Love and Degradation

In this provocative and intensely personal new book of essays about love and language, desire and drama, reminiscence, change, and fandom, William J. Simmons takes up Eve Sedgwick’s reparative reading as a challenge to empirical and taxonomical approaches to art, music, and film and instead promotes new ways of discussing them that create community and empathy rather than hierarchies. Specifically, Simmons advocates for incorporating memoir, history, theory, poetry, and even “the cringey admissions of a fanboy” into criticism.

Love and Degradation argues for queer feminism’s value to reading and thinking about works by creators as varied as Lana Del Rey, Charlotte Brontë, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and filmmaker Steve McQueen. It also includes essays on Glenn Ligon, Barbara Kruger, and Kristen Stewart. In essence, the essays in this volume represent a series of the author’s “saviors, obsessions, and losses.”

A compelling read for students and scholars of art history, queer and gender studies, creative writing, and the study of film, television, and pop culture, this book encourages readers to embrace fandom and raises important questions about the state of queer and feminist discourse.

“A thought-provoking analysis that uses art to challenge readers to dig deeper.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Simmons’s Love and Degradation is a must-read for those of us engaged in examining art, literature, and pop culture through the lens of queer and feminist theory. His writing is engagingly and deeply personal.”—Joey Soloway, artist, activist, TV/film producer

“Simmons seamlessly blends analysis of queer and feminist art with autobiography—the result is incandescent, intimate, and vulnerable. Whether his object of contemplation is art, literature, cinema, or gossip, Simmons positions himself as one of our most expansive and perceptive critics and thinkers.”—Emily Wells, author of A Matter of Appearance

William J. Simmons is a writer based in the Santa Clarita Valley. He is the author of Queer Formalism: The Return.

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Leaving Calabasas

1. The Presumption of Light: On Toyin Ojih Odutola’s The Treatment

2. Normative Desire / Narrative Desire and the Production of Love in Villette

3. Bad Feminism: On Queer-Feminist Relatability and the Production of Truth in Fleabag

4. Glenn Ligon’s Untitled (Negro Sunshine): Toward a Queer Theory of Post-Critique

5. “Banality Is Sometimes Striking”: On Felix Gonzalez-Torres

6. On Affect and Criticality in Steve McQueen’s Widows

7. A Paucity of Words (for Kristin Scott Thomas)

8. Borderline Personality Disorder in Spencer (for Stankie)

9. Love and the Paraliterary: On Barbara Kruger’s Picture/Readings

10. Deborah Kass: Teenage Dream

Conclusion: There Is Only Love / Queerness Is Dead / You Said You Needed Space

Notes

Index

Introduction

Art History & Architecture

           Modern and Contemporary

           Art Theory & Criticism

Biography & Memoir

Gender Studies

Film & TV Criticism

           LGBTQ studies