve the day’ (pp. 33–4); in fact, writer’s block days are those when ‘I do not exist at all. Don’t want to exist’ (p. 50). The stakes are high if writing is what makes you feel alive. Less existentially dramatic but more persistent is Sheila’s inability to complete her play in How Should a Person Be?, which gestures towards an unspoken addendum to the book’s titular question: how should a person be a writer? One encouraging answer the book implicitly provides is that writers need interesting, artistic friends whose singularity they properly value, and the confidence to write of their ugly audacities, whether that is the betrayal of a friend or the reality of their writer’s block. How Should a Person Be? is framed at either end by the challenge of the Ugly Painting Competition between fellow artists Margaux and Sholem. Will they have the audacity to make an ugly painting and show it to their friends? At the start of the book, Sheila muses on her commitment to avoiding ugliness: ‘I had spent so much time trying to make the play I was writing – and my life and my self – into an object of beauty. It was exhausting and all that I knew’ (p. 13). Life, her self, and her play all collapse into a single category for Sheila’s aesthetic improvement. But selfrepresentation with a commitment to mimesis or verisimilitude – through the techniques of transcription Sheila uses, for instance – may not be able to transform an ugly scene into a beautiful art object, as Immanuel Kant 36

K. Zambreno, Heroines (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), p. 213.

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claimed genuine art does.37 The Ugly Painting Competition reflects on Kant’s artistic observation by challenging Margaux and Sholem to abandon the urge to create beauty and instead deliberately to court its opposite. Sheila is the unacknowledged third competitor and the risk, as she perceives it, is that if the self is ugly, if the words and thoughts of that self are ugly, uninteresting, or unwise, then so will be the book or the play that results from them. If she really wrote herself, Sheila predicts, ‘I would have no new friends once my ugliness was out there in the world for everyone to see’ (p. 262). This is the audacious risk at the heart of How Should a Person Be?: to abandon imperatives to beauty, and make ugly art from the ugly self. When she finally sits down to write, Sheila pens not the play she had intended, hoped, and so far failed to write but another text that the reader is left to infer is How Should a Person Be? In a scene which, like Zambreno’s, is denuded of the romance of authorship, she describes how: ‘I went straight to my studio and thought about everything I had, all the trash and the shit inside me. And I started throwing the trash and throwing the shit, and the castle began to emerge’ (p. 277). This ‘throwing’ that is writing the self is also, more conventionally, an uncovering: ‘I’d never before wanted to uncover all the molecules of shit that were such a part of my deepest being, which, once released, would smell forever of the shit that I was, and which nothing – not exile, not fame – could ever disappear’ (p. 278). While shit and trash are classically abject in the Kristevean sense, this is not an abject scene but one wherein the writer actively takes responsibility for unravelling and revealing the self, creatively using her ugliness to overcome writer’s block and finally produce How Should a Person Be? 38 The result is not entirely comfortable because Sheila Heti is not entirely likeable: she makes poor choices, thinks about herself incessantly and about most events through the prism of her own desires, and is, right up until this final creative act, a failure when it comes to being a writer. In other words, she has very recognisable human failings, and has the audacity to write them into her work. Bechdel’s writing struggles are closest to the sense of revision Sullivan articulates, although considerably more extreme and, due to Bechdel’s psychotherapeutic treatment, quickly pathologised. In one of Are You My Mother? ’s many therapy scenes, Bechdel discusses the writing of her first graphic memoir, Fun Home, admitting that ‘for every sentence I put down, 37 38

I. Kant, Critique of Judgement, (ed.) N. Walker, trans. J. Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 141. For shit and trash, see J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. L. S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 2–3. For Kristeva’s theory of abjection of the self, see pp. 5–6.

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I delete two’ (p. 18). Like Penelope’s ancient unravelling of her day’s weaving in the Odyssey, this is interpreted as a form of subterfuge, what one therapist calls ‘undoing’, whereby the anxious self deliberately obstructs the writing self (p. 19). It is not classic writer’s block – where no writing can be done and composition stalls – but rather a repeated return to the blank slate, a textual erasure that works as its own sort of block, and which, in turn, requires the unravelling that therapy promises, and which forms much of Are You My Mother? Bechdel identifies the genesis of her writer’s block in a period of obsessive-compulsive disorder she experienced in childhood. This manifested as a drive to edit her diary, and at its height she began scoring out her own subjectivity, obscuring the many instances she had written ‘I’ (p. 49).39 Like Zambreno, the relation to writing is existential and to be blocked from writing, or unable to stop undoing it, is experienced as existentially troubling, doubly so since what both authors are trying to get down or keep upon the page is the writing of their own lives. Although Fun Home is eventually finished and published after a sevenyear struggle, Bechdel finds it almost as difficult to write Are You My Mother?, which took a shorter five years.40 This is another ugly fault of the mother, who Bechdel blames for her habit of erasure and lack of confidence in keeping words on the page: within a panel set in the therapist’s room, as they discuss Bechdel’s problems with writing, is an inset that reads, ‘My mother’s editorial voice – precisian, dispassionate, elegant, adverbless – is lodged deep in my temporal lobes’ (p. 23). Are You My Mother? thus becomes an account less of the mother or even of the parent–child relationship and more of the compositional difficulties Bechdel thinks these have induced. In this conception, the mother is an antithetical force, simultaneously driving and hindering the writing of Bechdel’s book. The decision of Bechdel, Zambreno, and Heti to feature the ugly exigencies of writer’s block in their texts sacrifices a potentially more aesthetically pleasing structure for one impelled by the constant return to the scene of fraught or failed writing. Countering the concept of authorship as inspired, they instead audaciously draw attention to its ugly hazards for both the self and the texts under construction. Sullivan warns that a commitment to revision can work to aggrandise the achievements of the 39 40

This is also mentioned in Bechdel’s previous memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), pp. 142–3. Emmert, ‘The Alison Bechdel Interview’, p. 73; Chute, Outside the Box, p. 161.

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writer by demonstrating the care invested in their craft (p. 2). However, the torturous and ugly nature of writer’s block for Bechdel, Heti, and Zambreno does not work in that manner. It may underline their passion, but what emerges more markedly is a picture of the grim perseverance of self-belief in the face of considerable personal obstacles. They are not alone in noting that writing or trying to write can be a risky enterprise for the self: as Timothy Clark’s insightful study The Theory of Inspiration observes, ‘literary history remains full of variously bizarre and variously reliable accounts of the process of composition as a crisis in subjectivity’.41 Clark defines ‘the real properties of composition’ as ‘the association of inspiration with an enhanced fluency, with a dictating voice, and with a dispossession that is also, paradoxically, a sense of empowerment’ (p. 16). As we have seen, Bechdel identifies her internalised dictating voice with her mother’s criticisms and thus the origin of her over-editing, and none of the three writers featured in this chapter feel the sense of empowerment Clark describes until their projects are completed. Clark’s use of the formal term ‘composition’, with its connotations of design, contrivance, and orchestration, also contrasts with the arguably less literary term ‘writing’ favoured by the authors discussed here. In fact, Zambreno argues that composition is subtly assumed to be reliant upon the practice of self-composure. She analyses how pioneering woman writers of mental illness, such as Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, were enjoined by their husbands and doctors to cultivate calmness, to avoid the excitation of their own struggles with mental health (pp. 74–5). Drawing attention to how their writing, and her own, represents experiences of mental illness and its treatment, she writes: ‘COMPOSE YOURSELF. What does this mean? You must COMPOSE YOURSELF. They were undisciplined women. That is the storyline. To be disciplined and write of the undisciplined’ (p. 76). The paradox she highlights, and indeed lives the contradictions of, is that one is supposed, ideally and medically, to be selfcomposed in order to compose a literary story of disintegration, especially when what is disintegrating is your own self-belief and sense of identity. Composing oneself, literally writing the self – but, in the process, also organising and ordering – can appear to be an exercise in self-control fundamentally at odds with the chaotic contents of the life to be narrated and even the life as it is lived and experienced. For none of these women is inspiration easily available or experienced as transcendent or mystical; on the 41

T. Clark, The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and PostRomantic Writing (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 15.

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contrary, for them the process of writing is difficult, frustrating, disheartening, and ethically problematic. As we have seen so far, it entails ugliness and betrayal, unseemly self-doubt and self-reckoning.42 To be honest about the difficulties of writing is to resist promulgating the notion that an artwork arrives effortlessly, from outside the self. Instead, these authors have the audacity to tell their uglier compositional stories.

The Audacity of Artistic Genius For those who believe in the existence of genius, Kant’s proposal remains credible: the genius is the person who, with the same skills and knowledge as others, nonetheless creates a unique formal innovation, moving a field into a new paradigm.43 Yet genius does not tend to be attributed to women as often as to men, or to autobiographers with the frequency that novelists attract the epithet. Can writing of oneself really be done with genius? The incongruity of this suggestion should give pause for thought: since no field is barred to the man or woman of genius, there is no reason why they should not be writing autobiography. In fact, Søren Kierkegaard discusses in The Concept of Anxiety how the figure of the genius ‘is primarily concerned with himself’, which we might think makes him or her a perfect candidate for autobiography.44 Kierkegaard’s perception of a link between genius and anxiety finds in literary studies its most famous proponent in Harold Bloom, whose The Anxiety of Influence depicts the poet as anxiously and inevitably reacting to his male predecessors, the preeminent among which is that genius Shakespeare.45 In the book’s most contentious and provocative chapter, Bloom suggests that influence, and the anxiety to which it gives rise, is in fact a kind of ‘influenza’, a motivating sickness to bypass the problem that, as Bloom expresses it, ‘[h]ealth is stasis’ (p. 95). Bloom is being metaphorical, but Zambreno, Heti, and Bechdel are not when they write about their writer’s block: the anxiety it causes is 42

43 44

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Autobiography or writing which draws on life is necessarily a more intimate process than writing fiction. However, Clark begins with Wordsworth’s The Prelude so it is not as though authorial selfaccounting is absent from his study. Instead, as this chapter examines, it is the dynamics of how sexual and gender identity, as well as mental illness, affect the writers I am discussing that sets them apart from those in Clark’s study. Kant, Critique of Judgement, pp. 136–40. S. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, ed. and trans. R. Thomte and A. B. Anderson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 107. H. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 95. He calls Shakespeare a genius in the ‘Preface’, p. xlvii.

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a spur to their eventual creative outputs. Anxiety is future-orientated, as Sianne Ngai explains in Ugly Feelings, and in the history she sketches for intellectual anxiety there is a further appearance of genius.46 These various conjunctions of anxiety and genius point to a richer relationship than might be expected. Ngai’s book reveals the anxious quest to be gendered male, further chiming with how genius is commonly conceived. Audacity has as one of its modes a lack of modesty. It is audacious to want to be considered a genius and even more audacious – or perhaps incredibly foolhardy – to claim you are one.47 Out of this chapter’s three featured authors, Bechdel arguably has a recognisable claim to genius, after becoming a recipient of one of the generous MacArthur ‘genius’ grants in 2014.48 While she was shocked to be chosen, both her memoirs foreshadow this accolade: Fun Home has a reference to her family home as one in which each member found ‘gratification’ in their ‘own geniuses’ (p. 134) and in Are You My Mother? Bechdel’s therapist, Carol, sympathetically suggests that ‘in your family there wasn’t enough room under one roof for several geniuses’ (p. 71). Early on in How Should a Person Be? Sheila jokes about her desire to be a genius, saying she will find more time to dedicate to it by abandoning her efforts to be the perfect girlfriend (p. 4).49 Part of the ugliness she has to reveal in the course of the book is this desire to be a genius, unalloyed by deflecting humour. Margaux recognises the ambition of her friend, and punctures it, perhaps in response to Sheila’s continued failure to finish her play, re-titling a painting of Sheila initially called The Genius to House for a Head, much to Sheila’s silent chagrin (p. 94). All three writers express how even from quite an early age or stage of writing, they were aspirational, if anxiously so, about their abilities to excel. Heti and Zambreno point out too that women face the further difficulty of how genius is frequently assumed to be male: ‘One good thing about being a woman’, Sheila says at the start of the book, ‘is that we haven’t too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me’, dismissing how male writers ‘talk themselves up all the time’ with their ‘phoney-baloney genius crap’ intended to bloat their literary reputations (p. 4). One 46 47 48

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S. Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 209–10. Dave Eggers’s memoir-novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000) obviously plays with this idea. A. Flood, ‘Cartoonist Alison Bechdel “In Shock” after Winning $625,000 “Genius” Grant’, The Guardian (17 September 2014). Interestingly, the MacArthur fellowships are mentioned in How Should a Person Be? when Margaux emails Sheila about them. The book’s interest in genius has been noted by reviewers: see Biggs, ‘It Could Be Me’, and, on gender and genius, the interview with La Force, ‘Sheila Heti’.

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problem pointed to archly by theorist Nina Power is that male genius gobbles up the qualities often ascribed to women, thus leaving women by contrast with ungenial, overly polarised characteristics: The ‘genius’ typically possesses feminine characteristics – imagination, intuition, emotion, madness – but is not of course an actual woman: the great artist is a feminine male, but not a feminine female or a masculine female. Women can be mad, but not aesthetically inspired, or they can be sane, and provide comfort for the true creators, who are a little bit womanish, but not too much.50

This problem of women being perceived as excessive, when the same qualities in men are greeted with generous praise for their sensitive intellectual acuity, is one that Zambreno sees replicated in literary texts, which in turn influence young girls and how they conceive of their own potential: ‘What prohibits the young girl from actually being an author? I think this idea of tradition is important. If she only sees herself as a character in the books she is given, these characters which are often pathologised, can she have the audacity to dream of being an author? Perhaps with girls there’s less belief in their future genius?’ (pp. 244–5).51 In this account, audacity is the ability to imagine oneself not as the heroine of a story but, more powerful by far, the author of it. Audacity is thus projective and thinks into the future; as Zambreno describes writing: ‘It is all about self-identity, and discipline, this audacity to believe that what one could possibly create is worth sharing with the world’ (p. 199). It is a question of fostering selfbelief: women must ‘convince ourselves’, she writes hopefully, ‘of our eventual genius’ (p. 296). The literary tale of how the artist comes to fulfil his calling, or the Künstlerroman, is central to a masculine mode of modernism, and its most recognisable example is James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1916). According to Mark McGurl’s analysis in The Program Era, such books participated ‘in the operation, the autopoesis, of a larger cultural system geared for the production of self-expressive originality’, which ultimately results, McGurl argues, in the rise of creative writing as a popular university programme.52 What McGurl’s concentration on writing programmes illuminates is the less-recognised fact that these 50 51

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N. Power, One-Dimensional Woman (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009), p. 34. It is not just women who may lack belief in their own intellect, but the public. Depressingly, recent studies of students found them more negatively biased against their female tutors. See C. Flaherty, ‘Bias against Female Instructors’, Inside Higher Education (11 January 2016). M. McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 49.

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books of artistic self-becoming have a perhaps unintended didactic dimension: they encourage others to take up the pen. At the start of this chapter, I rehearsed the familiar story of autobiography’s roots in Augustine’s didactic conversion testimony.53 In its careful indexing of how a bright young man arrives at a rejection of his Irish homeland and his decision to be an artist, Joyce’s Portrait is also didactic, albeit in a secular sense. In place of the morally improving warning to beware – and even highly moralistic texts risk rendering attractive what they intend to condemn – Joyce’s autobiographical novel offered a blueprint for ambitious young male writers in Ireland at the time. Yet Stephen Dedalus scorns didactic art. He espouses a traditional aesthetic hierarchy wherein ‘kinetic emotions’, including desire and loathing, are evoked by lower, ‘improper arts’ and so both their literary forms and the feelings they elicit are dismissed: they cannot be beautiful, he decrees.54 Within the binary thinking of Joyce’s young genius-in-waiting, this must mean they are instead ugly and as examples of these ugly, improper arts Stephen lists the pornographic and the didactic. Within the context of this discussion, Stephen’s selection of the didactic as an ugly art form is both fitting and ironic. Like Portrait, Are You My Mother?, How Should a Person Be?, and Heroines show the development of the artist and showcase her ideas about her chosen medium; unlike Portrait, which shifts only in the final pages from third-person narration to Stephen’s first fledging autobiographical entries, these books are committed to the autobiographical as a significant art form from the start. With their audacious desires to be the authors of their lives coupled with an unabashed perseverance in the face of their own struggles with writing and mental health, these writers offer not so much robust theories of autobiography as models of how to survive its harshest and ugliest challenges. Additionally, they confront the imperatives associated with their gender, finding the audacity to refuse to conform to the required image of the ‘good girl’, whether in their familial, romantic, or working lives, and to contravene a lifelong training which, in Zambreno’s words, normatively impels women ‘to be nice, to be liked . . . to not show the ugliness’ (p. 252). The ugly life and the ugly art form befit one another with a shared, compelling impertinence.

53

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Others who also start out with discussing these writers include Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, p. 2; M. DiBattista and E. O. Wittman, ‘Introduction’, in M. DiBattista and E. O. Wittman (eds.), The Cambridge Introduction to Autobiography (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 1–20, at p. 6. J. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, (ed.) S. Deane (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 222.

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It is worth considering at this point how the didactic dimensions of these texts operate, particularly in the light of Zambreno’s belief that women need the audacity to consider themselves authors. The ‘kinetic emotion’ Stephen Dedalus implicitly aligns with didactic art is loathing, presumably elicited by the sinful behaviour the artwork condemns. The contemporary auto/biographies of this chapter are more likely to elicit the other emotion he identifies in the same vein – desire, although not, as Stephen appears to understand it, sexual desire but the desire to be a writer, an artist. Despite the ugliness confronted in the process of writing the self, all three texts examined in this chapter present auto/biography as an eventually worthwhile, even admirable, endeavour, one leading to greater self-confidence and self-understanding and better relationships with other women. Dialogue, that ancient method by which Socrates taught his philosophical interlocutors that they were mistaken, was instrumental in Stephen Dedalus’s incipient understanding of the role of the artist, as he walked the streets of Dublin discussing aesthetics with his friend, Cranly. In Bechdel and Heti in particular it is dialogue with women which is central to their gains in self-understanding and their ability to overcome their writer’s block. For Zambreno, online communities of women writers are important, as is the communication she establishes between her own situation and those of the dead modernist women she studies. Crucially, all three texts pass the ‘Bechdel test’, named for one of Bechdel’s Dykes to Look Out For comic strips, which famously highlighted how few films feature women talking to other women about anything other than men, and which is now applied to fiction too as a quick rule to distinguish which texts are committed to more complex, less sexist depictions of communication between women. Dialogue in these texts is often dialogue about writing. In How Should a Person Be? Sheila hopes the dialogues she records with Margaux will be the catalyst for the completion of her play, an expectation the reader initially shares and which is encouraged by how the conversations are set out like scripts and thus marked off from other types of dialogue in the text.55 The two women discuss art, although their conversations are frequently inconclusive, more prone to suggestion than assertion. If at first Sheila’s audacity would seem to appear to be in using these conversations as the basis for finding out how a person should be, and thus completing her 55

For a discussion of the tape recorder as mediating subjectivity and sociality in the book, see Z. Dinnen, The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), pp. 73–96.

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play, it transpires that the real challenge is to reveal her own ugliness and her betrayal of Margaux. The trajectory of the book is thus a moral one, with Sheila having to write the ugliness of herself to repair her friendship by demonstrating a more ethical stance in the writing of self and others. The book’s very title indicates the didactic nature of what is to come: it asks not how a person can or might be but, more exhortative by far, how they should be. The centrality of self-adjustment is similarly part of the narrative propulsion in Are You My Mother? Through what we understand are many hours of dialogue with therapists, Bechdel seeks to become less anxious, less envious, and more emotionally stable. Eventually, the therapeutic dialogues result in the transformation of her conversations with her mother from maternally dominated monologues about the minutiae of quotidian life to powerful dialogues between mother and daughter about the past, parenting, and lifewriting. Are You My Mother? and How Should a Person Be? therefore give dialogue between women a reparative, a transformative, and, above all, a didactic role: dialogue is a site for learning about the self that one then has to have the audacity to reveal. Zambreno’s didacticism takes a different tack, based not on the instructive dimensions of dialogue between women but on a direct address to women readers who are writers or wish to be so. Her methodology is explicitly feminist in its commitment to revealing the ugly scenes in her life without shame and in order to empower other women to write with equal candour.56 To this end she details her breakdowns, violent arguments with her husband, feelings of depression and therapy sessions, and, as we have already seen, her writer's block. She is deeply suspicious of discourses that pathologise women’s emotions and behaviour or trivialise their writing, seeing striking similarities in how women are reprimanded for expressing themselves and how they are categorised psychiatrically: ‘The charges against borderline personality disorder are the same charges against girls writing literature, I realize – too emotional, too impulsive, no boundaries’ (p. 266). In recovering and celebrating the voices and achievements of ‘mad’ modernist women writers and wives, she questions the silencing and policing to which they were subjected by their husbands and the medical establishment. The book is not straightforward literary history, however, since Zambreno moves fluidly, sometimes almost imperceptibly, between the situation of women writers in the early twentieth century and her own experiences at

56

Felski tracks disclosure in order to face down shame as feminist practice in her chapter ‘On Confession’ in Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, pp. 86–121.

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the start of the twenty-first, contiguously suggesting parallels between their circumstances and her own. However, while there are similarities, there are considerable differences, with far greater opportunities for women writers today, and Heroines is bursting with advice and encouragement for them. Zambreno names these burgeoning women writers her ‘scribbling sisters’ and enjoins them to ‘write yourselves, your body, your own experience’ without compunction (p. 296). Heroines attempts to create and participate in an alternative women’s canon, one which takes women’s writing seriously and does not immediately reductively interpret it through its author’s body, her gender, or, if she has one, her psychiatric diagnosis (pp. 260, 258). Zambreno insists on the validity of women writing from their bodies, from experience, but refuses the body, its biology, or biography as the final focal point of the interpretative lens. If this sounds like a contradiction or a tension, the book provides plenty of examples of modernist men who have used their own experiences of emotional and psychic turmoil in their writing but have escaped such reductive readings. After instructing young women to follow her example in dressing up before they write, looking at their reflection in a mirror, and telling themselves, ‘You’re a fucking genius’ (p. 296), Zambreno finishes the book with the following unapologetic proclamation, written as an inset couplet: ‘Fuck the canon. Fuck the boys with their big books. / For, after all, we must be our own heroines’ (p. 297). In this polemical finale, with its upbeat affective intensity aimed at invigorating young women writers in a rhetorical manner not dissimilar to Despentes’s in King Kong Theory, discussed in Chapter 1, genius and heroism are reconfigured as matters of cultivating the self-confidence – the audacity – to put the self at the centre of one’s story. If Zambreno demonstrates the discriminatory gender dynamics behind literature and its history in order to give young women writers the audacity to challenge the legacy they inherit, Bechdel’s text offers scenes of psychoanalytic learning, primarily depicting her own intellectual journey: as she learns, so too can her readers. The meaning of the mother–daughter matrix is disclosed for her by understanding the unfolding psychoanalytic narratives of child development. Panel upon panel depicts Bechdel reading psychoanalytic texts and discussing psychoanalytic concepts with her analysts, who, in obliging psychoanalytic style, play a series of temporary mother substitutes. Thus, as the intra-textual Bechdel learns her psychoanalytic letters, so do her readers: Are You My Mother? is filled with explanations of psychoanalytic ideas, delivered with the hallmark clarity and concise precision of a skilled cartoonist. Alongside this, the text is

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structured along psychoanalytic principles: not only does every chapter title allude to a psychoanalytic idea, but each chapter opens with a dream sequence which Bechdel will come to an interpretation of by the chapter’s close.57 The book’s chronology is similarly propelled by a psychoanalytic rhythm, with memories arising from free associations made within and outside therapy sessions in a layering effect which ensures the ‘present’ is embedded within the past that is supposed to unlock its significance.58 Bechdel’s audacity is evident in her desire to lay bare this process of psychoanalytic learning and discussion, especially in relation to how she feels about her mother’s parenting, and she shows us scenes of frustration, emotional difficulty, and pain normally preserved within the sanctity of the confidential psychoanalytic space. The allure of theories of child- and self-development lies in their tacit invitation to measure one’s own personal experience against their universalising explanations. This is where Bechdel’s text stakes out its didactic terrain. Was mine a ‘good-enough mother’, we might ask ourselves, as Bechdel does while reading Winnicott. Are You My Mother? offers the potential for readers to adopt Bechdel’s specific questions or those of her analysts for themselves. Naturally, psychoanalysis has a technical term and a more articulated version of what happens psychically when a person takes on aspects of someone else’s behaviour or personality: identification. Despite a loosely similar meaning now in general language, in psychoanalytic terminology identification names the precise process ‘whereby the subject assimilates an aspect, property, or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially, after the model the other provides’, as succinctly summarised by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis.59 Intra-textually, identification might thus superficially appear to describe how Bechdel comes to understand that she carries her mother’s detrimental view of girls; how Sheila eventually adopts Margaux’s position that good art can come from revealing ugliness; how Zambreno sees herself in and is an advocate for the messy emotionality of the mad modernist wives. However, these examples highlight how the psychoanalytic term cannot therefore exactly name what happens in the experience of reading; or, at 57 58

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Many chapter titles are Winnicottian: ‘The Ordinary Devoted Mother’, ‘Transitional Objects’, ‘True and False Selves’, ‘Mind’, ‘Hate’, ‘Mirror’, and ‘The Use of an Object’. Bechdel’s psychoanalytic reading in Are You My Mother? is impressive: Sigmund Freud on the unconscious (p. 46), dreams (p. 65), compulsion (p. 50), and narcissism (p. 215); Alice Miller’s The Gifted Child (p. 54); Jung on archetypes (p. 80); Adam Phillips’s On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (pp. 253, 275) and his biography of Winnicott (p. 198); Lacan’s mirror stage (pp. 253, 232). J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 1973), p. 205.

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least, it would be a rare kind of reading that exerts such a powerful psychic impact. Further still, identification in the Freudian sense entails a transformation for the subject who, through assimilation, comes to resemble the other more closely. This is not quite what is happening with these texts, either for the women who write them or for their readers, because the writers actually move further away from the person or people with whom they have identified: Bechdel, in understanding her mother, hopes to extinguish her obsession with her; Sheila stops relying on plagiarising Margaux and becomes a writer in her own right; and Zambreno wants to legitimise a writing of the emotionally difficult self which in the past had been treated as aberrant and ended in silencing or incarceration for the women who practised it. Instead of taking inside what they admire in the other, as they would in Freudian identification, they use it to move forward into greater artistic autonomy and away from the past. Neither does identification help in delineating the didactic components of these texts, how they offer routes for understanding the self for their readers. A more commodious term and one better suited to capturing what happens when one reads these auto/biographies is recognition, as proposed by Rita Felski in Uses of Literature. For Felski, ‘Recognition is not repetition: it denotes not just the previously known, but the becoming known. Something that may have been sensed in a vague, diffuse, or semiconscious way now takes on a distinct shape, is amplified, heightened, or made newly visible. In a mobile interplay of exteriority and interiority, something that exists outside of me inspires a revised or altered sense of who I am.’60 Despite what sound like parallels with Freudian identification, the emphasis here is on unfolding self-knowledge instigated by reading literature.61 Seeing similarities between the self and a character within a text is the option closest to psychoanalytic identification, in a process Felski calls ‘self-intensification’, which operates through ‘flashes of intersubjective recognition, of perceived commonality and shared history’ (p. 39). She further argues that recognition can work through ‘selfextension’ whereby the reader unexpectedly sees aspects of themselves in ‘what seems distant or strange’ (p. 39) or is ‘forced into awareness of the instability and opacities of personhood’ (p. 42). Felski’s examples of recognition in literature are all drawn from novels and plays; no form of 60 61

R. Felski, Uses of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), p. 25. While Felski deals with identification as a literary term, her only engagement with psychoanalysis is to refute Jacques Lacan’s theory of misrecognition (méconnaissance) as laid out in the mirror-stage essay. This is a curious omission given that identification is key to Freudian subject-formation and she is proposing an alternative definition.

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auto/biography is mentioned, despite the obvious suitability for her argument. One of the ways she believes recognition can be enhanced is when a text ‘[d]epict[s] characters engaged in introspection and soul-searching’, which, she claims, ‘encourages readers to engage in similar acts of selfscrutiny’ (p. 25). I am less convinced than Felski that novels provoke mimetic behaviour in their readers when presented with characters examining themselves: given that plots of novels tend to drive characters to make decisions, I would suggest that readers are more readily invited to judge the quality of a decision than to replicate the soul-searching that precedes it. What is intriguing about Felski’s idea, however, is that it takes on a rather different hue in the context of the auto/biographies studied in this chapter, and in two related respects. Firstly, readers are not being presented with fiction but with life as it is recounted by those who have lived it. Secondly, these texts contain theories of the self, examples of how to write about others and not be overwhelmed by them and, more specifically, theories of the development of the woman writer as an audacious, risk-taking, genrebending artist. Bechdel, Zambreno, and Heti provide accounts of women who want to be writers, who are assailed by doubts and anxieties about their writing but possess deep convictions that they need to write about their lives. They are women who do not, at the start of their books, know how to complete what they are aiming to write or how it will end. The desire to become ‘someone’, to distinguish oneself, to become a writer or an artist, to be considered a genius: these are culturally powerful fantasies depicted in these texts by those who have striven to achieve them. Extending Felski’s work on recognition, it is clear that the didacticism of these books lies in offering potential points of recognition for women with similar desires. There are detractors from such an affirmative reading, however. Eva Illouz, for instance, might class these texts as classic examples of what she calls ‘therapeutic narratives’, a charge that can particularly be levelled at Bechdel’s commitment to representing her psychoanalytic journey.62 Part of a cultural impetus that cashes in on emotional intelligence and exploits the perceived need for its improvement for commercial reasons, narratives of self-realisation are structured around the overcoming of suffering in ways that feed capitalist structures of individualism, Illouz warns. Indeed, she thinks the diagnosis such texts offer creates the need for an often expensive resolution: ‘It structurally makes one understand one’s life as a generalized dysfunction, in order precisely to overcome it. This 62

Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 52.

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narrative foregrounds negative emotions as shame, guilt, fear, inadequacy, yet does not activate moral schemes or blame’ (p. 52). Here, then, is where the texts Illouz criticises diverge from Heti’s, Zambreno’s, and Bechdel’s. Heti has to learn a more ethical auto/biographic practice and route to friendship; Zambreno blames patriarchal structures for the way women’s writing is pathologised and dismissed; and Bechdel quite firmly blames her mother, even if her book is ultimately a way of confronting her mother with that without extracting anything in recompense other than an eventual harmony over their auto/biography being public. Thus, as I have been arguing, these texts do activate moral schemas, not least in the didactic opportunities they hold out to other women by their own example and encouragement. In my interpretation of this work, then, it is the stories told of the journeys to artistic autonomy that mark these writers out as new audacity authors. To see their texts as merely stories of self-realisation within a culture saturated with therapeutic languages and structures of emotional understanding is to miss what testimonies of ugly audacities can be mobilised for in terms of artistic and, crucially, feminist achievement. At the start of this chapter, the audacity of the ugly act was posited as a key set piece within autobiographical writing, one prompting a comparative appraisal of the reading self against the ugliness of the other’s behaviour, their social or moral transgressions. By now, we can appreciate that the auto/biographical writing on show here is didactic insofar as it is centrally concerned with detailing what makes or sustains a life-writer, and in so doing refuses to withhold information about the difficulties entailed in such a commitment. Heroines, Are You My Mother?, and How Should a Person Be? offer the women who read them, and especially the women who are or wish to be writers working in an auto/biographical mode, points of recognition that are not only oriented towards fantasies of success but rather predominantly shaped by the ugly but necessary experiences of failure, frustration, and betrayal. With that comes the challenge to be as audacious as these authors have been in admitting the power of such exigencies to shape their writing and thus their lives, including struggles with mental health and the obstacles presented by a still largely masculine literary culture.

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chapter 3

Stripping Off for the First Time Recasting Vulnerability in the Writing of Hetero-sex and Desire

If being a victim renders one vulnerable, as it did Tracey Emin and Jana Leo in Chapter 1, it is not automatically the case that vulnerability entails victimhood. This distinction has on occasion been ignored in feminist discussions of the position of women under patriarchy, especially in the more trenchant polemics over sexuality by key feminists of the 1980s.1 There is little feminist discussion of voluntary vulnerability outside of debates over sex work and BDSM, where women who partake in these activities are described as vulnerable victims of patriarchy by those who condemn their actions.2 Although some feminists and scholars defend women’s rights to masochism and submission, they tend to frame such behaviours as strong, sexually liberated pursuits of kink undertaken in mutually consensual environments, products of agency rather than an abandonment of it. The understanding of BDSM as a semi-public set of practices undertaken within a subcultural scene among known players is crucial to this construction: to be involved in BDSM, this postulates, is to have acknowledged one’s desires in advance and to have committed to exploring them with like-minded others. But what if rendering oneself vulnerable within a private heterosexual relationship, outside of a scene or a script, is what you desire? Katherine Angel’s Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (2012), Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1999), and Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life (2013) explore heterosexual vulnerability. In these books, 1

2

The most influential are A. Dworkin, Intercourse (London: Secker and Warburg, 1987) and C. A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1987). Similar arguments are made in criticisms of BDSM; see R. R. Linden (ed.), Against Sadomasochism (East Alto, CA: Frog in the Well, 1982); S. L. Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York and London: Routledge, 1990). During discussions of BDSM (bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism) such as Bartky’s, little space is occupied with thinking through the role of dominatrixes. This is in fact generally true even of those academics seeking to combat dismissals of BDSM.

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the authors place themselves sexually and emotionally into the hands of the men they desire. The writing and publication of these desires and intimacies further exposes them, and, in an additional layer to the metaphorics of stripping off, for each woman it is her first book. Whilst not without precedent, sexual autobiography is still an audacious genre, especially for a woman as she embarks on a writing career, a fact reflected in the provocative titles of these texts.3 Vulnerability is not simply a sexual problem or an outcome of public telling for Angel, Kraus, and Calloway; it is also, as we see in what follows, a resource. In I Love Dick, Kraus asks, ‘Why is female vulnerability still only acceptable when it’s neuroticized and personal; when it feeds back on itself? Why do people still not get it when we handle vulnerability like philosophy, at some remove?’4 The question of distance is important: the prevailing assumption in human relations is that proximity ushers in a greater potential for vulnerability, yet even while these authors explore sexual vulnerability, the writing which is their medium and the author functions it puts into play provide a distancing mechanism which, as Kraus complains, is frequently discounted in their aesthetic reception. Women are inevitably more vulnerable than heterosexual men to social censure when they write about their sex lives, and these reproofs can even emanate from women theorists of contemporary sexuality. Eva de Clercq, for instance, declares herself ‘rather astonished’ at how ‘female writers, politicians, actresses, and academics’ exhibit such ‘eagerness to confess they like sex, have different sexual partners, masturbate, and so on’, sniping that ‘one would almost forget the way they make a living’, as though none of these professions should have an interest in challenging the traditional boundaries of publicly admissible topics.5 Or there is Laura Kipnis who, with typical if unsympathetic verve, decries ‘the recent crop of selfdramatizing literary sexual confessions’, characterising them as ‘obsessive feminine masochism infused with the ecstasy of public self-exposure: a perfect storm of high-profile narcissism, wrapped in an invitation to social rebuke’, a set of judgements in accord with some of the reactions to 3

4 5

See, for another example, C. Millet, The Sexual Life of Catherine M, trans. A. Hunter (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2002). It was not Millet’s first book (she was a published art critic), but it caused inevitable controversy. C. Kraus, I Love Dick (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006), pp. 207–8. E. de Clercq, The Seduction of the Female Body: Women’s Rights in Need of a New Body Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 132. De Clercq calls this ‘a rather puzzling title’; I concur (p. 1). There is little discussion or theorisation of seduction; in fact, sexual desire is curiously missing from these pages. Instead, de Clercq rather complicatedly argues for the body as inherently and ontologically vulnerable. Sexual difference then re-enters the discussion with her claim that bodies symbolise differently. This is not the kind of vulnerability discussed in this chapter.

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Calloway’s text in particular.6 The criticisms de Clercq and Kipnis advance stem from a shared concern: both argue that feminism has too readily embraced for women the position of victim, or what Kipnis calls the ‘sexas-victimhood concept’ (p. 129).7 In these two very different books, by very dissimilar theorists – Kipnis, for instance, calls herself a feminist while de Clercq rejects the term – the diagnosis of this problem within feminist discourse also entails an implicitly sympathetic reading of how it has misrepresented men.8 Feminism, writes de Clercq, teaches that ‘women are always and everywhere the defenceless victims of men’ (p. 9); for Kipnis, ‘in both feminism and commercial women’s culture, [there] is the sense of a certain inevitability that women will be used and wounded by men’ (p. 128). For both critics, feminist insistence on the wrongs of patriarchy results in misrepresenting not simply all women as victims but also all men as exploiters or abusers. Neither of these arguments is persuasive because of their necessary reliance upon a reductive account of feminism and gender relations which ignores the many counterexamples of nuanced feminist analyses of sex, gender, and lifewriting which do not paint all women as victims (or attention-seeking masochists) and all men as exploiters. Similarly, Kipnis and de Clercq’s characterisations of women’s life-writing reveal them to be seemingly unaware of the careful work critics such as Sidonie Smith, Julia Watson, and Rita Felski have done to establish how women writing about their sex lives, their desires, and the difficulties they experience with these have made important contributions to dismantling a detrimental bracketing which relegates women and their experience to the private sphere.9 Indeed, women discussing their sex lives have played a central role in creating what Lauren Berlant has termed ‘intimate publics’, historically recent and frequently commercial arenas where 6 7

8

9

L. Kipnis, The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), p. 150. They are not alone in this diagnosis. In Female Masculinity, Jack Judith Halberstam criticises ‘a slightly old-fashioned feminism that understands women as endlessly victimized within systems of male power. Woman, within such a model, is the name for those subjects within patriarchy who have no access to male power and who are regulated and confined by patriarchal structures’, a view they argue that ‘conveniently ignores the ways in which gender relations are scrambled where and when gender variance comes into play’. See J. J. Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 17. De Clercq asserts that the term ‘feminist’ is now ‘difficult or impossible to define’, ‘has become a term of derision’, and has ‘lost its credibility with the younger generation’ (p. 9), even though the first chapter provides a quite good summary of feminist thought and her main ideas derive from Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero. S. Smith and J. Watson (eds.), Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998); R. Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), especially ‘On Confession’, pp. 86–121.

