I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

           It isn’t every day that I read a book based on the BookTok hype, but I found myself intrigued by Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men. The hype is a little strange, given that the book was originally published thirty years ago. I suppose the renewed traction is the result of its new 2022 translation by Sophie Macintosh. It also turned out to be part of a pattern in my reading for 2025—novels about women in isolated situations.

I Who Have Never Known Men is a post-apocalyptic novel that offers more questions than answers. The novel’s protagonist is the youngest girl in a group of women who’ve been imprisoned in an underground bunker, continually surveilled by men with whips. The women were previously unknown to each other, don’t know how they got there, don’t know why they’re being monitored. It’s a world shrouded in mystery—and it might not even be our world; it’s heavily implied that they’re on a different planet entirely, which is a fun twist.

Our protagonist knows nothing of how the world was before and so is doubly othered. Like the other women, she can’t explain why things are the way they are. Unlike other women, she has no point of comparison. The conspiratorial nature of the book is presented early on and its ambiguity is one of the highlights of the text. In conversation with other women, the narrator is told, “No one has the slightest idea what’s behind all this. There isn’t the slightest clue. They rounded up the adults—you’re almost certainly here by accident. At first—well, not really at first, because there’s a period that remains hazy in everybody’s minds—but after that, from the time when our memories became clearer, we know we used to think all the time” (25). The mystery goes on: the men could have killed all the women or taken them away elsewhere, but the men don’t kill them. The interlocutor says, “your arrival would have brought news, and the one thing we are certain of is that they don’t want us to know anything. We came to the conclusion that they left you here because any decision can be analysed, and that their lack of decision indicated the only thing they wanted us to know, which is that we must know nothing” (25). There’s a perversity in the captors’ logic. Their calculated ambiguity disrupts all comprehension.

There’s a kind of relationship between knowledge and desire that emerges in the early chapters of the book. Following the conversation above, the protagonist notes that she “experienced a mild light-headedness which was rather pleasant. It reminded me vaguely of the eruption and I promised myself I’d see if I could work it into one of my stories” (25). She notes how “never had any of the women spoken to [her] at such length” and she “sensed that she’d passed on to me everything she knew” (25). There’s a kind of titillation in knowing things, in having secrets revealed. When she refers to “the eruption,” she alludes to a kind of early adolescent fantasy about one of the guards, a figure of knowledge-power (how Foucault!). That fantasy itself, also rendered ambiguous, is pretty twisted. It’s somewhere around Stockholm Syndrome but without the language to even describe her experience.

When the protagonist senses the importance of secrets, she dabbles in formulating her own. In her experiments, she reflects:

Andrea, who was the brightest of the women, immediately grasped that it wasn’t the actual content of the secret that mattered, but the fact that while living under the continual scrutiny of other women, it was possible to claim to have a secret and be believed. This seemed too complicated for the women to understand and they dismissed Anthea with a gesture of annoyance, demanding that the secret be prised from me. (18)

What I appreciate about Harpman’s approach is that she sets up early that the structure of the secret is what matters, not the content. The rest of the book breeds that paranoiac thinking. The key plot points in the book are secrets. Partway through the novel, the women all escape the bunker. With no explanation, the men are gone, the doors are open, and the women are free to go. They then wander what may or may not be Earth, unsure of whether they’ll ever find another refuge. The group does eventually find equally inexplicable bunkers: bunkers where the women have all died without being released, but then there are also bunkers of men, so the potential explanations fall apart. Later, the protagonist comes across a bus of deceased guards wearing gas masks and things—again, with no explanation offered. The secret prevails.

I forgot to mark off the passage, but there’s even a part about how questions keep her going. After questions, there are new questions, and those questions give us purpose. It’s interesting how Harpman brings together the idea of secrecy, desire, power, and purpose.

