Kate Wagner x Grace Byron

A Conversation with Critic Kate Wagner

Art by Carol Rama.

Kate and I became penpals recently and started writing back and forth about criticism, friendship, feminist intellectual tradition and thought it be worth sharing for a wider, more public audience. This is a condensed version of some of the things we covered. Lots to unpack but think of it as an offering of friendship and communal thought.

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Grace Byron: So let’s start at the beginning, how did you come to criticism?

Kate Wagner: I came to criticism in a pretty meandering way. When I was little and all through high school I was focused on writing stories, most of which weren't very good, but early on writing became a compulsive way of thinking for me, a way of working out at first ideals, dreams, and emotions, and later observations about the world. I felt that writing things down was a way of documenting them (I have a weird fear of forgetfulness), solving them, understanding them, connecting them to other things. It's funny that you mention religion because even though I'm no longer religious, I grew up Catholic, and that gave me the sense that there was a redemptive quality in ritual, art (especially music) and language. Confession, the cleansing of the soul and of all its pain, after all, is an act of speech. (This is also something I would later love about psychoanalysis.) Catholicism also gave me a somewhat negative view of the world as being in need of redemption, which I still think is true, albeit in a secular way, and I still think that language and art are core parts of that reckoning, as sentimental as it sounds. To me this sentiment is best articulated in the scene in Purgatorio where Dante must leave Virgil in order to ascend further on his journey, and it becomes clear that within the dialectic of Dante the writer and Dante the pilgrim, neither could either imagine nor proceed towards the ecstasy of heaven without Virgil the poet, that "sweetest father" by his side.

Beyond religion I grew up in what savvy political candidates would call a "lower middle class" family. My mother worked at a daycare and my dad was a civil servant at the General Services Administration which is basically the federal government's plumber. We lived in a small house in a suffocatingly small town in then rural (now kind of quasi-exurban) North Carolina. I had all kinds of developmental and social problems growing up, including undiagnosed autism and as a result, I spent an enormous amount of time alone with only my own thoughts for company. Instead of trying to make friends, I became out of necessity a social observer, trying to understand what my peers liked and why. Not to imitate them -- as in 2006 belonging was particularly attached to material wealth and my parents didn't have the means to keep up with the Joneses -- but to understand what made people want those things and why they behaved the way they did so that I could maybe meet them on an achievable middle ground.

It was then that I became painfully aware of social class and also of the signs and symbols of status, how they were constantly rearranged to make new shapes and forms and desires. Throughout the years, those observations congealed into a mix of satire and inquiry. Some of my earliest writing was polemical, about my neighbors who tore down the woods next to my house (I knew a lot about local botany and was very upset) to build a house that was ugly as sin. I felt that by writing that way I could in some way ameliorate that injustice, which is still an impetus I have today. Late in high school I read Naomi Klein's No Logo, and it blew my mind wide open. Suddenly all these fashion trends and aesthetic signifiers had shocking roots in the material world, in sweatshops and brand headquarters. This led me to read more books of criticism. I was more drawn towards what I call "observational critics," particularly John Berger and Susan Sontag. Both of them harbored above all powers of description and observation, and then a critical instinct that was sophisticated and ideological but rooted very much in the world, and oriented towards the public. I started writing essays in my spare time, usually just cultural notes or observations of the built environment, which because of its permanence I believed conveyed certain, more dedicated truths. Eventually, after undergrad, I began putting those essays online and well, here we are. I definitely think if I entered puberty at a way less materialistic time, I would have turned out differently.

GB: And, why architecture? What’s the origin story?

KW: It's funny, because for my entire life, all the way up until grad school, I was actually trained as a classical musician. While I developed an early love for houses, especially looking at them for hours on end, I didn't get into architecture proper until high school. I was sixteen, when me, my mom and my sister got stuck in the parking lot of Paul Rudolph's Orange County Government Center, in Goshen, New York, which blew my mind. My mother hated the building and we got in a big fight about it. (I think I won but also I lost because the building was later lobotomized by a horrible addition.) Anyway, it was one of those brutalist buildings that are really Late Modern -- think a bunch of cubes all tangled together in a mass, intruding and extruding, and then that mass was clustered around some classic Le Corbusier stilts. I spent a long time on the Skyscraper City Forums trying to find what the building was (searching for things on the internet wasn't so easy back then) until I found it, more of Rudolph's work, and the crazy weird world of Late Modern architecture writ large. Unfortunately, I had no inherent talent for being an architect so I decided to go to music school instead.