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women can see themselves and their concerns reflected; where they can feel, even if fantasmatically, connected to the lives of other women in ways which were repressed well into the past century.10 However, the criticisms of de Clercq and Kipnis, especially their fears that feminist discourses encourage women to identify with vulnerability, suffering, and subordination, are important here because they chime with a wider and worrying recent tendency within feminist thinking to emphasise what Alison Phipps diagnoses as ‘a neoliberal individualism in which victimhood is seen as either an identity or a psychological state’.11 As Phipps argues, ‘this rests upon a rather rudimentary transformation of ideas about agency into the concept of “choice”: one can choose to be a victim, and can also refuse this designation and make the best of one’s lot in life’ (p. 34). If one chooses the former rather than the latter, then, under a regime which stresses personal responsibility, it is your own fault if you fall apart after suffering abuse or violence. This model therefore abandons the demand for large structural social change that we saw Jana Leo and Virginie Despentes make in Chapter 1 in order to prevent suffering and abuse in the first place. Instead, suffering is personalised and stigmatised. Vulnerability thus gets bundled up with victimhood, both rejected by a certain incarnation of contemporary feminism primarily keen to affirm women’s agency and their ability to choose their futures. Such a conflation fails to distinguish between the victim who is made vulnerable – who did not choose to feel vulnerable, like the authors discussed in Chapter 1 – by the perpetrator of crimes committed against her, and the woman who chooses to explore her own vulnerability in her erotic life. Even more than sexual confessions, BDSM works as a litmus test for feminist arguments over vulnerability and victimhood, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the bifurcating responses to the popular success of E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey (2011). In her essay on the novel, Lisa Downing usefully recaps the opposite sides of this debate in a summary worth reprising.12 On the one hand, radical feminists see in Fifty Shades 10 11 12

L. Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 5–12. A. Phipps, The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), p. 34. L. Downing, ‘Safewording! Kinkphobia and Gender Normativity in Fifty Shades of Grey’, Psychology and Sexuality 4:1 (2013), pp. 92–102, at p. 97. These feminist debates get revisited frequently, often around issues of rape and sexual violence, and pornography and sex work. For three examples relevant because of their interests in victimhood and transgression, see M. Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (London and Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 143–86; H. Hester, Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), pp. 21–34; Phipps, The Politics of the Body, pp. 20–48.

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a demeaning and misogynistic glamorisation of male dominance played out through the classic stereotypes of a patriarchal, controlling alpha male who initiates an ingénue virgin into accepting what is in fact abuse. As Downing observes, this conflates abuse and consensual play; the contention here therefore rests upon whether or not one believes that a woman who engages in heterosexual masochism or acts as a submissive can ever do so truly consensually. Radical feminists, following Andrea Dworkin, Sandra Lee Bartky, and others, argue that BDSM practices tend not so much to play with as to rely upon and even reify patriarchal values through eroticising them. One way of typifying this position is as orientated towards thinking of women as vulnerable subjects in the patriarchal matrix, even when they explicitly claim to be expressing their own desires and choosing their own sexual behaviours. There is more than a whiff of proscription attached to the radical feminist position on BDSM. On the other side of the debate, Downing points out, are the sex-positive feminists, who affirm women’s rights to sexual pleasure and to engage in diverse forms of consensual sexual activity without moral censure. From this perspective, Fifty Shades, however trite, opens up new sexual horizons, often considered niche, to a wider mainstream audience, thus destigmatising BDSM and encouraging more women to explore their kinkier sexual predilections and erotic fantasies. In direct contrast to the radical feminist position, from this perspective women are strong sexual consumers who have the agency to lay claim to their own desires. As Downing rightly contends, there can be considerable political naïveté within this argument, which tends to assume that choice means freedom – a classic piece of neoliberal rhetoric – and that sexual acts and sexual pleasure are necessarily political or feminist in and of themselves. In place of these opposing feminist viewpoints, Downing advocates what she calls a sex-critical position, whereby all forms of sex and sexuality are held up to critical scrutiny, even those deemed normal and institutionally enshrined, such as marriage. What these debates show is that despite BDSM’s increasing visibility in mainstream culture and female masochism’s place as a staple component in BDSM play scenes, it remains a troublesome issue for many feminists.13 These differences among feminists are important in the context of this chapter because Kraus, Calloway, and Angel write of how they deliberately submit to men and explore different facets of sexual vulnerability. Their audacity, then, lies not simply 13

Both researchers and practitioners agree that since the late twentieth century there has been a ‘mainstreaming of SM fashion and style’ (Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure, p. 66).

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in broaching what is often unspoken of or softened through romanticisation in mainstream culture – where depictions of women voluntarily submitting to strong men are all too common – but in writing about what often attracts the ire and criticism of feminism too. Their writing challenges the easy association between vulnerability and weakness, and the assumption that submission is a fundamental personality trait or flaw rather than a position capable of exploration and potential exploitation. Unsurprisingly, their books have sometimes received rather prickly receptions. As noted in Chapter 1, Judith Butler argues for a fundamental form of vulnerability at the heart of what it means to be human in her recent book Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. For Butler, vulnerability offers a route for rethinking communality through the body, and through our attachments to others, which begin in infant dependency and continually expose us to the potentiality of the other’s loss, but also, on occasion, their violence.14 While her claims are larger than those this chapter explores, there is nevertheless within Butler’s work an understanding of how desire makes us vulnerable, as does our need for the other to recognise us. This inevitably opens the self to danger. For other thinkers, the strength and unruliness of sexual desire itself can draw us toward our limits, and thus into vulnerability. Writing about sex during a discussion of its representations by French writers such as Pauline Réage and Georges Bataille, Susan Sontag suggests: ‘Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness – pushing us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of one’s consciousness, for death itself.’15 In this account, sexual desire has the capacity to overcome its widespread attenuation and compulsively ally itself to even more definitive transgressions of social life. Leo Bersani’s psychoanalytically inflected theorisation of sexuality is less extreme than Sontag’s sense that sex can lead to a desire for death, but nevertheless discusses ‘the self which the sexual shatters’.16 He extrapolates: ‘It is possible to think of the sexual as, precisely, moving between a hyperbolic sense of self and a loss of all consciousness of self. But sex as 14 15 16

J. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), pp. 19–43. S. Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1969), p. 57. L. Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 25.

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self-hyperbole is perhaps a repression of sex as self-abolition.’17 Sex is a risky and unstable moment for us, Bersani claims: it can feed the narcissism of the ego in our ability to make another desire us, but it can also undo us through ‘a more radical disintegration and humiliation of the self’ (p. 24), one which underscores our separation from one another (p. 30). Because of the intensity of this encounter with our limits, sexuality might even, he suggests, ‘be a tautology for masochism’ (p. 24). Another psychoanalytically orientated theorist, Lee Edelman, in part agrees, defining sex as ‘an encounter with otherness that attains the stability of a knowable relation only by way of an optimism that erases its negativity’.18 Otherness, in Edelman’s account, threatens our sovereignty to such an extent in sex that we need to convince ourselves otherwise: ‘For me’, he writes, ‘[sex] has something to do with experiencing corporeally, and in the orbit of the libidinal, the shock of discontinuity and the encounter with nonknowledge’ (p. 4). Both Bersani and Edelman perceive a kind of kernel of opacity residing at the heart of the sexual, resisting our attempts to fully account for it epistemologically or subsume it to the self. Sex leads us to limits, of self, of other, of understanding, and, by extension, of rationality; all of this makes us vulnerable. One response to that, as Edelman is keen to highlight, is to tell oneself a different narrative about sex, one which less threatens who we think we are or who the other is. In line with the insights of these thinkers, Angel, Kraus, and Calloway write about the extremes and limits of self to which they are brought by sex and desire. Each manages the vulnerability entailed in her sexual ventures differently, but all three reconfigure vulnerability and make attempts to resist the various positions of victimhood with which it is so often aligned. There is also a recurrence, in the work of Kraus and Calloway, of the naming and shaming practices seen in Tracey Emin’s Strangeland. In these respects, then, the authors featured in this chapter extend the audacious critique of victimhood advanced by the authors discussed in Chapter 1 into fresh but equally important territory.

The Problem of Feminist Sex Angel’s Unmastered uses its titular metaphor to think audaciously about vulnerability, mastery, and subordination. During the abandon of sex, 17 18

Ibid. This position is also advocated by Anita Phillips, who follows Bersani in seeing masochism as self-shattering. See In Defence of Masochism (London: Faber and Faber, 1998). L. Berlant and L. Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 1. Although this is a conversation, the quotes I use are Edelman’s.

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‘when we are on the rugged tracks of desire, careening towards something, pitching this way and that, threatening to tip over at any moment; when his hands are in my hair, and he is inside me, and I am biting him, and we are all teeth and claws and wings’, Angel posits that ‘we are seen, revealed as ferocious, and also vulnerable – unmastered’.19 This definition of vulnerability as being unmastered stands in seeming contrast to Angel’s interest in sexual submission, but for Angel if submission involves vulnerability, so does domination – or any expression of sexual desire. Sex in this sense is not unlike the risky encounter with limits that Bersani, Sontag, and Edelman believe it can be. By contrast, the prose in Unmastered is anything but abandoned: precise, poetic, and economical, the language is tightly controlled alongside the formal distribution of words upon its sparsely populated pages. As in the quotes cited earlier, the text moves between the ‘I’ of personal memory and a ‘we’ which could name the couple Angel is half of or a more ruminative ‘we’ apiece with the text’s broader investigation of what it means to be a desiring woman. This is a very different sense of vulnerability to that which we see in Kraus and Calloway. Vulnerability, in this account, comes with being recognised – seen – by the other in the strength of our desire, which is thereby the site of our weakness, a signal of our need, but also the crucial grounds for reciprocal intimacy and trustful sexual experimentation. Angel’s text is attentive to the emotional and interpersonal complexity of sex, its contradictions and complications. She tracks how power is distributed within her heterosexual relationship with ‘The Man’ – who may or may not be the same man throughout – and, crucially, how it slips and shifts between them during sexual acts. The ‘unmastering’ that the book audaciously explores traverses domains both physical and discursive. In the sexual sense described earlier, it involves relinquishing the mastery over oneself that holds back, holds in reserve and at arm’s length from the lover, by instead giving oneself up to desire and the vulnerability involved in revealing it. This does not automatically entail submission; it could be giving rein to the desire to dominate a man too (p. 116). A further form of vulnerability emerges in the ‘telling’ of the book’s subtitle, the admission to the lover – and the reader – of the specificities of Angel’s sexual desires. This entails speaking of sadomasochism, requesting ‘The Man’ tie her up (p. 60), admitting to her fantasies of being hit (p. 89), and asking to be physically mastered (pp. 90–1). These are the visceral vulnerabilities the book has the audacity to recount. The other kinds of 19

K. Angel, Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2012), pp. 92 and 94, respectively.

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vulnerability Angel focuses upon are the complex creations of powerful master discourses.20 Most prosaic for both sexes are the prescriptions of the gender binary. For women, this conventionally entails a quiet and often unnoticed social subservience that Angel is acutely aware of: ‘I should be accommodating. I should be good. I should not leave the party when I want to,’ she writes (p. 157). There is a continuity here with what Kate Zambreno, as noted in the previous chapter, saw as the suppression of any sign of excess in women’s behaviour and an echo of the safe domesticated behaviour that Despentes thought she was raped for rejecting, as discussed in Chapter 1. Drawing on examples given by Virginia Woolf, three imperatives come to summarise this quiet and domestic role in Unmastered: take the chicken thigh, sit in the draught (p. 22), and, Angel’s own formulation, ‘[l]et the boy win at tennis!’ (p. 77). Playing ‘the yielding, deferring woman’ invokes its complementary correlative, ‘the hypostasized, brutal man’ (p. 110). Angel berates herself for periodically falling into female self-abnegation, but her depiction of her sex life, while acknowledging the power of ‘the script’ that he is ‘A Man’ and she ‘the girl – who is vulnerable, fragile’, deliberately describes an alternative of complex dynamics wherein they are both brought to the ‘brink’ of themselves (p. 111). In company with Leo and Despentes as examined in Chapter 1, and with other authors discussed in Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing, Angel offers a critique of feminism. She seeks to extricate herself from the version of its master discourse that her younger self had fashioned and hidden behind as a carapace against the unruly chaos and incoherence of her sexual desires and her enjoyment of being dominated: ‘Those hypostasized feminist ancestors – my companions, my people – I see them containing my desire, my perversion. I look over at them, their avid eyes, their conviction. I feel their hands around my throat’ (p. 204). Strangulation, a set piece within certain scenes of sadomasochistic play, is not a neutral metaphor to use to describe the power feminist discourse had over the young author. Yet Angel claims kinship and admits complicity with ‘the feminism that made me, and that forbade my desire; or the feminism I made make me – for what makes us choose the canon we choose?’ (p. 205). This problem – of what kind of space within feminism there is for a woman who desires to be sexually dominated by a man – is central to the first section of Unmastered, which deals primarily with sex in practice and in theory. To be ‘unmastered’ in this context is to escape the 20

A whole later section of the text I do not discuss recounts the vulnerability of having a voluntary abortion after unprotected sex, and what grieving for that foetus entailed amid middle-class disapproval of sexual carelessness over contraception.

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containment proffered by a masterful feminist discourse that condemns female sadomasochism as capitulating to incapacitating vulnerability and victimhood because of men’s continued patriarchal mastery over women. As the start of this chapter rehearsed, this is only one, older, albeit influential, version of feminism. Angel understands that its appeal lies in a rigidity that refuses to properly confront the danger and power of heterosexual desire – a power and danger capable of working in both directions, of making men as well as women vulnerable. She describes how this kind of feminism aided her in consolidating cross-generational bonds: it ‘allowed my mother and me, in our denouncements of sexist adverts, as we walked arm-in-arm through town, to put the woman that I might become – attractive, attracting, provocative, and therefore both powerful and vulnerable – back into a box’ (p. 188). In Unmastered, an older Angel owns her ‘hunger for men’ (p. 183), her enjoyment of them, her sexual potency, but nevertheless, sex is not a simple subject sequestered away from intellectual discussions of its meaning; sex is not simply a satisfying of desire. After attending a feminist lecture advocating that women abandon vaginal sex as useless to their orgasmic pleasure, Angel comments on the speaker, Shere Hite, famous for her radical sociological work in the 1970s: Sometimes it would be nice, I think – it would be a relief – to be so certain. To be so sure, to have such sharp edges. To know where one began and ended. But I did, in fact, use to be sure, to be that certain. And it felt like this: like a hard stone in my body that caught and scraped, and made it difficult to move. That made it impossible to feel, to taste and trace the contours of myself, of others. (p. 180)

Instead of sharp edges, she seeks contours; in place of a calcified certainty, Angel prioritises the motility of feelings, taste, and touch. Hite’s position is intended to protect women from being the victims of male sexual exploitation, to encourage them to prioritise their own pleasure. This creates a figure who may look as though she is the confident sexual consumer in Downing’s account, but whose sexual behaviours are still underpinned by what Kipnis characterises as ‘sex-as-victimhood’ because they are founded on a conviction that to partake in vaginal sex without female orgasm as its aim is to be taken advantage of by a man, to submit to the priority of his desire. Angel is frustrated with such a narrow definition of sexual excitement and submission: she walks out of the talk. To master something – and, within the way it is described in Angel’s book, to master someone – is also to learn how to do it, to become intimate with it or with them. Because of this semantic capaciousness, it is also possible, Angel suggests, to master the skill of unmastering:

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Mastering abandon, hurtling down the hill in the rickety carriage. Mastering myself, not letting anyone else be Lord or Master. The master in me, that is us, him, you.

(p. 162)

This list has the quality of a mantra. The book plays within and between different iterations of mastery, on top of the sexual mastery to which Angel enjoys submitting. Subjectivity is not fixed at some point on a continuum between submission and domination but a dialectic within the self, as well as between self and other. It is too simple to interpret the first two statements just cited as a contradiction here; instead, they can be recast as learning to be vulnerable without victimhood. Unmastered repeatedly sides with the body and its desires, even while acknowledging the power that dominant discourses, our commitment to them, and the histories they shape for us have over our experience of sex and our sexuality. An example bringing together the book’s careful unpicking of mastery occurs when an argument between Angel and her lover results in a return to intimacy the following morning: [I am t]ouching him, and then he is touching himself. More firm, and faster, and then I am on my side, and I watch and my breathing is excited, all of me is excited, I love to watch – and then he comes – onto me, my breasts, my belly, my neck. I love this. The sudden wet coolness on me. The smell: summer rain on cement. Fresh, open windows. (p. 168)

In Unmastered, sections are numbered and, within them, paragraphs frequently are too. These paragraphs join another short opening paragraph describing the conflict Angel feels about time lost to arguing that could be spent writing; this is part ‘1’ of section ‘1’ of the chapter ‘I Would Even Say: To Open Her Mouth’, a reference to the part of Hélène Cixous’s ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ that discusses the fear women feel of speaking of themselves in public. Isolated and alone, part 2 follows this scene of sexual happiness on the recto page. It is three sentences, composed of only three words: ‘Dupe. Collaborator. Victim’ (p. 169). The rest of the page is blank. Like the empty page, these sharp accusations break the intimacy, marking the moment sexual excitement and vulnerable abandon become cast as victimhood. ‘Dupe. Collaborator. Victim.’ immediately and violently withdraws the sexual act from the personal space of shared experience in the context of desire rekindled and inserts it back into a wider cultural narrative where male ejaculate over a woman’s body, so familiar a scene within mainstream

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pornography, represents the patriarchal prioritising of male pleasure and the sexual exploitation of women. Unsurprisingly, this dynamic is a problem for feminism, but it is also and consequently, as Angel so succinctly shows here, a potential problem for the personal life of a heterosexual feminist. Does the sexual enjoyment – Angel is excited – of heterosexual male sexual pleasure make a woman a victim of patriarchal ideological manipulation? Angel has no problem admitting to being ‘a whore in the bedroom’ (p. 32); the more tangled query she continues to pose in Unmastered is whether one can be so while being a feminist (p. 32). The result is the tension played out in the scene just quoted. Importantly, on the page after the censorious feminist self-accusations that follow her enjoyment of The Man’s ejaculation over her, she writes in section ‘3’, ‘I always liked that – the sharp gasp of wetness on skin,’ as though the other voices had not interjected (p. 170). Once again, these are the only words on an otherwise empty page. Together, the three short sections gesture towards a dialectic but cannot reach a synthesis; instead Angel returns us to the sexual pleasures of her and her lover’s bodies, acknowledging the feminist voices, the suspicion of victimhood, but continuing nevertheless to prioritise her sexual experiences. Unmastered recognises the ferocity of feelings: referring to feminism, Angel claims ‘we are more than our beliefs’ (p. 215) and, later, that we are even adept at ‘fashioning our beliefs to resolve our feelings’ (p. 224), a statement which applies just as much to her adult rejection of the feminist positions she had adopted when younger. If desire is always potentially destabilising, it became elevated in the twentieth century to a force that carried a considerable burden of presumed radicality, especially for feminism.21 Yet, as Downing warns in relation to sex-positive praise of erotic autonomy and choice, it is easy to overstate the political potential of our sexual choices and attachments. For Angel, her sexual desires are in tension with her feminism, or, more precisely, with the forms of feminism she encounters around her. Despite her sadomasochistic pleasures – which are light, even arguably mainstream compared to the kinds of submission practised by regular scene-players or a sexual experimenter such as Calloway – Angel’s sexual relationships in Unmastered are relatively normative: heterosexual monogamous couplings that prize intimacy and trust, communication and reciprocity. If mass culture and society in general prefer normativity, critical theory valorises the non-normative, in line with its commitment to critiquing repressive social mores and discrimination. 21

L. Berlant, Desire/Love (New York: Punctum Books, 2012), pp. 46–7. This was particularly so for 1970s French feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, so it is notable that the section of Angel’s text under discussion here draws upon Cixous’s ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’.

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Published by Allen Lane, an imprint of publishing powerhouse Penguin, Unmastered manages to explore how even relatively normative sexual desires and experiences can stimulate engaged theoretical critique of feminism’s stances on female sexuality. Its audacity lies, in fact, in combining the frenetic pace of sexual excitement, evident in the quotes cited earlier, with a commitment to turning difficult ideas over slowly, returning to question them over and again. Angel is not prepared to bracket sadomasochist desires off as a subcultural activity, but she insists on linking them – though not directly or causally – to the social subordination which women frequently find themselves embodying. Unmastered is a deliberately literary book, laced with references to writers and written with lyrical force, even while it refuses to apologise for its interest in sex, vulnerability, and erotic submission. The following texts this chapter discusses increase in audacity in terms of the sexual and erotic situations they narrate but decrease in their commitment to a recognisably literary prose, a trait which stems from striving for a different, more immediate, and often more colloquial authenticity of tone.

Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick Joke The earliest of the texts discussed in Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing, I Love Dick was published by Kraus in 1997 and is the literary precursor to the work of Calloway and Angel. Hailed in its 2006 preface by the poet and feminist Eileen Myles as ‘a remarkable study in female abjection’ within which Kraus ‘march[es] boldly into self-abasement and self-advertisement’ in order to write ‘an entirely ghastly, cunty exegesis’, the twenty-firstcentury US reissue of the book is clearly framed as audacious from the start by Myles’s sharp-eyed and enthusiastic endorsement, coupled with the existing crudity of its confessional title.22 Calling your first book I Love Dick is obviously suggestive, and this declarative title takes on a life of its own for readers in public spaces. Due to its complete capitalisation, there is a tantalisingly arch slippage of reference between ‘Dick’ as a man’s name and ‘dick’ as a synecdoche for orificial sex.23 Reviewing the book, Leslie 22

23

E. Myles, ‘What about Chris?’, in Kraus, I Love Dick, pp. 13, 13, and 15, respectively. The much later 2015 UK publication by Serpent’s Tail lacks Myles’s preface and arrived when Kraus’s career was established and the book was already well known through the TV show. One of the blurbs on the Serpent’s Tail website for the UK edition is by new audacity writer Sheila Heti (https://serpentstail .com/i-love-dick.html). I owe the term ‘orificial sex’ to So Mayer, who used it to introduce a poem of theirs at the Sussex Poetry Festival, 6 June 2015. It is helpful here since Chris Kraus’s name is gender ambiguous, so at first glance the title could refer to female heterosexual or male homosexual desire, unless the author is known.

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Jamison comments on how her copy attracted ‘asinine comments’ from male train commuters who treated the cover as though the author’s name was absent and the title was the reader’s personal confession.24 I Love Dick’s interest in how women’s desire elicits misogyny and misreading (even, as we see in what follows, misspelling) extends well beyond the cover page and forward, but the title has a curiously performative and affective potential. As Jamison discovered, it can make its readers vulnerable to male comments in public. Yet this declarative feature has been taken up in a cult manner on a Tumblr where young women post selfies of themselves holding the book.25 I Love Dick is a candid exploration of Kraus’s obsessive and somewhat fantastic love for the eponymous Dick, later identified in the New York press as the British cultural critic Dick Hebdige.26 Kraus exposes herself, Dick, and her husband, the post-structuralist academic Sylvère Lotringer, to public view, making them vulnerable to negative judgement from her readers, since each behaves badly at some point to one of the others.27 Within the typography of literary conventions, Kraus is exposed and vulnerable because her love – obsessive and fantasy-fuelled, declared but unrequited – is excessive and pathos-laden; Lotringer because he is cuckolded; and Dick because his behaviour, after he eventually starts a sexual relationship with Kraus, reveals him, amusingly enough, to be adjectivally eponymous. The morning after their first sexual encounter, he berates her for her obsession with him, calling her ‘evil and psychotic’; eventually, he writes to her husband, Lotringer, complaining of Kraus and the project which was to become I Love Dick (p. 163). The literary echoes of this ancient triangulation are not lost on any of them: at one point, Lotringer writes to Dick about 24 25

26

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L. Jamison, ‘This Female Consciousness: On Chris Kraus’, The New Yorker (9 April 2015). These fangirl responses, on a Tumblr entitled ‘Selfies with I Love Dick by Chris Kraus’, are posted mostly by young women who photograph themselves with the cover prominently in front of them or with the book displayed in their bedroom or study. These are tributes, but the declarative audacity of Kraus’s title is clearly part of the appeal: many of the girls look sheepish, proud, or amused. See www.ildselfies.tumblr.com. I am grateful to Rachel Sykes for bringing this to my attention. N. Zembla, ‘See Dick Sue: A Very Phallic Novel Gets a Rise Out of a Beloved Professor’, New York Magazine (17 November 1997), p. 20. The article quotes Hebdige as calling the project ‘beneath contempt’ and ‘despicable’ (p. 20). He does not admit to whether there is any truth to the account, but comments: ‘I don’t like reading bad reviews . . . and this book was like a bad review of my presence in the world’ (p. 20). Lotringer, who might appear initially to be the most beyond reproach, given that his friend and colleague sleeps with his wife who in turn leaves him, also behaves in ethically questionable ways: he secretly records a phone conversation he has with Dick for Kraus to hear (pp. 45–50), and, since his press published the book, he is as implicated as Kraus in the public dissemination of an unflattering account of Dick’s behaviour.

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‘Emma’ and signs off, ‘Charles Bovary’ (pp. 110–12). As literary, cultural, and art critics, all three are aware of the psychoanalytic and Lacanian resonances of the situation: Lotringer finishes an early letter with a knowing joke, asking, ‘And what does your name stand for, Dick?’ (p. 56). Given Hebdige purportedly offered legal opposition to the publication of I Love Dick, a substantial element of the audacity of this text lies in breaking codes of civility and friendship: academics, with their semi-public statuses, do not tend to broadcast their oft-entangled private lives; Kraus and Lotringer were clearly prepared to sacrifice their relationships with Hebdige in order for the book to be published, a fact perhaps more understandable from Kraus’s point of view than from that of the abandoned Lotringer.28 Furthermore, Kraus breaks her word, having previously assured Dick that ‘[she’d] never use this writing to “expose” [him]’ (p. 236). The book comprises letters, mainly from Kraus to Dick, framed by and occasionally interspersed with journal entries, written in the third person, recounting how Kraus feels about Dick and the impact of this upon her life and marriage. Dick is an academic acquaintance of Lotringer; when the three meet, Kraus and Dick flirt a little. The husband and wife later submit this to analysis: ‘because they are no longer having sex’, the third person narrative tells us, ‘the two maintain their intimacy via deconstruction’ (p. 21). Dick fills a hole in their relationship, and they are both acutely, wryly aware of it. Lotringer writes the first letter to Dick, and Kraus follows suit; they then write to him and to each other about him, and they sometimes compose epistles jointly. They write many, so far unsent, letters, but this only lasts until Kraus leaves Lotringer at the end of the first part of the book, whereupon only Kraus writes, and her letters get longer, turning into quasi-essays on artists, political activism, and even rural impoverishment in the Adirondacks.29 Dick never replies to her even though she intermittently sends him her letters in audacious bulk bundles. The only letter Dick writes, reproduced in I Love Dick, is the aforementioned complaint to Lotringer. In this, Dick attempts to salvage some space for continuing the two men’s professional relationship but objects strongly to the proposed publication of I Love Dick, complaining that his ‘right to privacy 28

29

Zembla, in ‘See Dick Sue’ (p. 20), claims that Hebdige tried to sue; Kraus confirms this, but notes he dropped the case before it got to court. See G. Intra, ‘A Fusion of Gossip and Theory’, Artnet.com (13 November 1997). In I Love Dick’s acknowledgements, Kraus thanks Eryk Kvam ‘for legal counsel’, indicating that Hebdige’s threat was taken seriously by the publishers (p. 9). The philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle suggests that historically ‘sex and philosophy exchange their nakedness’ in letters. See A. Dufourmantelle, Blind Date: Sex and Philosophy, trans. C. Porter (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), p. 85.

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has been sacrificed’ for the sake of Kraus’s writing talent (p. 260). He also manages to spell Kraus’s name incorrectly several times. Not only that, but in place of the letter which he had eventually promised to write to her, he instead sends her a photocopy of his letter to Lotringer. The final lines of the book narrate her embodied reaction to such a deeply dismissive, patriarchal gesture: ‘she gasped and breathed under the weight of it’ (p. 261). In the end, then, despite Kraus’s many letters, the discourse begins and closes between two white male professors; in the end – an ending which, in I Love Dick at least, Kraus is the author of – it is difficult to see how Dick has done anything more than fulfil the promise of his name. In an initial reading, I Love Dick places Dick, Kraus, and Lotringer in vulnerable positions, each in some fashion a victim of the other. The men, as established academics, appear to have the most materially and publicly to lose compared to Kraus, who by her own admission is a failed filmmaker. To maintain this, however, is to ignore the extent to which Kraus’s project grounds itself in strong claims for its emotional authenticity and integrity, for its forthright commitment to describing how she is feeling: her stake in this project rests upon her vulnerability. In contrast, when Lotringer and Dick show any interest in the project, it is for its artistic merit and literary novelty. Kraus writes to Dick: ‘My personal goal here – apart from anything else that may happen – is to express myself as clearly and honestly as I can’ (p. 130). Connected to this is her feminist commitment to speak from the position of women’s experience. Striking an optimistic tone, Kraus writes: ‘I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world’ (p. 210). The breathy length of this listing detracts from the politically stickier points it deliberately skates over: how is women’s self-destruction revolutionary, we might want to ask, for instance. Nevertheless, Kraus’s zeal for what she is doing, her belief in her own writing as performative, is palpable. In this kind of mode, I Love Dick communicates the commitment of the amateur enthusiast: Kraus is the newly arrived female writer bravely striking out in new directions, emotionally stripping for Dick and for her readers, and hoping in the process to secure change in the way women’s emotions are perceived. This somewhat green position is given further credence by what Anna Watkins Fisher, with some suspicion, refers to as Kraus’s ‘claimed outsiderness’ when it comes to the academy and the art world.30 30

A. Watkins Fisher, ‘Manic Impositions: The Parasitical Art of Chris Kraus and Sophie Calle’, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 40:1 & 2 (Spring/Summer 2012), pp. 223–35, at p. 226.

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Added to this emergent picture of Kraus as an honest, committed feminist and without institutional attachments, her emotional credibility is reinforced by the personal and humiliating tenor of her confessions. For instance, she recounts how she urinated awkwardly into a cup in her car to avoid having to ask to use Dick’s toilet upon her arrival at his house (p. 151); she admits to begging to be Dick’s ‘lapdog’ during sex (p. 161). Indeed, her repeated claims to love a man whose investment in her is so slight adds to her emotional vulnerability. She knows full well she risks being labelled ‘crazy’ (pp. 105, 155) by him, but also by her readers. All these factors combine to underwrite the authenticity of her confessions because of the potential shame and public embarrassment to which such intimacies expose her. As Peter Brooks points out in his book Troubling Confessions, ‘truth of the self and to the self have become markers of authenticity, and confession – written or spoken – has come to seem the necessary, though risky, act through which one lays bare one’s most intimate self, to know oneself and make oneself known’.31 Authenticity is currently a powerful cultural cliché in the West: from artisan bread through to designer handbags and reality TV, contemporary twenty-first-century life repeatedly insists that the real and the authentic can be pitted dichotomously against the fake and the representational, and that the former is better, stronger, or, at the least, more immediate and less mediated. The formal properties of I Love Dick, its epistolary and diaristic composition, as well as the inclusion of the writing and conversation of Dick and Lotringer, complements and reinforces the emotional intimacy of its confessional contents. Stylistically, the letters allow Kraus to apostrophise: ‘Dick’, ‘Dear Dick’, she repeats, setting regular reminders for readers that there is a ‘real’ addressee, that we are not the originally intended reader. Despite Myles’s writerly recognition of the skilled editing which must have shaped the book (p. 15), Kraus’s informal, ‘jotted’ habit of employing ampersands, slang, colloquialisms, and contractions, even for words that might only usually be used in this way in speech (e.g. ‘Everything’s different’, p. 89), deliberately creates the opposite impression, of writing that is immediate and direct. There is, though, an even more visceral manner through which I Love Dick establishes its authenticity and thus the emotional vulnerability of Kraus’s position and the audacity of her writing. Drawing upon the work of Bersani that I mentioned at the start of this chapter, Helen Hester has written about the appeal of intensity for readers of those tragic tales of 31

P. Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 9.

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childhood abuse often dubbed ‘misery memoirs’. This is the genre par excellence of victimhood. Noting how it is frequently called ‘misery porn’, Hester comments that ‘there is an obvious point at which autobiography and pornography can be seen to intersect, and that is via a certain insistence on the real – that is, on the centrality of both the extra-textual event and the subject in a state of self-shattering intensity’.32 There is considerable critical agreement across discipline boundaries that intensity, whether physical or emotional or both, is a key component of authenticity in contemporary culture, as it is, indeed, of intimacy.33 This observation is supported by Kraus’s writing, most obviously in the explicitness with which she describes her sexual encounters but, more significantly, in her insistence on the ‘extra-textual’ event – falling in love with Dick – which has caused the life she used to live to be shattered and the self she becomes to be strung out on intensity. Even Kraus’s first Dick letter, while admitting that what preceded its writing was a ‘three-day fictitious romance’, singles out intensity as the preeminent experience: But Dick, I know that as you read this, you’ll know these things are true. You understand the game is real, or even better than, reality, and better than is what it’s all about. What sex is better than drugs, what art is better than sex? Better than means stepping out into complete intensity. Being in love with you, being ready to take this ride, made me feel 16. (p. 28)

Once again, the style is breathy, the punctuation is somewhat askew, and the tone veers between the confidence of that central definition of ‘better than’ and the clichéd inarticulacy of adolescence in the phrases ‘better than is what it’s all about’ and ‘being ready to take this ride’. Kraus even suggests that Lotringer initially entertains her desire for Dick on the grounds that it restores to her a more intense investment in life: she now ‘seems animated and alive’ (p. 24). The intensity does not abate. In her final, thirty-five-page letter to Dick, Kraus is still reacting with fierce viscerality to him: her stomach flips when she unexpectedly sees his car (p. 251), she sweats while on the phone to him, and she vomits after he’s defensive with her (p. 257). She is still insisting on her experience as corporeal and life-transformative, 32 33

Hester, Beyond Explicit, pp. 147–8. See also Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave?, p. 25. See Hester, Beyond Explicit, and C. Lindholm, Culture and Authenticity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), p. 65. This has also been stressed in academic and popular books on marketing, PR, and strategies of global corporate and commercial branding. See S. Banet-Weiser, Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York and London: New York University Press, 2012). For a popular, conservative defence of authenticity (pitting it uncomplicatedly against the fake), see D. Boyle, Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life (London: Harper Perennial, 2004).

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if more melancholically, more desperately, and with a note of finality indicated by the past tense: ‘Loving you was a kind of truth-drug’ (p. 235). The final line she writes to Dick sets up a scenario in which we always fall emotionally, one way or another: ‘[w]e fall in love in hope of anchoring ourselves to someone else, to keep from falling’ (p. 257). Dick saves Kraus from an intimacy with Lotringer that has become stale and discursive, returning her to desire as embodied, risky, and visceral, ‘a painful elemental state’ which renders her vulnerable to Dick (p. 27). The emotion, intensity, and viscerality Kraus describes are essential to the project’s establishment of vulnerability and authenticity, and to the reader’s belief that, as Kraus puts it in an interview, ‘this Dick is real’.34 This durable quip, however, participates in a different dimension of I Love Dick which is in direct tension with the vulnerability and emotional authenticity Kraus works hard to establish: the text, like its author, is clever. Vulnerability and intelligence are rarely assumed to belong together, except in exceptional figures like the idiot savant or child genius, and, as Kraus notes, the cultural freighting of any ‘outsider’ figure is in addition gendered. In a comment that echoes Chapter 2’s discussion of the gendering of genius, Kraus notes curtly, ‘singular men are geniuses. Singular women are just “quirky”.’35 When she asks with frustration, ‘Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement?’ (p. 211), the answer lies in the question itself: to show how gendered social scripts make a woman debased, or a victim, or vulnerable, where a man would not be deemed so, does not safeguard the woman who reveals this from being ascribed to the role, as seen in the abrasive and even abusive responses Calloway receives to her writing. Kraus’s answer is to present her vulnerability to Dick as intelligently as possible. In this respect, the book displays its theoretical mastery through its postmodern ‘jokes’, with Dick as the centrepiece (or, perhaps more accurately, the codpiece): he is the theorist who perfectly embodies his name and is exposed as doing so; he is the absent phallic presence around which the project pivots. Other post-structuralist and postmodern ploys are also at play, as when Kraus quotes from a book she is yet to publish and attributes it admiringly to Dick (pp. 135–7). Joan Hawkins’s afterword, ‘Theoretical Fictions’, comments upon how Kraus ‘invokes theory, SEEMS TO FEEL COMFORTABLE IN A THEORETICAL SKIN, without using theoretical language’ (p. 273). We could add to this that the book and its publisher – Lotringer’s lauded 34 35

Kraus in an interview with Giovanna Intra. See Intra, ‘A Fusion of Gossip and Theory’. Ibid. As seen in Chapter 2, Kate Zambreno makes a very similar comment in Heroines.

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Semiotext(e), the small but highly influential publishing house that later will publish Zambreno but that has already bought French theory to American audiences inside and outside of the academy – assume the readership will be familiar enough with theory that its performance will not go unnoticed. Within this landscape, I Love Dick can be read as the smart reply to Jacques Derrida’s The Postcard and his foreskin-centred Circumfessions; it riffs off the Lacanian phallus, and it poses a feminist response to a late twentieth-century theory world full of straight white men who – as Lotringer admits of Semiotext(e) before Kraus became involved – all published each other without thinking about women writers or theorists.36 The book is also aware of itself as an evolving project. While Kraus and Lotringer are still together and writing to each other, Kraus describes what they are doing in a playful, somewhat abstract manner: it is a ‘conceptual fuck’ (p. 22) or ‘abstract romanticism’ (p. 27).37 By contrast, Lotringer immediately employs a more academic, theoretical register which swiftly solidifies into classificatory terminology: their letters are ‘a dialectical resolution of a crisis that never was’ (p. 34) and ‘a new genre, something in between cultural criticism and fiction’ (p. 43).38 Early on they discuss the potential for publication (p. 58). It takes longer for Kraus to fix upon a term for what I Love Dick is doing, eventually returning to the idea of a case study (pp. 97, 153, 155) and once, later on, naming it ‘performative philosophy’ (p. 211), a term that Angel will echo to describe what she is doing in Unmastered.39 In Kraus’s discussions of art in the longer letters to Dick, she deliberately positions herself within a legacy of female artists and writers, including Katherine Mansfield, Sophie Calle, and Hannah Wilke; more than once, the epistolary novel is selfreflexively deemed a bourgeois form (e.g. p. 68). In other words, I Love 36

37 38

39

Watkins Fisher notes the affinity with Derrida’s The Postcard and the way Dick becomes the phallus. See ‘Manic Impositions’, pp. 227 and 226, respectively. On Semiotext(e)’s early disregard for women writers and thinkers, see the interview with Kraus and Lotringer in H. Schwarz and A. Balsamo, ‘Under the Sign of Semiotext(e): The Story according to Sylvère Lotringer and Chris Kraus’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 37:3 (Spring 1996), pp. 205–20, especially Lotringer’s admission regarding feminism that ‘It happened and I wasn’t aware of it. I guess meeting Chris opened my eyes to it. Really, most of the books we published from Europe were written by white males, right?’, a statement corrected by Chris as ‘all 25 Foreign Agent [a Semiotext(e) imprint] authors were white males’, which she calls ‘a huge embarrassment’ (p. 212). In these early stages of the project, Kraus also calls it ‘a kind of game’ (p. 25), ‘a fictional liaison’ (p. 29), and ‘scheming of another kind’ (p. 33). Lotringer also dubs them a ‘referential delirium’ (p. 30), ‘a cultural document’ (p. 42), and ‘confrontational performing art’ (p. 43). When the couple write to Dick about being involved in a video about the letters, they call it ‘kind of like Calle Art’ (p. 44). Lotringer describes it to Dick as ‘a collaborative piece’ (p. 43) and ‘a project that’s a little weird’ (p. 47), proposing to make it into ‘an art piece with a text’ (p. 49). K. Angel and S. Collins, ‘Interview’, Tender 4 (April 2014), pp. 20–7, at p. 24.

