I Wanted Black Skates: Gender, Cash, Pleasure, and the Politics of Criticism

Abstract

One of my favorite models for critical writing is the 1994 book Her Tongue on My Theory: Images, Essays, Fantasies by members of the dyke art collective Kiss and Tell. In the book, they set out to address a situation they encoun tered as writers that many people also encounter as readers: the frequently vexed relation between and analytic writing, even is an ingredient of the subject under consideration. As they explain in their introduction, their art revels in taking sexual analysis and sexual and mix[ing] them up. Yet even so, they discovered, lust increasingly dis appeared from their discussions as they worked on the book, which began as a series of critical essays about sex, representation, and politics. essay format, they write, didn't seem to leave much room for indulging in un redeemed pleasure. In response, they wrote sex stories that run across the bottom of the essay pages. The book also features images that not illus trate the stories or the essays, but run parallel to them, questioning the same issues of erotic representation, narrative, literal meaning, and censorship.1 I love this book partly just for naming what the authors term unre deemed pleasure as a valued component of critical work and the lives of people who pursue it. For reasons too numerous and too contingent on context to elaborate here, embracing pleasures—especially but not only bodily pleasures—that do not readily appear to advance a higher pur pose is often considered suspect, both outside and within academic circles. It across as shallow, lazy, duped, dangerous, and/or merely insuffi cient in theorizations ranging from Dear Abby, which counseled recently that when something feels good, it is easy to become addicted ... and then you'll be in for a world of pain, to academic classics like Roland Barthes's Pleasure of the Text, in which satisfaction makes pleasure, which, for him, comes from culture and does not break with it, a rather super ficial penultimate of the loss-imposing bliss.2