In undergrad I started to immediately become interested in the intersection of music and architecture, which was acoustics. I was at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro training to be a composer, and was working in the recording studio. Classical recording is very minimalist, and I kept running into the problem of the concert hall, something that couldn't be solved with microphones. I wrote a lot of papers about cathedrals and Medieval music as well as sound theory. In graduate school I went on to study architectural acoustics because originally I wanted to work on concert halls themselves. Later my thesis work became a mix of architecture theory and the history of science. I kept and keep returning to the Late/Post-modern transition because it was a time of great failure, and in concert halls, as the technology both advanced and floundered, there were lots of noble experiments that created unique, if ultimately unsatisfying forms. Failure and ugliness in architecture is what continues to attract me far more than beauty and success. I'm kind of embarrassing in that I sometimes like looking at a corporate office tower as much as I do Frank Lloyd Wright.

But to answer your question, I chose to write about architecture at first because I initially found it natural to describe. I loved being in the car or on a train and, as quickly as possible, constructing a landscape, a scene. Also because I became so invested in the idea of architecture as a collection of hidden meanings, including as I said before, of desire, social class and aspiration, I found it a more stable vehicle for criticism because the built environment has a shelf-life of at times around thirty years (for residential and commercial buildings) and at other times thousands. Through sound I came to see architecture as not just a visual but an auditory, spatial, and the only truly inhabitable art. Also no one can charge you for looking up on the street. Beyond being works of art, architecture is the embodiment of what we as a society value, what we, in a time of extraordinary impermanence, want to invest the time, capital, and labor to communicate via physical space. Usually, that's for the worse these days, but sometimes it's also for the better.

Finally, whether it can be considered an art or not (I would argue it's usually not!) architecture, at its most vulgar core, is a formal-historical assemblage of commodities, and because each commodity is touched and developed by human hands, each building is a spiraling fractal of human involvement at a quite literally systemic level. Because architecture is the site of habitation and everyday life, it is the form of "art" we interact with most intuitively and most often. It has ramifications at the political, urban, financial, and aesthetic levels. Its market is different from the art market, as it's a market large swaths of the population have stakes in, sometimes with devastating results. And because architecture is sited, the history and politics of space, from gender and race, colonization to gentrification, are also inescapable which opens up many modes of inquiry. The politics of architecture are vast and explicit. A building has a much harder time justifying itself than I think a painting does. (I would love to see what you think about this re: the novel.) A skyscraper in Hudson Yards conceals fewer of its problems - structural or aesthetic - through form than a Matisse even though both cost millions of dollars. Lots of people feel that they have no "right" to talk about art because they are not experts, but almost everyone who looks at a building and goes "what the fuck is that thing" is an architecture critic. And so the project and horizon of architecture criticism to me feels so full of possibility, if contested, because it's so inherently public and shared by its nature of being in the world.

In a similar vein, how did you come to criticism? Was it more externally/socially driven or internalized?

GB: My first great loves were novels. Simple ones I suppose---The Great Gatsby, Salinger, Harper Lee. I loved reading fantasy too. Later I discovered bell hooks, Sontag, Annie Dillard, Barthes, Didion. People who wrote about their experiencesand the world around them interpretively. I think Barthes especially broke me open. I was like ah, yes there is poetry not just in writing haiku but in writing about haiku. Many years later, while still writing fiction, a friend of mine became the arts editor at an online magazine and kind of let me have free reign. I reviewed anything and everything. Tana French, Sally Rooney, Imogen Binnie, Leonora Carrington, comics—it was good training.

KW: I'm mostly familiar with your reviews in magazines and online but I know that right now you're writing a novel - I was wondering what the relationship is like for you between criticism and fiction - do they stay relatively autonomous or are they intertwined? As a literary critic does the criticism part of your brain help or hinder the fiction part? (Thinking of how Rilke advised young artists to never read critics!)

GB: You know people ask me this, and I don't have a great answer. The short answer is that it feels like church and state. They are different voices, different styles, different ideologies. Fiction is harder. It requires more of an engine, starting from nothing. I have a work flow when I’m writing criticism now. Of course, I'd love to write longer pieces that meander and move with grace rather than just the hot 1200 word pieces. But here we are. There’s been enough said about the state of criticism from an economic standpoint. Fiction was, and remains, my first love.