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Dick is very self-aware. Thus, when Kraus extols the depth of her feelings for Dick by claiming that ‘to experience intensity is to not know how things will end’ (p. 211), there is at least one sense in which, on the contrary, this writing, from a very early stage, has been pursued as a project intended to culminate in publication. When interviewed about I Love Dick, Kraus’s responses are informed by theory: asked about the extent to which her work is fiction, Kraus replies with the familiar post-structuralist caveat: ‘It’s all fiction. As soon as you write something down, it’s fiction.’40 In the same interview, she rejects the term ‘confessional’ to describe her work, replying instead by quoting Gilles Deleuze: ‘“Confessional” of what? Personal confessions? There’s a great line from a book we published by Deleuze: Life is not personal. The word “confessional” is not a good descriptor of my work.’41 Kraus is not the only writer in this study to express impatience at the persistence with which women’s lifewriting is labelled ‘confessional’, with all the concomitant implications of sinfulness, secrecy, and a religious doctrine that demands women’s subservience to men.42 If there is no such thing as personal confession, no such thing as a personal life, it is because we are interpolated into social structures which continually speak before us, as well as upon our behalf: one has to have learned what the church deems as sin before one can gain forgiveness for any particular, personal infringement through confession, for instance. Kraus argues that instead of confession she is utilising ‘an active “I” that’s turned out onto the world’, and that common misreadings of women who use ‘I’ in this active manner, ‘points towards this great disgust with female-ness. As if a revelatory female self cannot be anything but compromised and murky’, a quote which underlines how vulnerable women are to being dismissed and reflects Zambreno’s arguments of Chapter 2.43 Pointing to a problem does not necessarily ensure escape from it, however. I Love Dick performs this discomforting fact: the clever, selfreflexive, and theory-slick framing of Dick sits at an awkward angle to the 40 41 42

43

C. Kraus and D. Frimer, ‘Chris Kraus in Conversation with Denise Frimer’, The Brooklyn Rail (10 April 2006). Ibid. In a different interview she refers to I Love Dick as ‘strategic confession’. See Intra, ‘A Fusion of Gossip and Theory’. As discussed in Chapter 2, Kate Zambreno writes in Heroines with frustration of how women’s writing is dismissed as too personal and how, when women write autobiographically, it is viewed differently to when men do and dismissed as less serious, too emotional. At the conference ‘Women Writing Pleasure’ at Liverpool John Moores University (3–4 July 2015), Angel talked about her frustration at the assumption of readers and critics that Unmastered could be understood as simply confessional. Ibid.

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authenticity of the book’s forms and style, the appeal to emotional veracity, the vulnerable exposure of Kraus to social shame, and the insistence on the corporeal intensity of her feelings. Furthermore, the book needs its claims for emotional intensity as the basis for feminist critique since as a literary plot it is utterly jejune: it tells an old, heteronormative tale of a stale marriage, a Dick-focused affair, the separation of husband and wife, and the male lover’s disavowal of intimacy. Without Dick’s obligingly poor behaviour – the post-coital recourse to accusations of insanity in the face of Kraus’s intimacy, the letter to Lotringer – there is no tale to tell here, except that of the bored, intelligent, and unfulfilled wife of an academic and her failed film. If on one level Dick stands in for all the other Dicks, is Universal Dick, on another, we are supposed to feel that the photocopy of his complaint letter to Lotringer that Kraus opens, anticipating he will keep his promise by eventually replying to her, is a final punch to her stomach, deliberately personal in its very impersonality. Circuitously, then, Kraus needs us to believe in the visceral intensity of her reactions to Dick to prove once again how female artists are perceived to be ‘trapped within the purely psychological’ (p. 196) and their writing or art rejected as ‘personal’, a parade of wounded vulnerability, instead of read as theoretical (p. 217), philosophical (p. 207), or universal (p. 211). She needs Dick. This need for Dick, despite the delicious culpability of its double entendre, is also a need for Dick’s professional position and demeanour, a need for his theoretical interests, to ensure he is a good, safe Dick to feature in such a project and, despite his initial threat of legal action, Kraus was right: professionally speaking, I Love Dick does not make Dick especially vulnerable. Neither Dick nor Lotringer is going to lose his professorial chair, intellectual reputation, the respect of his publisher, or his future speaker’s fees because of I Love Dick. If anything, it is going to surround these men with the fizzle and frisson of libidinal intrigue, confirming that there is sexual life in the old theory dogs yet. In addition, despite their cash flow complaints, Kraus and Lotringer have a great deal of financial and cultural capital: they juggle assets with art shows, speaker’s fees with filmmaking, and theory with pillow talk. Even when she leaves him, Kraus is financially secure. I Love Dick is not reputationally and therefore materially risky for any of them; these are privileged people, both financially and culturally, and Kraus, by her own admission, has little to lose and the intellect and knowledge to insert herself into a lineage of sidelined female artists who also write or perform the personal. I Love Dick works because these men are quasi-famous in the smallness of theory and art circles and

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yet have secure positions; it works because they ultimately understand the project as a performance of vulnerability produced as literary art. The contradictions of I Love Dick are instructive, I think, in that they both delineate what is audacious about the project and the factors which mitigate some of its affects. Vulnerability and intelligence in a woman artist are shown to be a still uncomfortable combination because their coupling is assumed to be transactional, as Dick deemed was the case in his letter: in this view, the intelligent woman uses her vulnerability to leverage a return, whether the result is emotional reciprocity, the satisfaction of revenge, or the reward of artistic recognition. The audacity of Kraus in this respect is to defy the assumption that transactional vulnerability is part of her modus operandi: there is quickly no question of any meaningful reciprocity from Dick; the establishment of authenticity through her visceral attachment to Dick, the epistolary present tense, and the immediacy of the style keep the reader from the suspicion of contrivance; the only risk was that as a first book it might be dismissed or simply attract no attention at all, however well-placed she was in the edgy side of the publishing world. In a rather different way, in I Love Dick emotional veracity and the abstraction of post-structuralist play alternately undermine each other; the green, teenaged intensity of Kraus’s feelings chaffs against her culturally privileged knowledge and the position of the men she audaciously outwits. The most glaring if salutary of contradictions is the silence or misunderstanding that Kraus argues women writers and artists are frequently treated to and the noise I Love Dick created, along with the opportunities it has opened up for its author: Kraus has gone on to successfully publish other works, make several experimental films, secure herself her own professorship, and, somewhat incredibly, I Love Dick has been made by Amazon into a TV show.44 Kraus resisted victimhood but explored her vulnerability, using it to transform a series of personal humiliations into points about how social structures tend to disadvantage women who write about their emotions and their desire. Thus it is that the vulnerabilities involved in writing I Love Dick also turn into its strength and this is the reason it is the earliest published text discussed in Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing and a fitting precursor to its later sisters. A very different and more disturbing engagement with vulnerability emerges in the work of the next author to whom we now turn. 44

M. Gajanan, ‘Coming from the Creator of Transparent: I Love Dick, the TV Version of Cult Novel’, The Guardian (18 February 2016). The TV show disappointingly makes the Kraus character considerably more desperate and less smart than the book’s author.

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Calloway Incarnate Marie Calloway’s life-sized face adorns the black-and-white front cover of her first book. She is young, wearing relatively little make-up, and one ear pushes cutely through her hair on the right-hand side. Despite this, her level stare, angled upwards as though to emphasise her smallness, looks out at the reader with a hint of challenge and accusation, reinforcing the title, what purpose did i serve in your life (2013). The combination of her youthfulness, the flat, lower-case title with its missing question mark, and this direct, upward gaze produces an image of vulnerability exploited and suggests the book’s contents may provide a rejoinder to such misuse. But who is Marie Calloway? This is not an idle question, for the name is pseudonymous and the genre unclear. Because the narrative voice across the stories remains consistent, because the stories tend to ‘share’ similar details and build upon one another (e.g. ‘sex work one’, ‘sex work two’, and ‘sex work three’), and because the photographs within the book are all of the same woman who is on the cover, it makes sense to read this as the sexual autobiography or memoir of the author. Yet there are small inconsistencies between the stories that suggest at least some degree of fiction at work: for instance, a claim for poverty in one tale (p. 14) is contradicted by the confession of a trust fund in another (p. 39). Reviewers and interviewers do not share consensus about the book’s genre either.45 This, then, is what Leigh Gilmore would class as a ‘limit-case’ form of life-writing, where ‘selfrepresentation operates at a distance from the conventions of autobiography’, exacerbated by Calloway’s investment in her online life, which further blurs the distance between self and representation.46 What purpose is an audacious book about sexual vulnerability, in terms of both the sexual situations explored and the reactions that readers have had to Calloway’s writing. It is by far the most disturbing and contentious of the three texts discussed in this chapter: the BDSM is more extreme; the level of literal and rhetorical violence directed at Calloway – by sexual 45

46

Vanessa Willoughby called what purpose a novel in her blog post ‘Unpopular Opinion: I Like Marie Calloway’, Bookriot (18 August 2015). Jacob M. Appel’s review referred to it as a book of stories in The Quarterly Conversation 33 (2 September 2013). In an interview after the publication of ‘Adrien Brody’ (which came out before what purpose but is one of its chapters), Calloway describes the story as based on her life experience, although a postscript explains it was published as fiction. See S. Elliott, ‘The Rumpus Interview with Marie Calloway’, The Rumpus (29 December 2011). Many reviewers assume what purpose is fiction informed by life, exactly the fine line that new audacity writers tread so well. For example, see B. Brown, ‘Marie Calloway Pushes the Boundaries of What’s Printable’, The Huffington Post (22 May 2013). L. Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 7.

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partners, by erotic interlocutors, and by her early readers whose comments are included in the book – is shocking; and the aesthetic value of the text is highly disputed, with considerable speculation that Calloway is deliberately courting notoriety. The printer refused to produce review copies once they had seen the content.47 This is a book whose author and publisher have traded on the audacity of writing about the enjoyment of degradation and gritty sexual submission. This is not the world of professional doms with whips and leather harnesses but that of male rape fantasies and internet hook-ups involving fists and vomit. What is indisputably clear is that Calloway is fascinated by how men respond to female vulnerability. In line with the ‘callow’ carried within its author’s chosen surname, what purpose deals primarily with inexperience: most of the chapters are firsttime sexual vignettes, such as the opening story, entitled ‘portland, oregon, 2008’, recounting the loss of Calloway’s virginity or the final tale of Calloway’s first threesome with two men, called, either ironically or dispiritingly, ‘thank you for touching me’.48 In many of these encounters, Calloway is the sexually more inexperienced and is often younger than her male partners, both facts that place her in a potentially vulnerable position. Other sections of the book comprise montages of her Facebook conversations, emails, selfies, and quotes from correspondence, sometimes interspersed with Calloway’s own commentary. Most chapters focus on a different area of sexual experience, including sex work, cybersex, BDSM play, and internet conversations with strangers or men who admire her writing. The exceptions are ‘Jeremy Lin’, which is about her first publisher, Tao Lin, and a reading they gave together in New York, and ‘Criticism’, wherein caustic and even cruel quotes taken from responses to her first published story are reprinted over black-and-white photos of Calloway, some of which are sexual or provocative in nature, such as one where she is dressed to resemble Lolita.49 Calloway came to literary notice because, like Kraus, she published a tale which audaciously named and shamed the sexual behaviour of an older, more famous male writer, a feminist strategy to reclaim narrative autonomy over an experience also discussed in Chapter 1 in relation to Emin. 47 48

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‘Citing “Content” Issue, Printer Refuses to Print Marie Calloway’s Tyrant Books Debut’, Publisher’s Weekly (15 January 2013). ‘Marie’ apparently reflects Calloway’s admiration for Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette. See K. Stoeffel, ‘Meet Marie Calloway: The New Model for Literary Seductress Is Part Feminist, Part “Famewhore” and All Pseudonymous’, The Observer (20 December 2011). Calloway had had work accepted by Thought Catalog, an online publishing platform, but Tao Lin’s Muumuu House was the first established literary publisher to feature Calloway’s writing.

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Before getting formally published Calloway had been posting her writing on a blog, including the story of how she had sexually propositioned a man from New York who was older than her, whose writing she admired, and who had sex with her without the knowledge of his girlfriend. The story’s title was the name of the writer and was accompanied by photos, including one of Calloway with what appeared to be his semen dribbling from her lips. With a new, pseudonymous title, ‘Adrien Brody’, the story later appeared on the Muumuu House website, a New York ‘alt-lit’ (alternative literature) publisher that represented Calloway’s first breakthrough into the literary avant-garde. Much like Dick of I Love Dick, the man at the centre of ‘Adrien Brody’ was easily identifiable and his girlfriend, it would appear, learned of his infidelity from reading Calloway’s explicit tale.50 The internet frenzy this caused – readers were quick to search for Calloway’s original title and thus the man’s name, even though she swiftly removed these from the Web – was exacerbated when, a few days after the story’s publication, the New York Observer ran an article entitled, ‘Meet Marie Calloway: The New Model for Literary Seductress Is Part Feminist, Part “Famewhore” and All Pseudonymous’.51 The internet reaction, as Calloway discusses in her story ‘Jeremy Lin’, was immediate. Social media commentators were not reticent in their condemnation, even while they drove traffic to her other blogged stories, many of which provided accounts of sexual encounters. Comments about Calloway’s writing reproduced in what purpose range from aesthetically damning and condemnatory (‘boring prose’ [p. 141]; ‘a lazy boring writer’ [p. 150]); and scornful and insulting (‘they are stories about a female trainwreck . . . her female characters are so fucking ugly’ [p. 142]; ‘she’s just not very bright’ [p. 146]; ‘she’s kind of a moron’ [p. 148]) to concerned speculations that Calloway might be suffering from mental illness (p. 84) or autism (p. 150); and, at the outer extreme, included rape and death threats (p. 162) and a fantasy of Calloway’s violent demise (p. 144). She had become the victim of her own successful audacity, rapidly sucked in by all the attention – positive as well as negative, although it is primarily the latter which is reproduced in what purpose – to what she describes as ‘an unhealthy obsessive/self-hate cycle’ and eventual writer’s block (p. 164). 50

51

Details of the girlfriend’s knowledge are murky: shortly after Calloway’s story was published, The Hairpin website ran an anonymous letter on its advice page from a woman who discovered her boyfriend’s infidelity after reading an explicit account of it by a young writer online. The Hairpin removed the letter shortly afterwards. See Stoeffel, ‘Meet Marie Calloway’. Stoeffel, ‘Meet Marie Calloway’. To get a flavour of the responses Calloway’s story attracted, see the below-the-line comments.

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The reactions just quoted are from the section of what purpose entitled ‘Criticism’. Calloway thereby transforms these reviews into her own material, offered up for review in turn, with the added twist that they are literally written over her photographed body: she superimposes them across images of herself. This has the crudity of an internet meme and the sophistication of highlighting that such reviews have bodily effects: the shame they seek to induce – and Kaye Mitchell has identified this prevalent intention across the variety of responses – has bodily manifestations and such commentary can lead to ‘mental exhaustion’, panic attacks, and hyperventilation, as Calloway describes her reactions in ‘Jeremy Lin’ (p. 159).52 At the same time, these superimposed reviews highlight how Calloway is perforce a mediated composition rather than identical with the construction of the woman who writes ‘I’ in what purpose or appears in its photographs. If photographs – especially selfies – are deliberate constructions that capture only the surface, these reviews are equally distortive and shallow, Calloway’s reframing of them suggests. Resultantly, the cacophonous opprobrium and callous speculations of the reviewers mount, page by page, until they look suspiciously like a symptom of something far more pathological than Calloway’s writing or her sexual adventures, thus suggesting that one purpose she serves for her readers is as a scapegoat to chastise, sacrificed on the altar of offended literary sentiments and old-fashioned misogyny. For a young writer publishing her first short story, Calloway attracted a tremendous amount of intrigue and comment, much of it negative and vitriolic, and in what purpose she audaciously showcases the cruelty of those commentators and effectively allows them to indict themselves. Many of the reviewers assume Calloway is young, naïve, and vulnerable; by extension, they frequently imply she is stupid or shallow. The pages of what purpose, with their selfies, their ‘youthtitude’, and their sexual confessions wherein the self appears as an object upon which to trade for ‘likes’, for notoriety, or for accumulating the desire of the other, can look remarkably close to various iterations of the empty, late-capitalist, thoroughly commodified figure of the ‘Young-Girl’, as theorised somewhat repetitively by the collective Tiqqun.53 Here is a brief, apposite selection of their definitions, 52

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Kaye Mitchell’s book, Writing Shame: Contemporary Literature, Gender and Negative Affect, forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press, points out that these reactions attempt to induce shame in Calloway. I’m grateful to Kaye for sharing an early draft of a chapter which in part discussed what purpose. The chapter in its final form in Writing Shame uses the same trio of texts as this chapter and results in sometimes different, sometimes complementary interpretations Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl, trans. A. Reines (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), p. 30. The book contains many sentences which ‘stand alone’ and in different

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which could apply directly to the author of what purpose: ‘The Young-Girl is old insofar as she is known to be young’ (p. 23); ‘The Young-Girl is obsessed with authenticity because it’s a lie’ (p. 23); ‘The intimacy of the Young-Girl, now equivalent to all intimacy, has become something anonymous and exterior, an object’ (p. 24); ‘The Young-Girl knows the standard perversions’ (p. 39). In Tiqqun’s unpalatable depiction, the young girl is both vulnerable and knowing, a willing victim to the logic of consumer capitalism, lacking, the text implies, the shape and resistance a commitment to politics might provide. However controversially, Tiqqun have captured the essence of a zeitgeist figure, one who provokes considerable disquiet, whether she appears to surface in theory, life-writing, or fiction.54 Her vulnerability is a spectacle. In this vein, Kate Zambreno’s novel Green Girl (2011) paints a picture of a young, ‘green’ girl who strikingly echoes the figure adumbrated by Tiqqun and the qualities that commentators attribute to Calloway: ‘She is such a trainwreck’, Zambreno’s narrator comments, ‘But that’s why we like to watch. The spectacle of the unstable girl-woman. Look at her losing it in public.’55 There is a similar spectrum of fascination and revulsion in the negative responses to Calloway. The reviewers’ accusations of her narcissism or self-absorption, alongside the photographs and social media images of her throughout the book, resonate with Tiqqun’s rather scornful declarations that ‘The Young-Girl resembles her photo’ (p. 33), ‘the Young-Girl doesn’t love herself; what she loves is “her” image’ (p. 61), and ‘The Young-Girl never creates anything; / All in all she only re-creates herself ’ (p. 24). Almost uncannily, in fact, some of the qualities Calloway’s reviewers accuse her of are also qualities Tiqqun attribute to the Young-Girl: a form of autism (p. 30), narcissism (p. 61), being a ‘wreck’ (in Tiqqun, it’s a shipwreck [p. 29], in Zambreno, as we see earlier, a train wreck) and being naïve (p. 38). It is not

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typefaces, producing a visual effect of different voices vying to define a cultural phenomenon they admit is also ‘an oxymoron’ (p. 131). The publication sparked debate. See M. Weigal and M. Ahern, ‘Further Materials towards a Theory of the Man-Child’, The New Inquiry (9 July 2013). Responding to this is J. Mansoor, ‘Notes on Militant Folds: Against Weigal and Ahern’s “Further Materials towards a Theory of the ManChild”’, The Claudius App 5 (August 2013). For a discussion contextualising this in relation to Tiqqun’s other work, see Critila, ‘Mind the Dash’, The Anvil Review (19 December 2013). Available at: www.theanvilreview.org/print/mind-the-dash/. See also Nina Power’s review, with which I broadly agree: N. Power, ‘She’s Just Not That into You’, Radical Philosophy 177 (January/ February 2013). K. Zambreno, Green Girl (New York: HarperCollins, 2014 [2011]), p. 13. Like Tiqqun, Zambreno gives multiple definitions of the ‘green girl’, represented by the central character, Ruth, and others like her: ‘They trade in compliments about each other’s daily costume, the false currency for the green girl’ (p. 31); ‘A green girl . . . is waiting around to be discovered just for being herself’ (p. 65); ‘She has not formed any opinions of her own’ (p. 93); ‘The green girl needs to externalize her own suffering’ (p. 161); ‘The green girl breaks easily with her past’ (p. 255).

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inconceivable that Calloway would be aware of Tiqqun’s text, published in 1999 and circulating as a PDF in English by 2010, given the discussions online and in academic circles to which it gave rise and her interest in what she identifies as her ‘reverse Lolita complex’: her attraction to crafting her cuteness, youth, and an air of vulnerability in order to attract older men with such preferences (p. 129). In my reading of what purpose youthfulness, vulnerability, and naïveté are qualities Calloway clearly possesses because she is young, inexperienced, and a woman in a patriarchal culture, but they are also qualities she consciously curates as part of a literary venture, not, as Tiqqun would have it, as an unwitting avatar for contemporary identity or its lack, but to attract men, to learn what they like and what they are like, to assess the effect she can have upon them, and to explore her own sexuality and its limits. At the same time, although not necessarily in a deliberately instrumental fashion, these experiences generate material for her writing. In the process, her writing draws attention – both in the interactions she has within the book and the reactions her prose receives – to the stereotypes typically attributed to young, newly sexually active women, stereotypes which derive their continued relevance from common features of sexual experiences available to young women under the structures of a patriarchal hetero-social-sexual system. Calloway is acutely aware that vulnerability is attractive to men and that older men particularly enjoy being the experienced gatekeepers inducting the young girl into sexual enlightenment, an age-old plot line and familiar driver for erotic writing.56 In ‘Adrien Brody’ she writes, ‘I tried to make myself vulnerable to him, to gain his affection’ (p. 95). The vulnerability Calloway performs and projects in what purpose is thus both true inasmuch as it is a generalised likelihood that women will feel vulnerable in many of the circumstances she recounts and, in the specific linguistic, structural, and visual choices she makes as a writer, it is aesthetically devised. The opening story, in which she deliberately loses her virginity to a stranger, tells us in the first paragraph, ‘I wanted to do this very adult thing,’ as though she is still apt to do childish things, as though, like a child, she thinks adulthood is achieved by passing a series of milestone experiences. She admits to being ‘nervous’ (p. 4) and ‘insecure’ about her looks (p. 4); a page on, she informs us in parentheses ‘(A few years later I would learn I am completely unable to feel oral sex due to past sexual trauma)’ 56

See, for example, the Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) through to E. L. James, Fifty Shades of Grey (2011).

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(p. 4). The voice is inexperienced, uncertain, and already damaged, all markers of youthful vulnerability. When it comes, penetration hurts her; she fakes enjoyment and later feels shame (p. 9). This is the thresholdcrossing into heterosexual activity common to the experience of many women, and Calloway pointedly places it at the start of what purpose: ‘I wonder’, she writes, in a way we can read as one of her many semiresponses to the book’s title, ‘if he was excited by the idea of being first’ (p. 4). Losing her virginity causes her to ‘write furiously, obsessively’ and ‘all day long about what had happened’ (p. 9), establishing early in the book the connection for her between sexual experiences and her writing. Despite the pain and lack of pleasure, the story closes with her seeking this man out again for sex, immediately hooked, we perhaps may think, into the self-abnegating patterns of female heterosexuality, a victim of patriarchal power. Structurally, the next two stories, ‘sex work experience one’ and ‘sex work experience two’, placed straight after the loss of Calloway’s virginity and similarly laced with unsurprising disclosures of inexperience, set up a clunky causality between sexual trauma, the loss of virginity, lack of sexual satisfaction, and sex work, which adds to the picture of her vulnerability. ‘Sex work experience one’ deliberately stresses that the narrator has run out of money: ‘Am I really going to do this? I guess I don’t have any choice: I have about 12 pounds to last me for 10 more days in London’ (p. 14).57 The fourth story, wherein young Marie meets up with a photographer she first connected with online, discovers she enjoys degradation while giving him fellatio, and realises that he ‘is three years younger than my Dad’ (p. 46), consolidates the picture of a young girl’s exploited sexuality. The structural organisation of these stories is provocative: more conservative readers may conclude that Calloway is ‘giving herself away’ to men who definitely do not deserve the gift – as this line of creepy thinking insinuates – of young female flesh; even liberally minded readers may be tempted to suppose Calloway will regret some of these sexual decisions when she is older, a view expressed by some of her commentators. The more pertinent question, however, is how a young woman who wishes to experiment with new sexual experiences is to avoid such ubiquitous judgements: there are no socially acceptable models of how to be a sexually active and adventurous young woman without attracting 57

This detail is contradicted in ‘the irish photographer’. He asks if she’s ever had a job; she replies no, with the narrative voice commenting: ‘I’ve never needed a job. I have a trust fund’ (p. 39). Across the stories certain biographical details like this may change, but the narrative voice maintains a strong identity and tends to disclose information about the self which is consistent, e.g. admissions of social anxiety, a curiosity towards how sex makes her feel, a high threshold for sexual disgust.

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moral censure. In a stark manner, then, in representing sexual experiences which are likely to elicit judgement, Calloway lays bare the contradictory economic and mystical thinking at the heart of heterosexuality which positions her as always in the wrong: her virginity should be ‘worth’ more than a sexually unpleasurable experience with a stranger; her sex acts should be ‘worth’ more than the sushi, make-up, and margaritas she wishes to buy with the cash from prostitution (pp. 28, 65); she should ‘value’ herself more than to give herself ‘for free’ to an internet pervert who may take photos of her in compromising positions. Juno Mac and Molly Smith note this moral squeamishness about sex, criticising the perception that ‘to have sex (or to have sex in the wrong ways – too much, with the wrong person, or for the wrong reason) brings about some kind of loss’.58 Within this pernicious logic the final maths is simple: the men prize Calloway more than she does herself because virginity, youth, and sexual first times – all conditions considered vulnerable to exploitation – can be sold for higher prices, better experiences, and lower risks than she achieves. Within this logic, too, female agency and desire are not a factor of consequence. It does not matter much that she wanted to lose her virginity to a stranger, that she chose sex work because she wanted money fast to buy make-up and sushi and margaritas, or that she desired to visit the Irish photographer. Such a logic whereby women inevitably fail is not new to us, yet the descriptions of a young woman’s traversal of these heterosexual vectors have considerable pathos in revealing how embedded is the value system attached to young female sexuality. The fact that many of her reviewers also express contempt for Calloway’s sexual behaviour fits precisely within this structure of valuation, which immediately situates her as the victim of the men she encounters. Calloway does not simply demonstrate the operation of these structures, however: far more disturbing to traditional and radical forms of feminism, she discovers she enjoys embodying many of these stereotypes and finds the desire and behaviour they elicit from men sexually exciting. We may live in the most liberal of Western times, but it is still audacious to admit to being sexually excited by your own degradation, as Calloway does. She curates her cuteness and vulnerability, cultivating a pliant passivity which tends to wait for men to initiate and direct sexual acts. As Sianne Ngai reminds us, drawing on the work of Daniel Harris, ‘the cute object’s exaggerated passivity seems likely to excite the consumer’s sadism or desire for mastery’.59 In ‘the irish photographer’, the 58 59

J. Mac and M. Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights (London and Brooklyn: Verso, 2018), pp. 22–3. S. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 65.

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fourth story in what purpose, Calloway states: ‘It was like I was his dog. He was humiliating me but I felt safe and warm and completely turned on. Nothing could be more enjoyable than this. To be dominated and degraded was what I wanted. Sex is just a way to get those things. I felt valued, even though I actually wasn’t’ (p. 45). The recognition of a chasm between enjoyable feelings and the less palatable or more questionable reality is to appear repeatedly in the pages of what purpose that follow.60 It rapidly becomes probable that Calloway is a sexual masochist: during a later account of rough and painful sex work, she writes in italics, as though in a repetitive, almost stream-of-consciousness mantra, ‘I’m getting off on being treated like this and I like it. I love it. I want to be treated like a worthless whore and I am a worthless whore’ (p. 69), returning us yet again to the question of how female sexuality is literally priced and de/valued. Throughout, though, this is accompanied, and its potential pathos thereby disrupted, by her forensic fascination with how men respond to her: ‘He is going to cum in my mouth because he wants to degrade me, he sees me as less than human,’ she comments, adding, ‘I am so tired of men pretending they see me as anything other than a whore, that they see any woman as anything other than that’ (p. 69). In ‘cybersex’, the fifth chapter of the book, this becomes not the internal commentary upon men’s behaviour that it has been up until that point but actual conversations with men: next to a thumbnail photo of Calloway she has typed, ‘do u have rape fantasy’ (p. 48) to her online interlocutor, whose identity is redacted. He is initially reticent but soon asks, ‘want me to rape you?’ (p. 48). With what may be a different man – their names and avatars are all blacked out – she writes, ‘tell me weird things you are into’ (p. 49). She encourages the men to write their sadistic sexual fantasies, asks them a lot of questions, and less frequently shares what appear to be her own masochistic fantasies. In these ‘cybersex’ conversations, Calloway is constantly pressing men for information about their sexual desires: ‘what other things do u like besides piss’ (p. 56); ‘tell me what else u like to force girls to di [sic]’ (p. 57); ‘what would turn you on the most? [sic]’ (p. 58). These exchanges are reproduced as screen shots from live online chats, complete with the spelling errors and informal contractions which reiterate their authenticity. Calloway frequently asks ‘y’ these men like what they say they do. She also regularly uses the cute and kittenish word ‘mew’ (e.g. pp. 49, 51) as a noncommittal, if softly encouraging and appropriately vulnerable response to what they describe. Both Kraus, with her desire to be Dick’s lapdog, and Calloway with her ‘mew’, link themselves to small, cute, and 60

For instance, pp. 68–9, 112–13, 115, 223, 234.

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weak domestic pets. As a deliberate gesture indicative of submission, Calloway’s ‘mew’ does not go untested: in a BDSM scene later in what purpose, the dominant man she is with demands she say it, hitting her until she does (p. 211). The ‘cybersex’ chapter ends with the response of a man, although it is not clear to what, who simply writes, ‘thats very feminist of you lol’ (p. 61), further evidence to add to Angel’s point that women’s heterosexual submission is generally perceived as incompatible with feminism. Because of Calloway’s active elicitation of these men’s desires and fantasies, in ‘cybersex’ a different incarnation of her emerges to the one the book has presented so far. As what purpose continues, this image of Calloway as deliberately provoking specific responses from the men she encounters intensifies. It is significant, in this light, that she never reports having an orgasm in what purpose, despite sometimes admitting to sexual arousal. In response to a direct interview question about this elision, she admits that it is a form of deliberate physical withholding from the men she encounters to protect her from being vulnerable: ‘Someone wrote about how men see female orgasms as trophies rather than pleasurable experiences to share with a partner. They laugh and mock women with their male friends that they made cum, like mockingly imitate how they sounded during. For this reason I find it humiliating to cum with a male partner, unless I trust and like him a lot.’61 Instead, she experiments with the desires and stereotypes which men are supposed to respond to: in ‘Adrien Brody’, she sends photos of herself to ‘Adrien’, declaring her desire to sleep with him. She writes, ‘I was also curious to see how someone who seemed so dignified and cerebral would respond to a young girl sending sexy photos of herself to him over the Internet’ (p. 90). The power is shifted here: gone is the vulnerability that might be assumed of a young writer seeking out the attention of an older man. Instead, Brady becomes the subject experimented upon. After they have met, she tells him she is twenty-one: ‘I was dropping my age’, she tells the reader, ‘I wanted to see how he felt about this’ (p. 94). During these sexual encounters, Calloway is often garnering material which will later be used in her writing; for instance, when she photographs Adrien, he asks ‘kind of nervously’ if she will publish it: ‘“No,” I said, fully intending to’ (p. 95), and in ‘thank you for touching me’ she breaks off during sex with two men to write down how she is feeling (p. 236). Calloway has claimed that to interpret her as ‘purposefully seeking out experiences so I could write about them or deal with psychological issues’ is to make 61

Z. Zolbred, ‘Six Question Sex Interview with Marie Calloway’, The Nervous Breakdown (6 June 2013).

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‘assumptions . . . kind of mired in misogyny, though sometimes unconsciously’.62 Her resistance is to the idea that she has instrumentalised her experiences and the people with whom she has had sex. Nevertheless, the stories themselves make a clear connection between sexual experiences and writing, writing which she later chooses to publish. There is no need to see this as simple causality, though: writing and sexual desire can be powerful imperatives, if differently felt and configured, and the tradition of noting down the effects on the self of new experiences has a far longer history than the novel. Directly related to this observation is the fact that one of the key words Calloway uses about her sexual experiences throughout the narratives in what purpose is ‘interesting’. Ngai’s work is again useful here in her identification of ‘interesting’ as an ambivalent word for our age. In a comment that accords well with Calloway’s sexual experiments, Ngai explains that ‘the experience of the interesting is essentially a feeling of not-yet-knowing’ (p. 131). Alongside Calloway’s often-made observation of a sexual situation as ‘interesting’, the hypothetical formulation ‘I wondered if . . . ’ makes repeated appearances.63 In the final story, ‘thank you for touching me’, Calloway’s feelings range across embarrassment, interest, excitement, shame, and the state of imaginative wondering which attempts to plumb her own motivations and those of the men with whom she is having sex. Having two men touch her simultaneously was, she writes, ‘pleasurable and interesting because it was a totally new sensation’ (p. 234); she found it ‘interesting’ that the men could ‘actively physically create a reason to respect me less’ (p. 234) and that one of the men appeared to direct the actions of the other (p. 235). She explores her own vulnerability in the face of their desire and treatment of her. Wonder eventually predominates, though, as a way to imagine herself into the reactions of the men she is with: ‘I wondered if he felt aroused, excited, disturbed’ and ‘I wondered what they would say to each other about it later. I wondered if they would make fun of me after they left’ (p. 235). This echoes what Calloway said in the interview quoted earlier: she suspects that men bond over sharing stories of their sexual intimacy with women, who are structurally vulnerable to their mockery. In narrative terms, the excurses into wonder represent to the reader a Calloway who retains an ability to detach herself from the embodied sexual present sufficiently to engage in exploratory thinking about its implications throughout. Despite the sex she participates in often being physically demanding and overwhelming, Calloway’s descriptions stress that sex does not stop her self-observing: the mind is not separate or subordinate to the body in these 62 63

Ibid. ‘I wondered if’ are the opening words of the first story (p. 3). ‘Interesting’ appears on the same page.

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encounters. In other words, her writing of sex, with its interspersed observations, even while it shows her vulnerability in a patriarchal culture, does not depict her as a victim but as a sexual participant with agency. As documented at the start of this chapter, feminist discomfort with BDSM is ongoing.64 Violent play and female subordination are not without their feminist defenders, however. For instance, Staci Newmahr, an ethnographer whose work in Playing on the Edge resulted from immersive participation in a sadomasochistic community, suggests that: Through bottoming [subordination to a dominant ‘top’], women confront and withstand and symbolically survive male violence. Women work the edge in SM [sadomasochism] of their everyday fears of violation, flirting, challenging, daring their would-be violators. These women are not celebrating violation, but actively defying the cultural proscription to live in fear of it.65

For Newmahr, the further crucial components in sadomasochism are the risks involved and the thrill provided by them: this is what she means when she uses the term ‘edge’, indicating that sadomasochism is less a surmounting or controlling of pain and emotions but more a continual ‘negotiation’ between chaos and order, intelligibility and incoherence (p. 184). Calloway’s BDSM chapter, the penultimate of the book, is as interested in presenting people’s reactions to her experiences as it is in recounting the experiences themselves. She reproduces photographs of her bruised body which she had posted to Facebook, as well as sections of messages and conversations that they prompted. All the reactions attempt to understand why Calloway engaged in these activities, to ascribe a meaning or motivation to them. They range from asking whether she was a victim of child abuse (p. 215); whether this ‘is thirdwave feminism’ (p. 222); accusing her of ‘calculated’ nonchalance (p. 217) and ‘working in the service of oppression’ (p. 222); seeing BDSM as a product of not living in a ‘liberated society’ (p. 223), as an example of ‘Fuck Me Feminism’ or of misogyny (p. 224); and naming the photos ‘exploratory measures’ (p. 224) and ‘triggering’ (p. 225), respectively implying that Calloway has been daring and experimental or rash and insensitive. Furthermore, Calloway’s inclusion of one of her Facebook statuses and other italicised sections provocatively suggests her emotional vulnerability through references to ‘past trauma’ (p. 223), ‘a 64

65

For classic twentieth-century representations of these debates, see A. Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York and London: Penguin Books, 1989); Bartky, Femininity and Domination. For a popular twenty-first-century take from a gender-performative perspective, see E. O’Toole, Girls Will Be Girls: Dressing Up, Playing Parts and Daring to Act Differently (London: Orion Publishing, 2015), pp. 204–9. S. Newmahr, Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011), p. 183.

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psychological thing’ (p. 223), and a ‘dad issue’ (p. 219), although, as we saw in the aforementioned interview, she will repudiate these as interpretative avenues for understanding her motivations. Even while Calloway does not directly explore the question of BDSM’s wider relationship to society and gender, the inclusions of these reactions and their anxious range clearly prompt the reader to wonder about the significance, ethics, and impetus behind violent play and female subordination. Two conversations which almost bookend the chapter contain, by contrast, rather different, trickier assertions. Below a poor-quality, black-and-white close-up photo of a bruise to what looks like the neck or shoulder is the following exchange: ‘Why do you enjoy being dominated?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘You’ve never thought about it? You don’t ever write about your sexual experiences?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Oh. I thought all writers did that. I do that,’ he said.

