Reflections on Virginie Despentes's King Kong Theory in Relation to Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts

 

Virginie Despentes: King Kong Theory 

Cover of the FSG Originals edition (2021) 

 

I write from the realms of the ugly, for the ugly, the frigid, the unfucked 

and the unfuckables, all those excluded from the great meat market of female flesh, 

and for all those guys who don't want to be protectors, for those who 

are not ambitious, competitive, or well-endowed. [1]

 

 

I. 

 

I have to confess, I don't know a great deal about the French writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes, other than that she likes to explore themes of gender, sexuality, and marginalisation and that her work is often labelled transgressive (i.e., that those marketing her books and movies want you to believe they have a certain edgy vibe). 

 

Probably her most famous fictional work is the 1993 novel Baise-moi, which she adapted for film in 2000. Because of its graphic mix of violence and explicit sex scenes, the movie received extensive media coverage - but not great reviews. It is sometimes considered an example of what critics like to refer to as the New French Extremity [2]. 

 

I'm afraid that when I come across any writing which seems to thrill with graphic depictions of rape and murder, I can't help recalling Lawrence's letter to Aldous Huxley in which he warned how this ultimately results in a feeling of profound boredom [3]. 

 

Still, that's just me - and I doubt very much I'm the target audience for this enfant terrible of French cinema and the literary world. 

 

 

II. 

  

When not writing fiction or directing films, Despentes produces cultural theory and feminist philosophy from a radical pro-sex and post-punk perspective. 

 

Her most famous contribution to such is the wonderfully titled 2006 book King Kong Theory - a work which, like Baise-moi, was shaped by her (not particularly pleasant) experiences as a teenaged hitchhiker and groupie and then, later, as a prostitute working in peep shows and massage parlours and walking the streets in low-cut tops and high-heeled shoes, not giving a shit about what people thought of her [4]. 

 

For Despentes, being gang-raped was the price she had to pay for living with total freedom: or living like a man, as she put it [5]. 

 

Or a giant gorilla ...   

 

 

III.  

 

In King Kong Theory, Despentes explicitly informs her readers early on that she is more King Kong than Kate Moss, by which she means "too aggressive, too loud, too fat, too brutish, too hairy, always too mannish" [6] to pass as a waifish and fashionable model of womanhood. 

 

Later, she expands on what it is to be a King Kong Girl: essentially, it's to be transgender and to trouble all binary distinctions; not just male and female, but also human and animal, primitive and civilised, good and evil. 

 

To become King Kong is not just to have an enormous appetite for bananas and destruction, but to realise one's potential for ultra-powerful, polymorphic sexuality and escape the confines of femininity (which she equates with bootlicking and the art of servility). 

 

Arguably, King Kong Theory owes a good deal to a number of earlier works, including Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto (1968). But it reminds me also of a more recent book, namely, Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (2015) and I thought it might be interesting to briefly compare and contrast these three texts ...

 

 

IV.  

 

With its use of aggressive, non-academic, and visceral language to critique patriarchal structures, sexual violence, and societal hierarchies, Virginie Despentes's King Kong Theory is most comparable to Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto. 

 

Both writers position themselves in the margins and address those excluded from conventional definitions of womanhood, respectability, or desirability. And both authors wilfully court controversy and reject mainstream feminist assimilation, opting instead to shock the reader into a new awareness of gender power dynamics. 

 

However, in terms of their political ideology, they diverge significantly: whereas SCUM girls seek the destruction of society and the elimination of men, King Kong Girls don't subscribe to such a separatist (and androcidal) revolutionary model. 

 

They seek only their own survival and autonomy whilst holding to the hope of building new relationships in a trans-future which liberates both men and women from the current forced masquerade of gender. For Despentes, feminism is ultimately a collective adventure. 

 

I think Despentes is a little less crazy than Solanas - she isn't going to shoot anyone (even if she promises to provide a gun for every girl) and King Kong Theory is rooted more in sincere personal memoir (with its mix of trauma and vulnerability) than razor sharp political satire. 

 

Ultimately, this makes it much less fun to read than SCUM, although, for those who like the kind of confessional writing (or autotheory) peddled by Despentes, King Kong Theory is more moving on a human level. 

 

And it is precisely this shift toward the deeply personal, structurally fluid world of autotheory that brings me to Maggie Nelson ...        

 

 

V.