KW: When you write a book review, what is your process? Do you start while still reading the book, or only after finishing? Do you mark up text or just blitz right through? Is there a certain point where the lightbulb goes off and you realize, oh this is the angle? (I don't write book reviews often but when I do I often struggle with the question, is it fair to focus a critique on what this book should but doesn't do?)

GB: I usually read the book first and then as many other books by the author as I can. I sometimes mark passages for later to return to and build on. I almost never have an angle so early. Or I do but it dissolves. I think I also find it difficult to not meander through the book as a reader instead of a critic. (Why can't I go off about a few-page description of eating a pear?) There's just so little time and space.

I also hate having to read books in the zeitgeist just to have an opinion. I read My Heavenly Favorite after an allegedly transphobic review. And yet I also love the experience of reading something in the discourse. It reminds me that words matter and characters matter and we deeply care about these things and how they circulate in the wider world. I'm listening to All Fours now. I think that in general, I like to focus on something I think I can have a take on. Or just books I think are taking a big enough swing that I will inevitably have strong feelings about by the time I’ve let myself have some time.

How do you think about community? I know that’s been a big thing we’ve discussed offline.

KW: I think my perspective on this is colored because my partner is a cis man and the family for me and the supremacy of romantic love are both things I've had to unlearn and that unlearning has taken years. It's unlearning that's had to happen not just because I adopted a set of ideological priors, but out of necessity, in order to be able to breathe and live a happier, freer life. My partner and I share the same political commitments, and so I like to think of what Badiou called 'a communism of two.' Also I'd love to maybe start a dialogue about friendship specifically (maybe centered around a book? Or an essay like Derrida's On Friendship) because - and this is going to sound weird - I only started making friends way into my adulthood. As I mentioned before, I suffered from a lot of developmental delays and problems growing up and was raised by parents who had no friends and a mother for whom marriage was the end goal of living, of self-actualization. I was especially discouraged from seeking friendships with women and was told all my life that women are difficult, cruel, unreliable, and jealous.

To put it bluntly, I didn't believe that friendship was real love, that it was infantile. I didn't know how to make friends, nor how to be a friend. When I came out of the closet, started seeing women romantically and being in queer and women's spaces, I thought this would automatically fix things, but it didn't because I hadn't accepted how to be in community with other people writ large. In my late 20s I was "adopted" into a long-standing and large set of friends who allowed me to reimagine what love was, and community. We watch each others' pets, take each other to doctors' appointments, help when someone's sick. (I'm happy to hear that your friends are helping you in similar, life-affirming ways!) One of my friends is trying for a baby and we've all sworn together to help with childcare and to welcome a baby into our same friend group, especially because motherhood in this country is so exhausting and alienating. Also keeping long distance friends is something new for me, an exercise in dedicated maintenance and care.

GB: I think this is a really fruitful space for discussion. I've always wondered where the great novels about friendship are. There's Sula and Swing Time and a few others--but so often they are quickly sublimated into the erotic. What about definitions of kinship? You speak a lot to friendship as its own politic. I think that's right. A big part of queerness/transness for me has been about what community outside of institutions means. Why do we want it? How do we create it? Safeguard it? What happens when the nonprofit industrial complex picks it back up? How do we fight the demands of the trad family to allow for wider communion? This is something I think Sophie Lewis and bell hooks both write beautifully about. Family abolition is interesting for this reason to me. It's part of a puzzle that leads to friendship and community. Which I don't think are always the same. I don't have to like my neighbor the same way I like my friend, but I do owe him my help. Here too "the face of the other" as Levinas, Arendt, and Butler write about comes to mind. There's an ethical demand. So much more from my friend, the face of the one I love. Yet how hard it is for people to join together. Just to make soup for one another in times of normality. We need crisis to care.

For many years I always had a fag hag. A bestie. (Now I am the fag hag.) Usually a straight woman who I let lead my life. Eventually, it stopped and became a variety of people, usually trans masc or gay men, who accompanied me as roommates/confidantes/codependents. It was like having a bestie. I rarely had a group. By the time Covid hit, the group dissolved because I was the only thing keeping it together and I fell apart. Ever since, I've been a loner and only occasionally had a few confidants. Mostly non-writers, mostly women. I miss having someone to go on walks with and talk all the time. Or to text about every little thing. I feel like Leslie Knope looking for a new best friend in "Galentine's Day" in Parks and Rec. Cringe reference. But I think it says something interesting about how past friendships can haunt us and form echoes.