(p. 207)

These few short lines are complicated. The male writer suggests a direct link between writing about sexual experiences and trying to understand, to think through, sexual impulses, as though writing is a simple route to selfknowledge. Calloway’s disavowal, the ‘no’ which answers the questions both of thought and writing, is directly contradicted by the contents of the book in which it is asserted. And finally, if the male writer is someone who she has engaged in BDSM with – and his presence in this chapter and this dialogue alongside the photograph suggests that he is – then his closing comment is also a warning that she might feature in his writing; instead, here he is, featuring in hers. The second remarkable conversation is the final of the chapter and is about the photographs for which Facebook temporarily banned Calloway due to their nudity and implied violence: ‘What did your friends say about those pictures?’ ‘Most people didn’t like them . . . I got called a misogynist . . . ’ ‘They called me a misogynist? Or you?’ ‘Me. For posting those pictures.’ ‘But did you explain that it’s not misogynistic because of Fuck Me Feminism?’ ‘People have different ideas about that sort of thing . . . ’ ‘I understand that. It’s very paradoxical . . . Do you think it is misogynistic?’ ‘I’ve never thought about it.’ ‘I’m asking you to think about it now and tell me your opinion.’ (pp. 224–5) ‘I’m not intelligent enough to have an opinion.’

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It is certainly not the case that Calloway lacks the intelligence to have an opinion: the book’s very reticence in proffering decisive positions on its central topics of sex work, BDSM, and other non-normative sex acts is a sign of its author’s acuity in the face of what is frankly a quagmire of feminist feuding. She resists the weak justification of BDSM offered by her interlocutor’s reference to ‘Fuck Me Feminism’ – a shorthand, denigratory term for the liberal sex-positive feminist position referred to at the start of this chapter which affirms all types of consensual sex.66 Once again, in this exchange she disavows in a form which constitutes a performative volte-face, given that the foregoing chapter provides evidence of thought and of opinion at the level of both the selection of material and its presentation, as well as in moments such as the social media message explaining why she enjoys violent fellatio: ‘it feels v intense / I just like / intensity etc cos u get to feel out of your head’ (p. 220). This attraction to an intensity which evacuates selfhood echoes the complex appeal that Sontag and Bersani identify at work in sex but can equally feed into a narrative of Calloway as a traumatised victim attempting to obliterate herself through increasingly extreme sexual experiences. Calloway’s editing decisions show she is very aware of the audacity of what she is making public: through presenting mainly the opinions of her readers and online interlocutors in the BDSM section, she provides a range of different positions against which the readers of what purpose can measure their own response, whilst sidestepping any presentation of her own views. At another point, Calloway ascribes her return to BDSM scenes to the same self-evacuating feeling, qualifying it as a ‘feeling of detachment’, although she avers, ‘I don’t think it’s a good thing to feel detached, or to make yourself feel that way’ (p. 223). The feeling she is describing here has a name in the BDSM scene, ‘the subspace’, and is recognised as ‘an altered state’ which subs and doms, in different ways, can achieve.67 Calloway, however, quite deliberately does not frame her BDSM experiences as occurring within a scene or a community, neither does the book make her appear to be involved in any specialist BDSM online forums of any kind. This makes her experiences of BDSM seem 66

67

For a brief recognition of ‘fuck-me feminism’ in an academic text (albeit for a popular market), see C. Sarracino and K. M. Scott, The Porning of America: The Rise of Porn Culture, What It Means, and Where We Go from Here (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2010), pp. 181–2. The view that sexiness, objectification, and exploitation need only to be actively appropriated by women themselves to solve the problems these raise is critiqued by many feminists, e.g. A. Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (New York: Free Press, 2005); N. Power, One Dimensional Woman (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009). ‘Subs’ are submissives or ‘bottoms’ and ‘doms’ are dominants or ‘tops’ in BDSM play. For a description of subspace, also sometimes termed ‘the drop’, see Newmahr, Playing on the Edge, pp. 95–9.

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particularly lonely and vulnerable, but also more audacious. She eschews the terminology that could frame her experiences as commonplace within an established subcultural activity and demonstrate that she belongs to a community of like-minded people. Instead, she deliberately posts the photographs of her bruises on Facebook, where the pictures are more likely to be seen by those with no experience of BDSM and therefore disturb their viewers and attract censure. As was evident with Kraus, a tension emerges within Calloway’s self-presentation, although in this instance it is between the cute, young, vulnerable, and inexperienced Calloway and the Calloway who is boldly experimenting with her sexual life, her body, her image, and, even more audaciously, with her audience. At the end of ‘Adrien Brody’ she directly refers to both her techniques and her motivations in relation to her audience in a curious paragraph, an addition to the story published on the Muumuu House website and effectively a new ending featured in what purpose. In the voice of a reviewer – a voice markedly different to the colloquial style of the rest of what purpose – Calloway writes of herself in the third person and of how she wishes to affect her readers: She subjects her fascination with Japanese culture – its preoccupation with reified cuteness, with fastidiousness, with compliant femininity – to elaborate scrutiny, with a variety of unconventional tools: submersion, revulsion, role-playing, obsession, ridicule, mimicry. . . . An elaborate strategy of purification, to blend honesty and revulsion until they are no longer separable, until readers must begin to shut themselves down. She is sure enough of herself to confront and even invite misunderstanding, as though misunderstanding might offer a way forward toward an authenticity beyond the deceptive surfaces of exhibitionism. (p. 139)

Once again, authenticity is prized, although admittedly here through the unusual route of courting misunderstanding. With the reference to a kind of Artaudian catharsis, the desire for purification is also ambiguous: purifying for whom? For Calloway herself or for her readers, those she hopes, in a somewhat self-aggrandising manner that could equally be self-satire, will be forced to ‘shut themselves down’? On consideration, this presents a perversely anti-literary aim: not simply the alienation of her readers but their ‘turning off’ and thus away from the author and her writing. It is also, of course, mimicry, one of her ‘unconventional tools’, providing a ‘review’ to counter the negative reviews that she types over her self-images in the section ‘Criticism’. This imitation of a reviewer, with its intelligent reframing of Calloway’s project, is paradoxically ironic and defensive at the same time: it parodies a more ‘intelligent’ review than those written by the commentators

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Calloway included in what purpose, while suggesting that a more abstract approach will yield more interesting results for readers than a moral stance that reacts only superficially to the surface. Yet this paragraph is also a challenge: in predicting readers will shut down or turn away, she simultaneously challenges them not to; in positing an elsewhere beyond misunderstanding and deceptive exhibitionism, she pre-empts certain ‘shallow’ responses and asks implicitly for more serious consideration. Calloway is a sexual explorer. When, at the start of the early tale ‘sex work experience three’, she opens with an italicised justification of her decision which includes the idea that sex work might be ‘a way to study other people besides through the Internet’ and allow her insight into ‘what sex work means, and what kinds of men pay for sex and why they do it’ (p. 65), these are positioned to retrospectively appear to be inadequate motivations, given they preface an ambivalently enjoyable but clearly abusive encounter which leaves her sobbing and hyperventilating on the floor (p. 69). In spite of this, the idea of embarking on sexual experiences as an adventure in learning about others as well as herself continues as she explores greater extremes, culminating in a sadomasochistic encounter which sees her comply with an order to lick semen mixed with her own vomit from a towel after being hit repeatedly. By the final story of sex with two men, she writes, ‘Whenever I allowed myself to be used so blatantly I could never reconcile my excitement and my curiosity, my desire to experience, with the feeling of being dehumanized and uncared for’ (p. 235). She feels her vulnerability keenly; at the same time, it excites her. Despite recognising how she is lessened, made less human, in this moment Calloway continues the sexual encounter, explaining, ‘It felt like something I had to experience,’ and adding, ‘I wondered if I were being driven by a selfdestructive impulse’ (p. 237). A page later she writes, ‘I felt like there was something that I was seeking from this situation that I hadn’t experienced yet’ (p. 238). This is experience as experiment. Stemming etymologically from the same Latin root, experiri, to try or to test out, ‘experience’ and ‘experiment’ self-reflexively define each other in dictionary terms. The structure of what purpose, opening with the loss of virginity and moving through a variety of adventurous, even non-normative, ‘first-time’ sexual experiences, demonstrates Calloway’s curiosity with experience as experiment and vice versa. The tension between experimentation and its potential risks is never far from her mind: it is thus not surprising that the possibility of rape or sexual violence is raised at several points before she embarks on meeting strangers for sex (pp. 16, 35–6). However, the book closes on a note of regret at odds with the brash audacity of much of what purpose. In the penultimate paragraph of the book, Calloway writes, ‘I wondered when

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I would stop abusing myself for the sake of new experiences, new sensations’ (p. 240). As a closing note, this subtly shifts the agency at work. For most of what purpose, the men are abusive or transgressive and Calloway is compliant, consenting, inviting, and submissive. In this final story, in fact, she admits to having ‘actively adjusted my sexuality so that it was more compatible with a common male sexual urge [to find it arousing to have sexually aroused a woman]’ (p. 237). But the final judgement, right at the end of the story and the end of the book, of her sexual experimentation as self-abuse claims sexual responsibility in a new way. Her self-assessment is redolent of Phipps’s insight that within neo-liberal culture victimhood – in this case, being a victim of one’s desire to explore sexually in a misogynistic culture – is frequently depicted as the result of simply poor personal choices. It also raises the question of whether Calloway’s sexual experiments would be so uncomfortable for her or, indeed, for many of her readers were society not so saturated in misogyny and sexism. Mostly, Calloway’s violent or transgressive sexual experiments have been experienced ambivalently: as alternately intriguing, enjoyable, arousing, disturbing, and often revealing of a deeply engrained misogyny for which the sexual subjugation of women to male desires is erotically intensified in a cultural environment where women have repeatedly critiqued such sexual dynamics (recall the ‘thats very feminist of you lol’ quip at the end of ‘cybersex’). Disturbingly, the affective power of Calloway’s writing stems from her audacious avowals of her interest and complicity, even her enjoyment of the violent or degrading sexual experiences with which she is experimenting, even as she recognises her vulnerability because men’s desires for and reactions to her are frequently underpinned by misogyny. Calloway, despite her assertion that she is not bright, is in fact not at all stupid. Neither is she especially vulnerable compared to other women, although she is fascinated by the sexual magnetism of performing and roleplaying vulnerability – at least in terms of the character presented in what purpose. What is possibly the most uncanny effect of her book is how it exposes the hopes and desires her readership have for sexually active young women. My reading is no different, in this respect: I desire Calloway to be strong, manipulative, and clever, to not be Tiqqun’s version of the young girl, and thus my interpretation of what purpose has tended to focus upon how she has transformed a series of positions of potential victimhood, which could be read as scenes wherein a young woman consents to being sexually exploited by a variety of men, into assertions of agency through writing. The audacious act of publishing what purpose makes the sex acts recounted within it more than sex: they are aestheticised and so become

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literary. At the same time, the act of publishing such intimacies has the odd effect of helping the author mysteriously recede: the more the usually private world of sexual experiences is brought into public view, the stronger the suspicion that the ‘real’ Marie Calloway, whoever she is, has somehow slipped away. The title of her book, it may be concluded, is asked as much to the reader as to the men we might initially assume it addresses. Angel, Kraus, and Calloway handle vulnerability differently, but then vulnerability – much like audacity – is not an immutable attribute but a matter of context. What they all understand is that while a man can make them vulnerable to his violence or his rejection or his insults, vulnerability itself is not stable but malleable. It can be ascribed to those who are not, in fact, vulnerable but who fit the stereotype of what is often considered to be, and vice versa; it can be experienced without being visible; and it can be erotic and eroticised. For each it is a resource, and their audacity lies in writing of how they explore it in their sexual relations. What all three writers defiantly reject, even while they admit the power of it to shape women’s narratives of experience, is the position of victim: the audacious publication of their texts is their ultimate act of agency.

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chapter 4

Breaking the Binaries New Audacity in the Writing of Trans Lives

The history of trans life-writing began by following the history of medical and surgical treatments that trans people underwent. The first such published account was of the life of Lili Elbe and the groundbreaking surgical procedures performed on her. Foregoing the usual first-person autobiographical arc from birth to the present that still dominates so much lifewriting, Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex (1933) is instead composed from manuscripts, letters, and other documents written by Elbe, brought together posthumously and in line with Elbe’s wishes by editor Niels Hoyer.1 As its title indicates, it conceptualises transition as a journey from one side of the gender binary to the other. The majority of the trans autobiographies that followed in the book’s wake, from Jan Morris’s Conundrum (1974) to Mark Rees’s Dear Sir or Madam (1996), for example, likewise hinged upon transition as the dramatic centrepiece of a narrative journey from one gender to another but were more traditional in their composition. They set the pattern, which usually begins with unhappiness in the early years and a desire to change gender, then a long journey to seek appropriate medical assistance, sex reassignment surgeries, and, finally, passing in the chosen gender. The three examples of twentyfirst-century writing of trans lives which this chapter examines have moved on from this earlier narrative mould and have the audacity to be impatient with the gender binary and the thinking that accompanies it. This writing opens up new possibilities for extending our thinking about subjectivity as the authors question and deconstruct the binaries man/woman, cis/trans, normative/non-normative, and reality/fiction. Paul B. Preciado’s undeniably audacious Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2013) is a ‘body-essay’ comprised of an interweaving of cultural critique, trans theory, histories of 1

On the context of Hoyer’s book, see N. Gailey, ‘Strange Bedfellows: Anachronisms, Identity Politics, and the Queer Case of Trans’, Journal of Homosexuality 64:12 (2017), pp. 1713–30, at pp. 1718–20.

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medicine and gender, and an account of both a love affair and a personal experiment with testosterone outside of a medical setting.2 As its titular portmanteau suggests, the book argues that we are living in a time of global capital when profit is generated from the human body itself, specifically from its excitation, and from chemical and physical modification. Preciado is unusual among critical theorists – though not among trans theorists – for offering potentially radical routes to social change that break with and disrupt the gender binary through bodily modification and gender performance.3 A very different account of trans futurity is offered in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015). Nelson’s book begins with her falling in love with Harry Dodge, a trans man with whom she will later set up home, have a family, and marry just before California passes discriminatory new laws. As the mother of their child, Iggy, Nelson works through her relationship with what she sees as queer theory’s exclusive focus on radical sexuality at the expense of attention to queer family-making. Nelson’s depiction of life with a trans man has been widely read and praised in literary circles, gaining high-profile reviews in newspapers like The Guardian and The New Yorker, as well as being Nelson’s last publication before she won the coveted MacArthur ‘genius’ award in 2016 that Alison Bechdel, discussed in Chapter 2, had been awarded two years before.4 In The Argonauts, the cis/ trans and normal/transgressive binaries are audaciously questioned by a cis author, raising questions about the role of cis people – including researchers such as myself – in responding to trans lives. The final author I turn to is Juliet Jacques, a British journalist and writer whose book Trans: A Memoir (2015) started life as a blog for The Guardian 2

3

4

B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, trans. B. Benderson (New York: Feminist Press, 2013), p. 11. Later editions, published after the author’s transition, carry the name Paul B. Preciado. I have used ‘he’ throughout in accordance with this, even though I am quoting from the earlier text. Chapter 1 adopts Preciado’s term ‘body-essay’ to think through the writing of rape in Jana Leo’s Rape New York and Virginie Despentes’s King Kong Theory. There is a strong strand of trans theorisation committed to intersectional and radical anti-capitalist abolitionist politics. See N. Raha, ‘Transfeminine Brokenness and Radical Transfeminism’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 116:3 (July 2017), pp. 632–46; D. Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2015); M. Bassichis, A. Lee, and D. Spade, ‘Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got’, in S. Stryker and A. Z. Aizura (eds.), The Transgender Studies Reader 2 (New York and London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 653–67; N. Raha et al., Radical Transfeminism (Leith: Sociopathetic Distro, 2017). L. Feigal, ‘The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. Review – A Radical Approach to Genre and Gender’, The Guardian (27 March 2016); H. Als, ‘Immediate Family: Maggie Nelson’s Life in Words’, The New Yorker (18 April 2016); J. Turner, ‘Like a Manta Ray’, London Review of Books 37:20–2 (October 2015), pp. 11–14; S. Zin, ‘Writer Maggie Nelson Wins a MacArthur “Genius Grant”’, Newsweek (22 August 2016).

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newspaper. Far less sensational than either Nelson or Preciado because her engagement with the politics of queer and trans theory is uncontroversial, Jacques’s work in Trans and her later autobiographical fiction, ‘Weekend in Brighton’, interest me precisely for their deliberate de-dramatisation of trans life. Far more a traditional autobiography than the other two texts, Trans stresses the precarity and boredom of the contemporary workplace, and the drudgery of and yet anxiety provoked by the medical process of assessment and the British ‘Real Life Experience’ demanded by the doctors and institutions that eventually granted Jacques the right to surgery. Moreover, Trans and ‘Weekend in Brighton’ both contain poignant descriptions of the social awkwardness of romantic encounters which, in place of the physical and emotional intensity testified to so joyously by Nelson and Preciado, are instead tinged with disappointment. There is audacity in writing that does not shy away from failure, difficulty, and depression, as we saw in Chapter 2, and that insists upon registering the minutiae of lived experience, the lows as well as the highs. If trans can sometimes appear to be ‘the latest “in” thing in queer identities’, as one of the contributors to the zine Radical Transfeminism laments, Jacques’s work reminds us that the contours of trans lived existence can be considerably less glamorous.5 There is a gentleness and humour in the prose of this writer that emphasises human experiences that befall us all, trans or otherwise, a humanism that offers a different route to the other writers featured in this chapter when breaking with the binary that divides trans from cis. Testo Junkie, Trans, and The Argonauts all engage with feminism. Nelson weaves quotes from feminist theorists such as Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed throughout the book. As a lesbian, she notes that ‘whatever sameness I’ve noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy.’6 Trans people share this knowledge and there should be a natural alliance between trans and feminist politics as a result. Sadly, this has not always been the case. Trans-exclusionary radical feminists, whose commitment to an essentialist view of sex and gender means they refuse to accept trans women as women, have been exceptionally vocal and divisive in their attempts to discredit trans women’s rights and to discount and disparage their identities.7 This has caused a detrimental and 5 6 7

A. B. Silvera, ‘BORED_TRAN_21st_CENTURY.EXE’, Radical Transfeminism (Leith: Sociopathetic Distro, 2017), pp. 6–10, at p. 7. M. Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2015), p. 25. Accounts of this are available in S. Stryker and T. M. Bettcher, ‘Introduction: Trans/Feminisms’, Transgender Studies Quarterly 3:1–2 (May 2016), pp. 5–14; S. Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008), pp. 101–14; J. Jacques, Trans: A Memoir (London: Verso, 2015), pp. 103–12.

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damaging split within contemporary feminism, as well as preventing feminism from being a discourse trans people can automatically claim affinity with because of what has been written in its name against them.8 Indeed, transfeminism owes its inception at least in part to the rejection of trans women launched by certain white, middle-class feminists.9 This legacy affected Jacques: ‘feminism has done a lot to shape my writing,’ she admits: ‘A Transgender Journey was an attempt to counter socialist, conservative, and feminist transphobia at the same time’ (p. 301). While still uncomfortable with self-describing as feminist, attributing this to fatigue ‘with labels in general’ (p. 301), when asked whether hormones have changed her, she replies, ‘I’ve become more feminist but that’s largely to do with the amount of shit I’ve had to take off dickhead men,’ testifying to the shared oppression that Nelson describes (p. 224). After the first application of testosterone gel, Preciado asks, ‘What can I do about all the years I defined myself as a feminist? What kind of feminist am I today: a feminist hooked on testosterone or a transgender body hooked on feminism?’ (pp. 21–2). Either way, Preciado’s feminism is crucial to the criticism he launches against the failure of previous feminists to be radical enough.

From Trans Tropes to the ‘Trans-Effect’ There have been centuries of literary enthusiasm for stories of physical and emotional transformation, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses through to the typical qualities of the Bildungsroman and the success of autobiography in general. Amidst a general appetite to read about lives transformed, trans autobiographies in particular have flourished as a niche genre. Jay Prosser, who was among the first scholars to write extensively on trans autobiography, claims there is an affinity between transsexual identity and autobiography, regardless of whether a person writes about their transition or not, because the ability to tell a coherent story of the self that a clinician can ‘read’ effectively is imperative to securing approval for the medical and surgical processes of transition.10 Narrative is universally key for the construction of any coherent sense of identity, Prosser argues, and therefore if one’s identity is non-normative, then reading other similar personal stories is a (trans)formative act: 8 9 10

Jacques encountered transphobic feminism before she had much of a sense of other forms of feminism. Jacques, Trans, p. 300. Stryker and Bettcher date this to Sandy Stone’s ‘Posttranssexual Manifesto’, ‘Introduction’, p. 10. J. Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 101. Prosser prefers ‘transsexual’ to ‘trans’, which I discuss shortly.

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Breaking the Binaries Transsexuality is thoroughly engineered by autobiographical narrative in this sense also: not only through the oral autobiography in the clinician’s office, not only in the retroactive reconstruction of the life into a transsexual bios but through the reading of published narratives, the latter often engineering the former. . . . [G]iven the dependence of transsexuality on narrative, given that transitions always require that narrativization of the life, there is no other way in which the subject – indeed surely the point is any subject – could come to naming, to realization of his or her categorical belonging except through some form of narrative. (p. 125)

Prosser thus bequeaths considerable power to trans life-writing, which in his reading offers models that help mould its readership. Such an account of transsexual identity does not quite explain the more recent emergence of gender hackers like Preciado who reject such a ‘to–from’ binary trajectory, however. As Susan Stryker and Talia M. Bettcher write in a special issue on ‘Trans/Feminisms’, some thirty years after Prosser’s important book, ‘trans’ has become an inclusive term and a prefix associated with dynamic and shifting forms of identity and resistance to gender conformism.11 In line with this, the ‘categorical belonging’ that Prosser values is explicitly rejected by Dodge and Preciado, while Jacques, as we have seen, declares herself weary of labels (p. 301).12 Prosser identifies a series of literary tropes regularly in use across the numerous twentieth-century transsexual autobiographies that he studied. Beyond the ‘before’ and ‘after’ narrative arc already discussed, these include the ‘epiphany’ moment of realisation that one is in a wrongly gendered body (p. 101); the metaphor of a ‘journey’ to name the often lengthy process of transition (p. 116); and the ubiquity of mirror scenes, wherein a person appraises themselves in front of a glass, sometimes bidding farewell to a body about to change or critically analysing a body yet to do so (p. 101). As we see in what follows, new audacity writers of trans lives have challenged or deliberately subverted these tropes. Neither Preciado nor Jacques subscribe to the wrong body trope, with the latter shifting the emphasis through an insistence that the ‘wrong body’ narrative misnames what is in fact a societal failing: ‘I felt trapped not by my body’, Jacques writes, ‘but a society that didn’t want me to modify it’ (p. 76). For Nelson, the wrong body narrative is implied by the term ‘trans’ itself. She notes that ‘trans may work well enough as a shorthand, but the quickly developing 11 12

Stryker and Bettcher, ‘Introduction’, p. 12. Other theorists also stress the idea of trans ‘becoming’ as a process of continual change. Jasbir K. Puar makes this argument in The Right to Main: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 50–61.

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mainstream narrative it evokes (“born in the wrong body”, necessitating an orthopaedic pilgrimage between two fixed destinations) is useless for some’ (pp. 52–3). Dodge, her partner, ‘is happy to identify as a butch on T[estosterone]’, rejecting both the wrong body narrative and the metaphor of the journey: ‘I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers’ (p. 53). Once again, there is a rejection of the gender binary as structuring the experience of transition. When Jacques wrote of her transition for The Guardian, the newspaper chose the title ‘A Transgender Journey’, most likely without realising how tired the trope already was. When she wrote Trans, Jacques deliberately shed this title and the structure it implied.13 In the Epilogue’s interview with Sheila Heti, Jacques complains about the media’s depiction of transition as ‘a mythical hero’s journey’, bathetically contesting instead that ‘To me it didn’t feel like that, rather a bunch of hoops to jump through while working in boring jobs’ (p. 294). Figuring transition as a journey and adopting a narrative structure of ‘before’ and ‘after’ starts, in the light of these critiques, to look like very twentieth-century characterisations of trans experience. The trope of the mirror scene, so reminiscent of Jacques Lacan’s infamous mirror stage, as Prosser’s analysis demonstrates (pp. 99–134), is not utterly absent from Testo Junkie, Trans, or The Argonauts, but it is reconfigured, sometimes through technologies of image reproduction. Jacques’s Trans contains the most traditional mirror scenes of the three authors, yet instead of depicting a private moment dedicated to a questioning selfcontemplation, the first of Jacques’s mirror scenes bustles with actions and decisions due to an attention to factual detail: At least I don’t have to hide this from my parents any more, I thought as I stood at the mirror in my room in Oak House, one of the biggest (and cheapest) student halls in Fallowfield, the university district in south Manchester. I shaved my face for the second time that day and then rubbed on the foundation. Would blusher be too much? I wondered as I put more gel into my short, spikey hair. I decided to do just my eyes, and that I’d stick with my Joy Division T-shirt, denim jeans and DM boots. What did people wear to these places anyway? (p. 11)

The familiarly of the relief and freedom of leaving the parental home and the anxiety of getting ready to go out with people one hardly knows to places one has never been before undercuts what might be more unusual about this typical student scene, while the quantity of details provided prevents the 13

Jacques notes she did not choose the title; see J. Jacques, ‘Forms of Resistance: Uses of Memoir, Theory, and Fiction in Trans Life Writing’, Life Writing 14:3 (2017), pp. 357–70, at p. 365.

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emotional dimension of this moment from dominating. The next mirror scene Jacques provides is a shared moment of happiness, doing her make-up with a girlfriend in front of the glass (p. 47). Neither scene is lonely or ontologically fraught: both are happy moments of excited anticipation. The closest Nelson comes to a mirror scene in The Argonauts is the description of a mug with a family photograph printed upon it. In it, Nelson is seven months pregnant with Iggy, Harry and his son are in suits, and they are about to attend a Christmas performance of the Nutcracker. Nelson’s mother took the photo and provided the mug; Nelson’s friend later commented, ‘I’ve never seen anything so heteronormative in all my life’ (p. 13). This is one of many times that Nelson will return to the problem of what looks normative about her family from the outside and what from the inside, to her, feels by contrast queer, and indeed would be deemed non-normative by most. Here, then, is a different version of the mirror scene as summarised by Prosser: in the place of an individual body appraised for how it has or will physically change there are the static collective bodies of Nelson’s family, generating the illusion of heteronormativity. By contrast, the scene within the first few pages of Testo Junkie, where Preciado describes how he films himself shaving his head, gluing a thin moustache of his hair to his upper lip, applying testosterone gel to his shoulder, shaving his pubic hair, belting on a harness, and penetrating his vagina and anus with dildos, all in front of a small mirror and a copy of a recently deceased friend’s book, is an intimate and undeniably audacious piece of writing about an unusual act of mourning (pp. 16–17). Preciado never watches the film; at the end of the book, he buries the video on the same day as the novelist Guillaume Dustan, his friend for whom it was made, is interred.14 Looking in the mirror before the beginning of this singular ritual, Preciado writes, ‘I was labelled a woman, but that’s imperceptible in the partial image reflected in the mirror’ (p. 17). Once the moustache is applied, Preciado looks directly into the mirror again: ‘Identical yet unrecognizable’ is his judgement (p. 18). Thus, the mirror in the first instance confirms gender nonconformity and in the second affirms the transformative potential of gender play – or gender hacking, as Preciado calls it (p. 394). As is clear from this account of the start of Preciado’s Testo Junkie, the narrative structure that Prosser describes has been decisively abandoned. Prosser posited that autobiography had a therapeutic role for transsexual writers, since ‘conforming the life into narrative coheres both “lives” on 14

For a fascinating discussion of the relationship between Preciado and Dustan in relation to the latter’s HIV status and advocacy of barebacking, see E. Evans, ‘Your HIV-positive Sperm, My Trans-dyke Uterus: Anti/futurity and the Politics of Bareback Sex between Guillaume Dustan and Beatriz Preciado’, Sexualities 18:1–2 (2015), pp. 127–40.

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either side of transition into an identity plot’ (p. 120). Yet the structures favoured by these new audacity writers work very differently. Jacques, for example, begins with an account of her sex reassignment surgery, from the six weeks before when she has to stop taking hormones to arriving home afterwards. The next chapter jumps back to Jacques at sixteen and, even though there is subsequently a roughly chronological account of Jacques’s life until after surgery, Trans is also interspersed with educative essaychapters dealing with cinematic, medical, media, theoretical, and autobiographical representations of trans lives. These present elements of trans theory, told with a personal touch. For instance, the section ‘Home Movies’, on cinematic representations of trans people, contains an analysis of Ace Ventura, Pet Detective familiar from Julia Serano’s writings, and ‘Conundrum: The Politics of Life Writing’ references Jan Morris’s autobiography and engages with the tropes of trans autobiography, just as Prosser’s Second Skins had done before it.15 Jacques thus produces a blend of essay and autobiography, of theory and experience, highly conscious of a readership that may have been drawn to the book from encountering one or more of her newspaper columns, and very much in keeping with the pedagogic nature of Susan Stryker’s Transgender History or Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw. Testo Junkie also employs both the personal and the theoretical in alternating chapters so that, for example, the chapter outlining the ‘History of Technosexuality’ is followed by a chapter, ‘In Which the Body of VD Becomes an Element in an Experimental Context’, providing an account of the first meetings and sexual encounters between Preciado and his lover Virginie Despentes, who is familiar to us from Chapter 2. Nelson, by contrast, has no chapter divisions at all. Instead, The Argonauts unfolds in small paragraphs, often quoting the work of queer and feminist academics, their names provided in the margins. There is a cyclical movement from anecdote to theory to anecdote again, and thus the book moves forward but also loops back to ideas it has already covered, sometimes from the advantage of a different experience. The ending of the book culminates in Nelson’s protracted labour and Dodge’s visits to his dying mother, an interweaving which winds death into the start of life. These are committed experimenters, like other new audacity writers. It would be wrong, however, to claim that they are the first to depart from the traditional trans autobiographical structures of the twentieth century. Rather, they are the inheritors of a legacy that has included, notably, the 15

See J. Serano, ‘Skirt Chasers: Why the Media Depicts the Trans Revolution in Lipstick and Heels’, in Stryker and Aizura, The Transgender Studies Reader 2, pp. 226–33.

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creative flair of influential writer and performer Kate Bornstein, whose Gender Outlaws uses unusual page layouts, emboldened typefaces, different font sizes, and combined interviews, quotes, lists, poetry, question-andanswer formats, even diagrams and excerpts from Bornstein’s performances, as well as a two-act play. Bornstein typifies the result as a ‘transgender style’ composed by ‘collage’ and ‘cut-and-paste’, with ‘a little bit from here, a little bit from there’.16 At the start of Gender Outlaw, Bornstein, like Dodge and Preciado, rejects the gender binary: I identify as neither male nor female, and now that my lover is going through his gender change, it turns out I am neither straight nor gay. What I’ve found as a result of this borderline life is that the more fluid my identity has become, and the less demanding my own need to belong to the camps of male, female, gay or straight, the more playful and less dictatorial my fashion has become – and my self-expression. (p. 4)

Bornstein suggests that identity and writing work in parallel so that when one stops cleaving to conventions so too does the other. Those who do not conceptualise their trans identities as a journey ‘from–to’ are going to create different textual accounts of their lives from those who do. Sandy Stone’s pivotal ‘The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto’ noted that early autobiographical accounts of MTF transition tended to work with a very stark gender binary: ‘They go from being unambiguous men, albeit unhappy men, to unambiguous women. There is no territory between.’17 Stone argues that the ability this gives them to pass blocks ‘the ability to authentically represent the complexities and ambiguities of lived experience’ (p. 230). Calling for a post-transsexual account of the self which testifies to the complexity of gendered histories, she writes, ‘To foreground the practices of inscription and reading which are part of this deliberate invocation of dissonance, I suggest constituting transsexuals not as a class or problematic “third gender”, but rather as a genre – a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored’ (p. 231). It is certainly within this spirit that the work of Preciado is penned, and with a similarly manifesto-esque air. 16 17

K. Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 4. S. Stone, ‘The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto’, in S. Stryker and S. Whittle (eds.), The Transgender Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 221–35, at p. 225. Stone’s 1998 title recalls that of Janice Raymond’s anti-trans book, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (1979).

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As is evident, terminology has been a shifting terrain in the texts of trans studies.18 In 1998 Prosser rejects the term ‘trans’ in favour of ‘transsexual’. With particular reference to the impact of Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity, he feared that transsexual desires for normativity within their chosen gender are often elided or even dismissed as retrograde within the environment created by queer theory’s celebration of the power of transgression and subversion to disrupt heteronormative assumptions and the gender binary (pp. 59–60). Conversely, Stone proposes ‘posttranssexual’ precisely to disrupt gender binaries and, more recently, ‘trans’ and ‘transgender’ have solidified as umbrella terms. Jacques, Nelson, and Preciado all directly address the issue of terminology. For Jacques, born in 1981, this was confusing as a teenager. Living in a provincial town, lacking role models but experimenting with cross-dressing, she rejected ‘transvestite’ as ‘sexual in a seedy, lonely way’, but writes, ‘“Transsexual” wasn’t accurate either. You needed to be someone who’d been through some medical process to alter your body, right? I hadn’t and I didn’t plan to: they’re not like me either, I thought’ (p. 14). It was another twelve years until Jacques underwent sex reassignment surgery. For her, the terms ‘trans’ and ‘transgender’ captured more of her experience precisely because of the history of how and which transsexual narratives had been told: ‘All the documentaries and articles I’d seen told the same story: someone, usually decades older than me, who’d been born male but “always knew” they “wanted to be a girl”, keeping their feelings secret while they started a family and a career’ (p. 14). At this point in time Jacques did not want the surgery that these stories resulted in, or the ‘normality’ that their subjects craved afterwards (p. 14). ‘Trans’ has a political dimension that spoke to Jacques as she tried to find a label that suited her because it ‘opened a space between male and female’ (p. 85) and provided ‘a way of understanding the oppressions shared by anyone who transgressed gender norms’ (p. 110). In other words, through the very non-specificity regarding a person’s surgical status, ‘trans’ had the linguistic advantage of creating a wider network of solidarity. Both Nelson and Preciado go far further than Jacques in their revisioning of trans. After Nelson audaciously abandons ‘trans’ as not that helpful for those like Dodge, she replaces it with the trope of the Argo, which she uses to conceptualise subjectivity in constant transformation. It can thus be applied as much to her own pregnant body as it can to the changes Dodge undergoes by taking testosterone and having top surgery. Nelson slowly 18

Stryker, Transgender History, pp. 1–29.

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builds more and more into the picture of Argo subjectivity as the book progresses. The Argonauts takes its name from another book which is one of Nelson’s most obvious inspirations, the personalised philosophical musing of Roland Barthes in Roland Barthes.19 Trying to theorise how the phrase ‘I love you’ avoids becoming hackneyed, Barthes posits that the lover is able to imbue it with ‘inflections which will be forever new’.20 This is a section of Barthes’s text which Nelson had shown to Dodge after declaring her love for him, and is quoted in the early pages of The Argonauts (p. 5). For Barthes, the structure of how the lover’s address remains fresh is similar to ‘the Argonaut renewing his ship during the voyage without changing its name’: this is the idea that appeals to Nelson (p. 114). An earlier section of Roland Barthes she does not quote introduces in more detail this ancient idea of the Argo, making clear the usefulness of the trope for allegorising transformation. Barthes explains that the continually creative process of keeping the ship Argo travelling involves ‘substitution (one part replaces another, as in a paradigm) and nomination (the name is in no way linked to the stability of the parts): by dint of combinations made within one and the same name, nothing is left of the origin: Argo is an object with no other cause than its name, with no other identity than its form’ (p. 46). It is now clearer why Nelson is partial in her quoting: Barthes’s idea that identity is derived from form is not quite what she is articulating with her iteration of Argo. While she never quite says it, for Nelson Argo is her new, sonically shifted name for the old Freudian-inflected ego: it is the self as embodied and ever-transforming entity. Particularly in Barthes’s sense of ‘nomination’ mentioned earlier, it becomes a useful trope for thinking about Dodge’s shifting body shape but seemingly stable sense of self, although, up until the final pages, Dodge’s voice is mostly absent even though the text is often about him. But it is not only the trans self that transforms in this text. One of the projects of The Argonauts, indeed, is to show how we are all Argos: ‘we develop’, Nelson tells us, ‘even in utero, in response to a flow of projections and reflections ricocheting off us. Eventually we call that snowball a self (Argo)’ (p. 95). An incident of passing together as husband and pregnant wife while dining out during their stay away from home for Dodge’s top surgery provides an opportunity for Nelson to extend her use of Argo further. Slipping, as the book sometimes does, into apostrophising Dodge, she 19

20

Barthes refers to the Argo and its transformative potential as one of those tropes that ‘fastens upon him for several years’. See R. Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. R. Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 127. Ibid., p. 114. Nelson, The Argonauts, p. 5.