 

By Nelson's own account, King Kong Theory was a direct inspiration on her book The Argonauts [7]. 

 

Both books are a very skilful blend of deeply personal memoir and critical theory used to dissolve traditional ideas - including mainstream feminist ideas - about gender, sex, and societal expectations and both writers refuse to separate the ideological from the biological. 

 

Thus, it is that their philosophical thinking is rooted in the messy reality of their own bodies, sex lives, and personal histories (interestingly, both authors identified as lesbians, but both became romantically involved with women who then transitioned to men) [8]. 

 

Despite sharing certain foundational similarities, there are contrasting structural differences between King Kong Theory and The Argonauts and their tone and style are very different. I wouldn't necessarily say that Nelson is the more gifted writer, but she's definitely the more lyrical and coolly analytic; less punk, perhaps, but more poetic and intellectual. 

 

Personally, as much as I like Despentes's use of a monstrous metaphor - King Kong - to describe polymorphic sexuality and a non-heteronormative way of being in the world, I think Nelson's mythological metaphor (borrowed from Roland Barthes) - the Argonauts' ship - is not only more subtle and sophisticated, but more useful for thinking about the continually changing nature of queer identity. 

 

In sum: Despentes's King Kong Theory is probably closer in anger and attitude to Solanas's Scum Manifesto than to Nelson's The Argonauts. But in as much as King Kong Theory blends personal memoir with gender theory and addresses queer marginalized lived experience, you'd have to say that it anticipates the latter work more than it recalls the former.  

 

 

VI.

 

A friend of mine asked which of the three books I would recommend for her fourteen-year-old daughter - which is a tricky question to answer. 

 

Liberal-minded people doubtless wouldn't hesitate to suggest The Argonauts as the most age-appropriate work and there is a lot to argue in favour of this. 

 

Maggie Nelson's book is a thoughtful, beautifully written piece of autotheory and for a teenager growing up in today's world, it offers a nuanced, empathetic, and highly relevant look at how we construct our identities and relationships. Whilst rich in fairly complex ideas, The Argonauts remains grounded in a real-world domestic situation and is written (for want of another word) with love [9]. 

 

However, I'm not particularly liberal-minded and always feel instinctively drawn to that which is inappropriate ... 

 

And so I think I'd probably go with the SCUM Manifesto - even at the risk that this might be misinterpreted by a young mind and taken all-too-literally. King Kong Theory loses out simply on the grounds that I think it offers far fewer laughs and, ultimately, as Lawrence warned about obscenely graphic writing, it can become boring and a bit depressing after a while. 

 

And - to be perfectly honest - I'd rather my friend's daughter dreamed of becoming a thrill-seeking female intent on overthrowing governments, destroying the male sex, cracking jokes, and building a magical world rather than thinking about the grim reality of pornography, prostitution, and gang-rape.  

Ultimately, with its cynicism, nihilism, and dark humour I still think the SCUM Manifesto is more punk than King Kong Theory [10] - despite the gritty authenticity of the latter and its liberal use of expletives. 

  

Notes

 

[1] This is a composite quote from the opening section ('Bad Lieutenants') to Virginie Despentes's King Kong Theory, translated by Frank Wynne (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020). The original French edition, King Kong théorie, was published by Grasset in 2006. 

      Previous English-language editions, trans. Stéphanie Benson, were published by Serpent's Tail (2009) and The Feminist Press (2010). 

 

[2] As a noun, un baiser simply means a kiss. But as a verb, baiser means to fuck. And so Baise-moi is best translated in English as Fuck Me. In some markets, however, Despentes's film is known as Rape Me - a mistranslation with which she has expressed her displeasure in interviews.

      As for the term New French Extremity, this was first coined by critic James Quandt in 2004 in a piece complaining about the violent turn that French filmmaking appeared to have taken in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

 

[3] In a letter to Huxley written in October 1929, Lawrence writes: "If you can only palpitate to murder, suicide, and rape [...] however are we going to live [...] it becomes a phantasmal boredom and produces ultimately inertia [...] and final atrophy of the feelings." See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 600. 

 

[4] See the section 'Sleeping With the Enemy' in King Kong Theory where Despentes discusses her time as a sex worker. She claims one of the things she found most difficult about the job was dealing with the loneliness and vulnerability of the men who were her clients. She positively contrasts sex work with heterosexual relationships in which, as she puts it, women are fucked for free.