The other element that was most compelling to me philosophically was the idea of time. The narrator essentially invents time from scratch. She starts to measure her heartbeat, counting the regular rhythm of its beats. She then extrapolates to count minutes and hours. I have to say, it’s pretty unbelievable to think she would actually be able to keep track of time while doing other things. If I suspend my disbelief entirely, what I think is more interesting is that the earliest experiences the narrator tells us about are related to desire, secrecy, and then time, the lattermost being the one that starts to give meaning to experiences. Time is converted into a weapon—if she can measure time, she can plot against the guards. I find that a really engaging way of thinking through the fundamentals of being human.

Admittedly, it’s been several months since I actually read this book and I’m trying to catch up on my reviews now, but I did find there were several moving sequences. The book spans decades. As the women get older, the central character takes on the role of euthanizing them. Rather than succumbing to illness or disease, the main character stabs them through the heart, not having particular hang-ups about suicide (for example). It’s heartbreaking to watch as the women die one after the other. The relationships are ambiguously romantic and it’s painful to see the narrator lose the woman closest to her and to be left alone forever.

Overall, I’d say I quite enjoyed the book. Given how much the characters focus on what happened, I would have expected there to be answers, but that’s not how the world works. There’s a heartfulness to the book, even if the narrator sometimes comes across as cold. The plot is mysterious and its ambiguity is compelling. It’s a philosophic meditation that is as frustrating as it is moving. A lot of people really hyped this up as being a perfect book; I’m not sure that’s quite true, but I did like it. It’s worth the read.

Happy reading!

The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams

  I recently had the privilege to see the greatest band of all time—Propagandhi—two nights in a row. On both nights, they took a break from playing their recent album and went back to 1996 for two minutes to play their song “Apparently, I’m a ‘P.C. Fascist’ (Because I Care About Both Human and Non-Human Animals),” which (on their album Less Talk, More Rock) transitions into the song “Nailing Descartes to the Wall / (Liquid) Meat Is Still Murder.” When the music stops, there is a spoken word transition that everyone knew to sing along with at the concert: “Consider someone else. Stop consuming animals.”

While Propagandhi have been much less militant than their reputation from the 90s, singer Chris Hannah still took a moment to advertise the book Little Red Barns by Will Potter, which was for sale at their merch table, and advertised the message that “it’s never too late to learn about animal agriculture” and to make changes. It was a really affirming moment, especially since I had just finished The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams, which I believe to be a seminal text in the animal liberation movement.

I have a complicated relationship with meat in that I recognize the problems of consuming animal corpses and yet I still haven’t made the leap to being vegetarian or vegan. I have significantly reduced my consumption of meat and dairy from my younger years, but I’m still not there yet.

In this vein, I read The Sexual Politics of Meat, which is an account of how vegetarianism and feminism are part and parcel with one another. The feminization of animals and the animalization of women have occurred concurrently and have led to the devaluation of each. Adams’ argument hinges on what the opening paragraphs of this review already reveal: the “absent referent.” The absent referent is the idea that reality is displaced, hidden, or abstracted through a series of tactics. For example, we talk about beef, not animal corpse. We talk about pork instead of dead big. Through this concealment, people like me are able to continue eating meat, since it exists in the abstract.

I think what most surprised me about Adams’ argument is how much of it hinges on literary referents. She offers a review of feminist literature and highlights their long history of connection to animal liberation. She also documents the reactionary responses that strove to minimize or trivialize both women and animal activism. A particularly compelling part of the book is a reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The chapter-length analysis goes through the way that Victor Frankenstein’s creature is aligned with subalterns like women and animals, highlighting in particular the creature’s vegetarianism as an indicator of its status as a virtuous outsider.