I think now I am the fag hag rather than having one. I just recently watched Anatomy of Hell which really turns that concept on its head.

KW: Yes!!! Actually! WHERE are the friendship novels? It's insane to me that friendship as an idea is so relegated to children's and YA fiction, again that idea of a pre-sexiness, an age-appropriate relationship that is outgrown and replaced with love as the key totalizing force. One friendship of mine had a mutual romantic/erotic undercurrent (if unfulfilled) and I wondered extensively whether it would be possible to subsume those feelings into a stronger friendship, which, yes, it took years, but ultimately this was successful because we both worked very, very hard at it. (I'm not entirely sure the platonic and erotic have to necessarily be separated in the first place, but the erotic has such precedence in understandings of intimacy...) And during that process, I was wondering a) where are the adult novels about friendship in general, and b) what strikes me about what novels there are is how the friendships are never mixed-gender. There are virtually no books about genuine friendships between women and men (to name the largest subset and it only gets worse from there) that don't end up with them being together in some way. The only recent one that came to mind was Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow which, not to be mean, felt like a YA novel for adults. One book I return a lot to is Scholem's Walter Benjamin - the way Scholem talks about Benjamin in that book is such an extraordinary demonstration of the love of friendship. This mix of pursuing, disappointment, unknowing, forgiveness, love, admiration, and ultimately, grief.

For me friendship was similar - one companion for a short period of time, very intense, almost co-dependent, and then because I was in my early 20s, they would move away or find a partner. Like you, curiously, most of my friends were also men, queer and not. Now they're pretty mixed. I think I've been the mother and half-girlfriend to a million men over the years, so now I structure my friendships with men differently from the beginning. Groups, too, had fickle dynamics. The reason mine works I think (and I hate to say it) is because most of the people have been in very long-term partnerships and have already been friends for over a decade. For me, also, there was always this longing to have a non-romantic companion, especially when I was little. Now I try really hard to maintain my friendships, to make them companionable, even when from afar. You can always text me about every little thing. I love texting!! And writing and reading these letters!!!

Definitely something I want to explore is exactly what you talk about here - friendship as something that in part is contra to the family. I don't like the rhetoric of the "found family" that so often permeates queer discourse because I don't want my friends to be my family. Within friendship is the agency of choice aided by maintenance and care. And what you said about community is there too - the social contract, the obligation we have to other people. "We need crisis to care" is such a brilliant observation. But what about right now where all there is, all there seems to be is crisis? Is this not the best time to reimagine care itself, to undo some of those wicked problems of social reproduction, even if it is only in the small scale between two people? And then beyond? Community, I will say, becomes harder when people can no longer afford to live near each other. Much was said in the 90s about the ghettoization of queer people, but now, as spatial politics become some of the most fraught, as the rents get higher, as people paradoxically depend on community more while being driven out of it, physically, it creates an almost impossible tension. This I tried to explore in my queer spaces piece, which was me finding out the hard way that coming out was the hard part. There wasn't an automatic community there. It has to be created and maintained - equally between the members - and when that's successful enough there are spatial ramifications, the birth of new places, that change even more lives. But the image of community, the aesthetics of community can be misleading. Community becomes a brand. Lockheed Martin at pride, or in my case, the gay bar full of Hillary staffers.

Also I've been thinking about this dichotomy of friendship and family as a way of working through the problem of heteropessimism, especially in literature where it is surprisingly trenchant in writers like Heti and Cusk (maybe also Cline, but more subtly). (I finished Intermezzo and feel like, especially with a character like Ivan, Rooney attracts heat partly because she's frankly a hetero-optimist in a heteropessimist climate.) I've always found heteropessimism uninspired because it relies on a foundation of gender essentialism. Women are perfect and sweet victims and men are cruel and inherently bad and that patriarchy is inevitable and so the solution is to withdraw. Femceldom. (This is a poison pill in bisexual discourse in particular. If men are inherently evil, why ever choose them besides comphet? But many would be lying to themselves if they said they chose men solely for comphet reasons. I certainly didn't.) The heteropessimist argument is not convincing to me, because cisheteropatriarchy is a system (actually intersecting systems) and people have agency to not only live differently (which is why heteropessimists are so jealous of queer people) but have the collective obligation to abolish these systems which do harm to everyone. Feminism of all stripes is also a praxis. Even in terms of internal reflection, it can have enormous impact. Heteropessimism also relies on a view of the world where the couple, the marriage, the family is still the end goal of social and spiritual satisfaction, the idea of completion via romantic love. Instead of interrogating why coupledom is so unsatisfying, there is an overwhelming preference for rejection. However, there is nothing heteropessimistic about friendship. I love Sophie Lewis' work. Along with Federici and de Beauvoir, she's totally scrambled my view of the world in a good way. I remember seeing Lewis speak at Left Forum in I think 2017, and it's crazy to me how opposed to her ideas people are, even people on the left. And if you grow up a certain way most of us do, they really are anathema. It's the same thing people say about socialism. "Must be nice but it's just not possible." Curious to hear your thoughts about this especially since we were texting about Heti earlier. And about how it's all connected - friendship, queerness, family abolition. The nice thing about family abolition is that it's so radical no one is aping to co-opt it, haha.