 

[5] That's maybe an unfair (reductive) characterisation of Despentes's position. 

      In the section of her book titled 'You Can't Rape a Woman Who's a Total Slut', Despentes recounts her experience of being gang-raped in 1986 at the age of seventeen, and explains how she has processed the experience since. 

      Her account and response is more nuanced than I imply. She notes, for example, how women who have been raped are socially encouraged to blame themselves and harbour feelings of guilt and shame for not resisting (this is, in fact, one of her central arguments). Despentes also suggests that female rape fantasies do not indicate an inherent desire for subjugation, but are the result of a patriarchal system that conflates female sexuality with powerlessness and oppression.  

      At the same time, however, it should be noted that Despentes famously rejects the status of dignified victim and this rejection is crucial to her punk-feminist philosophy in King Kong Theory. She will not feel shame and she will not be silent and prefers to assert angry agency rather than ask for pity (or even demand justice in the traditional legal sense). She explicitly claims that rape did not destroy or defeat her, even if it did permanently change her and lead to her wider political awakening.

 

[6] Virginie Despentes, King Kong Theory, trans. Frank Wynne (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020), p. 14. 

 

[7] Maggie Nelson generously provides a blurb for the Fitzcarraldo edition of King Kong Theory in which she writes: "I can think of almost no book I've enjoyed in recent years as much as King Kong Theory - in part for its content, in part for the ferocity of its style. [...] This book is a classic, and I'm grateful for it."

 

[8] Despentes dated Spanish philosopher Paul B. Preciado from 2005 to 2014; Maggie Nelson is married to the artist and writer Harry Dodge. The Argonauts largely chronicles their relationship and experiences with queer domesticity and family life. 

 

[9] I published a two-part post on Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts back in April 2025. To access part one of this post (on pp. 1-74 of the book), click here. There is a link to the second part of the post (pp. 75-180) at the end of part one. 

 

[10] For a recent post on Valerie Solanas's place in the punk imagination - with particular reference to the history of the Sex Pistols, click here.    

 

 

Bonus: Frank Wynne reads from Virginie Despentes's King Kong Theory (Fitzcarraldo, 2020 / FSG, 2021).

 

 

Notes on Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (Part 2: pp. 75-180)

Photo of Maggie Nelson by Jarrett Eakins (2013) 

alongside the cover of her book The Argonauts 

 (Graywolf Press, 2015)

 

 

Note: this post continues from part one (pp. 1-74) which can be accessed by clicking here.

 

 

I.

 

Performativity is a big part of being a writer, says Nelson, and I agree. 

 

But whereas she is keen to stress that this doesn't mean she isn't herself in her writing, or that her writing isn't somehow her - of course it's about me - I'm afraid that I do perform as a writer in a manner that might be branded "fraudulent or narcissistic or dangerous" [75] and which demonically dramatises the ways in which I am not myself, but always becoming-other. 

 

Of course, we should note that it's "easy to get juiced up about a concept like plurality or mutiplicity" [77], or becoming-other, and to use them so often that they become empty of any specificity; one doesn't wish to become like Freud, that is to say, intoxicated with "theoretical concepts that wilfully annihilate nuance" [85] or reality and fall into the white hole of idealism.

 

 

II.

 

Is homonormativity a "natural consequence of the decriminalization of homosexuality" [91]? I guess it probably is. 

 

And I can see how that might be a problem for outlaw fetishists like Bruce Benderson, who see homosexuality as an illicit "narrative of urban adventure" [91]; the chance to find pleasure via the breaking of laws. 

 

For once something is no longer "illicit, punishable, pathologized, or used as a lawful basis for raw discrimination or acts of violence, that phenomenon will no longer be abe to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe in the same way" [91].

 

So where's the (transgressive) fun? 

 

This is why, Nelson informs us, "nihilist pervs like painter Francis Bacon have gone so far to say that they wish that the death penalty was still the punishment for homosexuality" [91] - which is, perhaps, just one more reason why you've gotta love Franny B. 

 

Even Nelson concedes: "In the face of such a narrative, it's a comedown to wade through the planet-killing trash of a Pride parade ..." [91]. However, as she then goes on to say, the binary of normative/transgressive becomes unsustainable at last.

 

 

III.