Adams also goes through a number of ways that anti-vegetarian movements have tried to de-politicize the choice not to eat meat. For example, when abstaining from meat was reframed as a matter of health, it took away its fangs as a truly subversive act. Adams discusses the “history of distortion” that revises our cultural narrative so that, rather than seeing society as dysfunctional, we see individual people as dysfunctional. Within vegetarianism is a “critique of the dominant culture by attributing psychological motives rather than political motives” and society offers explanations “such as status displacement, the erosion of rural society, or a strong identification with pets” as “obvious attempts to eviscerate” those critiques and diminish “those who protest the activities of the dominant culture.” There’s a great quip from Nobel Laureate Isaach Bashevis Singer in response to people who say they became vegetarian for their health; he responds: “I do it for the health of the chickens.” I think it’s a great way to restore the subversiveness to the defanged claims of casual vegetarianism.

She continues on to note that “one way that the dominant culture avoids the radical critique of vegetarianism is by focusing on individuals who seem to disprove the claims of vegetarians.” She points to the fact that people refer to Hitler being a vegetarian (Adams notes that he was not) as a way of showing how the choice not to eat meat is disconnected from morality, politics, or ethics. I can’t possibly think of any contemporary examples of people (falsely) pointing to one exceptional example and building an entire case against a political movement. Not a’one.

In any case, Adam makes a compelling case against eating meat by exposing how women and animals have been conflated by the patriarchal system that offers them both up to consumption via the absent referent. As a work of literary criticism, there is a lot to discuss. As a work of social justice, there is a lot to discuss. As a seminal text of an ongoing discourse towards the liberation of all living beings, there is a lot to discuss.

Happy reading!

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

        Wordslut is such a fun book. Despite this being my first exposure to Amanda Montell, I can’t help but feel that her voice shines beautifully throughout the work. Her writing is lively, conversational, both-serious-and-not. There’s a real levity to her analysis that makes the book a truly entertaining read. It probably helps that she herself reads the audiobook and is really able to sell the tone.

At a glance, a number of the chapters come across as being silly. Consider, for example, the first chapter: “Slutty Skank Hoes and Nasty Dykes: A Comprehensive List of Gendered Insults I Hate (But Also Kind of Love?)”. Another chapter is “Cyclops, Panty Puppet, Bald-Headed Bastard (And 100+ Other Things to Call Your Genitalia)” and another is called “Fuck it: An Ode to Cursing While Female”. While these chapter titles give the impression of a crass-for-fun approach, there’s something more powerful happening throughout Wordslut.

The book is a sociolinguistic exploration of sex and gender. It’s told in such an approachable, personal way that it is a beautiful entry point for people thinking about language or gender studies. It’s corrective without being accusatory. It’s informative without being pedantic. One example is when Montell breaks down the class and race-based use of “y’all” and critiques the haters of this second person plural that makes language more clear than saying “you” to multiple people or “you guys” to people that don’t all identify as boys and men.

The book touches on a number of ideas around the misogyny embedded in language. Some of the ground has been covered before (for instance, doing a statistical analysis of how many derogatory words there are for women as opposed to men), but it is always done with a fresh set of eyes and empathy for the language users most often criticized (i.e. women, people of colour, and 2SLGBTQ+ folks).

To give a few examples, Montell discusses differences in communication between socialized women and men. She discusses phenomena like hedging the conversation, affirming comments, and so on, among women. Even the phrase “like,” disproportionately (and erroneously) attributed to valley girls, serves a valuable linguistic function. Montell even goes into detail on why “the gay voice” is a phenomenon. The book is progressive and, at every turn, Montell makes a case against prescriptive linguistics and for embracing the linguistic shifts that happen naturally as the English language develops.

A number of the specifics are fascinating, but it’s a little beyond my capacity to summarize all of the specific details. All I can really do is encourage you to read the book—and better yet, listen to the audiobook so that you can hear all the fun percussive curses that come from Montell’s mouth.

Happy reading!

Data Feminism by Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein

  Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein exists within a network of similar texts, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. The text operates in conversation with other books like Viral Justice by Ruha Benjamin, The Digital Closet by Alexander Monea, Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks, and Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble. Each of the texts deals with the way that technology impacts our relationship to sex, gender, race, and politics. Moreover, Data Feminism (like Automating Inequality) focuses on how data is used to manipulate real-world, tangible politics.