GB: The novel of the friend! It would be necessarily a novel of ideas. So Benjamin makes sense to me. His friend is so often history. Maps. Long-gone memories. Sigrid Nunez canonically wrote both The Friend and Where Are You Going, both were adapted into films at NYFF this year. I only saw the latter, The Room Next Door with Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore a film certainly about friendship. But at a tilt. What do morals mean in the face of a friendship--can you sketch out new morals together?

Broad City ironically is also a text about friendship in my mind as well as Girls, the HBO show. Friends, the sitcom, is, ironically not about friendship. Not really. It’s about coupling up. I've yet to read Derrida on friendship but there's also that great Montaigne essay. Clare Sestanovich's Ask Me Again is about a boy and girl who don't date and are friends but also---are they friends? I'm not so sure. They Call It Love by Alva Gotby, Radical Intimacy, and “White Glasses” by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Casey Plett's On Community. But so many of these books and essays only skate over the idea of friendship. And again, I think community/family abolition are both different than friendship. Friendship is, like you say, a choice. A contract based on mutual joy and delight. That doesn't mean it’s always delightful, but that it contains both bread and roses. Not one alone. And you're right both friendship and community require maintenance. Fighting gentrification, in one small way, is learning your neighbor's name. I was listening to some anti-rent folks talk and they said that a woman knew she was ready to organize when she felt comfortable asking her neighbor for an onion.

KW: I was against second-wave feminism forever, in part because it got hijacked by TERFs and in part because the Marxist feminists hated it. However, in reading Dworkin recently, I find myself extremely sympathetic to a lot of her opinions in a way I didn't expect to. We texted about this a little, but I'm more open to Intercourse after sexual harm was committed against me. I think if that didn't happen to me I would have a different and more conservative worldview, I'm sorry to say and I know it's a problematic thing to say. There's something almost forgiving about reading Dworkin, to just acknowledge in this really raw way the way men hurt women, physically, sexually, systemically and it's not (seemingly) materially rooted, it's almost senseless, the hatred they have, the entitlement. The common reduction of Dworkin's ideas to "all sex is rape" sounds ludicrous until one is raped, until that fundamental agency is taken away and sex is never again the same because it has been remade, unmade. I'm not even sure how much of Dworkin I agree with! Or how to reconcile her work with social reproduction theory. I actually have a really hard time with it. Her work on porn I'm even more ambivalent about.

As for the feminist critic, she's needed now more than ever. We are living in profoundly anti-feminist times, between the pushback against Me Too and the rightward turn of young men, the ascendant fascism with all its misogynistic trappings, eating disorder chich revivalism and the end of body positivity, the assault on bodily autonomy...after so many years of progress and broader acceptance especially of queer people and concepts - the backlash feels absolutely fucking terrible. The "feminism" that's been hijacked now is so piecemeal, diluted, and liberal that it's barely recognizable as feminism. Even the old liberal tactics used to cape for Hillary aren't working anymore re Kamala. You're not even seeing a lot of "first female president" type rhetoric in her campaign. I don't get an opportunity to write often about feminism in my work but I've felt more and more the urge to tackle this culture we're in now, if only out of sheer hate. When you showed me that Judy Chicago painting all I could think about was the Ballerina farm woman who was forced by her husband to give birth seven times at home without an epidural. Would love to see more of what you're thinking about this, especially because I feel like I'm all raw emotion about it and haven't really consolidated my thoughts. I think the feminist critic has to survive, otherwise I don't even want to be a critic.