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writes beautifully of how, ‘[o]n the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more “male”, mine, more and more “female”. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging’ (p. 83). Pregnancy changes her; testosterone changes him. Towards the end of the text, when the death of Dodge’s mother, told movingly in his own words, is interweaved with an account of Nelson’s long birthing labour, the transformations that aging argos undergo come full circle: foetal development, pregnancy, child development, trans change, illness, and finally death are all physical and chemical transformations presented in The Argonauts as parallel, though not equivalent, processes of being a human animal. There is a poetic elegance to this formulation, and an obvious repositioning of trans experience as simply another part of the complexities of life. Crucially, too, these are all experiences which are dependent upon the care and intervention of others, especially family members and medical professionals: as Nelson explains, ‘We are for another, or by virtue of another’ (p. 95). All of this, too, including the ‘loose witnessing’, accords with Nelson’s definition of our ‘snowball’ or Argo subjectivity as ‘keenly relational’ and ‘strange’ (p. 95). This definition is another borrowing and appears earlier in The Argonauts in a significantly different context. Some fifty pages or so before Nelson offers it as a definition of Argo subjectivity, she quotes Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s loose and baggy definition of ‘queer’, and it is exactly the same: ‘“Keenly it is relational, and strange”’ (p. 29). Nelson glosses that Sedgwick wanted the term to be ‘a kind of placeholder – a nominative, like Argo’ (p. 29). What this weaving of terms amounts to is a definition of the human animal as a queer, ever-transforming, subjectivity called Argo. In doing so, though, Nelson erases the political and social specificity and radicality of queerness and of trans identity, a problem to which we return. Where Nelson’s aim is to normalise trans living and to queer the supposedly quintessential womanly experience of pregnancy, Preciado has an audaciously extensive vision, with none of Nelson’s cosy domesticity. The word ‘trans’ is deployed throughout Testo Junkie in a strategic repetition, often in words like ‘transformation’ that include it as a prefix, ensuring it is embedded into the development of sexual, theoretical, and political histories that Preciado weaves together to account for the pharmacopornographic era. There are early discussions of: ‘the transformations in industrial production’ (p. 24), the ‘transition toward a third form of capitalism [after WW2]’ (p. 25); the ‘transformation of “sex”, “sexuality”, “sexual identity”, and “pleasure” into objects of the political management

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of living’ (p. 25); the ‘transformation of the governmental and economic regulations concerning pornography and prostitution’ during the Cold War (p. 28); Andy Warhol’s ‘transforming [of] his own body into a biopop object’ through filming his own facelift (p. 32); the mass consumption of plastic which led to a ‘large-scale ecological transformation’ resulting in destruction of energy resources and higher levels of pollution (p. 33); and, finally, the large claim that: Our world economy is dependent on the production and circulation of hundreds of tons of synthetic steroids and technically transformed organs, fluids, cells (techno-blood, techno-sperm, techno-ovum, etc.), on the global diffusion of a flood of pornographic images, on the elaboration and distribution of new varieties of legal and illegal synthetic psychotropic drugs (e.g. bromazepan, Special K, Viagra, speed, crystal, Prozac, ecstasy, heroin), on the flood of signs and circuits of the digital transmission of information, on the extension of a form of diffuse urban architecture to the entire planet in which megacities of misery are knotted into high concentrations of sexcapital. (p. 33, emphasis mine)

This one-sentence list, bedazzling in itself, is typical of Testo Junkie’s rhetorical intensity and Preciado’s desire to link disparate aspects of contemporary society into a coherent narrative about the exploitation of forms of self-transformation, aided by technology, science, and sex. At the centre of this dystopian depiction of the present is an individual body in thrall to its own powers of transformation, from inertia to arousal, through excitement to orgasm, even if or as assisted by drugs or images. Preciado theorises what he calls ‘potentia gaudendi’ or the ‘orgasmic force’, a close but not identical cousin to the French conception of jouissance, and a later relative of Freud’s conception of libido (p. 41). Potentia gaudendi is ‘the (real or virtual) strength of a body’s (total) excitation’ (p. 41), a non-gendered bodily energy existent in every molecule.21 It is ‘a force of transformation’ (p. 42) which can, crucially, ‘be transformed into capital’ (p. 43) through its capacity to be aided by drugs or digital images, by technology or by ‘techno-eros’ (p. 45). It is thus the raw material of transformation, or as Nelson might audaciously say, of life. What this lacing of trans through the text achieves is a rhetorically powerful but actually rather subtle form of persuasion. The histories Preciado provides become histories of transition and transformation, the movement of capital is 21

For a critical discussion of the ontological turn’s interest in the molecular and its political risks, with Testo Junkie as an example, see J. Rosenberg, ‘The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present’, Theory & Event 17:2 (2014), n.p. While I agree with Rosenberg’s reading of Preciado’s use of the molecule, it fails to mention Preciado’s political strategy of using drag king workshops, which are collective in nature.

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stressed as a transactional transfer, and, in the same vein as Nelson, Preciado’s conception of subjectivity is one of transformative potential. As Karine Espineira and Marie-Hélène/Sam Bourcier note, ‘trans is grammatically polymorphous . . . It can be a noun as well as a prefix that attaches to and dynamizes other words, providing new directions for them.’22 They point out too that the ‘trans’ prefix works across a range of European languages, including English, Italian, French, and Spanish. Testo Junkie puts this into play, creating a thorough ‘trans-effect’ whereby everything capable of change becomes attached to trans identity and weaved into an account of an era which specialises in the transformation of desire into profit.

The Transformative Potential of Biocodes Introducing Testo Junkie for a special issue of the journal Gender and Sexuality dedicated to the text, Ann Pellegrini dubs it ‘a genre-bending intellectual blast of a book’.23 As is no doubt by now clear, Testo Junkie is audacious in its range and frame of reference: Preciado discusses pornography and the pharmaceutical industry, as well as drugs more generally; reviews feminism, gender theory, and the history of sexuality; proposes a new perspective on contemporary capitalism; and offers a theory and practice of trans gender hacking. Instead of traditional commodities, the new form of capitalism Preciado describes ‘produces mobile ideas, living organs, symbols, desires, [and] chemical reactions’, and is responsible for ‘the invention of a subject and then its global reproduction’ (p. 36). Testo Junkie is not simply a set of essays, however. Central to the project is Preciado’s personal experiment with testosterone, which is self-administered regularly, in gel form bought on the black market, for the duration of the book. Although Preciado has since transitioned to become Paul, and has undergone the medical and psychiatric measures the Spanish state required of him in order to alter his birth certificate, the ‘BP’ narrator of Testo Junkie rejects transition.24 In the opening pages he proclaims, ‘I am not taking testosterone to change myself into a man or as a physical 22 23

24

K. Espineira and M.-H./S. Bourcier, ‘Transfeminisms: Something Else, Somewhere Else’, Transgender Studies Quarterly 3:1–2 (May 2016), pp. 84–94, at p. 90. A. Pellegrini, ‘Introducing Testo Junkie’, Gender and Sexuality 17:1 (2016), pp. 3–4, at p. 3. The special issue features three psychoanalytic clinicians reading Testo Junkie in relation to psychoanalytic ideas, and an essay by Preciado where he discusses his fifteen-year journey in ‘the bourgeois dispostif of psychoanalysis’ and calls for new psychoanalytic tools (p. 24), as well as for ‘a much more politicized and experimental psychoanalysis’ that would ‘leave the couch, leave the office and come with us to the streets’ (p. 26). See P. B. Preciado, ‘Testo Junkie Notes for a Psychoanalytic Forum’, Gender and Sexuality 17:1 (2016), pp. 23–6. P. B. Preciado, ‘Prénoms: Paul Beatriz, requête 34/2016’, Libération (9 September 2016).

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strategy of transsexualism’ (p. 16), and later there is an explicit repudiation of the gender binary: ‘I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it’ (p. 138). Clearly, at a certain point Preciado’s position on this altered and he ‘behaved the right way’ for medicine and the state, although he continues to write of his trans body as a material existence which jams the systems – juridical, social, political, and sexual – that enforce and police binary gender intelligibility.25 In Testo Junkie, Preciado identifies in multifarious ways: as a trans man (p. 137), as masculine (p. 86), as ‘dyke-transgender’ (p. 93), as a gender hacker (p. 55), and, as we have seen, as a feminist. Testosterone experimentation is the audacious accompanying performance of the theories Preciado proposes. He is his own ‘guinea pig’ (p. 139), seeking to demonstrate how gender is materially made, felt, and enacted. In spite of the book’s personal disclosures, Preciado’s opening sentence trenchantly declares, ‘This book is not a memoir. This book is a testosteronebased, voluntary intoxication protocol, which concerns the body and affects of BP. A body-essay. Fiction, actually. If things must be pushed to the extreme, this is a somato-political fiction, a theory of the self, or self-theory’ (p. 11). Once again in Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing, we see an author keen to contest the distinction between fiction and reality, just as Preciado is concomitantly keen to disrupt the gender binary. The rejection of memoir and its replacement with protocol indicates a focus on the future rather than the past, despite the loss of Dustan, and orientates the reader to the book’s more deliberately instructive elements: Testo Junkie’s details of testosterone application outside of a medically prescribed context can be easily followed.26 Preciado explains whereupon the body, in what form, how regularly, and in what dosage to take the drug, outlining too the shifting affects it entails. The book’s title hints at this content with its homage to William Burroughs’s semi-autobiographical Junkie (1953), which also provided explicit descriptions of drug-taking. Unlike Burroughs, though, whose novel can hardly be considered an exciting enticement to heroin use, Preciado celebrates the changes he observes and encourages readers to experiment likewise. 25 26

P. B. Preciado, ‘Mon corps n’existe pas’, Libération (24 June 2016). Sophie Jones makes a different argument, seeing a tension in the clash of genres that Testo Junkie performs, especially in the elegiac sections on Dustan and the future-orientated theorising of hormone alteration. See S. A. Jones, ‘The Biodrag of Genre in Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era’, Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 2:2 (19) (2018), n.p. I engage with a different dimension of Jones’s argument shortly.

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Preciado’s claim that his text is fiction is of a piece with his reference, in a later small essay, to ‘the Testo Junkie narrator (who is not me)’.27 There is one obvious way this assertion is manifested: the author of the initial imprint of Testo Junkie carried a different forename to the author of the essay. But there is a wider and more comprehensive dimension to this argument whereby discursive formations are always constitutionally a fabrication: ‘There are not two sexes’, Preciado declares, ‘but a multiplicity of genetic, hormonal, chromosomal, genital, sexual, and sensual configurations. There is no empirical truth to male or female gender beyond an assemblage of normative cultural fictions’ (p. 263). This is not to deny the power of the cultural, as well as medicalised, fictions that enforce the gender binary, however. In fact, they saturate contemporary life in multitudinous and often covert manners: Within the pharmacopornographic regime, gender is constructed in industrial networks of biopolitical materialization; it is reproduced and reinforced socially by its transformation into entertainment, moving images, digital data, pharmacological molecules, cybercodes. Pharmacopornographic female or male gender exists before a public audience, as a somaticdiscursive construction of a collective nature, facing a scientific community or network. Technogender is a public, scientific, community network biocode. (p. 118)

The language used here reveals the theoretical foundations of Preciado’s analyses: steeped in the history of pharmacological developments and advances in medical science, there are the evident marks of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics, Teresa de Lauretis’s Technologies of Gender, Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, and aspects of Paul Virilio and other thinkers of the postmodern or late capitalist moment. Testo Junkie’s ‘wild ride’ through hot sex scenes and contemporary theories of gender disruption are considerably more audacious.28 As a living example of what he describes, Preciado also stresses the transformations under way in his relationship with Despentes. ‘She is becoming a lesbian’, Preciado notes, ‘and, as for me, I’m becoming something other than a girl. She loves breasts and I love cocks’ (p. 86). The essentialist’s conception of binary bodies is rejected in favour of a more plastic and motile sexuality: ‘For me, an erection is an obvious fact, to the same extent in a body without a cock as in a body with one’ (p. 88). Gender and sexuality, sexual characteristics 27 28

Preciado, ‘Testo Junkie Notes’, p. 25. Jack Halberstam refers to the book as a ‘wild ride’ in their endorsement on the publisher’s website. See www.feministpress.org.

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and sex hormones, masculinity and femininity, real, metaphorical, and silicone strap-on body parts: Testo Junkie deliberately breaks the binaries which usually define who has what and what position they should be taking. Testo Junkie is a feminist text in its attention to and understanding of how women have been disadvantaged by the organisation of the pornographic and pharmaceutical industries. This does not prevent an acutely critical engagement with twentieth-century feminism and the unwitting damage it has done to itself. Testo Junkie argues that white liberal feminists unintentionally played into the hands of a ‘postindustrial, global and mediatic’ era, and all the corporate, pharmacological, capitalist, and government bodies that typically wield power within it, to create what Preciado calls the ‘pharmacopornographic regime’ – defined as ‘the processes of a biomolecular (pharmaco) and semiotic-technical (pornographic) government of sexual subjectivity’ (pp. 33–4). Ultimately, sex, images, and drugs are what make profits in the contemporary era and, for Preciado, feminism’s inability to take a cohesive and radical line against the way these areas have disadvantaged and trapped women and minorities has enabled the entrenchment of an even greater exploitation. Over time, white liberal feminism down-scaled and domesticated radical feminist demands into a more shapely and acceptable mainstream-facing set of concerns which could be accommodated and co-opted by the state. Therefore it is necessary to ‘oppose state feminism’ implacably and without reserve: The masterstroke of the pharmacopornographic regime is its having exploited the revolutionary and emancipatory rhetoric of the feminist movement of the 1960s to pass off the chemical and contraceptive management of the female body as a step toward sexual liberation. In the same way, abolitionist feminism entrusted the management of the production and dissemination of pornography and the sex industry to the state, by demanding the abolition of prostitution and the penalization of pornography. (pp. 230–1)

For Preciado the Pill is not a sexual liberation simply to be championed and celebrated – as it was and continues to be by many feminists – but an opportunity for the mass training of female subjects to self-administer hormones, keeping populations down, encouraging normative sexuality, and harnessing a huge and constant profit-making market for the pharmaceutical industry. Like Shulamith Firestone so many years before, and Despentes in the contemporary period, Preciado argues for female liberation from ‘heterosexual work and the work of reproduction’ (p. 300). An effective

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feminism has to include an unfettered critique of capitalism and of its own complicity in creating circumstances which have held feminism back. The pharmacopornographic era is not without its potential, however. Nelson references Testo Junkie in The Argonauts, asking, ‘What if Beatriz Preciado is right – what if we have entered a new, post-Fordist era of capitalism that [Preciado] calls “the pharmacopornographic era”?’ (p. 111). But Nelson also appears to have misunderstood the book as advocating what it critiques, since she is wary of ‘this “new kind of hot psychotropic punk capitalism”’ in a way that suggests Preciado is not (p. 111). Preciado is alert to the subversive fortuity to be extracted from the present, and Testo Junkie argues there must be resistance to a neo-liberal system designed to successfully profit from our proclivities, most notably in the pornography and pharmaceutical sectors. Wresting hormone drugs away from institutions and contexts which usually proscribe them is key, Preciado argues, to a future that uncouples the gender binary and the static gender thinking that accompanies it. The body’s chemical properties are thus conceived as a resource for creating new gender blends, new subjectivities. Preciado calls for a ‘technosomatic communism’ where the ‘biocodes of gender, sex, and race’ would be held in common and collective ownership, enabling us to have the right to construct the ‘biopolitical fictions’ which determine our lives (p. 352).29 ‘Freely circulating and collectively used testosterone’, he claims, ‘is dynamite for the heterosexual regime’ (p. 230) because of how it can disrupt the sedimented strictures of gendered behaviour and enable ‘viable forms of incorporated gender, to produce a new sexual and affective platform that is neither male nor female in the pharmacopornographic sense of the term, which would make possible the transformation of the species’ (pp. 162–3). Preciado’s vision radically moves beyond gender and sexuality as it is currently conceived, prompting psychoanalyst Kirsten Lentz to declare that ‘after this text, feminism and queer politics can never be the same’.30 Indeed, the radicality of Preciado’s suggestions have elicited strong reactions from some readers of the text.31 Preciado’s advocacy for moving beyond gender categories 29

30 31

There have been several critiques of Testo Junkie’s politics, particularly in relation to questioning how the individual’s transformation aids collective projects of sociopolitical change. See Jones, ‘The Biodrag of Genre’; H. Hester, ‘Synthetic Genders and the Limits of Micropolitics’, . . . ment Journal 6 (2015), n.p.; J. Rivas, ‘Intoxication and Toxicity in a “Pharmacopornographic Era”: Beatriz Preciado’s Testo Junkie’, in E. Brennan and R. Williams (eds.), Literature and Intoxication: Writing, Politics and the Experience of Excess (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), pp. 147–59. K. Lentz, ‘Emergent Subjectivity: The Parallel Temporalities of Psychoanalysis and Social Theory’, Studies in Gender and Sexuality 17:1 (2016), pp. 5–13, at p. 6. The book appears to be particularly enraging to psychoanalysts, two of whom admit to an urge to throw it across the room. See J. Webster, ‘Memento Mori: The Book as Cut’, Studies in Gender and

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is not simply a theoretical or conceptual position – ‘Ideas’, he claims, ‘are not enough’ (p. 359) – but a personal experiment in the material embodiment of sociocultural and gender change, a formal exercise in modelling for the future. As another practical measure to challenge the gender binary, Preciado advocates women learning to perform and inhabit masculinity by undertaking drag king training. For Preciado, drag king workshops allow participants to actively experience how gender is constructed and interpreted in public spaces and social interactions. A further benefit is the access it facilitates to some of the pleasures of masculine privilege: For me, being a drag king is inhabiting the potential that it is my prerogative not to deny, without apologizing, and fulfilling my sexual and political desire to be the master, to incorporate those performative codes, to attain this type of specialization of power, to experiment with the city, the body, sex, public speech the way a cis-male would. Without excuses. Without naturalization. (p. 372)

Indeed, one dimension through which to view the enjoyment of drag is that it usurps cis-male privilege from the inside, clandestinely, and shows it to be an unnatural performance, open to others: it is using the master’s tools to dismantle his house.32 Preciado’s are audacious claims and feminists might raise a series of objections to Testo Junkie, not least of which is that Preciado clearly puts the onus on women as the ones to use the tools of hormonal change and benefit from workshops. In claims like ‘For cis-females, true liberation from heterosexual work and from the work of reproduction cannot come from contemporary methods of contraception . . . but from a radical transformation of their gender status and their sex and sexuality, and from a reappropriation of the sexopolitical techniques of subjugation,’ Preciado clearly expects change to come from below, from those who suffer the most under contemporary arrangements (p. 300). To any who object to such an expectation, Preciado would likely answer that feminism’s attempt to ask men to cede some of their positions of power has not altered conditions for the majority of women. Yet Preciado’s enthusiastic advocacy for fulfilling the roles of men has a darker side, as Sophie Jones’s sharp

32

Sexuality 17:1 (2016), pp. 14–18, at p. 15, and C. Stack, ‘Falling: Jouissance or Madness’, Studies in Gender and Sexuality 17:1 (2016), pp. 19–22, at p. 20. At one point in Testo Junkie Preciado laments the ‘prohibitions about destroying the house of the master with the tools of the master’ promulgated by ‘dominant feminist politics’ (p. 372). The quote is a reference to Audre Lorde’s infamous essay, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), pp. 110–13.

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analysis of Testo Junkie demonstrates, especially in the sections of the text that are closest to autobiography. Jones identifies misogyny in Preciado’s acquisitive and off-hand reference to the girls in his home town as ‘my little girls, my bitches’ (p. 94) and a disturbing racialisation in the chapter where he purchases a chocolate-coloured dildo he nicknames ‘Jimi’ because Despentes has fantasised about Jimi Hendrix.33 The masculine potency Preciado describes Jimi as providing and the deeply uncomfortable racial politics that accompany it are encapsulated in Preciado’s apostrophising question, ‘Hey Jimi, can I borrow your cock to plough my blond’s ass?’ (p. 328). As Jones rightly notes, this is ‘a fantasy of black male sexual prowess’ and, alongside the other pornographic sections of the book, it ‘grant[s] subjectivity to Preciado and VD while sustaining the racist and sexist tropes of the [pornographic] genre’.34 These are important criticisms and identify a blind spot in Testo Junkie, which Jones sees as linked to the way Preciado moves between different genres: Testo Junkie’s failure to theorise the vivid points at which structural violence meets desire is part of its literary technique. The book’s formal split between omniscient theory and autobiographical practice makes certain dimensions of experience simultaneously visible and invisible, witnessed but untheorisable. Even as the colonial and patriarchal context of hormone production resurfaces as pornography, it remains impervious to Preciado’s theoretical register.35

If Preciado is attentive to racial politics as it plays out in the histories of hormone development and avows his feminist commitments, there are nevertheless deeply problematic examples in Testo Junkie of how he exhibits his masculinity. While registering the serious issues to which Jones’s critique draws attention, I want to examine the text’s politics in a different vein, one that thinks about the specific political measures Preciado advocates. Testo Junkie is situated between the manifesto and the ‘utopian demand’, in the sense that Kathi Weeks employs towards the end of The Problem with Work. Several commentators have noted that there is a manifesto-like quality to Testo Junkie and Preciado is evidently unafraid of proclamations.36 Weeks argues that the manifesto is ‘an exemplary literature of provocation’ that ‘challenges its readers to think the future and . . . bring it into being’ (p. 214).37 Moreover, like Testo 33 36 37

35 Jones, ‘The Biodrag of Genre’, n.p. 34 Ibid. Ibid. For example, Lentz, ‘Emergent Subjectivity’, p. 9; Jones, ‘The Biodrag of Genre’, n.p. K. Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 214.

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Junkie, the manifesto is ‘a famously self-assured piece of writing’ that ‘takes aim at the affects and imagination’ (p. 214). Manifestos favour the declarative sentence and have ‘the extravagant gesture and immodest demand’ as staples (p. 215). Thus far, then, Testo Junkie fulfils the qualities of the manifesto, with Preciado’s applications of testosterone outside of a medically prescribed routine as an extravagant gesture par excellence. Weeks notes the popularity of the manifesto among US feminists of the Left in the 1960s and 1970s, which saw work published like Valarie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. Notably, there has been a recent feminist renaissance of the form among feminists since the turn of the twenty-first century, in which Testo Junkie participates, at least in tone if not in name.38 Yet Testo Junkie also constitutes, I contend, a utopian demand, which Weeks describes as ‘an offshoot or even a subset of the manifesto’ (p. 218). It is more than clear that Preciado is no reformist – with his distaste for and frustration towards liberal feminism and his thorough critique of contemporary capitalism – but the utopian demand is not reformist either; rather, it is circumscribed. The examples Weeks uses are the demand for a basic income and, as an historical example, the wages for housework movement. These are initially a far cry from Preciado’s demands for a hormone and biocodes commons and drag workshops for all. Yet Weeks’s description of the utopian demand does describe the specificity of Preciado’s desires: To function optimally as a demand, a utopian demand should be recognizable as a possibility grounded in actually existing tendencies . . . it should be concrete rather than abstract. A utopian demand should be capable of producing an estrangement effect and substantial change, while also registering as a credible call with immediate appeal; it must be both strange and familiar, grounded in the present and gesturing toward the future. (p. 221)

Trans people already take hormones; gender hackers like Preciado already take testosterone outside of medically prescribed conditions; drag workshops are undertaken by all sorts of people, including actors, not simply butches or trans men: in other words, there are already existing conditions for what Preciado wants to see as accessible for all. Testo Junkie also works extremely hard to make sure that its utopian demands have familiar 38

For example: S. Ahmed, ‘A Killjoy Manifesto’, in Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 251–68; the Xenofeminism manifesto by the Laboria Cuboniks Collective on the website www.laboriacuboniks.net, discussed in H. Hester, Xenofeminism (Cambridge: Polity, 2018); and Edinburgh Action for Trans Health’s ‘Trans Health Manifesto’, in N. Raha et al., Radical Transfeminism, pp. 56–61. I discuss these texts in ‘Feminist Manuals and Manifestos in the Twenty-First Century’, in J. Cooke (ed.), New Feminist Studies: Twenty-FirstCentury Critical Interventions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

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contexts: as Preciado points out, we all self-administer chemicals to change our bodies, often daily through the use of headache pills, prescription medicines, caffeine, contraception, alcohol, and the many other things we ingest that alter our bodies and behaviour. For all its manifesto moments, it is in these two concrete suggestions of a hormone commons and gender workshops that Testo Junkie holds out utopian demands for new futures, thinkable now, that have the potential to disrupt the gender binary. In this way, Preciado proffers trans potential as an invitation to everyone to break out of the constraints of gender conformity. The audacity of Preciado’s Testo Junkie operates on multiple levels: the self-experimentation with testosterone; the book’s mixture of intimate registers with an impressive range and force of arguments; its explicitness; the advocacy for a biocode commons and for the practice of drag; its position somewhere between life-writing, argument, manifesto, history, and a series of utopian demands that are already being actioned by a minority of the population. The binaries of cis/trans, fiction/memoir, straight/lesbian, and man/woman are all rendered obsolete within the vision of this singular, audacious text.

The Question of Queer Normativity Nelson’s The Argonauts moves in a very different direction to Testo Junkie in its vision of a queer future that is both trans and family friendly. The binary Nelson primarily seeks to critique is normative/transgressive, where motherhood, pregnancy, and family life all line up on the first side and queer, trans, and non-vanilla sexual practices line up on the second. An unspoken binary, boring/exciting, underpins normative/transgressive and dictates that the family is a space of conservativism, repetition, and stasis, whereas the transgressive side of the binary is perceived to be potentially transformative, politically radical, and sexy. As already discussed, Nelson’s family life is non-normative but looks normative from the outside. Both Nelson and Dodge have faced difficulties associated with their genders and sexualities: discrimination, ranging from a past physical attack on Dodge to various looks and comments, as well as concerns about transphobic decisions from the authorities regarding custody of Dodge’s son; the expense and heartache of IVF; and the emotional and physical exigencies involved in going through, and supporting someone who is going through, aspects of trans treatment. On the other hand, they are privileged: white, middle-class, and educated, one an author and lecturer who has been the recipient of several grants, and the other an artist and film-maker. Their

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position is rich in cultural capital, even if they are not homeowners or particularly wealthy. While behind closed doors their lives are gender variant, when Dodge passes in public they consequently all pass, looking just like a heteronormative nuclear family, as in the photograph on the mug. When Nelson describes ‘the binary of normative/transgressive’ as ‘unsustainable, along with the demand that anyone live a life that’s all one thing’, she is commenting upon how motherhood is perceived to remove women from other more transgressive or radical positions or identities and deliver them into normativity, as though by definition (p. 72). The problem for Nelson, as we see later, is that as The Argonauts progresses this is exactly the story to which it testifies. One theoretical element of Nelson’s criticism of the normative/transgressive binary emerges as a clash between her maternal desires, and the experiences to which they lead, and the celebration of radical sexuality and concomitant denigration of reproductive futurity she identifies as a dominant and, for her, disturbing feature of contemporary queer theory. Lee Edelman’s influential No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive is the most unmistakable antagonist here, a fact confirmed by his presence in the scattered marginalia references The Argonauts provides to identify the theorists with whom Nelson sporadically engages or quotes (pp. 75–6). It is easy to recognise why a pregnant queer Nelson might object to Edelman’s assertion that ‘queerness names the side of those not “fighting for the children”, the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism’.39 It is not just family-making but specifically maternity that Nelson thinks is attacked – or precluded – by theorists such as Edelman, and she is keen to depict this as an outdated mode of queer thinking. With a direct address to her readers, she asks, ‘As more queers have kids, will the presumed opposition [between queerness and procreation/maternity] simply wither away? Will you miss it?’ (p. 13). Of course, Nelson is not the first to point out that queer lives are not de facto transgressive anymore: Leo Bersani made this point in Homos, albeit, unlike Nelson, in the service of calling for less conformity to existing patterns of sociality.40 As we have seen, one response Nelson makes to counter Edelman and others is in her audacious theorisation of the ever-transforming Argo as a replacement for trans and in order to capture a range of human changes 39 40

L. Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 3. L. Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 66–8.

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over a lifetime. Alongside this, she also seeks to render pregnancy not conformist but ‘an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative’ that she suggests it could be ‘queer’ (p. 13, my emphasis). What does it mean to render an experience often considered quintessentially normative as queer? On the one hand, for the first-time mother there is no denying that the bodily changes she undergoes are new experiences, not part of her ‘normal’ life up until that point. On the other, as with how Argo robs trans of its political specificity anchored in experiences that cis people do not have, so calling pregnancy queer takes the political edge from the specificity of gay experience that queer usually names. Nelson brings the two together at one point, folding her ‘queer’ pregnancy and Dodge’s trans treatment causing his Argo alterations into one another to such an extent that she refers collectively to their ‘inscrutable hormonal soup’ (p. 79). Nelson’s audacity lies in this stretching of terms outside of their usual range of reference. Yet this has the capacity to offend in both directions: conservatives and anti-trans feminists are unlikely to accept the normalisation, even naturalisation, of trans bodily changes Nelson hereby suggests, and trans people, especially those like Preciado for whom trans is a marker of potentially radical subjectivity and a politically subversive challenge to normativity, are likely to see a deliberate attempt to domesticate and depoliticise the term. Similar objections can obviously be made to Nelson’s use of queer too. The problem of normativity bears down upon trans people from at least two directions. On the one hand, there is the binary which casts them as other, defined against ‘normal’ cis people. On the other, a result of the first, the fight for rights and recognition has often entailed defending trans people as ‘normal’ citizens, capable of making valuable contributions to culture and to the economy. The political scientist Dan Irving notes that ‘Transsexual individuals can be viewed as viable neoliberal subjects: they have proven to be flexible and fluid, self-sufficient, and major contributors to their families, workplaces, communities and societies. To many, emphasizing the normative potential of transsexuality has been a successful strategy to counter the marginalization effects of pathologization.’41 Even if not consciously part of her strategy, in The Argonauts Nelson mostly stresses Dodge’s normative potential: he is a good dad, a good son to a dying mother, an interesting artist, an exciting lover, and a supportive partner to Nelson. However, Irving cautions against assimilationist arguments because they 41

D. Irving, ‘Normalized Transgressions: Legitimizing the Transsexual Body as Productive’, in Stryker and Aizura, The Transgender Studies Reader 2, pp. 15–29, at p. 26.

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by necessity exclude those whose lives do not correspond with the narrative’s requirements, those who are not, for whatever reasons, good citizens. Furthermore, Irving warns against simply inverting binary terms: ‘To flip dichotomies so that the abnormal becomes normal, the unproductive becomes productive, and the uncreative becomes artistic is to plant some dangerous seeds that jeopardize the state of trans theory and politics’ because it ‘privileges those within trans communities who have the potential to become respectable social subjects’ and neglects those who do not fit into prevailing neo-liberal socio-economic pictures of productive citizenship, such as trans people who do not pass, or are ill, disabled, or incarcerated (p. 24). Nelson’s lyrical and loving account of the normality of her and Dodge’s family – folding laundry, entertaining toddlers, breastfeeding at night – and her normalising of Dodge’s transition through its association with other times of bodily change such as pregnancy, risks not just flipping the dichotomies, especially cis/trans, normal/abnormal, and normative/queer, but collapsing them. This is both the audacity of the book and the moment when Nelson’s politics become problematic. A considerable amount of political vigour and critique in trans theory recognises that trans people have a marginalised position in society, are often confined to precarious or criminalised forms of labour or unemployment, and thus have an experiential position from which to understand and highlight the failings of contemporary global capitalism, and even, in Irving’s words, ‘spark radical imaginations of a queer future’ (p. 27).42 While The Argonauts is an affirmative text, it also veers away from the idea that trans identity has the potential to launch a wider critique of society and politics. Two examples will suffice to demonstrate that what initially may appear as impatience with a binary which reductively and restrictively pits the transgressive or radical against the normative instead begins, as The Argonauts progresses, to look increasingly like reluctance on Nelson’s part to align herself with any manifestation of radicality committed to the transformation of the broad status quo, of capitalism and its institutions. While she is critical of ‘assimilationist’ homonormative calls for marriage and entry into the military, and warns that ‘if we want to do more than claw our way into repressive structures, we have our work cut out for us’ (p. 26), when questions of wider sociopolitical organisation 42

See also Raha, ‘Transfeminine Brokenness’; Spade, Normal Life; Bassichis, Lee, and Spade, ‘Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement’; Raha et al., Radical Transfeminism; Puar, The Right to Main, pp. 33–62.

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arise, Nelson is not on the side of the radicals. For instance, during Dodge’s recovery from top surgery they watch and discuss the movie X-Men: First Class, debating ‘assimilation vs. revolution’ (p. 81). Dodge is on the side of the revolutionaries, whereas Nelson admits, with just the right amount of sheepish self-deprecation to sweeten the conservativism of her position, that the movie’s ‘assimilationists were advocating nonviolence and identification with the Other in that bastardized Buddhist way that gets me every time’ (p. 81). She complains that the ensuing discussion is polarised less by the couple’s actual positions than by those provided by the fictional parameters that constitute the film’s structure, but either way, it results, she bemoans, in ‘a needless binary’ argument (p. 82). This example echoes an earlier moment in the book, when Nelson encounters a radical queer protest at the 2012 Pride in Oakland. Calling the protesters ‘antiassimilationist activists’, she reproduces the wording on their flier which affirms a queer anti-capitalism, then states ‘our diagnosis is similar’, but in the end she distances herself from their politics, deciding dismissively that ‘I’ve come to understand revolutionary language as a kind of fetish’ (p. 27). In a shift away from politics and towards semantics familiar from much of the post-structuralist theory that The Argonauts draws upon, including, tellingly, Barthes’s use of the Argo, she asks, ‘Perhaps it’s the word radical which needs rethinking?’ (p. 27). What is occluded by Nelson is that the protesters were objecting to a charge levied upon entry to Oakland Pride for the first time, a fact which gives a specific context to their challenge to the event and to their claims that they can ‘never be commodified’ (p. 26) and prefer to stand with the ‘exploited of the world’ (p. 27).43 The audacity of The Argonauts, these examples demonstrate, certainly does not lie in the radicality of its arguments for a differently lived and imagined future. Yet these arguments are made frequently and in radical terms by trans theorists and thinkers. In contrast, the world Nelson is keen to build and protect is the home she shares with Dodge and their children. When life-making is not easily done, as is the case for Nelson and Dodge, should Nelson really be blamed for criticising a radicality which, as she points out, has little time for her life as a mother? The problem here, and with the expansion of the term ‘trans’ that Nelson enacts, is that she is a political liberal who, despite her criticisms of the normative/transgression binary, depends upon presenting herself and Dodge initially as transgressive for the success of The Argonauts. This is the less obvious but greater audacity and risk of the book: it relies for its effect upon a mainly cis- and 43

My thanks to Wendy Trevino for this information about the Oakland protest.

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educated but not politically radical audience who will perhaps be mildly shocked but also pleased by how Nelson writes about her life with a trans person, an audience who will also predominantly approve of her distrust of queer and political radicality.44 My analysis here derives from comparing the arguments the book makes against radical queer theory and revolutionary politics, as laid out earlier, to how Nelson sculpts the beginning of her text. The Argonauts opens with a couple of sentences setting up a lunch scene between Nelson and a friend, but this is swiftly interrupted by the fourth sentence of the book, which ushers in a very different scene: Instead the words I love you come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank bachelor pad. You had Molloy by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does it get any better? (p. 3)

The question is poised perfectly to position Nelson as sexually perverse, and radically so. Elsewhere in The Argonauts Nelson asks, ‘how can rampant, “deviant” sexual activity remain the marker of radicality?’ (p. 110). Yet female anal sex, despite a rise in prevalence, is still generally considered non-normative, and lesbian anal sex, so much less culturally visible, even more so.45 Neither is this a scene of sexuality set in the midst of recognisable domestic comfort – where much of the rest of the book will take place – but in a dwelling dedicated to the aesthetically and sensually raw, from Beckett’s prose to Nelson’s face ‘smashed’ into the dank and unadorned cement floor. Furthermore, at this point in the book, Dodge’s gender identity is unrevealed and will remain so for several pages even though Nelson addresses him directly and intimately in the second person, and makes reference to a further sexual scene of sadomasochistic play between them. Only after several pages does the luncheon friend reappear, with a move to a computer and a search for the correct pronoun to use for this new dildo-wearing, belt-wielding lover. And it is only at this moment that Dodge, still unnamed, is revealed as trans. While Nelson is not the only one to include an account of anal penetration in the opening pages of an autobiographical account – Preciado does too – it is far from usual and, I would argue, in The Argonauts it is deliberately positioned in order to 44 45

This is borne out in the reviews. See Feigal, ‘The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson’; Als, ‘Immediate Family’; Turner, ‘Like a Manta Ray’. E. Kosofsky Sedgwick claims that ‘there has been no important or sustained Western discourse in which women’s anal eroticism means. Means anything’. (Tendencies [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993], p. 203.)

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immediately exploit the alluring frisson produced by accounts of queer sexual radicality, as well as suggesting further sexual revelations are likely in the pages to follow. This in turn implicitly relies upon a prurience that the general public has about trans bodies and sexual behaviour, what Jacques calls the ‘the lurid “body shock”’ aspect of transitioning that the mainstream media focus upon so heavily (p. 296). It matters that Nelson is a cis writer testifying to trans sexual behaviour, and it matters too that her readership is wider than the primarily academic and trans audiences who read Preciado.46 While there is no doubt that these opening pages make for an effectively audacious start to The Argonauts, it is in direct contradiction to the arguments against radical queerness that the text will later make. If much of the text argues for the invalidity of the binary transgressive/ normative, this opening scene relies upon the audaciously non-normative and the transgressive to capture its readers’ attention and whet their appetites for further disclosures of ‘transgressive’ sexual acts and intimate details of trans experience. A generous reading of The Argonauts, while noting the tensions in the text that I have highlighted, might nevertheless want to take the implications of Nelson’s questions about assimilation seriously. What happens, she asks, when trans become normal, when her family is no longer radical or non-normative because gender variance has lost its specifically radical edge and is simply one among many different living options that can be fulfilled without prejudice, no longer governed by a strict binary? The answer The Argonauts implicitly supplies is its presentation of Nelson’s life with Dodge. In its sheering away from queer anal sex in a dank basement and its movement towards the domestic couch and child-rearing, The Argonauts offers reassurance to hetero- and homonormative audiences in its representation of middle-class family-building with a trans person. This family does not, in the end, look dissimilar to how mainstream culture wants to imagine most ‘normal’ families. In this sense, then, The Argonauts seeks to erode the binary which would dichotomise queer family-making against hetero-cis family-making, and it is successful in doing this. As Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner point out, queer couples can invent their own versions of heteronormative forms of intimacy, ‘by betrothing themselves to the couple form and its language of personal significance’, but, the theorists warn, doing so leaves ‘untransformed the material and ideological conditions that divide intimacy from history, politics, and 46

This division in reception is clear from newspaper reviews, which Nelson received a good collection of and Preciado did not.