This line obviously makes smile: "Basking in the punk allure of 'no future' won't suffice ..." [95] Is Nelson advocating an ideal of hope here à la Shep Fairey? [a]

 

And this line also also caught my eye when flicking through The Argonauts: "I find it more embarrassing than enraging to read Baudrillard ..." [98] Well, honestly, there are passages in her book that I find more embarrassing than liberating. 

 

Again, this might be due to my own uneasiness around certain subjects, including what Nelson delights in calling ass-fucking, but I can't help feeling that she suffers from what Lawrence terms the "yellow disease of dirt-lust" [b], confusing the flow of sex with the excrementary functions.

 

"In the really healthy human being", writes Lawrence, "the distinction between the two is instant, our profoundest instincts are perhaps our instincts of opposition beween the two flows.

      But in the degraded human being the deep instincts have gone dead, and then the two flows become identical. [...] Then sex is dirt and dirt is sex, and sexual excitement becomes a playing with dirt ..." [c] 

 

This might explain why Ms Nelson is not interested in "a hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphorics" [106] of her anus, but only interested in ass-fucking and the fact that "the human anus is one of the most innervated parts of the body" [106]. 

 

However, whilst recognising that "the anal cavity and the vagina canal lean on each other" [104], Nelson doesn't assert they are one and the same; what she suggests, rather, is that female sexuality is complex and diverse and not rooted in a single fixed location (and ultimately even Lady Chatterley takes it up the arse and discovers anal sex to be full of redemptive possibility [d]). 

 

IV.

I'm very sympathetic to Nelson's fear of assertion. 

 

Indeed, my writing, like hers, is riddled with "tics of uncertainty" [122]; words like perhaps and maybe, for example, as one attempts to "get out of 'totalizing' language; i.e., language that rides roughshod over specificity" [122] (although Barthes thinks it absurd to try and escape from language's inherently assertive nature by the use of such tics). 

 

V.

I'm also sympathetic to Nelson's (Deleuzian) view of herself as an empiricist; i.e., as a writer who aims to clarify rather than create per se, but who, in clarifying - and in dispelling myths of the eternal or universal - creates the conditions under which something new might be produced (see p. 128).  

  

 

VI.

 

How can deviant sexual activity and/or queerness "remain the marker of radicality" [137] in a pornified culture?  Precisely! 

 

Nelson sees the allure of "exchanging horniness for exhaustion" [138]; of turning to one's partner and asking: What are you doing after the orgy? [e] - but I doubt she'll ever dare whisper this in Harry's ear (even whilst recognising her right to fatigue).

 

 

VII.

 

Maggie may be embarrassed by Baudrillard, but she loves Barthes: particularly his book The Neutral (2007). 

 

And that makes me happy, because I love Barthes too and have recently published a post in gentle praise of this work [f] and of a concept which, "in the face of dogmatism, the menacing pressure to take sides, offers novel responses: to flee, to escape, to demur, to shift or refuse terms, to disengage, to turn away" [139-140].     

 

However, Nelson has also discovered that been born slippy like an otter isn't everything; that "studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure" [140]. 

 

Such as the pleasures of insisting and persisting, for example; and of making a commitment, sticking by what one has said previously, etc. I have to admit, however, that such pleasures continue to escape me and I shan't be singing 'Abide With Me' anytime soon.

 

   

Notes

 

[a] See the post of 6 Feb 2022 entitled 'The Rich Can Buy Soap' - click here. 

[b] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. Jaes T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 242.

 

[c] Ibid.

 

[d] See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), chapter XVI. According to Lawrence, when Connie allows her lover to anally penetrate her she is made a different woman; one free of shame who discovers her ultimate nakedness.

 

[e] The phrase 'after the orgy' is from an essay of this title by the philosopher Nelson finds embarrassing - Baudrillard - and can be found in The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (Verso, 1993), pp. 3-13. 

      The orgy in question was "the moment when modernity exploded on us, the moment of liberation in every sphere [...] an orgy of the real, the rational, the sexual, of criticism as of anti-criticism, of development as a crisis of development" [3]. 

      For Baudrillard, now everything has been liberated, all we can do is "simulate the orgy, simulate liberation" [3], and accelerate in a void. 

 

[f] See the post pubished on 1 April 2025: click here.   