GB: Have you read Jamie Hood's “Fucking Like a Housewife” or its sequel essay? I think those are both interesting texts on hetero-optimism in this weird way, in addition to Sally Rooney. Or at least making space for heterosexuality as a field of study without diminishing it to good/bad dichotomies. I have mostly been in relationships with men, so I find any room to navigate as something important to work through. I think we're in a moment where writers are interested in writing towards making straightness whole. (An irony itself.) I think even Dworkin in Intercourse was working toward what would it mean to have good, fulfilling, non-patriarchal, non-phallocentric sex. Where is pleasure? Where is mutual co-ordination? "Show me emotional respect," Bjork sings on Vulnicura—her work too is about ecstatic heterosexuality.

I think this feeds into our discussion about the feminist critic. Who is she? Who will take on the mantel? There's a lot of infighting in the field right now too. About TERFs, SWERFs, Palestine, heterosexuality, Dworkin, historical materialism, and power consolidation. You have a lot of critics breaking ground---Sophie Lewis, Joy James, Moira Donegan, Hazel V Carby, Melissa Gira-Grant, Amia Srinivasan, Hannah Zeavin, Jacqueline Rose, Andrea Long Chu, Tiana Reid, some of the foremost minds writing about feminism today. I think it's there but for every major voice, there are many being held back by a lack of resources or being siloed into indie magazines. That's something we were texting about---the way radical voices--especially I would argue critics who are trans and people of color--are being forced to write only about their identity and only for smaller magazines. That's less pay, less incentive, less readers. That's hard on the overall ecosystem of criticism. It means less room. It means less people at the table. Imagine Judy Chicago's Dinner Party but for feminist critics. Because of the current inequality, I think that table would unfortunately look pretty homogenous. Not because those other voices don't exist but because they don't always get resources. Their books don't get much coverage. Pluto and Haymarket have great books coming out but so often their books don't get enough coverage. To your point about Sally Rooney, what if more people reviewed these radical books? I think editors are afraid. I think taking chances in our conservative moment is costly. But we should be taking those chances. I admire Parapraxis a lot for this reason--they've dedicated a lot of print space to Palestinian, Black, and trans voices who are thinking through politics, culture, psychoanalysis, and history. Our current return to Freud seems to have many hallways. Obviously the work of Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell set that up.

Did you read the Track Changes: An Art Criticism Handbook by N+1? It had some thoughts on this, on feminist art criticism. I admire Jeanne Vaccaro's work in this realm. I think she's someone both as a curator and writer, she was my professor briefly long ago, who I think is thinking through Second Wave Feminism, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and form in an interesting way. Material analysis can be very feminist I think. I'm also, in reading Jameson, aware of how thinking dialectically can be many things at once---Marxist, feminist, analytic.

I hope there is some feminism inherent in what I do. For a long time I wondered what was the point? Could something that had been so rotted by SWERFs, TERFs, nationalists, racists, and Zionists be preserved? Could we take the beginnings and forget the way Suffragettes were not all abolitionists? Of course, there is abolition feminism, Womanism, Black feminism, trans feminism...Still, I often wonder what those reclamations mean in relation to the discipline's history. But then I read something by one of the above critics and I think a-ha. Yes. We can and should continue. We must have a feminist critique of Kamala Harris, we must have a feminist critique of The Substance. The eternal recurrence of misogyny is in full force now. It's on X all the time. Neither feminism nor trad life are biologically inherent.

KW: I think about this kind of thing all the time because I've been with the same man for almost a decade now and it's like the answer has to be bigger than just having "gotten lucky" and having found "one of the good ones" as though it were a matter of fallibility rather than practice, resocialization, choice, agency. One can't rely on love or luck alone. Lots of men who called themselves feminists loved me. They used love and rhetoric to obscure action. Perhaps they weren't even aware of it. Being raped made me think differently about sex. By robbing me of my agency it made me realize I was freely giving it away.

There is a liberatory potential, always, in sex. I think that's an important thing to take away from Intercourse which is such an often parodied book. There is something still liberatory in the idea of non-phallocentric sex which many people see as juvenile vis a vis real sex in the same way people see friendship as juvenile vis a vis romantic love. Those intuitive, exploratory instincts we feel in adolescence somehow cannot be returned to, even though they are human and beautiful. It's something I get very sentimental about, actually, maybe off the record. At any rate, Heteropessimism treats heterosexuality as a kind of original sin, in which a kind of atonement is theoretically possible. It squares with the Sally Rooney stuff and Emmeline [Clein]'s essay, which also touched on these themes. What would it take to make straightness whole?