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publics’ (p. 326).47 In The Argonauts, Nelson keeps sex, intimacy, and her family separate from radical politics and its implications. In her discussion of the gendered nature of liberal discourse, Wendy Brown examines how contemporary liberalism relies upon traditions that led to a ‘stark differentiation between [the] family and civil society’.48 Brown’s discussion of the binaries upon which liberalism is structured shows how these are implicitly gendered such that ‘formulations of personhood, citizenship, and politics’ under liberalism ‘themselves contain women’s subordination’ (p. 164). Wealthier women can outsource domestic labour to other, less well-paid women while they take up positions in the public sphere – or write books such as The Argonauts – but, Brown argues, this is precisely why ‘feminism operating with unreconstructed liberal discourse is therefore trapped’ (p. 164): it frees only some women for fuller political and social participations, not all. This is the crux of my problem with Nelson’s criticisms of queer radicalism. While I am sympathetic to a justified accusation that the most influential strains of queer theory have not managed to sufficiently make space for queer family-making without branding it as disparagingly homonormative, The Argonauts’s trajectory into the privatised domestic space, focalised through the eyes and maternal activities of Iggy’s primary cis care giver and with very little mention of Dodge’s personal relationship with their offspring, results in proffering the family as an idealised safe haven away from transphobia and the demands for new forms of living and sociopolitical organisation which pertain within discourses of queer radicality and left political activism. The strong analyses offered by feminism, queer, and now trans theory of the failings of liberalism and of the more recent neo-liberal political projects in the United States and the United Kingdom demonstrate how the prevailing tenets underpinning Western politics disadvantage those they most weaken and least protect, and upon whose labour those who benefit from such systems are sustained.49

The Audacity of De-dramatisation Next to Testo Junkie’s audacious arguments, intimate accounts of passionate sex, and daring chemical self-experimentation, and next to The 47 48 49

L. Berlant and M. Warner, ‘Sex in Public’, in L. Berlant (ed.), Intimacy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 311–30, at p. 326. W. Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 137. It is also the case, as Brown discusses, that this gendering is further inflected by race as much as by class.

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Argonauts’s seductive prose, sophisticated and lyrical engagements with theory, and affirmations of queer family life, Jacques’s Trans is a quiet, quotidian tale of transition. It is less ambitious and formally innovative than either Preciado or Nelson, and, as noted, more akin to the traditional forms of trans autobiography common in the twentieth century. The importance of Trans lies in its deliberate de-dramatisation of trans life and transition. This is distinct, as a project, from Nelson’s attempt to normalise trans being by folding it into an account of human life as a continuum of embodied changes. Instead, Jacques is absolutely specific about how trans experience marks her out as different, whether she wants to be or not. There is a completely different kind of audacity at work here, one that, as with the authors in Chapter 2 who boldly discussed their writer’s block, is unafraid to admit to failure and to write about disappointment and depression. The context of how trans lives are socially perceived and frequently represented also shapes what is audacious about Trans by virtue of Jacques’s deliberate positioning of her life. For instance, the contemporary media insists on transition as a drama, but while Jacques is explicit about the surgery and other treatments she undergoes, the book is deliberately non-sensational. Unlike Nelson and Preciado, whose lives and friends appear edgy, interesting, rich in cultural capital, and centred around the arts, Jacques writes of the boring jobs she is forced to take to survive as she tries to become a writer through many failures and rejections. Trans attends to the frustrations and everyday humiliations Jacques and her emerging identity undergo, as well as the moments of connection and recognition as she discovers more trans people like her and places where she can express herself. While Nelson and Preciado find themselves excitingly in love and having passionate sex, Jacques’s romantic encounters are relatively fleeting and definitely subsidiary to the process of transition. In Trans, friends are more important than lovers. Unlike Nelson, there is no attempt to argue that this or that type of non-normative life is actually pretty normal. Instead, there is just the normality of mundane life – working, paying the bills, hanging out with friends, wishing for something better – a life that is constrained and made more difficult to negotiate by the process of transition. Precisely because trans life is often seen as a dramatic and inevitably public decision, de-dramatisation is a deliberate aesthetic decision, evident in both the telling and the choice of what to tell. I trace this through attention to style, a discussion of work and the desire to write, and finally, in an example of life-informed short fiction that Jacques wrote after Trans.

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Trans opens with a chapter taken straight from Jacques’s ‘Transgender Journey’ Guardian column and reproduced almost exactly.50 It details her experience of sex reassignment surgery, from the moment six weeks before surgery when she had to stop taking hormones to her arrival home from hospital. It is a frank and moving account of her emotional tribulations as well as of the post-surgery pain and discombobulation she experienced. Towards the end, in order to be released from hospital, she has to learn to use a dildo: ‘I start dilating, using lubricating jelly and two five-inch dilators, one two inches wide, the other three. I have to use the smaller one for five minutes, then the larger for twenty to keep the neovagina open, three times daily for now. (In Scotland, I met someone who was down to once a month, three years post-SRS). This is very dull, and I make it tolerable by listening to music’ (pp. 8–9). In what will unfold as a signature rhetorical strategy, one also seen in the mirror scene of make-up application recounted at the start of this chapter, Jacques describes her dilation experience in great factual detail, finishing with the bathetic reference to its tedium and so divesting the dildo of its usual rather risqué association with sexual pleasure, which both Nelson and Preciado rely upon in the opening pages of their books. Counter-intuitively, perhaps, this refusal to follow the usual routes for marking trans life as audacious shows the text to have an unusual kind of audacity of its own. This scene is typical in tone to the rest of the book, which closes, but for the Epilogue, on a similarly de-dramatising note. Finally discharged fully from medical oversight and freed from regular check-ups, Jacques steps out of the hospital: ‘I should celebrate, I thought. I looked around at the laundrette and the Conservative Club on the Greyhound Road, Pizza Express across the street and the Southern Belle in front of me. Treat yourself to lunch at least’ (p. 292). Jacques enters the pub, which is empty and showing football, and orders food: Resting my head on my palm and my elbow on the table, I picked up a stick [of halloumi] and dipped it in the cream, watching the goals from the weekend’s Premier League games on the big screen. I bit off the end, sighed and ate the rest of the stick. I ate two more, pushed away the bowl, got up and left. I walked back to the Education Centre, climbed the stairs and opened the door to my office. I pressed CTRL, ALT and DELETE and entered my password to unlock my PC. I had no new emails, so I went on the Guardian website, but there 50

There are minor changes in the book version, such as the removal of the name of a nurse. See Jacques, Trans, pp. 1–9, and J. Jacques, ‘Transgender Journey: Time for Sex Reassignment Surgery at Last’, The Guardian (30 August 2012).

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was nothing new I wanted to read. I let go of the mouse, drummed my fingers on my desk and then gently reclined into my chair, letting the day go by. (pp. 292–3)

The desultory and partial meal in a typically dull British pub on a similarly unlovely high street is underscored by the addition of so much detail, one halloumi stick, then another, one action followed by its logical next step. There is a strain of British humour subtly at work here, an example of a kind of wry expectation that an experience will be dissatisfactory and disappointing which obviates the need for those negative feelings to emerge fully – a sigh is enough – because they are so inevitable: the pub was bound to be mediocre, the food bound to be unappetising. This is further elaborated in the boring ritual of going back to work, logging on, checking various sources of information, only to find the new, what we might think of as the interesting, the irruptive, or the dramatic, is missing: no new email, nothing new to read in the news. In the Epilogue, Jacques describes this as ‘a deliberately flat note’ (p. 294), commenting ‘it really was that anticlimactic’ (p. 295). But this is a celebratory moment of sorts since the whole book has revolved around transition, even if Jacques has consistently chosen de-dramatising modes for describing it.51 To be able to experience the day just ‘going by’ has not been what Trans has testified to up until this point: the final signing off from the doctor enables the anxiety of having to offer oneself and one’s body up for medical scrutiny to lift, leaving Jacques to luxuriate in the nothing new of an anxiety-free moment.52 Much of Jacques’s life during the period leading up to and during transition is dominated by disappointment: she doesn’t get funding for her Masters (p. 69), or again for her PhD project (p. 101); various theatres reject her play (p. 90); and a book proposal on the footballer Justin Fashanu is turned down (p. 146). There are some authorial successes, such as being invited to join a Young Writer’s Programme at the Soho theatre (p. 90), the publication of a small book on little-known writer Raynor Heppenstall (p. 124), various bits and pieces of journalism, and, finally, The Guardian blog commission, which transforms her into a public figure, invited to speak at various events (p. 202). But these writing ventures never provide enough income to live on. Trans tracks Jacques taking up a series of dull retail and administrative roles for which she is 51 52

This is noted by Sheila Heti in the Epilogue interview, p. 295. Heti notes that the phrase ‘letting the day go by’ is an echo of the Talking Head’s song ‘Once in a Lifetime’, which Jacques describes as about ‘the idea of an experience that’s both transcendent and mundane, and then fades into the past. Back then [when she was thirteen], I couldn’t have imagined how apt it would seem in my early thirties’ (p. 295).

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always overqualified: selling freezers and other white goods in a department store (p. 72); working for Legal and General checking insurance policies (p. 82); and temping for various Primary Care Trusts in the National Health Service (pp. 147, 163, 190, 245, 283), mostly on short-term contracts, which is where she is still working when the book closes. Between these jobs are sometimes stretches of unemployment when she has to ‘sign on’, claiming the paltry income support the British state provides to those who have completed the necessary paperwork and registered at the Jobcentre (pp. 1, 190, 260, 182). There are job frustrations too, as she interviews badly and is frequently rejected (pp. 89, 90, 134). Once she has a date for surgery, it is difficult to find permanent work that would allow her to take the required recuperation time so early into a role, and the loss of earnings during her surgery and her recovery period leave her even poorer (p. 281). In the twentyfirst century, this is the mostly untold and definitely unglamorous story of transition that Jacques has the audacity to tell. She is at least lucky to have the support of friends and family, and yet, still, this is a lonely time of work precarity and the stressful financial insecurity that accompanies it. As Weeks observes, waged work is ‘the basic means by which status is allocated’ (p. 6). Jacques’s different writing projects signal her desire to move away from the low-status roles she takes in order to support her attempts to become a writer until she is successful enough to earn her living by the pen. This paradox is exacerbated by the problems thrown in the way of developing her career by the process of transition. She needs a workplace in which it is safe to come out while undertaking the two-year Real Life Experience required by the UK medical establishment before they grant access to surgery. It is perhaps not surprising that working within the health care system provides such an environment, even if only on temporary contracts. Precarious work is more likely among trans people, who frequently suffer workplace discrimination.53 Neither are Jacques’s mental health difficulties, linked both to her body dysmorphia and her thwarted attempts to make a living as a writer, uncommon among trans people.54 It is not even an irony that it is her transition which makes her dreams of publishing and journalism into a greater reality than ever before, given the media’s interest in stories of sex reassignment surgery and trans women in particular.55 In fact, instead of Trans, Jacques had hoped to write a history of transgender British people or a collection of transgender short fiction, she tells new audacity writer Heti in the Epilogue interview, but publishers 53 55

Spade, Normal Life, pp. 50–93. 54 Raha, ‘Transfeminine Brokenness’, pp. 632–46. Serano, ‘Skirt Chasers’, pp. 226–33.

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were only interested in her transition story (p. 299).56 Jacques has an audacity Heti clearly admires: the audacity to write her transition with a deliberately de-dramatising focus on the factual details of processes, on difficulties, depression, and failures. This is not the only aspect of Trans that is audacious, however. In the acknowledgements Jacques thanks the friends who had spoken to her about past experiences, which then allowed her ‘to shape them into the “constructed reality” of the book’ (p. viii). At a book launch for Trans in London, feminist Jacqueline Rose referred to this fictionality at the heart of the memoir as ‘the scandal of the book’.57 The thrust of the audacity Rose recognises is not so much, I think, that Jacques has embellished gaps in her memory, but that she admitted to doing so, thus breaking with Philippe Lejeune’s conception of the autobiographical pact by which there is an unstated but implicit agreement between readers and writers of autobiography that the truth is being told.58 Given that How Should a Person Be? has an unclear line between autobiography and fiction, it is obvious why Heti is an appropriate choice to conduct the Epilogue’s interview. Even so, Jacques distinguishes their projects, writing, ‘I would have loved this book to blend fiction and autobiography, like your novel How Should a Person Be? ’ (p. 309), but admits that she felt constrained by the commission to write a memoir. In a point that is important for what follows, Jacques confesses, ‘What I love about fiction is that you can invent one big lie, but after that you can be far more truthful because you are not worried about treading on [real people’s] toes in the same way’ (p. 309). The freedom Jacques sees in autobiographically informed fiction is finally embodied in her short story ‘Weekend in Brighton’, which she chose to include as an extra to the audio recording of Trans, ‘further positing it as fiction that was close to memoir, and blurring the genre lines’, she explains (p. 369).59 ‘Weekend in Brighton’ takes elements of Jacques’s life in Brighton, and an expunged S/M club night scene from Trans, and incorporates them into a fiction. Like Jacques, Patrick/Trish in ‘Weekend in Brighton’ visits a shop for cross-dressers in Hove, lives in the seafront building Embassy Court, works 56 57 58 59

Jacques has since won funding and completed a creative and critical PhD at Sussex University, and published transgender fiction. ‘Trans: Juliet Jacques with Chloe Aridjis’, London Review Bookshop, London, 29 September 2015. Rose made the comment during the Q & A session. P. Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. K. Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 1–30. Jacques, ‘Forms of Resistance’, p. 369.

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in a dull office job, and is an ex-student struggling to pay off debts.60 Additionally, ‘Weekend in Brighton’ reprises the office scene and the ubiquitous Control-Alt-Delete signing-on function that characterises work computers and marks the start of the working day. Unlike the Jacques of Trans, although as Jacques did in real life, Patrick/Trish attends an S/M night at the Harlequin nightclub. For Trish it is the first time at an S/M night, the first time out as a woman in this gay club, and the first time she has taken part in S/M play, which, somewhat fantastically, she submits to with remarkable alacrity given that in the other scenes of the story, even those in gay venues, Patrick/Trish is self-conscious and feels out of place. But this is the role of fiction, which can lead characters out of themselves in ways that perhaps their authors would not permit in their own lives: ‘One problem I’d had with writing a memoir’, Jacques admits, ‘was that throughout my life I’d tried to explore and express my gender identity with as little drama as possible. In . . . Weekend in Brighton, I could imagine how situations where I had avoided conflict might have turned out differently’ (p. 368). Intriguingly, though, there are in fact no conflicts in ‘Weekend in Brighton’, but there is a fair amount of spanking. Trish leaves the club with Bree, to go back to the latter’s hotel. Bree wants to continue the play they began at Harlequins together, and Trish tries but is concerned other guests will hear them. What follows is the centre point of the story, a tender, awkward failure of a scene that is both humorous and sad: Trish swung the belt again. There wasn’t enough space: it kept striking the wardrobe, the wall or the bedpost, draining its force well before it got to Bree. ‘Use your hand, I’ll lie across your lap.’ Trish sat on the bed, and Bree laid across her. ‘Roll up my skirt.’ Trish suppressed a sigh, and sensed Bree becoming impatient, wriggling a little across her lap. She followed Bree’s request and spanked her a few times. ‘Harder.’ She hit Bree with more force and then looked at the door. ‘I thought I heard someone.’

Trish’s self-consciousness has returned in the cramped room and the result is not an extension of the scene they found sexy in public but one that swiftly turns into apologies, hugs, and goodbyes. They never see each other 60

J. Jacques, ‘Weekend in Brighton’, Catapult (2 October 2015). See www.catapult.co/stories/week end-in-brighton. All further quotes refer to this online version.

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again. Trish asks herself, ‘Why am I so disappointed? I’ve finally met someone like me, tried something I’ve always wanted to try,’ but soon after moves to London, upon which note the story closes. Although the obvious audacity here is the inclusion of S/M play in a work of short fiction, since it is usually confined to erotica, more audacious still is Jacques’s refusal to reify or glamorise trans experience, instead taking the risk of writing a sad, tender tale of two people who do not quite manage to sustain a connection. Thus, Jacques audaciously inaugurates a literary trans realism which, informed by life events, seeks to reflect the complexity of human interactions and the fact that even though there are two people who ostensibly want this encounter to work, it fails to do so. Trans fiction is still in its infancy in the early part of the twenty-first century, but Juliet Jacques is one of its quiet yet audacious trailblazers. The audacity of those writing about trans lives is, as this chapter has demonstrated, incredibly varied, on the one hand chaffing at the idea that trans people are so very different to their cis peers and on the other highlighting the differences they so frequently experience and the political promise trans people hold out in terms of challenging gender binaries and other forms of dichotomised thinking. Such audacity is also highly contingent upon a context where trans lives and the problems they encounter are still unfamiliar to many. It is clear that trans politics is at a crucial juncture right now.61 As people often struggling against and at the edges of the state, trans people have an especially clear view of interlocking repressive structures and discriminatory practices that stretch across policing, the prison-industrial complex, medical institutions, the media, and the workplace, and which disadvantage the most vulnerable. Both Preciado, in the audacious breadth of his anti-capitalist arguments, and Jacques, in her de-dramatising documentation of the quotidian struggles that she encountered, contribute to an increasing range of voices testifying to lived injustices and trying to imagine trans futures that are different. 61

This is certainly the case in the United States under Donald Trump and was evident in the recent anti-trans discourse that sprang up in the United Kingdom around the consultation for changes to the Gender Recognition Act.

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chapter 5

The Dangers of Audacity Vanessa Place’s Contradictory Feminism

Vanessa Place is an audacious poet who courts controversy. She posts rape jokes as status updates on Facebook and has recently published a book using the same material, You Had to Be There: Rape Jokes (2018).1 She has turned her name into a company, VanessaPlaceInc, with the tagline ‘It’s not the point, it’s the platform.’2 One of the objects the company put up for sale was a book of bound $1 bills entitled $20 and priced at $50.3 In 2015, her regular tweeting of Gone with the Wind and adoption of ‘Mammy’ from the film as her avatar for doing so provoked such a furore that the subsequent debates hit the international press: she was accused of being a racist for performing in blackface and for reproducing the text’s racism.4 Does repurposing problematic material repeat the offence or highlight and thus critique the original offensiveness? Considerable consensus culminated around the former judgement in the case of Place’s Gone with the Wind project, seeing her dropped from conferences and art events after a Twitter and online campaign against her resulted in organisers receiving numerous complaints.5 Naomi Toth has called the ‘targets’ Place chooses 1

2

3 4

5

For example, on 28 July 2017 she posted a picture of one of her tweets as a Facebook status. It read: ‘What’s black and blue and doesn’t like sex? I’ll let you know tomorrow. #gags’. She first published a collection of such jokes as an article, later a book, You Had to Be There: Rape Jokes (London: Penguin Random House, 2018). For the former, see V. Place, ‘Rape Jokes’, Studies in Gender and Sexuality 18:4 (2017), pp. 260–8. This issue of the journal features nine different essays on rape jokes, including Place’s. VanessaPlaceInc’s tagline is from the Twitter feed description: twitter.com/VanessaPlaceInc. The account has been dormant since early 2014. It appears the ‘company’ has closed or the project been abandoned. V. Place, ‘Interview with Vanessa Place’, interviewed by J. Bromberg, The White Review (October 2014). S. Martelle, ‘Vanessa Place’s Gone with the Wind Tweets: Artistic Expression or Racism?’, LA Times (19 May 2015); E. Helmore, ‘Gone with the Wind Tweeter Says She Is Being Shunned by Art Institutions’, The Guardian (25 June 2015). Ibid. Helmore’s article chronicles how the Berkeley Poetry conference disinvited Place, the Whitney Museum cancelled one of Place’s readings, and the Association of Writers and Writing Programmes (AWP) removed Place from one of its subcommittees.

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‘already hot items, dangerously seductive’, even, as some have said, ‘so hot as to be untouchable’.6 In conversation with Toth, Place declares, ‘every rape is a joke,’ adding that she means this ‘in the Freudian/Lacanian sense of the obscene joke’ (p. 40) and defining the obscene as ‘that which is just off site’ and ‘the unspeakable that is spoken’ (p. 46). To call rape a joke is an obvious provocation, one that invites citation without attention to its theoretical framing: it is a deliberately outrageous, audacious statement. It is also one, disquietingly, that describes a facet of rape that Tracey Emin, Jana Leo, and Virginie Despentes all documented and that I discussed as ‘the mendacity of rapists’ in Chapter 1: the rapists of all three women treated the rape as though it was not rape, as though it was fun or a date. This can be seen as a sick joke, yet there is no denying that Place’s audacity in naming rape as such, and the trajectory of many of her other projects, deliberately plays at the dangerous limits of offence and acceptability.

The Texts and Their Contexts This chapter examines Place’s disturbing and audacious three-volume project, Tragodía (2010–11), which draws upon material from her work as a criminal appeals attorney in Los Angeles. The appeals she specialises in are for convicted rapists, paedophiles, and other sex offenders who are already serving their terms. Typically, she will be appealing against one or more charges among many. Examples include: arguing for a sentence reduction, often in response to how Californian law can award multiple life sentences adding up to well over a lifetime; objecting to expert testimony or DNA interpretation; or fighting the classification of a rapist as a Sexually Violent Predator, a metric determiner which sentences them to indefinite psychiatric rather than criminal incarceration. According to Place, she rarely wins.7 The case I particularly focus upon centres on a pimp who is imprisoned on the testimony of his sex workers and an expert who testifies to their victimisation.8 How Place represents the case – in the legal appeals documents themselves, in the Tragodía, and in her book about rape reform, The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality, and Law (2010) – is contradictory, especially in 6 7

8

N. Toth and V. Place, After Vanessa Place (London: MA Bibliothèque, 2017), p. 77. V. Place, The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality, and Law (New York: Other Press, 2010), p. 16. References to this text appear in parentheses in the body of the chapter. For clarity, it will be abbreviated to TGP. The court documents reveal that of all the arguments Place presented in relation to this case, only one prevailed and shaved twenty-two months from her client’s sentence. Given the extreme length of his sentence, this makes very little difference. See People v. Brandon, Opinion (2006), p. 42.

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feminist terms: at certain points she paints the sex workers as victims and at others she argues for their autonomy and self-determination. Place’s rape writing is therefore not as clearly situated as is that of Tracey Emin, Jana Leo, and Virginie Despentes, who were discussed in Chapter 1, and all of whom are clear in their support for women’s autonomy over their bodies and their resistance of victimhood. Tragodía is comprised of three volumes: Statement of Facts (2010), which contains the summaries of thirty-three trials Place wrote in her professional capacity for appeals cases; Statement of the Case (2011), which provides thirty-three procedural histories of the charges and sentences handed down for different cases; and Argument (2011), which contains thirty-three appeals arguments Place lodged on behalf of her clients.9 All three volumes borrow their names from the official component parts of an appellate brief. Both Statement of the Case and Argument are more technical than Statement of Facts because the former refers to specific laws and the latter to previous legal cases as precedents for the arguments being advanced. In each volume, every chapter is simply numbered in the contents list, e.g. ‘No. 1: Statement of Facts’, ‘No. 2: Statement of Facts’, and so on. Furthermore, the cases are not in the same order in each volume, neither is it necessarily easy to match them up. For instance, the case I focus upon in this chapter, ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’, initially looks as though it might relate to three or even four of the chapters in Argument, but the court documents reveal that only one is actually an argument made in that case.10 This anonymising and disordering mean the reader has to play detective to link a case across the three books. Statement of Facts is the first and longest book of Tragodía. In an actual appellate brief, the statement of the case comes before the statement of facts, which is then followed by the arguments.11 However, Place has chosen to present the most narratively compelling of the appeals documents first. In its 9

10

11

V. Place, Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts (Los Angeles: Blanc Press, 2010); V. Place, Tragodía 2: Statement of the Case (Los Angeles, Blanc Press, 2011); V. Place, Tragodía 3: Argument (Los Angeles: Blanc Press, 2011). References to these texts appear in parentheses in the body of the chapter. For clarity, they are respectively abbreviated as SoF, SoC, and A. People v. Brandon (2006), p. i. It is argument 1: ‘Appellant’s convictions on those counts involving Mamie D. Must be Reversed as the Witness’s Facial Covering During Trial Violated Appellant’s Sixth Amendment Right to Confrontation and to a Fair Trial’. This is reproduced in Argument, with the witness’s name changed to Rikki E (p. 143). Sample appellate briefs for the Appellate Court in California can be found online. The California Courts: The Judicial Branch of California website provides my favourite, which uses the fairy tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears to illustrate the formal structure of appeals documents. The statement of the case comes first, then the statement of appealability, then the statement of facts, followed by the arguments. Available at: www.courts.ca.gov.

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structural organisation, therefore, Tragodía immediately diverges from its legal counterparts or ‘pre-texts’.12 A statement of facts summarises the prosecution’s case, with evidence given by victims and witnesses, including the police or experts; provides a brief account of any technical evidence, such as DNA findings; summarises the defence case; and sometimes includes a rebuttal of the defence. The cases Place includes frequently involve multiple occasions of abuse, often against minors of both sexes or women whose options are limited by their socio-economic circumstances or social vulnerability: the rape victims include runaways, sex workers, drug addicts, disabled children, and those in poverty or already in abusive environments or relationships. Statement of Facts is, in the words of one reviewer, a ‘truly difficult’ book to read.13 The supposedly neutral and descriptive language makes the violence and abuse within it stark. This writing contains no metaphors or abstractions: it aims to appear factual. There is, however, the appearance of cause and effect because the summaries are plot-based, in the sense that Peter Brooks describes in Reading for the Plot: a statement of facts provides an ‘explanatory narrative’ of how the crimes were committed and against who, thus fulfilling Brooks’s definition that ‘the end writes the beginning and shapes the middle.’14 Yet what the statement does not seek to uncover is why these crimes were committed since it is not necessarily important to the law to explain why the law was broken. Given the traditional link narrative has to sense-making and causality, the cases in Statement of Facts invite speculation as to the reasons for the extreme behaviours they chronicle, while simultaneously demonstrating the redundancy of these reasons to the legal proceedings or, at least, demonstrating that reasons for crimes are a matter of dispute: what the prosecution may paint as a motivation, the defence may depict as dissembling. The overall title of Place’s project, Tragodía, has obvious epic allusions as well as nodding in the direction of Dante’s Divina Commedia through its name, its similar use of the three-volume structure, and the splitting of each volume into thirty-three sections, just as Dante splits each part of his Commedia into thirty-three cantos.15 If the progression from volume one to three in Place’s project lacks the redemptive trajectory of Dante’s journey, 12

13 14 15

More is said about Place as a conceptual poet in what follows, but it is worth noting that the conceptualists use the term ‘pre-text’ to refer to the original source material which they re-present as literature. See V. Place and R. Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualism (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), p. 13. S. Zultanski, ‘Short Statement in Five Parts on Statement of Facts’, Jacket2 (16 October 2012). P. Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design, Intention & Narrative (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 22. I am not the first to note the allusion to Dante. See D. Kaufmann, ‘Bullshit and Interest: Casing Vanessa Place’, Postmodern Culture 24:2 (January 2014), n.p. Place has discussed Dante’s influence:

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Statement of Facts is, like the Inferno, hellish in the sexual offences it details. Tragodía is the same word in both Italian and Spanish, and thus also makes sense as an allusion to the many identifiably Hispanic names in the cases.16 As other critics have noted, the work’s closest literary precursor in terms of methodological approach is Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust (1975), composed from testimonies drawn from the court transcripts of the Eichmann and Nuremberg trials.17 Place’s court documents are drawn from her work life and were published, after some initial difficulty, with Blanc Press, a small avant-garde outfit dedicated to producing ‘innovative art and literature’.18 All the documents examined in Tragodía are in theory already in the public domain and are, the book jacket declares, ‘matters of public record, i.e., could be found or read by anyone, as are the transcripts of the trials themselves’, a claim that critics have repeated.19 However, these records are in fact not easily accessible for members of the public since the archives require either a case number or an identifying name to retrieve the files. No case numbers are given in Tragodía and Place changed names and direct identifiers, ‘eliminating only specific witness/victim information as necessary to protect those people’s identities’.20 Furthermore, the documents for the case I am focusing upon are now held in deep storage, probably because of the time that has elapsed since the trials, and have to be retrieved by a legal company which charges for the service. Thus, finding the original legal documents Place wrote to cross-check against Tragodía is actually very difficult.21

16 17

18 19

20 21

V. Place, ‘“Nothing That’s Quite Your Own”: Vanessa Place Interviewed’, interviewed by E. Hardy (August 2011). Available at: intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com. Names have been changed from their originals, but it is not clear whether ethnicities have. There are a substantial number of Hispanic names. This is mentioned by M. Horn, Postmodern Plagiarisms: Cultural Agenda and Aesthetic Strategies of Appropriation in US-American Literature (1970–2010) (Berlin and Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2015), pp. 215–16; A. Moschovakis, ‘Poetics of Guilt’, American Book Reviews 22:4 (May/ June 2011), pp. 9–10, at p. 10; H. Aji, ‘Un(decidable), Un(creative), Un(precedented), Un(readable), Un(nerving): Christian Bök, Craig Dworkin, Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place’, Études anglaises 65:2 (2012), pp. 162–80, at p. 178. This is how Blanc Press described itself on its website, 31 August 2017 (www.insertblancpress.net /pages/about-insert-blanc). Place, Statement of Facts, dust jacket, inside fly leaf. For critics echoing this, see K. Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 101; G. Colby, ‘Engaged Disengagement: Reframing as Feminist Critique in Vanessa Place’s Tragodía’, Textual Practice 31:4 (2017), pp. 1–17, at p. 3; Horn, Postmodern Plagiarisms, p. 201. Horn claims that the documents for the cases are available in the LA Law Library or through PACER (Public Access to Electronic Court Documents). Neither holds the case material – either the original trial or the appeal – for ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’. Place, Statement of Facts, dust jacket, inside fly leaf. They are initially held by the Appellate Court. The LA Law Library informed me that the Appellate Court has the right to destroy records so it is not always possible to retrieve case files. My thanks to Austin Stoub, the reference librarian at the LA Law Library, for his help.

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I was able to identify the appellant in ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’ online, mainly through serendipity, and was therefore able to order the legal appeals files.22 It is thus possible to confirm that Place does indeed reproduce in Statement of Fact the writing she submitted to the court in this case, with only names changed. Material from the case appears too as one of the entries in Argument (pp. 143–51), and as one of the entries in Statement of the Case (pp. 67–8). Additionally, the files include a response to the appeal, which also contains a statement of facts, and so provide an alternative prose account of the events Place has summarised. A comparison between the respondent’s brief and Place’s rendering of the same incidents in her appeals brief reveals the extent to which her writing is poetically crafted for affective impact. A further text important to this chapter is Place’s book The Guilt Project, an unacknowledged companion piece to Tragodía, published in the same year as Statement of Facts and detailing the objections she has to the original court decisions for certain cases she has worked on, and the changes to the law she would like to see.23 I am particularly interested in how The Guilt Project documents Place’s feminism in relation to sex workers and how it discusses a case which is remarkably similar to, if not the same as, ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’. In The Guilt Project Place describes her clients as ‘very bad men’ (TGP, p. 1) who have ‘done actual evil’ (TGP, p. 10). Some of them she classes as ‘more or less monsters’ (TGP, p. 78); all of them, she points out, are legally guilty, being currently incarcerated after conviction (TGP, p. 9). ‘You might hate my clients’, she comments at the start of The Guilt Project, ‘and you might be right’ (TGP, p. 10). If Place’s job defending these men – and it is mainly men who commit the crimes in Statement of Facts – is audacious, publishing the documentation of their violent and extreme acts as poetry is more audacious still. Tragodía is an ethically troubling project and this chapter takes the measure of its dangerous audacity in relation to feminism and perceptions of victimhood. Place is known in the literary world as a conceptual poet. This genre of poetry, as practised by Place, Kenneth Goldsmith, and others, appropriates text from one source and republishes it as poetry, as Place did by tweeting Gone with the Wind and in creating Tragodía. Notable examples – and far less controversial – are Goldsmith’s replications of radio weather reports in 22

23

I initially found some materials from the case on the FindLaw.com website, a legal information service platform. P. J. Turner, ‘People v. Brandon’, FindLaw.com. This gave a case file number and enabled me to identify the appellant as Marlon Brandon. Unacknowledged insofar as neither text mentions the other, even though The Guilt Project provides considerable context for the cases in Tragodía and makes important reference to them.

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his book The Weather (2005), and Day (2003), his rewriting of one full edition of The New York Times. Conceptual poetry has been proudly called ‘uncreative writing’ by its proponents, who believe it critiques the tenacious Romantic trust many still have in lyric sensibility, literary originality, and the mastery of authorship.24 Much of what is valued about poetry is challenged by conceptual practices, which is why Penelope Galey-Sacks characterises work in this mode as ‘poetic audacity’.25 Yet Statement of Facts differs from the majority of conceptual poetry projects in being originally written, even if for a different context, by the person who then appropriates it: the author, unconventionally, remains the same.26 While Place’s reputation as a conceptual poet has been marked by controversy, her projects have repeatedly engaged with questions of gender and her co-directorship of publisher Les Figues Press has supported numerous women writers to disseminate their experimental work. A recent Place publication, Boycott (2013), reproduces samples of classic feminist texts by writers like Luce Irigaray, Valarie Solanas, Shulamith Firestone and others, with the references to women expunged and replaced by ‘man’ or ‘men’. The result is more complex than might initially be assumed. For instance, an Audre Lorde quotation about women is rendered, ‘As men, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change,’ a statement that this transformation shows applies to both genders.27 The project also underlines the difficulty that binary thinking can trap feminism within, and has been hailed by one reviewer as a ‘revolutionary feminist poetics of iteration’.28 While Place is clearly interested in gendered behaviour, she also has the audacity to question the feminist canon. Tragodía is a conceptual project, but it is also more than that. Place’s disguising of the identities of those within its pages testifies to the material effects upon people’s lives and privacy that could result from using their real names. In other words, Tragodía is a special kind of testimonial 24

25 26 27

28

C. Dworkin, ‘The Fate of Echo’, in C. Dworkin and K. Goldsmith (eds.), Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), pp. xxiii–liv, at p. xliii. P. Galey-Sacks, ‘Introduction: A Field of New Voicings’, Études anglaises 65:2 (2012), pp. 131–4, at p. 134. Moschovakis, ‘Poetics of Guilt’, p. 10. V. Place, Boycott, Ontic volume (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), p. 4. The original essay is in A. Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), pp. 110–13, and was published in 1983. J. Edmond, ‘Emancipation via Elimination: Vanessa Place’s “Boycott Project”’, Jacket2 (29 November 2012).

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life-writing, bearing witness to Place’s working life and legal skills, the lives of her clients and their victims, and the working of the courts. Part of Place’s job is reconstructing narratives of people’s lives as told in trial documents in such a way that they make a coherent case for the appeal to which she has been appointed: she writes the biographies of people’s traumas as recounted in court in the required condensed legalese, though the jacket leaf of Statement of Facts warns that ‘many lawyers may make implicit arguments in statement of facts, using a variety of tricks to sway the reader to one point of view or another’ and ‘to paint someone in a favourable light, or to dismiss the reliability of someone else’.29 This observation is important to the close readings that follow. As we see later in this chapter, the book’s reception demonstrates that the ethical questions about truth, accuracy, and bias raised by, first, the summarising of trial testimonies that occurs in the composition of an appellate brief and, second, the publication of these for a literary audience remain whether Statement of Facts is classified as conceptual poetry, life-writing, or both. The US reception of the text was predictably stormy. One reviewer, writing in the wake of an endorsement by poetry critic Marjorie Perloff, a series of post-endorsement denouncements, a post-denouncement defence by Perloff, and several intensely debated social media threads, described the resulting fray – with unfortunate ineptitude, given the subject matter of Statement of Facts – as a ‘cluster fuck’.30 Despite such apparent interest and ire, however, much of the debate chiefly revolved less around Place’s book, which had yet to be read in full or even partially, in some cases, by many of those involved in the discussions. Instead, the focus was upon how Perloff had claimed, at the Rethinking Poetics conference at Columbia University in 2010, that ‘the rape victims in the book are “at least as bad as or worse than the rapists”’.31 In defence of her endorsement, Perloff, who also contributed a blurb for the book’s jacket, stoked the fires further: ‘What Vanessa’s book shows, by the sheer evidence of the police reports and court documents[,] is that the culture of rape is largely a socioeconomic problem. Cases that come before the court occur primarily within certain interfamilial situations involving poor people – in LA mostly among Latinos – in “families” that live in terribly cramped conditions.’32 29 30 31 32

Place, Statement of Facts, dust jacket, inside fly leaf. S. Fama, ‘Poetry from the Law, Part 5’ on his blog The Glade of Theoric Ornithic Hermetica (15 August 2010). Available at: stevenfama.blogspot.co.uk. Recounted in S. Young, Ursula or University (San Francisco: Krupskaya, 2013), p. 43. This comes from a link posted on 17 June 2010 at the request of Perloff on Stephanie Young’s blog, Too Much Work and Still to Be Poets, where Young had first posted a report of the conference and

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She goes on to repeat that it’s a ‘horrible’, even a ‘horrific socio-economic situation’, and then provides several invented examples of how these poor racial minorities get drunk and rape their cousin’s daughter or refuse to testify on behalf of their raped daughter for fear of deportation, concluding by reiterating, if somewhat shifting the ground of, her earlier remark: ‘[the rapists] are not always “worse” people than those in the larger network involved’.33 Perloff ’s claims clearly fall into victim-blaming. Her suggestion that ‘the culture of rape is largely a socio-economic problem’ and her treatment of Statement of Facts as though it is representative of all those who rape and are raped are obviously inaccurate. In Chapter 1, we saw Jana Leo in Rape New York explore the links between rape and poverty, but, as she also insists, rape is not confined to the poor, and Leo’s book is a good example of how to discuss poverty and rape without conflating them or assuming they are causal, as Perloff does. The ‘rape culture’ prevalent in the privileged spaces of US university campuses that has been brought to public notice by documentaries like The Hunting Ground (2015) clearly demonstrates that Perloff is harbouring classist and, indeed, racist misapprehensions. What is notable for my argument about the debate her comments sparked is not so much the valid refutations of her position as the grounds upon which those refutations build their case. Perloff and those objecting to her are, perhaps unconsciously, responding to Statement of Facts primarily as life-writing. The concerns about representation and reality that the book has raised are because it is people’s real lives that are involved. This is what prompted Juliana Spahr to ask whether Place’s text ‘intentionally, or even unintentionally, tells a story that might lead readers to conclude that rape is largely something poor people, mainly Latinos, do? . . . does she, by presenting only certain legal cases, such as the ones she has been involved with, lead us to think she is saying something larger about rape? Is there a representational question?’34 The ‘representational question’ is one that Place, as a lawyer, and everyone whose stories are retold in Statement of Facts, from the police to the expert witnesses, victims, and criminals, are acutely conscious of in court because it matters to their lives, their livelihoods, and their futures. The question Spahr raises is one of framing beyond the ‘reframing’ that conceptualism performs upon its source material. She asks how the text,

33 34

criticised Perloff’s original endorsement. There is also a discussion thread about this debate on the page. All available at: could-be-otherwise.blogspot.com. Ibid. Ibid. This is the first comment on Young’s blog page where Perloff’s document, quoted earlier, is linked. Spahr’s response was posted 18 June 2010.

