From Philosopher's Wife to Feminist Autotheorist: Performing Phallic Mimesis as Parody in Chris Kraus's I Love Dick

Abstract

From Philosopher's Wife to Feminist Autotheorist:Performing Phallic Mimesis as Parody in Chris Kraus's I Love Dick Lauren Fournier (bio) I just knew in a quiet way I was ruined. If I agreed to be female. Eileen Myles Foreword to Chris Kraus's I Love Dick Chris kraus's I Love Dick (1997) is a polarizing, genre-blurring book of contemporary feminist literature that continues to perplex and thrill readers with its weird modes of articulation. Brassily sharp yet self-consciously complicit in her critiques of theory and the art world, the protagonist Chris Kraus is a barely-fictionalized version of the author who writes through the end of her marriage to her then-husband Sylvere Lotringer-the French-American cultural critic and founding editor of Semiotext(e) press. The plot of I Love Dick centres around Kraus's obsession with a man named Dick, a British writer and theorist whom she meets in the opening pages through Lotringer, but the book is not so much driven by plot as it is by political and discursive issues related to contemporary theory, art, writing, and feminism. Over the course of the book, Kraus pens self-reflexive letters to Dick (who she names her "ideal reader" [Dick 130]) about her coming-of-age as a woman and aspiring artist in an academic art scene [End Page 23] where her husband thrives, interpellating Dick as a phallic cipher for all her desires and frustrations. The resurgence of interest in I Love Dick over the last five years is due in part to its prescient moves around public shame and blame that resonate with present-day feminist movements like #TimesUp and #MeToo. Kraus's I Love Dick shares with fourth-wave feminists the strategy of disclosure, or the "outing" of bad behaviour of known, named men as a means of resisting sexual harassment and rape culture. A large part of Kraus's critical practice is taking issue with specific theorists and their lived actions, drawing attention to contradictions and hypocrisies between rhetoric and practice. Whether it is French poststructuralist men like Guattari excluding women from their anthologies of theory (Dick 227) or whether it is a revered professor and academic behaving in sexually inappropriate ways with students, Kraus does not hesitate to call specific people out. In the case of the latter, it is Richard Schechner, the founder and theorist of the discipline now known as Performance Studies, who Kraus "outs" for sexual misconduct with female students (173). In 2016, just one year after American writer Maggie Nelson's similarly genre-defying The Argonauts popularized the term "autotheory"1 as a form of critical memoir, writer and director Jill Soloway extended I Love Dick's reach to Hollywood with her on-screen adaptation of Kraus's book as an Amazon series in which Kathryn Hahn played Kraus and Kevin Bacon played the titular "Dick." The one-season show was shot on location in Marfa, Texas—the home of Soloway's then-partner, poet Eileen Myles, whose 1991 Not Me was published by Kraus through Semiotext(e) sub-press Native Agents. Such entwined relations mirror the reflexively incestuous ties that constitute a certain scene of alternative American theory, literature, and criticism embodied by Semiotext(e)—a point Kraus astutely hones in on with I Love Dick—her first major published work. Working comedically, Kraus uses the strategic tactic of mimesis to subvert the unchecked gendered biases undergirding continental philosophy, French poststructuralism, and American literature. In this article, I read Chris Kraus's I Love Dick as a particularly clear example of the autotheoretical impulse in contemporary feminist practices. I consider how Kraus performatively engages with the male-authored traditions of theory from the perspective of a critically adept, postpunk, Jewish feminist living in America near the end of the twentieth century. Kraus's use of mimesis, as an iterative, transformative moment that takes [End Page 24] place over the course of her autotheoretical cult classic I Love Dick, is deeply resonant with Luce Irigaray's thesis on mimesis that she espouses in relation to the role of the philosopher's wife (This Sex Which is Not One 151). Through close readings of...