The unfortunate thing for D’Ignazio and Klein is that they are late to my reading party; I’ve already read several related books prior to their contribution to the discourse. As a result, a lot of the information presented here isn’t exactly new or revolutionary. Some of the examples are even pulled from texts I’ve already read and so it left me feeling a little bit lukewarm.

I thought some of the language they added into the conversation was valuable. First was the idea of “privilege hazard”---essentially that one’s entitlement in society creates dangers for others, often in the form of blind spots when collecting and presenting data. That term seems useful to me for conceptualizing oppression without it necessarily assigning a particular blame and without assigning a foregone conclusion. It’s a hazard—something to consider, but also something that can be avoided or minimized. Also, something that is a hazard to us even when it is unintended. On the cheekier side, D’Ignazio and Klein use the term Big Dick Data to describe a masculinized approach to data, and I thought that was an amusing characterization.

Another layer of the book I found compelling was their discussion of data visualization and the debates which surround it. Common opinion is to present data as being value-neutral and being presented in as clear and concise a manner as possible, without even icons to suggest emotion. However, as we know, data is never neutral. Even the decision of what to include is rooted in values. So, D’Ignazio and Klein discuss the idea of data sensationalism. They describe some interesting projects with how data gets presented. For example, they describe a death-by-gun-violence map blocking out entire sections of neighbourhoods or showing a tally of “stolen years” from children that have died by gun violence. They also talk about a presentation where people read the alphabetized names of all the artists in (if I remember correctly) the MET? The Smithsonian? MOMA? Anyway, they read the names out and it becomes a wave of Marks, Jasons, Jameses, Andrews, and so forth. It cascades like a wave and then every once in a while, there is a joyful insertion of a woman’s name and the presenters change their demeanour for that brief instant. It’s a way of presenting data in such a way that the implications are immediately obvious. Exploring those creative means of presenting data to give a particular point of view were especially interesting.

In any case, the book is pretty good, if not really ‘new for me’. If you’re exploring the discourse for the first time, it would be well worth it to start here.

Happy reading!

Utopia by Heidi Sopinka

“She’s driving a speed addict’s car in an inside-out shirt, on painkillers, with a hand wrapped in gauze, on her way to find her husband’s dead ex-wife. If she concentrates hard enough, these things will snap into a logical pattern” (146).

If you find these two sentences enticing, then you might be inclined to read Heidi Sopinka’s novel Utopia. In the first section of her novel, we are introduced to two central characters: Billy and Romy, conceptual artists in 1970s America. Billy is a successful artist, primarily by virtue of being male and stealing some of his best known works from Romy. Romy, meanwhile, is taking on ambitious experiential works about light and has a track record of projects that seem in conversation with real-life artist Marina Abramović. Romy has not been as successful and the reason is because she’s a woman. In the opening twenty pages or so of the book, we discover that Romy is a new mother to Billy’s child and we find them all at an artist party getting sloppily drunk. It is on that night that Romy falls to her death, and it’s never quite certain Billy is innocent of murdering her.

From there, we flash forward to Paz, another budding artist and Billy’s second wife. The novel then becomes a sort of inverted version of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, which Sopinka has the good sense to acknowledge directly. While Paz is in conversation with her friend, she starts the conversation, “Last night I dreamed —” and her friend interrupts, “That you went to Manderley again” (23). For those unfamiliar with the novel, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” and the novel’s unnamed narrator is haunted by the dead and perfect Rebecca. She feels she is forever in her shadow. Sopinka’s Paz goes through a similar experience, feeling overlooked for her art and by her partner, remembering Romy as an incredible force. As a result, she feels a sense of unreality hovering over her: “I dreamed, not for the first time, that I was in an apocalyptic wall of flames” (23). She then insists that her friend touch the table, and Essa tells her, “Nothing is wrong with this table.” Paz, in turn, “has an uneasy feeling that this does not feel like real life, exactly” (23). When Billy leaves for an exhibition elsewhere and leaves Paz alone at home with his daughter, combined with the fact that she finds Romy’s old diaries, is a perfect storm for her to descend into paranoid speculation and dissociative behaviours.