 

Notes on Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (Part 1: pp. 1-74)

Cover of the Melville House edition 

(2016) [a]

 

 

I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: Maggie Nelson is one of those very rare individuals who probably deserves the title of genius; an original and insightful writer who produces work that is both lyrical and philosophical [b].

 

I still think she has an unfortunate tendency to overshare and give us just a little too much personal information, but that might just be me being a bit uptight and prudish [c]. And, for all the times when I want to look away from the page, there are many more occasions on which I'm grateful as a reader for her honesty, courage, and intelligence.  

 

And so, let's take a look at The Argonauts (pp. 1-74), but please note this is more a response to the lines or paragraphs that most resonate with me, rather than a review of the book as a whole (some aspects of which, even if central - such as sodomitical parenthood - I don't really care about [d]).  

 

 

I. 

 

Nelson tells us that before she met the great love of her life, the artist Harry Dodge, she had "spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein's idea that the inexpressible is contained - inexpressibly! - in the expressed" [3] [e]. 

 

It was this profound but paradoxical truth that enabled Nelson to keep her faith in language - words are good enough! - and continue writing. But then Dodge, "equally devoted to the conviction that words are not good enough" [4], obliged her to reconsider the matter; perhaps words were "corrosive to all that is good, all that is real, all that is flow" [4] and that to name is to kill; perhaps we can't conceptualise and articulate the world clearly (and non-destructively) after all.

However, I'm not sure that Nelson, as a writer and poet, ever quite accepts this; a little later she asks: "How can the words not be good enough?" [8].

 

 

II.

Nelson has always thought it a little romantic to allow "an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one" [10]. 

 

And I agree, it is romantic to just love Thelma, Alice, or Nicolas Poussin, rather than identifying oneself in terms of a fixed sexuality, although maybe that's easier for me to say than for someone who is (or has been) persecuted or discriminated against for their queerness; I don't have to worry about how certain pieces of legislation, such as Clause 28 or Prop 8, are going to impact on my life [f].

 

 

III.

 

This is very similar to how I feel and act when it comes to home improvements and domestic chores: I don't want to lift a finger "to better my surroundings" [14], or even keep things ship shape and Bristol fashion. I prefer to literally let things "fall apart all around" [14] and then, "when it gets to be too much" [14], just move on and flee the scene.   

 

IV. 

  

This is an undeniably correct observation (one that reminds me of something Baudrillard might have written, although Nelson credits the idea to Lacan, whose idea of the Real is not quite the same as the former's): 

 

"To align oneself with the real [...] can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis." [17]

 

In other words, whilst aligning with a real or natural identity can be a source of pride and pleasure, it can also bring with it a touch of horror and be impossible to sustain for 24/7; no one can be themselves all day every day, can they?

 

There have to be moments when we don't quite feel ourselves and we take a breather from reality. 

 

 

V.

 

I like the fact that Nelson doesn't just keep banging on about difference and otherness; the fact that she acknowledges that encountering sameness can also be important, "as it has to do with seeing reflected that which has been reviled" [31]. 

 

And this encounter with sameness can also allow self-discovery: "To devote yourself to someone else's pussy can be a means of devoting yourself to your own." [31]

 

And I suppose that matters; although not as much as the "shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy" [31] - the kind of sentence which one simply has to let pass when reading an author like Nelson, who passionately believes that there is "some evil shit in this world that needs fucking up" [33], such as the phallocratic order and capitalism, even if she has "come to understand revolutionary language" [33] as a mixture of fantasy and fetish. 

 

 

VI.

 

This is pure liberalism: "I support private, consensual groups of adults deciding to live together however they please" [37]. 

 

The problem is such groups don't live in a giggly bubble on the moon; they have neighbours and they belong to wider society and so their decisions and lifestyle choices invariably impact others. They also inhabit the planet with other species and, like Nelson, I think our relationship with animals and plants in sacred terms.     

 

 

VII.

 

"Even if women are consulting the same satellites, or reading from the same script: their reports are suspect ..." [47]

 

This remark about the perceived difference in reporting accuracy between male and female weather reporters is interesting. I'm not sure, however, that the reason for it is the one Nelson (and Luce Irigaray) imagine; i.e., that women are somehow removed as a sex from the language game that assures objective coherence and predictive ability.

 

But there does seem to be some sort of difference involved based on sex and a woman's greater attunement to her own body in relationship to the world; it's very rare that the Little Greek, for example, will say it's cold outside (giving reference to the air temperature), preferring instead to tell me she's feeling cold.  