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through a lack of contextual explanation, might be misconstrued in the very way Perloff demonstrates, and what responsibility Place has for the text’s reception. Statement of Facts shows us monstrous men and their monstrous acts. In that respect, it is sensational: it shocks and shivers its readers’ sensibilities, often openly at Place’s public readings.35 As Eileen Myles has pointed out, at the narrative heart of Statement of Facts is the sensational use of the naked female body (also, we could add, the child’s body) and ‘the underclass violated body’.36 Of Perloff’s characterisation of Statement of Facts as a ‘limit-case’ for conceptualism, Spahr bluntly asks, ‘Is it OK to use the stories of poor people to make a point about genre?’37 For Spahr, clearly, to champion the text as an intervention that explores the formal boundaries of conceptual practice is to unethically ignore that real people, real and poor people’s lives, are the vehicles for Place’s literary endeavour. It can thus be argued that the text panders to an unpalatable class-inflected prurience by instrumentalising the victims of horrific crimes and turning them and their lives into an aesthetic object, poetry, for the contemplation, the discussion, the frisson of disgust – or titillation – of those who, in all likelihood, enjoy very much more secure economic circumstances, a higher class status, and better prospects than the predominantly poor, black, and Latino victims of Place’s clients.38 Statement of Facts, considered singly, outside of the Tragodía and the context provided by The Guilt Project, sails dangerously close to being just this type of aesthetic object. However, the route I take in this chapter, a comparative reading of ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’ as part of the Tragodía and in dialogue with The Guilt Project, allows for an alternative exploration centred around the embodiment of and resistance to discourses of victimhood that these different texts provide in relation to sex work. Tragodía is clearly an audacious project, and the controversy that has swirled around its reception demonstrates that it treads on dangerous ground. Like other books discussed in this study, it exists at the limits of 35

36 37 38

I heard Place read from Statement of Facts at the Cross-Genre Poetry Festival, University of Greenwich, London, July 2010. At least one person walked out, in tears, extremely upset by the material. Place refers to this in V. Place, ‘Interview: Vanessa Place, Lawyer and Performing Poet’, The Scotsman (8 November 2010). Place’s reading style for this material is lilting, fast, emotionless. She has a melodic voice and often dresses in a formal black suit. Some readings can be viewed on YouTube.com, including one entitled ‘Vanessa Place Reads from Statement of Facts at KWH’, recorded at Kelly Writers House (24 March 2011), where she reads from Joncey’s testimony, which I discuss shortly. E. Myles, ‘Painted Clear, Painted Black’, Evening Will Come: A Monthly Journal of Poetics 29 (May 2013). Available at: thevolta.org. Perloff’s statement, posted at her request on Young’s blog at: could-be-otherwise.blogspot.com. Horn, Postmodern Plagiarisms, pp. 203–4. Spahr is obviously asking this question, as is Myles.

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a genre and is an experiment with form. It is a window onto the nature of Place’s work, its complex politics, and how important language is to shaping perceptions and judgements. It also testifies to the difficulty of the material Place deals with in her everyday life as an attorney, where she confronts the horrific side of human behaviour more often than most. Like other writers discussed in Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing, Place engages directly with feminist positions in this project, especially in the case I discuss here, where one of her appeals arguments resists the narrative that sex workers are perforce passive victims. In an interview with the poet Amy King, Place suggests that Statement of Facts ‘could be a critique of a certain kind of canonical feminism’, a claim I test.39 In the close and comparative readings that follow, I focus on how the sex workers are represented differently in different discussions and representations of the case across the legal documents, in the texts of the Tragodía, and in The Guilt Project.40 I am particularly concerned to test Statement of Facts against Place’s description of her own feminist stance, which is not dissimilar from that of other new audacity writers like Despentes in desiring radical political and social change. In The Guilt Project she writes: I consider myself a feminist of the street variety: I’m not very interested in furthering legal or social structures that protect women by way of bubble and shrink wrap. Or those that preserve the status quo by merely visually expanding the pool of who gets to become a corporate attorney, or run a corporation. What I want is not reform but real change. The goal should not be how can we pass more laws to shelter more women or treat more women like most men, but how can the law work to create the freedom and support for everyone to contribute freely to the social whole of work and family. (TGP, p. 183)

The Guilt Project is uncharacteristically straightforward, even straighttalking, in comparison with Place’s many interviews about her conceptual projects, where she has a tendency to discuss conceptualism in abstract and theoretical terms.41 What this chapter seeks to trace is the tension between the politics of Tragodía and the feminist positions expressed in The Guilt Project and presented in Argument to understand the nature of Place’s audacity in these volumes and to be able to illuminate how they compare to new audacity writers from Chapter 1, particularly Leo and Despentes, who 39 40 41

V. Place, ‘Interview with Vanessa Place’, interviewed by A. King, Denver Quarterly 48:3 (2014), pp. 74–87, at p. 79. SoF, pp. 23–46; A, pp. 127–35, 143–51, 181–92; TGP, pp. 147–71; People v. Brandon (2006). For example, see Toth and Place, After Vanessa Place.

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used their writing about their rapes to make directly political feminist arguments.

Statement of Facts: Structure, Style, Affect Mac is a Los Angeles pimp.42 The prosecution evidence in ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’ comes from five of his sex workers. The charges against Mac are extensive: pandering, pimping, rape, forced oral copulation, sexual assault of a child, procuring a child to engage in a lewd act, false imprisonment, and even kidnapping. He is found guilty on nineteen charges. According to the court documents and their counterpart in Statement of the Case, he is given a sentence of fifty-four years to life (SoC, p. 67).43 As the vehicle through which one generates what she calls a truth effect, language is important to Place and to how the legal documents she writes are composed, despite and perhaps even in tandem with the constraints imposed by their conventions. As she discusses in an interview: When I write violence in the law, when I do it in my briefs, there’s a way in which because of the form, it favors the simple declarative sentence. The law likes the simple declarative sentence. Americans like the simple declarative sentence. I’m not a particular fan of the simple declarative sentence, but for anybody who’s experienced violence, or the Real in a genuine way, there’s a certain way in which it feels inevitable as it’s happening, and also inescapable. And the long sentence, the sentence that has some sort of subordinate, whether subordinate clauses or dependent clauses, is causal. And when you are in these extreme situations, they feel causal even when they’re not.44 (My emphasis.)

Place strains to make writing convey feeling, a commitment to verisimilitude alien to work produced by her fellow conceptualists: surprisingly perhaps, in legal writing the lyrical Place appears. Even her expression in this interview is performative: when discussing simple declarative sentences she employs one, and similarly for longer sentences with clauses. As we see in what follows, this is evident across Statement of Facts so that even factual statements of violence and pain maximise their affective potential. She has said of those who encounter her work, ‘I want audiences/readers to feel themselves corporally, as well as sentimentally or intellectually.’45 42 43 44 45

He is also known as MacD, Mac-Bone, and MacDaddy by different sex workers and police officers across ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’ and The Guilt Project. I refer to him as Mac for simplicity. People v. Brandon, Cal. App. 2nd (2006), p. 2. V. Place, ‘Vanessa Place: An Interview in Paris’, interviewed by M. Charret-Del Bove and F. Palleau-Papin, Transatlantica 1 (2012), pp. 1–16, at p. 8. Toth and Place, After Vanessa Place, p. 30.

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A statement of facts tells us very little, if anything, about the character and personality of the people involved, apart from the initial identification of their ages and the relationships between them. However, character insights are provided through direct and reported speech, which break through, usually with brutality or pathos, what otherwise appears to be descriptive neutrality, such as in the following account of Nikki’s first experience of sex work from ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’: Appellant dropped her off, saying to call after she turned the trick, she did, he had her meet him and give him the money, started to leave, he asked her where she was going, she said home, he said ‘this ain’t no money,’ and asked her to go back out, she said she was scared, he said to do just one more, she did, and continued working for appellant. (SoF, p. 31)

If the final clause emphasises Nikki’s choice, the rest of the sentence makes it feel like no choice at all. Trapping her in this long sentence where one action leads quickly into another, Place conveys the impression that Nikki too feels trapped. The multiple clauses underline the inevitability of Mac’s dominance and his ability to bend Nikki to his will and financial gain by enclosing her completely in the sentence’s eventful as well as its grammatical trajectory. His brusque repudiation of her labour jars; her fear is poignant. The short, twice-used clause ‘she did’ has a simple, swift blandness, deliberately understating by marking as barely notable a seventeenyear-old’s first two experiences of sex work, the moment when she becomes a street prostitute with all the negative sociocultural resonances that will then entail. There is pathos in the brevity of such a subclause. ‘She did’ also illustrates Nikki’s rapid acquiescence to Mac’s demands. According to Place, ‘at some point in their careers, 48 to 59 percent [of sex workers] are raped by a client, 29 to 50 percent raped by a pimp, and 27 percent raped by a police officer’.46 Nikki testifies to Mac’s rape of her. This incident is characterised by the same harsh language, the same vulnerability, and the same linguistic condensation of a sex act that we saw in her first experience prostituting for Mac, but is more brutal by far. Nikki has been forced to orally copulate Mac at knifepoint, and then he: said he wanted to have sex with her ‘in her behind.’ Nikki said no, please, she’d never done that before. Appellant said he wasn’t going to hear that, to get off the floor on her knees and take off her pants, she said please, please, still holding the knife, appellant said he wasn’t going to hear that shit, she said please, please; he said what did you think, did you think I was only 46

Place, TGP, p. 292, fn. 1.

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playing with it, and started swinging the knife, saying, what you going to do. Nikki begged, appellant asked her if she wanted him to cut her, she said no, he said he wasn’t going to ask her anymore, so she bent over for him and he put his penis in her anus. It hurt. (SoF, p. 32)

This account is affectively constructed, despite its facticity. Desire is stated, consent is refused. The euphemistic phrase used for anal sex, ‘in her behind’, makes Nikki appear childlike and naïve, cleaning up Mac’s language for the courtroom, since there is nothing in the other examples of his direct or reported speech to suggest this may be his linguistic delicacy. The long middle sentence swings, like the knife it contains, between his threats and commands and her repetitive entreaties which, even while we know they are begs for clemency, highlight the contradictory potential of the little word ‘please’. This lengthy sentence ends flatly, without the appropriate punctuation mark; there is no need to pretend this is a question: it is a threat and an assertion. The next question is also rhetorical in that the answer is as inevitable as Nikki’s eventual capitulation to her forced sodomisation. The flat brevity and inevitable pathos of the tiny sentence ‘It hurt,’ which finishes this paragraph, underlines as it understates the brutality of what has just happened to her.47 It is similar to, if more conclusive than, Place’s deployment of ‘she did’ earlier in Nikki’s summary. Yet again, the sex act itself, compared to the fraught exchange which leads up to the rape, takes very few words to describe, enacting the curious inversion whereby the description of violence is far briefer than the description of what anticipates it. Place once again writes how it feels and consequently the reader’s sympathy for Nikki is secured. Given that Place is trying to win an appeal for her client, it is strange, here, that her writing emphasises his brutality and Nikki’s evident pain and distress. Place is, of course, not the first to write violence in a stark manner. In discussing the ‘blank, coarse and extreme’ sexual violence in the writing of Kathy Acker, Sharon Stockton describes Acker’s ‘blank narrative style’ as characterised by ‘flat affect’.48 Place’s appellate briefs have stylistic similarities to Stockton’s characterisation of Acker’s writing. Flat affect is not simply an attribute of prose, however, but one of the psychological responses to trauma. In a metatextual twist, flat affect is described in Statement of Facts by an expert psychologist, Dr Nancy Kaser-Boyd, who 47 48

I discuss the impact of the phrase ‘It hurt,’ as used in Jana Leo’s account of her rape, in Chapter 1. S. Stockton, The Economics of Fantasy: Rape in Twentieth-Century Literature (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), pp. 189 and 190, respectively.

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is called in for her opinion on a diagnosis of battered women’s syndrome in a different case to Mac’s: ‘“Flat affect” is the description of one’s trauma without emotion; flat affect itself is a clinical symptom of trauma disorder, though there will be points at which the affect is broken through and the defense [mechanism] cannot contain the sadness/fear: this breakdown is further sign of trauma’ (SoF, p. 69). While this provides an expert opinion on why a woman did not leave her husband even though he was raping and torturing both her and her daughter, it also, rather uncannily, describes how the legalised accounts of trauma in Statement of Facts create their textual effects, especially in relation to how direct speech forces through the apparent facticity of the rest of the writing. We see this playing out in Place’s prose and how it further aids the picture of Nikki and the other sex workers as traumatised, abused, and broken. A comparison with the respondent’s statement of facts from the appeals documents, written by the team defending the original trial sentence and in which Nikki’s anal rape is described, makes stark what Place’s writing achieves. Nikki’s real name is Mamie: Appellant demanded anal intercourse. Mamie D. pleaded with appellant not to do so, explaining that she had never had anal intercourse and it would hurt. Appellant, who still held the knife, said, ‘I ain’t trying to hear that shit.’ Appellant swung the knife in his hand and said, ‘what you going to do?’ Mamie D. begged, but appellant threatened to cut her. Mamie D. bent over for appellant, who penetrated her anus with his penis. (4RT 793–8).49

The events are the same but the writing is not, which makes the events feel, to use Place’s term, different. Her version is more poetic by far. By contrast, in the respondent’s version Mac is given direct speech while Mamie/Nikki is not. Mac is rude, threatening, and domineering. Place has left out his actual words, thus painting her client in a better light. The sentences in the respondent’s version are shorter and choppier than Place’s, switching between Mac’s desire and threats and Mamie’s attempts to refuse and reason with him, and thereby playing out as a power struggle that Mac wins through the threat of violence. In Place’s longer and more detailed version, Nikki begs for clemency earlier, repeatedly, and for longer. Notably, the respondent’s version lacks the powerful punchline of Place’s terminal ‘It hurt’ at the end of the paragraph. Place’s version thus exhibits a strange tension in light of her role as Mac’s attorney: while her elisions tend to soften the dramatic brutality of Mac’s actual speech by reporting it, her 49

People v. Brandon, Cal. App. 2nd Respondent statement of facts (2006), p. 10.

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style highlights the brutal inevitability of his actions and Nikki’s powerlessness. This works at least partially against her client’s interests by supporting the thesis of the expert Lois Lee, whose testimony that sex workers are in thrall to their pimp through fear helped to put Mac behind bars. Both professionally and politically, then, this is a puzzling piece of writing from Place.

Statement of Facts: Sex Workers Are Powerless Victims As all the statement of facts do, ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’ starts with a summary of evidence from witnesses, in this case organised by the name of the sex worker to which the charges pertain: Tabethna, Joncey, Nikki, Rochelle, and Unity worked for Mac – some while underage. Structure matters to the affective impact of a text and this is especially the case with the trial summaries in Statement of Facts. All the statements follow the order of the courts, where the prosecution presents its case first. Although this ordering is legible to those familiar with court proceedings or who have read enough of Statement of Facts to identify its pattern, new readers – this is only statement ‘No. 3’ – are inevitably going to be affected by encountering the evidence of the prosecution first, and given that these are all cases that resulted in convictions, the evidence against the accused is frequently substantial, detailed, and damning.50 In ‘No. 3’, the summaries of the women and girls are followed by a swift account of ‘The Investigation’ given by Detective Haight from the Los Angeles vice squad, who explains where and how he interviewed some of the women and testifies to the conventions of street prostitution in Los Angeles. Then there is a summary of the ‘Expert Testimony’ of Dr Lois Lee, who runs a shelter for child prostitutes and believes that the nature of prostitution makes consent meaningless since sex workers are exploited and manipulated by their pimps. Eventually, there is a summary of the ‘Defence Case’, which pertains to Mac’s whereabouts on various dates, and seeks to discredit the evidence of Nikki in particular by demonstrating her unreliability with facts. By this point, however, readers are undoubtedly convinced that Mac is indeed a monster who has manipulated the women who worked for him and used violence and threats against them to such an extent that they were scared to leave. In ‘Statement No. 3’, there is one testimony which confirms in a most curious but instructive manner this picture of Mac’s sex workers as 50

The effect of order upon reading is also noted by Horn, Postmodern Plagiarisms, pp. 209–10.

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powerless victims, even while the sex worker in question claims she is autonomous. Joncey’s evidence is remarkable for being given almost entirely in the negative, and consequentially for how its context – as legal document or poetry – radically alters its impact. It begins: Joncey was seventeen years old at the time of the trial; for the past six years, she’s told police she was five years older because she is a prostitute, and didn’t want them to know she was a minor. At trial, Joncey testified she did not remember or did not want to answer, a number of questions. Joncey did testify that she told Detective Haight that in November 1998, when Joncey was eleven, she met appellant at a Greyhound bus station in San Bernardino, and he took her to Los Angeles. (SoF, p. 26)

Joncey is not the only young girl Mac finds at a bus station and initiates into sex work. Rochelle was also approached in this way, but Joncey is the only one who appeared at the trial but consistently refused to cooperate:51 Joncey testified that she did not remember telling the detective appellant then took her shopping for new clothes and had her hair and nails done, or that later, two black men arrived, appellant told Joncey to just do what they say, and one of the men took out his penis and said, ‘Just do it, suck my dick.’ She did not recall saying that she left that night to try and get away, but appellant found her and brought her back to the motel, where she and appellant took showers and appellant asked if Joncey’d ever had sex and she said no, she didn’t know anything about sex. (SoF, p. 27)

Every paragraph which relates to Joncey’s testimony at the original trial is structured by these repetitions of ‘Joncey did not remember.’ One paragraph begins ‘She did not recall telling the detective that a few days later appellant drove her to Figueroa to start street-walking,’ with the further four sentences employing anaphora by beginning ‘Or’, making her lack of memory, compared with the detail of what she had previously attested to, seem improbable and strategic (SoF, p. 28). As Anna Moschovakis notes, Place’s writing shows evidence of the rhetorical tools of a poet at work.52 Joncey’s story is told first through these denials and then a second time by Detective Haight in ‘The Investigation’, who recounts what ‘Joncey told him’ before the trial (SoF, pp. 28–9). Thus multiple frames are at work, all of them a further remove, both in temporal and in testimony terms, from the unstable ground of what might have happened: Joncey tells Haight 51 52

Detective Haight testified that ‘[n]one of the witnesses were completely cooperative’ (SoF, p. 39). Moschovakis, ‘Poetic Guilt’, p. 10. Toth states that legal texts have ‘poetic qualities’ and notes the example of Joncey’s recantations, although she stresses less than Moschovakis the role Place has in crafting these sentences: Toth and Place, After Vanessa Place, p. 9.

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what the appellant told her and did to her; the detective brings charges – which include an account of what happened – against Mac, resulting in a trial; at the trial, questions about what she told Haight are denied by Joncey; the appeals lawyer Place summarises her denials and Haight’s attestation for the appeal case; these are summarised again by the respondent; Place publishes her summaries as literature. Joncey’s narrative has been told, appropriated, and retold multiple times. This distance is informative and performative: Joncey is represented by the law, her words summarised by Haight, by Place, and by the respondent, and, as such, she cannot and, indeed, in the court did not, speak directly of her experience (she denies it). Her voice is mostly not heard in court recounting these events, or directly in Statement of Facts. What she does affirm in court – the fact that she is happy being a sex worker – is overwhelmed by the weight of what she is supposed to have told Haight and then denied at trial. Yet at the same time this is what happens in a court of law: representation and representation. The legal process is not neutral. This is the point made in Georgina Colby’s essay on Statement of Facts, which she views as a form of ‘contemporary feminist cultural critique’.53 For Colby, Place reveals ‘the oppression of the victim’s discourse’ that occurs within these legal documents, and the poet’s conceptual reframing ‘becomes an ethical gesture, a paratextual pathway to metamorphosis, positioned against the linguistic deformation that takes place in the legal narratives’ (p. 15). My reading is considerably more sceptical than Colby’s because I think Tragodía a fundamentally more ambivalent and confused project, especially in relation to feminism. Neither does Place share Colby’s implied faith in the purity of a victim’s voice that is then distorted by the law or authorities. In The Guilt Project, she pointedly suggests that the sex workers in Mac’s case are not necessarily victims of the law or even of their pimp: We want to believe victims because they are victims, even though, like the pimp’s prostitute, what they are victims of may not be exclusively the defendant’s fault. There are assumptions about which player has more power in a game that starts on the street and ends in the court, and which may be, in fact, played among equals. (TGP, p. 183)

Colby suggests that Place’s conceptualist use of appropriation, ‘in its refusal to interpret, creates a site of contextual resistance and a new textual field of meaning-making’ (p. 15), yet this strikes a too redemptive note, given that the meaning-making achieved by the literary document 53

Colby, ‘Engaged Disengagement’, p. 1.

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Statement of Facts, especially as manifested in ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’, is counter to both the arguments about women’s autonomy advanced in The Guilt Project and Argument and the role of Place as an appeals attorney employed to win the legal argument for her client. Joncey’s recantations are a good example of what prevents ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’ from being read too easily as restitutive for the sex worker. Her testimony, couched in denials, works to confirm her victimhood. Because of the asymmetrical violence and abuse from the start of her relationship with Mac, because of the very young age at which she began sex work, and the prevalent conception of prostitutes as victims, especially those who have been so since childhood, Joncey’s denials read as though they stem from fear rather than memory loss or deliberate obfuscation and so secure sympathy for her despite her lack of cooperation with the trial. Her negatives, in this sense, are turned into a positive, a reading then supported by the trial’s expert, Lee, who testifies that there are ‘tried and true’ pimping strategies which Mac, like other pimps, uses to attract and keep women and girls ‘in the game’, and these match up with the testimonies of the women in the case: Mac used sex as a punishment and as a reward; he purchased clothes for his prostitutes; he physically punished some of them; he sexually initiated inexperienced girls; he told the girls what he thought they wanted to hear (SoF, p. 41). Lee testifies that prostitutes might ‘recant prior testimony’, as Joncey does, ‘for fear of community disapproval or other criminal penalties’ or ‘for fear of retribution against them and their families’ from the pimp (SoF, p. 43). Yet Lee’s interpretation of sex workers positions them as helpless victims. Firstly, attributing Joncey’s recantation to presumed fear paints her as a victim-prostitute whose will is still dominated by the rapist-pimp and his community instead of reading her refusal to cooperate at the trail as an act, however futile, demonstrating a desire to assert or regain agency. Lee’s cleverly tricksy account makes Joncey a victim whatever she says: either she testifies to the truth of what she had said, a story in which she is an abused and passive teenager, and gains the fatherly protection of the law who will punish her abuser, or she denies the story and so maintains the violent and abusive protection of the pimp, also sometimes called ‘Daddy’, and the community of ‘the game’ in which she has lived since a child (TGP, p. 149). In either confirming or denying these two scenarios, Joncey is required to be the passive female victim. The problem of – and for – Joncey is that it is her victimhood which secures her authenticity and thus her credibility, a problem Frances Ferguson articulates in her essay ‘Rape and the Rise of the Novel’: ‘Were a woman to become powerful, she would lose the

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weakness that is the very strength of her testimony. That is, her very lack of power guarantees her truthfulness; her not counting makes her words count.’54 If we follow Lee’s argument, Joncey is even further embroiled in contradiction than Ferguson’s account suggests, because it is her recantations which, paradoxically, cement her authenticity. As a sex worker, her job renders her even less socially legible than other women and even more exposed to the unpalatable exigencies of patriarchal and misogynistic violence: sex workers count even less, but this does not necessarily ensure their actual words count more, as Joncey discovers when she recants and tries to affirm that she is happy with her life. In addition to making her appear to be thoroughly victimised by Mac and without autonomy, Joncey’s evidence confirms the long-held supposition that when it comes to rape and abuse, ‘women are liars.’55 The problem here is that she is a liar, according to the structure of ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’: she either lied to Detective Haight about Mac or she lied in court about her memory. Either way, she is unreliable, not to be trusted, which helps Place’s appeal. Additionally, we are expertly told by Lee that prostitutes often lie after having told the truth, so Joncey’s denials, however emotionally affective we assume the circumstances are that forced her to recant, feed into a larger myth that women, particularly those who have been abused, particularly those who are working class, are unstable and ‘inherently untrustworthy’.56 In other words, Joncey is in a variety of binds which compel her to be seen as a victim-prostitute and to confirm a set of negative stereotypes about women in the process. Place’s writing thus deliberately emphasises Joncey’s unreliability, confirming her victim status. In the full court documents it is easy to track across from the summary of the trial provided by the statement of facts to the appeals arguments and so perceive how Joncey’s recantations and affirmations might actually aid Place’s arguments that, as we see later in this chapter, sex workers should be treated not as victims but as women who know what their choices are and who have autonomy over their lives. However, in the literary Tragodía, where the documents are split across three books, mixed up in terms of order, and anonymised, Place’s position and politics become fragmented and far more difficult to discern. The overwhelming impression Statement of Facts establishes is that these women and girls are victims as Lee argues they are. This, then, is a feature of Tragodía that is ethically 54 55 56

F. Ferguson, ‘Rape and the Rise of the Novel’, Representations 20 (Autumn 1987), pp. 88–112, at p. 97. J. Bourke, Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present Day (London: Virago, 2007), pp. 28–41. Ibid., p. 41.

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troubling in a manner the ‘pre-text’ legal documents are not. In Tragodía, Place’s argued stance in the original case vis-à-vis sex work and victimhood, repeated in The Guilt Project, is obscured by the very procedure she has used to make the court materials into a conceptual project. The literary version thus gathers a very different affective force to the legal documents it is formed from and the arguments in The Guilt Project. In ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’ there is no criticism of Lee’s testimony; to locate these critiques, one has, as we see in what follows, to read The Guilt Project or comb carefully through Argument until reaching ‘No. 10: Argument’ against Lee. Thus, in Statement of Facts, when Joncey asserts that she ‘pays her own way and likes her life’ and ‘does not want to quit prostituting’ despite police offers to help rehabilitate her (SoF, p. 29), the cumulative locutory power of her denials in court, the fact that prostitution is commonly perceived as a vocational last resort, the prevalent underlying cultural belief in women’s emotionality and passive status in relation to victimhood, and the weight of Lee’s expert opinion which confirms these perceptions determine that she will not be believed. Readers of Statement of Facts have plenty of opportunities to doubt the veracity of Joncey’s word, but the most powerful one set up by the text’s structure and the structure of the volumes of Tragodía confirms Lee’s position rather than Place’s legal and feminist arguments to the contrary made in other texts. This is odd, to say the least.

The Guilt Project and Argument: Sex Workers Are Not Powerless Victims In The Guilt Project is a chapter entitled ‘The Ballard of Mac the Pimp’. Like ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’ it centres upon a Los Angeles pimp called Mac, who is accused of the same crimes as Mac in Statement of Facts and whose case also features the expert testimony of Lee regarding the powerless victimhood of prostitutes. Are these the same cases? When I posed this question to Place, she confirmed that they are, and yet the details in The Guilt Project are curiously and rather bafflingly different to those in Statement of Facts and in the court documents from which it is composed.57 The Guilt Project discusses three sex workers from the trial: 57

In an email dated 17 October 2014 I asked Place whether ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’ refers to the same case as the chapter of The Guilt Project entitled ‘The Ballard of Mac the Pimp’. She confirmed on 19 October 2014 that it is. It is possible that the initial trial had elements that do not pertain to the appeal and so are omitted from the appeals paperwork. Place would have had access to the original trial documents, hence she may be drawing upon material from there in The Guilt Project.

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Dakota and Rickie, who testify against Mac, and Tee, who was called by the defence in the original case to support the position that sex workers have autonomy and can choose to leave a pimp. These are not the same names or the same stories as those told in Statement of Facts or the legal appeals documents. For instance, in the pages of these two sets of texts, there is no mention of a sex worker giving evidence for the defence. Neither do Dakota and Rickie’s experiences quite map onto any of the sex workers in Statement of Facts. There are similarities, for instance, a sex worker who is sodomised and hides money from Mac, but there are also details which are different or missing. The major similarity is, of course, Mac’s name, used in The Guilt Project, in Statement of Facts, and in the legal documents.58 To increase the confusion, three of the entries in Argument have content which could be associated with Mac’s case, but only one is present in the court documents, and that relates to one of the women wearing sunglasses and a headscarf during the trial.59 Like Joncey, this woman, Nikki from ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’, is also not to be trusted, according to Argument.60 In US law, a defendant has the constitutional right to look his accuser in the eye. Objecting that this had not been fulfilled is the basis for one of the appeal’s arguments, which closes by quoting a range of literary, religious, and proverbial sources to establish the importance of the eyes, including Shakespeare’s Sonnet 152, which Place quotes in full, somewhat audaciously for court documents, I imagine (A, p. 150). Place argues that Nikki (Mamie D. in the court documents and Rikki E. in Argument) was an unreliable witness, her account ‘rife with inconsistencies, small and large’ (A, p. 150), even suggesting that neither the jury nor the appellant could tell, because of her face covering, whether she was looking away from the appellant ‘as, sometimes, liars will’ (A, p. 149). Clearly, Place is seeking in Argument to cast Nikki/Mamie D./Rikki E. in a negative light; clearly, she is seeking to discredit her testimony. One of the other entries in 58

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Despite the same name, different sentence lengths are listed. Marlon Brandon, the appellant whose case is recounted in ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’, receives a sentence of ‘54 years to life’ (People v. Brandon, p. 3, and SoC, p. 67). According to The Guilt Project’s introduction, Mac received a sentence of 250 years plus life (TGP, p. 9), yet in that book’s chapter ‘The Ballard of Mac the Pimp’, his sentence is listed as seventy-seven years and eight months, with parole eligibility after sixty-four years (TGP, p. 148). This was Mamie D. She had been threatened before the trial to dissuade her from testifying and was nervous in court. The different names can be mapped onto the same sex worker because Mamie’s version in the court documents is the same as Nikki’s in Statement of Facts, and in the court documents Mamie D. is the subject of one of the arguments against her partially covering her face in court, which is reproduced with the name Rickie E. in Argument (A, pp. 143–51).

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Argument argues against Lee’s expert testimony (‘No. 10: Argument’) and the other argues that the relationship between a pimp and a prostitute is consensual (‘No. 18: Argument’), which is why it might initially be assumed that both relate to ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’. Furthermore, ‘No. 18: Argument’ provides some of the same details as The Guilt Project (A, pp. 181–92). For instance, in ‘No. 18: Argument’, Place quotes ‘Ice’ as testifying that she became a prostitute because ‘instead of working for $8.00 an hour at Starbucks, I could work for $300.00 an hour’ (A, p. 186), a comment that in The Guilt Project is reproduced and attributed to Dakota. The comment does not appear in ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’ or in the legal appeals documents. This might suggest that, contra to Place’s emailed confirmation that The Guilt Project makes reference to the same case as is presented in ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’, these may in fact be different cases, although both included expert evidence from Lee, and in the arguments for both Place objected to Lee’s testimony and claimed that the relationship between prostitute and pimp is consensual.61 If they are the same case and Mac the same man, The Guilt Project draws on initial case trial materials that are absent from the appeals documents and from ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’ in a manner which is confusing, even obfuscatory. Does it really matter if Place has conflated two different cases in The Guilt Project, used material from both in Argument, and reproduced the same name for two different pimps, one in The Guilt Project and the other in ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’? Does it matter if details in The Guilt Project do not match up neatly or convincingly with those in the different components of Tragodía but refer nevertheless to the same case? It would not, if the way in which the sex workers were represented within these documents was consistent, but, as we have seen, Statement of Facts primarily represents them as victims, whereas Argument and The Guilt Project strongly resist this narrative and the politics it implies. The Guilt Project makes specific arguments about how rape trials involving prostitutes accusing pimps of rape and forced sexual acts are unjust on the grounds that the pimp’s sexual access to his sex workers and his ability to demand sex from them whenever he wishes is understood by both sides and consented to at the point the women agree to work for him. Women have the power to choose the pimp they work for and to walk away from 61

In ‘No. 10: Argument’, which objects to Lee’s testimony, Place names ‘Nikki, Ice, and Smith’ as the prostitutes involved (pp. 127–35). ‘No. 18: Argument’ references Nikki, Ice, and Jade Smith and argues that the pimp–prostitute relationship is consensual (pp. 181–92). The Guilt Project, as noted, calls these women Rickie, Dakota, and Tee.

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their pimp: ‘If any pimp beat her’, The Guilt Project informs us, ‘she [Tee] would quit him, either getting another pimp or becoming a “renegade”, pimpless, which she still is. According to Tee, whoring is “by choice, not by force. If I want to leave, I can leave. I don’t have to stay”’ (TGP, p. 159). In ‘No. 10: Argument’ and The Guilt Project Place objects to Lee’s expert testimony as a form of the ‘old’ feminist position that she labels the ‘domination theory’ (TGP, p. 168; A, p. 134). This holds that ‘voluntary sex workers are simply victims of false consciousness, the (unconscious) internalization by the oppressed of the oppressor’s ideology’ (TGP, p. 168). In Argument, she counters Lee’s position: ‘By voluntarily entering into a pimp/prostitute relationship with appellant, a relationship in which all parties understood oral copulation on demand was inherent in that relationship, Nikki [Rickie in The Guilt Project] and Ice [Dakota in The Guilt Project] waived the assumption of the lack of consent now inhering in sex offence prosecutions’ (A, p. 185). She goes further, in fact, asserting in ‘No. 18: Argument’ that ‘Nikki [Rickie], Ice [Dakota], and Smith [Tee] all testified to the rules of the game [prostitution], and all were quite cogent on appellant’s use of affection/force to keep his position, and of their own use of sex/obedience to prove their fealty’ (A, p. 135). The picture of sex workers that emerges from The Guilt Project and Argument is thus very different to that depicted in ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’. Importantly, Place argues, ‘They were adults. They were adults patently capable of extracting themselves from situations they did not want to be in,’ having left other pimps and engaged in various independent acts that demonstrate their autonomy (A, p. 191). This is revealing because in ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’ four out of five of Mac’s sex workers were underage when they first started working for him (Joncey, Rochelle, Nikki, Unity), so ‘No. 18: Argument’ cannot accurately be referring to them, or, if it is, Place is deliberately occluding the fact that, while they may be adults at the time of the trial, they were vulnerable children when Mac first met them and introduced them to street sex work. Place repeats her arguments about sex worker autonomy and free will in The Guilt Project, using much of the same language as that deployed in Argument: Women are adults. We don’t need more professionals to create more ways in which women are absolved in advance or retrospect of the moral and legal effect of their actions. Ho’s can be victims, true. They can also perpetrate. It is too naïve to assume that a prostitute would not use her status as a potential state witness to leverage some advantage for herself, or some revenge against her pimp. (TGP, p. 170)

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As we have already seen, this is of a piece with Place’s argument against Lee’s expert evidence and the ‘domination theory’ of sex workers as brainwashed. It also introduces the idea, not as easily in evidence in Statement of Facts, that the women might have additional reasons for testifying against Mac beyond simply his treatment of them. Place suggests that trials against their pimps are potentially transactional for sex workers. In ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’, Nikki was the most cruelly treated by Mac, subjected, as we have seen, to sodomy at knifepoint, and had wanted to get out of sex work (SoF, p. 33). She had a different job by the time of the trial (SoF, p. 33). Joncey and Rochelle were first interviewed while already incarcerated at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall because the detective testified that prostitutes are ‘more likely to cooperate’ when already under arrest (SoF, p. 38). The Guilt Project recounts that Rickie was given immunity in exchange for her testimony (TGP, p. 153). Place suggests that ‘in the underworld, . . . it may be entirely realistic to accuse someone else of rape to avoid having your own probation violated’ (TGP, p. 183). In The Guilt Project, she does not go so far as to directly accuse the sex workers who testified against Mac of lying, but she certainly suggests they have self-interested motivations for participating in the trial, one of which might be to take the opportunity to shift the narrative of their lives. One of the worst accounts of Mac’s sexual violence recounted in The Guilt Project is against Dakota: first, she was raped and robbed by someone she supposed was a client but was in fact another pimp, then Mac, missing his money, did not believe her story and punched her for every tear she shed. What happens next is not dissimilar to how the Mac of ‘No. 3: Statements of Facts’ treated Nikki: After beating Dakota for half an hour, MacD unbuttoned his pants and told Dakota to serve him. He pulled her face to his crotch and forced her to orally copulate him while telling her she was going to be his slave, to obey him, to be ‘a good white bitch’ and make him lots of money. MacD told Dakota to get on the bed on all fours. Dakota said, ‘No, please don’t, don’t do anything to me.’ When MacD sodomised Dakota, she screamed and jumped; he grabbed her by the hair, pulled her back, and continued raping her for the next three hours until he passed out and the other women returned. Dakota did not try to leave. (TGP, pp. 154–5)

Place’s final sentence here is important to her comment upon this incident that ‘[a]lthough there may be a visceral difference between the contractual bout of oral sex given by a prostitute to her pimp and the hair-pulling sodomy described by Dakota, I’m not sure that difference is recognised in the Game’ (TGP, p. 170). There is deliberate ambiguity in terming this

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a ‘visceral difference’ – for the woman experiencing it? Or for the reader? – but the description of the rape emphasises Place’s point that Dakota chose to stay. This is a classic liberal argument, positioning the individual as responsible for their own choices, even though at other points Place suggests that sex workers are subject to systemic disadvantages that are not of their choosing. Dakota [Ice in Argument] was a college dropout trying to establish her independence from her parents through sex work (TGP, p. 153). She was approached for evidence against Mac when in jail. She described incarceration as ‘the worst thing I’ve gone through in my life’ where ‘I had to stand in line and be on somebody else’s time’ (TGP, p. 157). Her role in The Guilt Project aids Place’s argument that ‘the big winner in MacD’s case was Dakota [Ice]’ because she ‘got to reinvent herself and her story, going from rebel girl sex worker to rejuvenated rape victim’ (TGP, p. 171). Place does not pass judgement upon whether Dakota’s account of her anal rape was true or not. Instead, she introduces information, such as Dakota’s hatred of jail, to suggest her motivations are not only for justice; presents Tee’s evidence that Dakota lies; and suggests a route for understanding Dakota as benefitting from the trial’s depiction of sex workers as brainwashed because it enabled her to rise ‘purified by the ordeal into pure victim’ (p. 180). Place argues that Dakota deliberately reframes her sex work experience: a ‘cold and unenviable business arrangement’ gets ‘revised into the story of a brainwashing, a softer, stickier saga of male dominance and female passivity’ in a manner the court will understand as a form of victimisation, one that fits with Lee’s evidence and that will aid Dakota in gaining ‘a fair amount of help and immeasurable sympathy’ (TGP, p. 171). Place also argues that Dakota’s white status among predominantly black sex workers helped the process of her bid for sympathy, from her initial conversation with the police onwards: ‘It’s too easy, but also true, that the white girl was treated that much better as having fallen that much further than the black girl’ (TGP, p. 171). Victimhood, in other words, is amplified by racial bias, an argument we have seen Leo also make in Chapter 1. Alongside arguing that certain sex workers deliberately embrace the position of victim to garner the support of the jury, Place also objects to the depiction of men like Mac as monsters: Pretending that certain men are inhuman, or that evil lies outside logic, excuses us personally and politically from calculated mercy. At heart, mercy is simply the steady responsibility to safeguard the humanity of all,

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The Dangers of Audacity including those we hate. There will always be people guilty of great evil. . . . As a people, we have to resist the temptation to make our morality contingent on anybody’s innocence. . . . But we can’t use them [the evil-doers] to undo our own humanity. (TGP, p. 10)

We would like, she argues, to make sex offenders the repository of a guilt that secures our innocence, when instead that guilt is one we all share: ‘Guilt is what separates our monsters and men, but we don’t understand we are them. We are the system in which they live, we are the situation in which they were bred, or were brought into being’ (TGP, pp. 238–9). Given that politics like these drive The Guilt Project, it seems incredible that Place allows the affective force of the Tragodía to lead poetry readers in the opposite direction and to a conclusion – that sex workers are always victims and Mac a monster beyond any form of compassion – with which she has clearly disagreed elsewhere, both in the original court documents and in The Guilt Project. This could have been mitigated by crossreferencing the cases and women’s names in the three volumes of Tragodía, printing the documents for each case together, as the appeals judge would read them, or, indeed, providing a framing introduction to either the cases or Statement of Facts. As it stands, though, The Guilt Project is the most extensive document that makes the moral and feminist arguments that frame the cases in Tragodía, including Mac’s in particular, but it is far less likely to be read by the poets who are Place’s main literary audience. Place’s decisions on how to present the Tragodía can be read in the light of her conceptual commitments, to which I shortly return, but that framework does not alter the fact that the ‘old’ feminist politics that are represented and reinforced in ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’ work against the more audacious forms of morality and ‘street feminism’ propounded in The Guilt Project and buried in Argument.