As the book progresses, Paz becomes less and less certain of herself and more resentful of the gender dynamics in her relationship. Here’s a passage after making love with Billy:

After, she looks over at Billy sleeping. How can he always sleep? She’s always flopping around like a fish that’s been caught. She sits on the bed holding her knees to her chest, wishing she still smoked. Her eyelids flicker. She’s taken a sleeping pill and is fighting it. The curtains move in the breeze and she gets up, hearing a little clicking noise that she follows downstairs, walking slowly. She sits on the couch, the sound of crickets loudly coming through the windows. After a few minutes she walks out onto the porch. In her half-sleep state, she thinks of him sleeping above. He gets to come and go, sleep with her, not give anything away. She lets it happen, but still she can’t help thinking how much power he has. He told her he was glad to be back, and she believed him. But what gets said in the middle of the night doesn’t matter. Daylight cancels everything, and you always have to start again. (114)

The passage captures that sleepy existentialism and morose midnight reflections I’m sure most people have experienced. Sopinka effectively captures that kind of hyperawareness that happens towards night. Paz’s restlessness is very true to life, and the final lines of the passage punctuate the scene really beautifully: “what gets said in the middle of the night doesn’t matter. Daylight cancels everything, and you always have to start again.”

So let’s start again. Utopia is, in some ways, two novels at once. On the one hand, it’s a thrilling and suspenseful mystery: what happened to Romy? On the other hand, it’s a kind of künstlerroman for Paz to discover who she is as an artist. In some ways, it matches the tonal register of Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi or Second Place by Rachel Cusk. It’s also like two novels in that it alternates between being tantalizingly uncertain and bludgeoningly direct.

Both of the registers have their merits, but I’m more inclined towards the mysterious, paranoid side of the equation. In that respect, the relationship between Paz and Romy is most effective. Paz lives in Romy’s shadow, who had lived in Billy’s shadow, and now finds herself obsessed with her husband’s dead wife. Paz cannot escape her jealousy when she finds Romy’s diary, but also must grapple with the guilt of having read it:

The next time she opened it, she found a thin notebook with pale-blue lines, writing of Romy’s detailing works in progress with a kind of murderous compression that verged on poetry. There was a scrap of paper wedged in as a bookmark that fell into her lap. Paz unfolded it. In Billy’s writing, it said ONLY YOU. Her stomach contracted. The words seemed to leap out at her, bringing a flush of jealousy, and then shame at herself for having looked at them. (25)

First of all, I like the characterization of Romy’s writing as “murderous compression that verged on poetry.” The terse note from Billy that says “ONLY YOU” is just the right phrase to inspire that jealousy in Paz; she is another, which is a serious problem for the circle of women artists that accuse Paz of stealing Romy’s life (including her work). Yet, in flashbacks we see that Romy and Paz seem to have their own special connection, opening up to each other in ways that they typically do not (despite Paz’s completely awkward fan-girling)..

In addition to the ambiguity of whether Paz is married to a murderer, Sopinka turns the screw further when Paz starts receiving postcards from Romy. Romy is supposed to dead, but is her death all a performance piece? There are a number of details that throw question on her death; supposedly only one person saw her body. She had also discussed plans for a big artistic project that takes place in the desert. These tidbits, along with the fact that postcards are arriving to Paz with succinct yet ominous messages, create a great dramatic tension. Is Paz part of a twisted game that Romy is playing? Will she emerge from the shadows to show that her death was all part of a performance piece? After all, she fell to her death and had already taken photos of ‘falling’ (which Billy stole and got credit for).

