Thomas Fink reviews I'M THE MAN WHO LOVES YOU

Curious about the rabbit hole that is my new book? Thomas Fink does some investigative reviewing over at Galatea Resurrects and finds a few more tunnels than predicted — in possibly one of his longest reviews yet! Even I’m still processing …

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Clips:

” … Does King utilize the poetic persona of a man who loves either another man or a woman? And how can we be so sure that ‘love’ signifies sexual love? ‘I’m the male father who loves you, my son or daughter’; ‘I’m the male mother (!) who loves you’; ‘I’m the son/male daughter who loves you, my mother or father’; ‘I’m the brother/male sister who loves you,’ etc…”

“…Perhaps King articulates respect for the integrity of the gap as it eludes assimilation into a narrative that defines, places, domesticates, and subordinates ‘qualities’ of absence to a presence that would presume to master desire. Another reading could be spun off the idea that ‘hole’ is a trope for the irreducibility of death, which always shadows ‘love,’ ‘loving,’ ‘fucking,’ spontaneity, etc…”

“…The phrase ‘crossover dress’ presents a particular social choice while simultaneously including a very legible trace of its opposite. If ‘we were meant’ to cater to a majority to gain popularity, ‘we’ could also defy mainstream authority with sartorial gender-bending. However, haven’t mass media and consumer culture already contextualized cross-dressing in ways that make it ‘cross over’ into normative cultural institutions, where oppositional possibilities are blunted? …”

“…Whether the ‘next apocalypse’ is a personal, interpersonal, or political crisis, it is debilitating enough that people may not want to take on the added burden of admitting to themselves that they are not ‘privately/ perfectly satisfied.’ However, sexual ‘restlessness’ becomes a symptom that is hard to ignore. King’s concluding line places her two slipperiest signifiers, ‘love’ and ‘hole,’ each of whose different possible meanings can be regarded as ‘inaccurately reconcilable,’ into the possibility of a reconciliation that lacks accuracy (’truth’ transcending ‘fictions’ of self- and other-fashioning) but, at least sometimes, ‘it must give pleasure,’ to re-cite Wallace Stevens …”

–from Galatea Resurrects by Thomas Fink

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