The Place of Audacity Place states that there are only stories in the courtroom: ‘The truth is that truth is nothing but an effect of language – a rhetorical effect,’ she proclaims provocatively in a talk that accompanied a reading from Statement of Facts in 2010.62 Her comments about Dakota’s ethnicity effecting the sympathy 62

‘You cannot be named Place and not develop a fondness for puns,’ Place wryly observes in Toth and Place, After Vanessa Place, p. 130. V. Place, ‘Echo’, a paper I heard delivered at the Cross-Genre Festival, Greenwich University, London, July 2010. Place has released it as a PDF on academia.edu. It was also published by Derek Beaulieu’s No Press in 2011 in a limited run of thirty-five for sale, and included a sound recording of the essay. In The Guilt Project she writes, ‘I treat these cases exactly as

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extended to her as a victim do not tally with this post-structuralist proclamation, however. Mac is black and so are most of his prostitutes.63 Most of his sex workers’ clients are white – apparent through Mac’s regular warnings to the women not to get into cars with black men, who he assumes will be other pimps – and when a black man is involved in a testimony, ethnicity is frequently noted, as with Joncey’s first experience of fellatio quoted earlier. It is notable that Dakota/Ice’s ethnicity is discussed at length in The Guilt Project and appears only briefly in Tragodía in ‘No. 18: Argument’, where we are told that ‘She wanted to be his “good loyal white bitch. I was a good bitch”’ (A, p. 186). She is not identifiable in the more widely read Statement of Facts. The law’s supposed impartiality and equality of treatment is, of course, not guaranteed in practice and is sometimes not in evidence at all, but it is present in theory. As symbolised by the blindfolded statue of justice, the law is supposed to be oblivious to markers of difference, including race. By contrast, ethnicity is highly visible in the poetry that is Tragodía, as the disquiet of Spahr’s question about the representation of rape and ethnic minorities in Statement of Facts made clear. Poetry has historically been dominated in the West by white writers. In such poetry, minority ethnicities frequently become symbolic or representative. This is why Place is wrong to assert that ‘in Statement of Facts, for the first time in poetry, a rape is a rape is a rape’.64 The Guilt Project in fact argues otherwise when it highlights how Dakota’s rape by Mac was responded to with especial sympathy by the jury because of her whiteness (TGP, p. 171). One reading of Tragodía is that the text highlights this problem of faux neutrality in the law through largely featuring ethnic minority Americans, and also highlights how poetry does not resolve the problem of racial bias but simply manifests it differently, as a problem of representation, and of authorial responsibility or its lack. The absence of Dakota/Ice from Statement of Facts waters even this already impuissant position down. At heart, both the law and the poetry world in the twenty-first century already know they are racist.65 They

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they come to me, the defendant having been convicted, the facts just as contradictory and confused as they were at trial, the stories, like all stories, still open to retelling’ (TGP, p. 9). Place mentions that Dakota/Ice is white and thus ‘[r]arer, and therefore more valuable, on the street’ (TGP, p. 153), which implies too that she was an anomaly among Mac’s workers. Rochelle mentions in her testimony that ‘There was a white woman working for appellant, but they dropped her off somewhere because she wanted to get out of the game and get an education’ (SoF, p. 35), which again implies white ethnicity is unusual among Mac’s sex workers. Place, ‘“Nothing That’s Quite Your Own”’. The Travyon Martin case is perhaps the most famous recent example of legal racial injustice. See D. Johnson, P. Y. Warren, and A. Farrell (eds.), Deadly Injustice: Trayvon Martin, Race, and the Criminal Justice System (New York and London: New York University Press, 2015).The whiteness of innovative poetry circles is discussed in T. Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian

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do not need Statement of Facts to demonstrate it. To argue that this is the value of Place’s Statement of Facts is to make an argument of little value indeed. As a conceptual project, Tragodía’s ‘radical mimesis’ in reproducing Place’s working documents is in line with what Place and Robert Fitterman class, in their Notes on Conceptualism, as ‘impure conceptualism’.66 They elaborate: ‘[i] mpure conceptualism, manifest in the extreme by the baroque, exaggerates reading in the traditional textual sense. In this sense, its excessive textual properties refuse, and are defeated by, the easy consumption/generation of text and the rejection of reading in the larger culture’ (p. 25). Aside from the fact that claims for the death of reading have themselves been greatly exaggerated, Tragodía can be said to resist easy reading in its documentation of visceral violence, especially in Statement of Facts.67 Statement of the Case and Argument are difficult to read in a different sense, through the legal forms they embody, such as the engagement with previous cases in Argument to prove precedence, or the listing of charges in Statement of the Case. Even more so, they are resistant to reading because the cases in themselves do not readily cross-identify with those in Statement of Facts, but instead float free of the main case narratives with which they were once connected and alongside which they make the most sense; this exacerbates the dullness of their bureaucratic and procedural content. They read as samples of legal writing, extracted from context, with weak narrative content and, because they are less violent and less disturbing they are therefore less shocking and compelling by far than Statement of Facts. They nevertheless still align with the definition of impure conceptualism. Another characterisation of impure conceptualism in Notes on Conceptualism is as a ‘strategy of failure’, one which ‘invites the reader to redress failure, hallucinate repair’ (p. 25). This chapter could stand as a response to that invitation in its evident desire to reassemble as fully as possible the details of Mac’s case, although it is not clear that such a procedure was what Place and Fitterman were advocating. In the context of the arguments in The Guilt Project

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American Poetry since 1965 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). The whiteness of conceptualism in particular has been challenged. See C. Park Hong, ‘There’s a New Movement in American Poetry and It’s Not Kenneth Goldsmith’, New Republic (1 October 2015). Place and Goldsmith have both been accused of racism, her for tweeting of Gone with the Wind as discussed earlier, and him for reading an autopsy report of Michael Brown, a black man killed by the police, that Goldsmith had deliberately rearranged to end on a description of Brown’s genitals. There was widespread condemnation of his reading, online and elsewhere. The reading is documented and responded to in B. Droitcour, ‘Reading and Rumour: The Problem with Kenneth Goldsmith’, Art in America (18 March 2015). Place and Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualism, p. 25. The data on the decline of reading are not as gloomy as literary critics tend to be. See R. Rylance, Literature and the Public Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 30–54.

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and the presentation of heinous acts in Statement of Facts, such a redress or repair could be seen as a moral call to rethink justice and its distribution. It is likely that Place would approve of either interpretation: I like to set up invitations and temptations. Especially in my conceptual work. What I say in my conceptual work is that this is all about you. This has nothing to do with me. All of these things are ways in which I feel I’m inviting the person who encounters the work to discover a little bit more about themselves and what they want and what their expectations are, so that the frustration is not my projecting a frustration on to you.68

Yet, on the contrary, the frustration I have experienced working with Tragodía and The Guilt Project is exactly of Place’s deliberate making, a result of her ordering and disordering of the parts of appellate briefs, their uneven spread around the three volumes, the continual name changes for the sex workers between documents, and the difficulty in obtaining the legal appeal case files. The order of publication and the delay of the second two volumes have also impacted how critics and reviewers have received Tragodía: it is Statement of Facts that has caused the most ink to flow and, even after the publication of the remaining two volumes, essayists and reviewers have chosen not to dwell on Statement of the Case or Argument much further than a passing description. The only person who can ultimately confirm which document matches which, which woman matches up with who, and whether Mac the Pimp in The Guilt Project is the Mac of ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’ is Place, reinforcing her role as the author and creator of these documents. The attention drawn to her as the author because of the reactions Statement of Facts has provoked in readers, reviewers, and audiences who have attended her readings has been noted by several critics before me.69 The fantasy of authorial erasure envisioned earlier – ‘this has nothing to do with me’ – is belied by the attention she thus gains from the book’s reception, but also, and more imperceptibly, by the strong structural control she exerts over Tragodía, to the extent that it could be considered a piece of deliberate deformation, rather than the echo or mimesis so beloved of conceptualists to describe their practice.70 As I have demonstrated, I am interested in where the literary structure launches the reader, which perspective or attitude it encourages them to take towards the material they encounter, 68 69

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Place, ‘Vanessa Place: An Interview in Paris’. Kaufmann, ‘Bullshit and Interest’; Aji, ‘Un(decideable)’, p. 178; Horn, Postmodern Plagiarisms, pp. 218–19. Horn is one of the few critics to note that Statement of Facts also works to raise questions about the reliability of witnesses (pp. 214–15). On the significance of echoes, see Place, ‘Echo’; Dworkin, ‘The Fate of Echo’, pp. xxiii–liv; Place and Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualism, p. 20; Toth and Place, After Vanessa Place.

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how Place constructs the sex workers as victims yet argues for their autonomy, and how this interacts with the feminist politics exhibited by her and by other new audacity writers. In swapping the order of an appellate brief by publishing Statement of Facts at the forefront of Tragodía, before Statement of the Case, and in her disordering to prevent the easy linking of any statement of facts to its respective statement of the case and arguments, Place removes the focus on the appeals process. Instead, she positions readers far more firmly as analogous to the jury in the original case, but in front of men already deemed guilty. As she says of herself in defending guilty clients, and mostly losing their cases, ‘it’s a bit of a cheat, really’ because ‘you can feel quite good about your quixotic self, tilting at windmills without worrying too much that you’ll free roving bands of the clammy-handed’ (TGP, p. 16). Statement of Facts places its readers in the position of moral judgement, reading the differing accounts of the prosecution and the defence, but in the safety of knowing the legal judgment has already been made and handed down. The men are assuredly guilty already – they are monsters, like Mac – and the women fall into their binary place as victims. As I have demonstrated in this chapter, Statement of Facts thus confirms what Place’s stated politics elsewhere deny. Had she started Tragodía with Statement of the Case, as a legal appellate brief would order these documents, or had she reproduced appellate briefs with the three parts together instead of separating them across three separate books and not linking them to their companion parts clearly, readers would be invited, as she is in her work, to judge the law and whether it was applied fairly. Instead, they are invited to judge the appellant and the witnesses, without all the information assembled in one place. The complexities of legal justice are stripped away in favour of titillating readers’ moral sensibilities. In this way, Tragodía is Place’s other, far less politically coherent guilt project. With Statement of Facts as its flagship volume, the danger of Tragodía’s audacity lies in how the politics of its lead volume are, in Mac’s case, considerably more conservative than Place’s writings about the same or a similar case in The Guilt Project and contradict the arguments she made in the original case documents. Her concern with making conceptualism matter by tackling politically important topics such as feminism, sexual violence, and racism has the consequence of reproducing, in Statement of Facts, a view of sex workers that contradicts the position she represents in her working life and in The Guilt Project. She knows very well that readers of Tragodía pay less, if any, attention to Statement of the Case and Argument, just as she is aware that they are unlikely to spend time

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matching the cases across the volumes or the money to access the original files, and her disordering of the cases and lack of labelling deliberately disrupts attempts to do so anyway. The audacity of her arguments in The Guilt Project, evident too in Argument, as to the autonomy of sex workers, their clear understanding of their position, and their ability to take advantage of situations for their own benefit if they can, are all obscured. In all of this, Statement of Facts betrays the politics evinced in The Guilt Project and Argument, at least in relation to ‘No. 3: Statement of Facts’. Instead, the shock value of the sexual violence in Statement of Facts, with its flat affect prose, its rhetorical use of grammar to provide feeling and pathos, and its irruptions of abrasive direct speech, often overtly misogynistic, is what dominates readers’ experiences of Tragodía. Its more complex politics, when cases are reassembled across volumes and read in conjunction with the arguments in The Guilt Project, are eclipsed. Statement of Facts thus represents a dangerous audacity, one that encourages readers to view raped women solely as victims and sex workers as brainwashed, unreliable, and largely without autonomy. Had the politics Place professes in The Guilt Project emerged more evidently in Tragodía, through a framing device or less wilful disordering, then the feminism that her work exhibits could have been consistent rather than contradictory. If Place has a consistent feminist politics, one that accords with her stated positions in The Guilt Project and Argument and that emerges occasionally in her interviews, this chapter demonstrates that in Tragodía it has been sacrificed to an audacious set of aesthetic decisions that serves her literary reputation first and foremost. When Toth called Place’s work ‘dangerously seductive’ in a quote I started this chapter with, it has become apparent in the subsequent discussion that the dangerous seduction for Place lies in mobilising audacity for audacity’s sake and, in so doing, her feminism becomes a set of contradictions. This, then, works as a final warning note on which to close Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing’s tracking of the new audacity. As this chapter demonstrates, the politics of new audacity writers are not always clear, and audacity can be mobilised for politically murky and ambiguous ends as well as those we can celebrate as unequivocally feminist.

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Afterword After Audacity?

Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity has examined some of the most exciting feminist life-writing of the twenty-first century thus far. Experimental auto/biography is clearly a thriving area for publishing and is gaining greater recognition within literary circles too. The writers featured in this study are bold and daring in their confrontations with the difficulties they experience, whether with depression or mental illness, sexual violence, becoming an artist, or becoming trans, or in coming to terms with their sexual desires and how these are perceived by others. They testify to transformative experiences, whether of rape, sex work, motherhood, friendship, writing, or taking hormones, some of which provide great fulfilment, while others are traumatic. Central to the stated politics of new audacity authors is an insistence on bodily autonomy and the rejection of passive victimhood. They show a clear and feminist commitment to the power of writing and to experimentation with genres and forms. Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing represents breadth of approach and project, from the notoriety of Tracey Emin, Marie Calloway, and Vanessa Place, to the quieter audacity of Katherine Angel, Alison Bechdel, and Juliet Jacques, from the smart, racy prose of Chris Kraus, Maggie Nelson, and Paul Preciado, to the feminist interventions of Jana Leo and Virginie Despentes, and finally to the honesty about failure and writer’s block in the work of Sheila Heti and Kate Zambreno. This book defines and engages with these fresh directions in feminist life-writing. As the Introduction indicated, new as this writing might be, it is not without its precursors, many written by women of colour from the generation before. It is a regret of mine that this study, while including authors from a range of ethnicities and Anglo-American and European nationalities, is nevertheless dominated by white feminists. In large part, this has been dictated by the networks which link the authors I have included, as I outlined in the Introduction. These powerful forms of co-endorsement and support extend across national boundaries and work in distinct sinews 202

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of association so that the group of writers I have included are chain-linked through presses and publications, promotional blurbs and shared events, aesthetic values and influences, and personal relationships.1 Such a loosely affiliated network has a tendency to reinforce itself, drawing like members into its orbit, and its very informality can replicate sameness and discourage diversity, without any specific, conscious design.2 In another respect, however, the limits of Contemporary Feminist LifeWriting are a result of my own choices. One of these has been to exclude the consideration of lyric poetry. This has entailed the neglect of some writers whose work would definitely have fitted into the fold. For instance, the very fine lyric poet Nat Raha would have made an excellent addition to the chapter on trans life-writing. Equally, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) shares many of the hallmarks of new audacity writing and would have allowed for the expansion of the project to take on a consideration of the life-writing of racism. Yet Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing’s authors are all otherwise working in prose, and some, like Heti, Calloway, and Jacques, are deliberately blending autobiography with fiction in experiments that pointedly address the boundaries of these genres in a manner which is relatively new within life-writing. Lyric poetry, by contrast, has long drawn upon the autobiographical, but not in a manner that is traditionally considered under the umbrella of life-writing, and I am reticent to approach lyric poetry from a primarily autobiographical perspective. When I teach lyric poetry to my students, I encourage them not to reduce the poem to the expressive intentionality of the poet who writes ‘I’, and it would have felt aesthetically and pedagogically counter-intuitive to deliberately take the opposite route in my own research. This testifies, I think, to the much more experimental sensibility of many of the best poets working in the contemporary lyric tradition. It is also the case that many new audacity writers are by definition direct in their relationship to their readers, with a commitment to authenticity that is not much interested in complicated positions of authorship, although Vanessa Place marks an exception here and it is why her audacity, like that of Calloway’s, is especially complex. To point to how by necessity 1

2

Two exceptions are Marie Calloway, who is relatively isolated from these networks, although her altfiction connections provide a different kind of coterie, and Tracey Emin, who already had fame and a wide potential audience through her pre-existing art world reputation and connections with Britpop. As Sara Ahmed says, ‘Privilege is an energy-saving device. Less effort is required to be or to do’ (pp. 125–6 in Living a Feminist Life [Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017]). Artistic and literary circles operate in informal networks of friendship and patronage that usually have to be challenged about their whiteness or their maleness.

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Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing is curtailed is not, I hope, to close down the potential for the further expansion of the new audacity archive. This book takes its authors as examples to characterise a new direction in contemporary feminist writing and offers by no means an exhaustive list of work in this mode. Audacity is always a matter of cultural context: audacious acts are not transhistorical or transnational, although the digital connectedness of the Western world means that there is enough shared ground among feminist writers from Europe, North America, and the United Kingdom for them to be brought together. Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing is particularly timely, and new audacity writers are very much of their twenty-firstcentury time. Feminist discontent with gender inequality is emerging in powerful institutions and cultural sectors, as witnessed with the Harvey Weinstein revelations, and the global reach of the #MeToo campaign across many countries and industries. Recent revelations of sexism, misogyny, and abuse have rocked the worlds of politics, journalism, and sport, as well as the film and music industries, to name just a few powerfully influential areas of contemporary life. Now is definitely a moment more open than perhaps ever before to women speaking about rape and breaking the silence and shame that traditionally accompany victimhood. Tracey Emin’s naming and shaming of her rapist and abusers anticipates the online revelations of sexual abuse and misconduct that continue to be shared by women across the globe in cumulative testimonies and voices in chorus for the collective. Sara Ahmed appositely offers as one among her many characterisations of feminism in Living a Feminist Life that it comprises ‘a history of wilful tongues. Feminism: that which infects a body with a desire to speak in ways other than how you have been commanded to speak’ (p. 191). Writers of the new audacity embody this definition. One characterisation of the relationship between feminism and audacity is that when there is no longer a need for the former, the latter’s link to gender will become a matter of historical record. While the rise of feminism’s profile in the twenty-first century is to be celebrated and needs to be sustained, it is still the case that feminists in the present are, to steal the title of one of Jacqueline Rose’s recent books, ‘women in dark times’, although Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing has also recognised the value of feminist thought undertaken by trans men.3 The rise of nationalism and the growth of far-right movements across Europe and the United States are, 3

J. Rose, Women in Dark Times (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).

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frankly, frightening: the masculinism and misogyny that characterise both will not serve women and feminists well. We will need the audacious voices of the present to continue to speak out and to speak up. Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity has argued for the importance of such work within feminist and literary studies, within life-writing scholarship, and for those researching the contemporary. New audacity authors show us that writing lives is urgently necessary to the project of energising radical twenty-first-century change.

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Index

Abbott, Steve, 16 abjection, 79, 105 abortion, 32, 101 fn. 20 Acker, Kathy, 17, 183 activism, 6, 47, 107, 162 affect, 5, 16, 82, 130, 183 flat, 183–4, 201 agency, 4, 28, 32, 36, 42, 51, 68, 93, 96, 97, 123, 127, 131–3, 188 Ahmed, Sara, 7, 51–2, 56, 136, 203, 204 Alighieri, Dante, 173 Angel, Katherine, 3–4, 15, 23, 38, 202 Angelou, Maya, 8 anger, 30, 40, 50, 65 Angot, Christine, 19, 20, 71 anti-capitalism, 135, 159, 169 anxiety, 35, 65, 82, 87, 122 fn. 57, 136, 139, 165 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 8, 9 Augustine, Saint, 66, 85 authenticity, 66, 105, 108–11, 114, 115, 120, 124, 130, 188, 203 autism, 118, 120 autofiction, 19–20, 70, 71 autonomy, 21, 42, 46, 56, 61, 68, 72, 74–5, 90, 92, 104, 117, 172, 185–91, 193, 200, 201, 202 Barthes, Roland, 144, 159 Bartky, Sandra L., 93 fn. 2, 97 Bataille, Georges, 98 Baumgardner, Jennifer, 40 BDSM, 93, 96–8, 116–17, 125, 127–30, 220 Bechdel, Alison, 2, 4, 9, 14–15, 23, 135, 202 Dykes to Look Out For, 73, 86 Fun Home, 65, 72, 79–80, 83 Bellamy, Dodie, 14, 16 Berlant, Lauren, 11, 95, 161 Bersani, Leo, 98–100, 109, 129, 156 Bettcher, Talia Mae, 137, 138 binary, gender, 101, 142 Blasey Ford, Christine, 27 Bloom, Harold, 82

Boone, Bruce, 16 Bornstein, Kate, 141–2 Bourcier, Marie-Hélène/Sam, 147 Bourke, Joanna, 28, 59–60 Bowles, Jane, 69 Brooks, Peter, 109, 173 Brown, Michael, 198 Brown, Wendy, 62, 162 Brownmiller, Susan, 26, 47 Burroughs, William, 148 Butler, Judith, 5, 49, 95 fn. 8, 98, 136, 143 Calle, Sophie, 15, 17, 112 Calloway, Marie, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 16–18, 22, 24, 46, 76, 202–4 capitalism, 21, 46–8, 62, 120, 145–7, 150–1, 154, 158 Capote, Truman, 70 Cavarero, Adriana, 95 fn. 8 Chabon, Michael, 20 child abuse, 181 childbirth, 4, 141, 145 Cisneros, Sandra, 8 ciswomen, 5 Cixous, Hélène, 20, 75, 103, 104 fn. 21 Clark, Timothy, 81, 82 Clercq, Eva de, 94–6 Colby, Georgina, 187–8 Colomina, Beatriz, 40 composition, 81–2 conceptualism, 24, 41, 173, 175–81, 187, 190, 196, 198–200 consent, 34, 35, 59–60, 183, 185, 192–4 Cooke, Emily, 14–16, 17 Coppola, Sofia, 117 fn. 48 cuteness, 121, 123–5, 130 cutting, female genital, 50 Dada, 15 death, 4, 38, 51, 72, 98, 118, 141, 145 de-dramatisation, 136, 162–9 degradation, 47, 117, 122–4, 132

222

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Index Deleuze, Gilles, 113 Derrida, Jacques, 112 fn. 36, 112 Despentes, Virginie, 2–4, 8, 9–11, 13, 14, 20, 22–3, 64–5, 88, 96, 101, 135, 141, 149–50, 153, 171, 172, 180–1, 202 Baise-Moi (film), 13, 14, 39–40, 60 Baise-Moi (novel), 29, 39, 58, 60, 61 Díaz, Junot, 20 didacticism, 67, 68, 84–92 dildos, 140, 150, 153, 160–1, 164 disability, 73 discrimination, 4, 7, 40, 104, 155, 166 disgust, 33, 64, 113, 122 fn. 57, 179 Dodge, Harry, 135, 138–9, 142, 143–5, 155–62 Downing, Lisa, 96–7, 102, 104 Doyle, Jennifer, 31 drag king, 146, 151–2, 154 Duchamp, Marcel, 15 Dufourmantelle, Anne, 107 fn. 29 Duras, Marguerite, 71 Dustan, Guillaume, 140, 148 Dworkin, Andrea, 97 Edelman, Lee, 99–100, 156–7 Edinburgh Action for Trans Health, 154 Edwards, Natalie, 39–40 Egan, Jennifer, 20 Eggers, Dave, 20, 83 Elbe, Lili, 134 Eliot, Vivien(ne), 23, 69 embodiment, 51 Emin, Tracey, 2, 4, 9, 14, 15, 17, 22, 23, 24, 93, 99, 171, 172, 202, 203, 204 Beautiful Child, 31 Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963 – 1995, 31 My Bed, 31 Top Spot, 29, 34 Tracey Emin C. V., 29 Why I Never Became a Dancer, 31 equality, gender, 19 Espineira, Karine, 147 ethnicity, 9, 12, 196–8, 202 Everyday Sexism Project, the, 6 everyday surreal, the, 53–4, 59 failure, 1, 18, 33, 44, 47, 72, 79, 83, 92, 136, 137, 153, 163, 168, 198, 202 Fallon, Michael, 28 Felski, Rita, 8, 12, 15, 38, 42, 48, 67, 87, 90–1, 95 feminism 1960s, 150 1970s, 48, 102, 104 fn. 21 1980s, 7, 93 anti-trans, 136, 137, 142, 157 liberal, 162

223

Marxist, 45 plutocratic, 6 radical, 96–7 second-wave, 8, 9, 19, 39, 47–8 sex-positive, 97, 104, 129 state, 150 white, liberal, 150, 154 white, Western, 51 Ferguson, Frances, 188–9 Firestone, Shulamith, 48, 150, 176 Fitterman, Robert, 198 Fitzgerald, Zelda, 23, 69 Foster Wallace, David, 20–2 Foucault, Michel, 149 Fraser, Nancy, 19 Freud, Sigmund, 89 futurism, reproductive, 156 Galey-Sacks, Penelope, 176 gaslighting, 22 Gender Recognition Act, the, 169 genius, 23, 111 Gilmore, Leigh, 5, 8–9, 11–12, 18, 24, 27, 28, 34, 116 Gira Grant, Melissa, 3 Glück, Robert, 16 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 175, 198 hacking, gender, 140, 147, 154 Halberstam, Jack Judith, 95 fn. 7 Halpern, Rob, 16 Hamad, Hannah, 6 harassment, sexual, 48 Haraway, Donna, 149 Hardy, Thomas, 17 Jude the Obscure, 1 Harris, Kaplan, 16 Hawkins, Joan, 111 Hebdige, Dick, 72, 106–15 Hemmings, Clare, 50–1 Henke, Suzette, 27 Hester, Helen, 50–1, 109 heteronormativity, 140 heteropatriarchy, 1 heterosexuality, 122–3, 151 Heti, Sheila, 2, 4, 9, 13–15, 16–17, 23, 105 fn. 22, 139, 165 fn. 52–53, 166, 167, 202–3 All Our Happy Days Are Stupid, 70 Motherhood, 9, 65 Hill, Anita, 27, 34 Hite, Shere, 102 Holmes, Richard, 69 Homer The Odyssey, 80 Hong Kingston, Maxine, 8, 9

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224

Index

hormones, 3, 5, 137, 141, 149–50, 154–5, 164, 202 Horn, Mirjam, 174 Hoyer, Niels, 134 Huffer, Lynne, 39–40 identification, 89–90 identity gender, 24, 82, 160 sexual, 82 illness, mental, 2, 3, 9, 44, 79–82, 118, 202 bipolar, 87 borderline personality disorder, 87 depression, 4, 19, 87, 136, 163, 167, 202 obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), 80 Illouz, Eva, 91–2 individualism, 68, 91, 96 inequality class, 39 economic, 47 gender, 5, 47, 204 social, 23, 30, 49 injustice, 43, 197 Irigaray, Luce, 104 fn. 21, 176 Irving, Dan, 157–8 Jacques, Juliet, 3, 13, 14, 16, 24, 38, 202, 203 ‘Weekend in Brighton’, 71 James, E. L. Fifty Shades of Grey, 96–7 Jameson, A. D., 21 Jamison, Leslie, 106 Jones, Sophie, 148, 152–3 Joyce, James, 15, 84 Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, 85–6 Jung, Carl, 89 Kant, Immanuel, 78, 79, 82 Kavanaugh, Brett, 27 Kelly, Adam, 21 Kierkegaard, Søren, 82 Killian, Kevin, 16 King, Amy, 180 Kipnis, Laura, 94 Knowles, Beyoncé, 6 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, 145, 160 Kraus, Chris, 2, 3–4, 6, 8, 9–11, 13–17, 23, 38, 41, 71, 72, 202 Aliens and Anorexia, 14 I Love Dick (TV series), 14, 115 fn. 44, 115 Torpor, 10, 14 Krishtalka, Sholem, 72, 77 Kristeva, Julia, 79

Lacan, Jacques, 89, 112, 139 Laplanche, Jean, 89 Lauretis, Teresa de, 5, 149 Lawrence, Jennifer, 6 Lejeune, Philippe, 21, 167 Lentz, Kirsten, 151 Leo, Jana, 2–4, 8, 9, 13, 22–3, 64, 93, 96, 101, 135, 171, 172, 178, 180, 183, 202 Control Games NY, 29 Lerner, Ben, 20 liberalism, 159, 162, 195 Lin, Tao, 21–2, 117 fn. 49, 117 Richard Yates, 22 Lorde, Audre, 8–9, 38, 152, 176 Lotringer, Sylvère, 10, 41, 106–15 Mac, Juno, 123 MacArthur Foundation, 14, 83, 135 Man, Paul de, 67, 72 Mansfield, Katherine, 112 Marcus, Laura, 7, 8, 69 Martin, Trayvon, 197 masculinity, 15, 42, 49, 150, 152, 153 masochism, 4, 93, 94, 95, 97–9, 124–5 maternity, 156 Maya Murray, Yxta, 35 Mayer, So, 105 fn. 23 McGurl, Mark, 84 McKinnon, Catharine, 45 memoir, misery, 30, 50, 67, 110 MeToo, 6, 28, 37, 204 Miller, Alice, 89 Miller, William K., 64 Millet, Catherine, 94 fn. 3 Millett, Kate, 7 misogyny, 2, 4–6, 15, 30, 40, 48, 62, 106, 119, 126, 127, 132, 153, 189, 201, 204–5 Mitchell, Kaye, 119 fn. 52, 119 Moraga, Cherrie, 8 morality, 1, 195–6 Moran, Caitlin, 32 Morris, Jan, 134, 141 Moschovakis, Anna, 186 motherhood, 66, 155, 202 Myles, Eileen, 17, 105 fn. 22, 105, 109, 179 narcissism, 19, 21, 67, 76, 89, 94, 99, 120 nationalism, 204 Negra, Diane, 6 Nelson, Maggie, 3–4, 8, 13–14, 24, 38, 202 Neo-conservatism, 48 neoliberalism, 18–19, 63, 96, 97, 132, 151, 157–8, 162 networks, literary, 8, 13–14, 41, 202, 203

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Index New Narrative. See writing Newmahr, Staci, 127 Ngai, Sianne, 83, 123, 126 non-heteronormativity, 55 non-normativity, 3, 57, 63, 104, 129, 131, 137, 140, 160–1 normativity, 85, 97, 104, 143, 150 queer, 155–62 norms, 1–2, 9, 10, 24, 41, 61, 143, 149 Notley, Alice, 17 Nussbaum, Martha, 33 Obama, Barack The Audacity of Hope, 2 orgasm, woman’s, 125 Ovid Metamorphosis, 137 pact, autobiographical, 21 Paglia, Camille, 42–3, 57 pathologisation, 84, 87, 92, 157 patriarchy, 40, 49, 93, 95 fn. 7, 95, 136 Pellegrini, Ann, 147 Pelzer, Dave, 30 people, trans, 3–5, 9, 24 Perkins Gilman, Charlotte, 81 Perloff, Marjorie, 177–9 phenomenology, 48–55, 59 Phillips, Adam, 89 Phillips, Anita, 99 fn. 17 Phipps, Alison, 18, 26, 63, 96, 132 pill, contraception, 150, 155 Place, Vanessa, 4, 8, 13, 14, 18, 24, 41, 54, 70, 202, 203 ‘Echo’, 196 Boycott, 176 Notes on Conceptualism, 198 The Guilt Project, 24 Tragodía, 24 You Had to Be There, 41 poetry, 203–4 police, 29, 35–6, 48, 173, 177, 178, 182, 186, 190, 195, 198 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 89 pornography, 50, 62, 96 fn. 12, 103, 110, 146, 147, 150–1, 153 poverty, 12, 30, 43–5, 46, 48–50, 62, 116, 173, 178 Power, Nina, 84, 120 fn. 54 precarity, 19, 136, 158, 166 Preciado, Paul, 3–5, 8, 9, 13, 24, 38–9, 202 pregnancy, 4, 24, 143, 145, 155, 157, 158 presses, small, 8, 11, 14 Blanc Press, 8, 174 Book Works, 55

225

Feminist Press, the, 8, 10, 13, 20, 30, 38, 40, 50, 55 Graywolf, 8 House of Anansi, 4, 13, 69 Les Figues, 176 Muumuu House, 22, 117 fn. 49, 118 Semiotext(e), 8, 10, 13, 111–12 Tyrant Books, 8 prison-industrial complex, the, 43, 169 Prosser, Jay, 137–8, 140–1, 143 psychoanalysis, 73, 88–90, 147, 151, 171 psychotherapy, 79 queerness, 140 racialisation, 28, 47, 152–3 racism, 178, 195, 197, 200 Raha, Nat, 203 Rankine, Claudia, 203 rape, 2–3, 9, 22, 24, 64, 96 fn. 12, 117, 118, 124, 131, 135, 181, 189, 192, 194, 197, 202, 204 anal, 182–5, 191, 194–5 jokes, 170–1 rapists, mendacity of, 55–62, 171 Raymond, Janice, 142 Réage, Pauline, 98 realism, trans, 169 recognition, 90–2 Rees, Mark, 134 Reznikoff, Charles, 174 Rhys, Jean, 69 Riot Grrrl, 9, 15 Rose, Jacqueline, 167, 204 Roth, Anne, 50, 51 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 67, 72 Royle, Nicholas, 71 sadism, 123–4 sadomasochism, 100–2, 104–5, 127, 131, 160, 168, 169 Sarkar, Raya, 33 self-care, 27 self-help, 26, 32 Serano, Julia, 141 sex, 105, 149, 182 anal, 3, 160–1 cyber, 117, 124–5 experiments, 131 submissive, 3–6, 9, 17, 23, 93, 97, 100, 101, 105, 117, 132 sex work, 3, 4, 9, 24, 39–40, 45, 62, 63, 93, 96 fn. 12, 116, 117, 122–4, 129, 131, 172, 173, 175, 179, 181–201, 202 shame, 10, 22, 28–9, 31, 33, 60–2, 63, 87, 92, 109, 114, 119 fn. 52, 119, 122, 126, 204

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226

Index

shamelessness, 1 shaming, 27, 31–7, 62–3, 65, 99, 204 Shields, David, 16, 71 silencing, 2, 27–8, 87 sincerity, 20 Smith, Molly, 123 Smith, Sidonie, 95 Solanas, Valerie, 40, 48, 154, 176 solidarity, 11, 62, 143 Sontag, Susan, 98, 100, 129 Spahr, Juliana, 178–9, 197 Spiotta, Dana, 20 Stockton, Sharon, 183 Stone, Sandy, 137, 142 Stryker, Susan, 137, 138, 141 subordination social, 101, 105 subspace, 129 Sullivan, Hannah, 77, 79, 80 Sumaq, Pluma, 46 surgery sex reassignment, 134, 136, 141, 143, 164, 166 top, 143, 144, 159 Sykes, Rachel, 106 fn. 25 testosterone, 38–9, 135, 137, 140, 143–5, 147–8, 151, 154–5 The Hunting Ground, 178 theory gender, 9, 17, 147 queer, 9, 17, 143, 156–7, 160, 162 trans, 141, 158, 159, 162 trauma, 9, 27 Thomas, Clarence, 27 Tiqqun, 119–21, 132 Toth, Naomi, 170, 171, 186, 201 transfeminism, 5, 137 transition, 4, 5, 24, 134, 135, 137–9, 141, 142, 145, 146–8, 158, 163–7 transphobia, 137, 162 trauma, 4, 8, 22, 24–6, 42, 49, 51–2, 121–2, 127, 177, 183 Tremblay-McGaw, Robin, 16

Trevino, Wendy, 159 Trump, Donald, 27, 28, 169 ugliness, 23, 61 victimhood, 2–3, 4, 9, 22–3, 30, 32, 37, 38, 56, 59, 60, 63, 93, 95–7, 99, 101–4, 110, 115, 132–3, 172, 175, 179, 185–92, 202, 204 virginity, 117, 121–3, 131 Virilio, Paul, 149 vulnerability, 15, 23, 30, 36, 44, 49, 57, 96, 111, 173, 182 wages for housework, 154 Wagner, Catherine, 17 Warner, Michael, 161 Watkins Fisher, Anna, 108 Watson, Emma, 6 Watson, Julia, 95 Weeks, Kathi, 153–5, 166 Weinstein, Harvey, 28, 204 Whitehead, Colson, 20 whiteness, 195, 197–8 Wilke, Hannah, 15, 17, 112 Williamson, Margaux, 70, 75, 77 Winnicott, D. W., 69, 73, 89 Wood, James, 69 Woolf, Virginia, 15, 23, 81, 101 To the Lighthouse, 74 Wordsworth, William, 82 writer’s block, 2, 19, 23, 118, 163, 202 writing New Narrative, 14, 16–17, 22 new sincerity, 20–2 xenofeminism, 154 Young, Stephanie, 177, 178, 179 Zambreno, Kate, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9–10, 11, 13–15, 17, 19, 23, 68–9, 101, 111 fn. 35, 112, 113 fn. 42, 113, 120–1, 202 Book of Mutter, 65 Green Girl, 120

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