I opened with the passage of Paz driving into the desert. She accidentally severs her finger, and then drives into the desert to follow a lead on the postcard. Paz follows Romy’s footsteps, which again feels conceptual, and then discovers more and more clues before finding Romy’s final artistic project and sharing in communion with it. I won’t spoil more at this point, because that core mystery is finely wrought.

The other component of the book is a direct commentary on the art world that leaves no room for ambiguity. Setting the book in the 1970s is a smart move in that respect, and there’s a clear pattern of male artists getting away with all kind of misogyny while women are left debating how to make it in the art world. There are some hardline views and debate amongst the women, who at times cannibalize one another and at others try to challenge the fundamentally competitive nature of a patriarchal art world.

Towards the end of the book, Billy is taken to court and questioned about Romy’s death. The presentation is excellent; the narration alternates between court transcripts and Paz’s masterwork art project. Going back and forth every few sentences has a great dramatic flare and it’s an effective culmination to multiple storylines. The court transcripts routinely downplay the importance of art in women’s lives and to pathologize women’s experiences. Here are a few examples:

THE DECEASED’S FUTURE PLANS FOR EXHIBITIONS, HER GUGGENHEIM GRANT, AND THE CREATION OF A LONG-TERM PROJECT HAVE BEEN OFFERED UP BY THE PROSECUTORS TO RULE OUT ANY NOTION OF SUICIDE. (OF NO CONSEQUENCE.) 

[...]

EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT THE DECEASED WAS GIVEN TO IRRATIONAL OUTBURSTS OVER MINOR OCCURRENCES AND WAS PRONE TO HYSTERIA, PARTICULARLY AS A POST-PARTUM FEMALE. (ADMISSABLE.)

[...]

WITNESSES SAY SHE LIVED FOR HER WORK. (HEARSAY.)

[...]

ACCORDING TO SEVERAL REPUTABLE SOURCES, THE DECEASED’S WORK HAD, QUOTE UNQUOTE, DEATH VIBES TO IT. (215)

The importance of Romy’s work is downplayed as being of no consequence and that she lived for her work is mere hearsay. What does get accounted for by the court is her post-partum depression and that her work supposedly had “death vibes” (which is a hilarious critique and hits too close too home for casual art commentary).

I’ve not presented the climactic moment for Paz that is interwoven with the court case. In part, it’s because I feel like it ought to be experienced. The other component is that, all things considered, it felt a bit saccharine. Towards the end of the book, there are a lot of feel-gooderies and optimistic moments that don’t entirely hit the mark. It’s a bit of a shame because so much of the book is well-written and the tensions in the text feel a little too easily resolved for effective payoff. 

In terms of style, Sopinka is often rich in description and imagery. An early passage in the book really got me invested in her rich language: “From the porch, [Paz] watched the lawn losing its green, like a lens tightening. Bodies of flies piled at the windowscreens. She began to wander when Flea was sleeping, searching for what, she wasn’t sure. She’d move through the rooms looking over her shoulder, with the methodical self-absorption of a thief, even though she knew Billy wouldn’t be home for hours and that it wasn’t possible for the kind of truth she was looking for in a drawer” (25). The image of a lens tightening is fantastic, especially given the artists’ work with photography. Paz’s characterization with “methodical self-absorption of a thief” adds to the awkward tension of her relationship. Elsewhere, in fact from the passage that started the review, Paz captures the spirit of a manic artist beautifully: “Paz is suddenly ravenous. She fishes around but she’s already finished most of what’s on the passenger seat. She kicks off her sandals and drives in her bare feet. She looks at herself in the rear-view mirror and sees that her shirt is inside out. The heat makes the scenery look almost two-dimensional. It gives it a radical geometry” (146). At the end of that section, there is some great imagery about the two-dimensional desert and its “radical geometry.”

