I Love Dick Is Just What It Sounds Like: New at Reason

I Love Dick, the TV show based on Chris Kraus’ novel, is full of laugh-out-loud burlesque.

Glenn Gavin writes:

The popularity of Chris Kraus among feminists has always eluded me. For 20 years now, she has been writing novels in which thinly disguised—and often not disguised at all—versions of herself endure serial humiliations as they pursue somewhat unpleasant and utterly uninterested men, frequently with her husband Sylvère Lotringer acting as a sort of cheerleader.

There’s considerable doubt about how much of this is true—Kraus labels her works novels, rejects the description of them as “confessional,” and adds, without clarification that “life is not personal.” But the title character of I Love Dick, the 1997 novel that started everything, a UC-Santa Barbara cultural critic named Dick Hebdige, found it close enough to reality that he sued.

What’s not in doubt is that Kraus’ character is so heedless of degradation in her sexual charges of the Light Brigade that literary critics almost inevitably invoke the term “female abnegation” in describing her. I myself prefer the term “marching boldly into self-abasement” used in the introduction to I Love Dick.

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