So yes, it's a different (more subjective) way of articulating reality; but I don't think this is the result of patriarchal forces looking to silence women or discredit their weather reportage.

VIII.

 

I'm grateful to Nelson for mentioning the poet and literary scholar Michael Snediker (whom I didn't know of) and his book Queer Optimism (2008). For his critical examination of waxing lyrical - as summarised here - is one I find very interesting.

 

For there is something problematic (and irritating) - particularly to a working class sensibility - when writers indulge in histrionics. Even issues of "maximum complexity and gravity" [56] can be discussed without exaggerated language and overarching concepts which can sometimes negate the "specificities of the situation at hand" [56].

 

(This returns us to Wittgenstein and the idea of speaking plainly.)  

IX.

Is transitioning from one gender to another (or even just floating somewhere in-between) really the same as a becoming as Deleuze and Guattari understand it? 

 

I don't think so. But perhaps Nelson's reading of the above on this topic is superior to mine; more true to the radical spirit of everybody's favourite nomad philosophers and certainly she and Harry Dodge know more about gender, sexuality, and identity issues than I do. 

 

Thus, best perhaps that I say nothing further here: for I don't want to run the risk of being thought presumptuous or another comfortably cisgendered straight white male know-it-all, who has forgotten (or is yet to learn) that "the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality - or anything else, really - is to listen to what they tell you [...] without shellacking over their version of reality" [66].

 

But then, having said that, this sounds suspiciously like an attempt to silence those who don't care about personal truth and refuse to value lived experience above everything else.         

 

X.

On my first day at school, I cried when they pinned a name badge on me and tried to remove it (true story). Ten year later, I smiled when Poly Styrene informed her audience that identity was the crisis (having already seen that) [h]. 

Thus, like Nelson's professor of feminist theory, Christina Crosby, I would be mortified were a student - or anyone else - to hand me an index card and ask me to write on it how I identified and then pin it on my lapel. For like Crosby, I've "spent a lifetime complicating and deconstructing identity and teaching others to do the same ..." [73]  

 

Notes 

 

[a] The Argonauts was originally published in the United States by Graywolf Press, in 2015. The first UK edition, published by Melville House, followed in 2016, and it is this edition to which all page numbers given in the text refer.  

 

[b] In 2016, a year after the publication of The Argonauts, Nelson was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship; known to many as the genius grant. See the two-part post 'Heathen, Hedonistic, and Horny: Notes on Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009)' (5 Sept 2024): click here.   

[c] See the post 'Can a Writer Ever Overshare? On Maggie Nelson's Self-Exposure' (9 Sept 2024): click here. 

[d] I'm sure Nelson would say it's this indifference to parenting - particularly the maternal - that disqualifies me from being a feminist; see pp. 48-52 and the story of a seminar with Jane Gallop and Rosalind Krauss. Nelson stands with the former, but I have to admit, I'm slightly more sympathetic to the latter. 

 

[e] I don't want to split hairs - though some say that philosophy is nothing other than the endless splitting of hairs - but I'm not sure Wittgenstein quite said this. 

      What he said, rather, was that the inexpressible (i.e., that which can be shown and, aguably, that which mysteriously matters most) forms the background against which whatever we can express has its meaning. In other words, context - not containment - is the crucial word here. 

      See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 16. A revised edition of this work, ed. G. H. von Wright, was published by Blackwell in 1998.

 

[f] Like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, I want to use the word queer to include "all kinds of resistances and fracturings and mismatches that have little or nothing to do with sexual orientation" [35]. 

      On the other hand, one feels obliged to acknowledge historical and contemporary prohibitions aimed specificaly against those who identify as lesbian or gay, for example. As Nelson notes, this is kind of like wanting it both ways. 

      But then, there is "much to be learned from wanting something both ways" [36] and Nelson concedes that "annoying as it might be to hear a straight white guy" who is comfortably cisgendered talk about queerness, "in the end it's probably all for the better" [36].

 

[g] I'm referring to the single 'Identity' released by X-Ray Spex (EMI, July 1978): click here. 

Before heading to part two of this post - which can be accessed here -  readers might like to see an earlier post anticipating this one, entitled 'Argonauts' (26 Aug 2024): click here.