Throughout the book, since the artworks are often so connected to place, there is a lot of description of the setting. There’s a transcendent kind of moment when Paz tracks down Romy’s work with light—which actually reminded me, partially, of an art work I saw in New York where there was a crisp cut square of sky. In any case, Sopinka’s descriptions offer some rich material. The book offers some great visuals.

Towards the end of the book, there’s a short section that wraps things up. There’s a twist to the book similar to Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise which is fine, though not quite as dramatic or mind-blowing as Choi’s novel. The bulk of the book stands on its own well, but the final section adds a few more dimensions and solidifies the feminist impulse of the text.

Overall, I was really impressed with Utopia. There is a lot in the book to like, and even love. The central mystery of the book really finely developed. The characterization in the book is really effective, which leads to strong relationships between characters. The writing is generally strong, if overly ‘clean’ towards the end. Heidi Sopinka is one of the writers I’ve read for the first time this year and is one of my “new writers to watch.”

Happy reading!

Nudités féminines: Images, pensées et sens du désir by Laurence Pelletier

  In the name of brevity, I’ll briefly summarize one of my traditions: I visit Montreal, I buy a French book. Normally, I buy a poetry book, but this time I tackled a full-length philosophy book. I’m not sure I would have taken on the double challenge of theoretical text that is also in my second language, but Harneet insisted upon this book by throwing it into my hands, neither of us knowing anything about it. So here we are: a philosophy book about the female nude in art.

I hope it goes without saying that, because French is not my first language, I may make some mistakes in translation or conceptualization of this text. If Laurence Pelletier’s Nudités féminines: Images, pensées et sens du désir seems flawed, I assure it is because of my own mistranslations of the text. I’ll take responsibility.

The opening of the book hurls you into the key concepts of the book: art, sex, sexuality, nudity, nakedness, the female nude, the male gaze, and all those interrelated concepts that spark interest and controversy. The essential premise of the book, in my recollection, is that the philosophical significance of the female nude as an art object has been historically defined by men within a male-centric episteme. So, Pelletier is looking to redefine the terms of the discussion in an alternative mode.

Even some of the basics of the argument prove surprisingly controversial. Pelletier explores the discourse surrounding nakedness and nudity as terms, tracing a significant difference between the two terms. To be naked is a fundamentally different quality from being nude. Essentially, the difference seems to be the relation between the viewer and the naked/nude subject and the meaning attached to it: is it primarily erotic? degrading? appraising? Where Pelletier lands is a recurring idea that nudity is attached to knowledge—but whether it reveals or conceals knowledge (and for whom) remains a question the rest of the text explores.

Pelletier traces the discourse around female nudity by examining specific works of art. Much of the earlier pieces in the collection deal with visual art (like Boticelli’s The Birth of Venus or Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde). She later revisits the visual arts in a discussion of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party. Grounding the conversation in particular works of art served as a helpful signpost for key points in the discussion. The literary works often sounded fascinating, but I missed out a little bit on never having read them myself. In particular, Pelletier’s discussion of the works of Marguerite Duras really inspired me to explore Duras’ work, and Kathy Acker gets a chapter’s worth of discussion—maybe I should follow through on reading her as I promised a random colleague at a conference five years ago. Same for Luce Irigaray and Jamaica Kincaid—I’ve got some reading to do!

The works with which I was most familiar also proved most fascinating in the discussion. The trajectory of Pelletier’s book is essentially as follows: 1) establish who creates the discourse around nudity and nakedness 2) consider how women address the issue of nudity and knowledge 3) explore the distinctions that emerge in trans identities, definitions of femininity, and so on and 4) explore how the issue of femininity manifests differently for women of colour. Thus, Pelletier offers a really compelling discussion of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (lots of vulvas—look it up if you’re not familiar) and talks about how Sojourner Truth is the only racialized woman and the only one whose vulva is not represented on the plate. Incidentally, there was a fascinating discussion of the colonial constructions and conversations surrounding Black womens’ rear ends. The fetishistic depictions of them prove a surprisingly fruitful site of historical insight.

All this to say, when Pelletier comments on Zadie Smith’s essay about Their Eyes Were Watching God was a familiar touchstone that emphasized the idea of self-recognition in representations of women. Having read Smith’s essay and feeling deeply moved by it, this was a nice touch for ending off the text. That said, I would note that the book leaves a lot to be desired in terms of conclusions. There are a number of threads that Pelletier follows, but I felt there was never a definitive account of why the female nude is important and what it means. That said, I recognize that offering a definitive account would be as reductive as previous philosophers are accused of being here.

One of the most productive conversations for me came from a surprising direction. One chapter references the Napalm Girl photo. There’s an incredible close reading of the photo. Pelletier contextualizes the image and explains why it was necessary to take the form it did; had it been a man or even an adult woman in the image, Pelletier convinced me it would not have become a part of our cultural zeitgeist. The conversation about the Vietnam war was riveting, but the analysis of the photo was also deeply insightful. Then, the chapter takes a surprising twist: Pelletier moves to a discussion of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, where a nude woman visually evokes the Napalm Girl. Drawing that parallel is not only persuasive but extraordinarily evocative since Pelletier suggests that the filmic woman gives voice to the Napalm Girl that she is not provided in the photo. It produced in me a whole slew of thoughts about diegetic and nondiegetic sound, like if the sound from her mouth can be both diegetic (since it happens in context) and nondiegetic (since it comes from another time, place, and subject)---and to quote Twin Peaks, “What year is it?” Incidentally, Pelletier does discuss the notion of time throughout the book, as well.

At this stage, I’ll try to summarize and extend a commentary on some of the passages that struck me as critical to Pelletier’s overall argument.

1. Womanhood and femininity are connected to conceptions of truth.

This premise is established early in the text and is indeed the reason that exploring the issue is worthwhile. Pelletier writes, “La rhétorique des deux philosophes lie donc les questions de la femme et du féminin à elle de la vérité. Elle utilise le féminin comme l’instrument, le support ou l’écran d’une expérience ontologique se voulant universelle et sexuellement neutre qui précéderait l’ordre social” (31). The notion that femininity is tied to truth and that the woman serves as a screen for an ontological experience is established as critical. Pelletier continues that “Elle laisse supposer que l’accession à la subjectivité, à la vérité du sujet, entretient une relation causale à l'objet regardé: on devient sujet devant ou par la nudité d’une femme” (31). It’s an essential reversal: the person who gains subjecthood in the act of seeing is the person seeing, not the person being observed, who is often erased in the same moment. Pelletier notes that it is a way of rendering woman an “abstraction, un idéal, un objet ou un instrument de discours. Elle est envisagée hors des conditions de déterminations matérielles, sociohistoriques et politiques qui la rattacheraient à l’existence des femmes” (31). It’s a materialist argument that challenges the universality of depictions of women, recalling that each woman is an individual—not a representative of a whole and that, in some capacity, philosophizing about the deep meaning of capital-W Woman serves to distance actual women from the question of Being.

2. The fetishization of nude women is related to a thirst for truth.

The female nude renders woman pure image: “Elle est ramenée à la fonction de pure apparence, de pure image. Incarnation de l’antimétaphysique, la femme dénudée trouble et défait les oppositions conceptuelles, ramène tout à la surface. Elle n’est qu’une forme, une surface idéalisée sur laquelle est projeté le désir de connaître la vérité” (44). While metaphysical questions take a back seat to the actual, visible qualities of the woman, she also becomes a surface upon which to project desire—and specifically a desire for truth. Pelletier suggests that the fetishization of women is related to the idea of the “disparition, dérobade, déception de la vérité, est liée à une fétichisation de la visibilité de la femme” (44). The nude woman becomes a kind of ground zero of knowledge: “la femme est concue comme un point aveugle obligatoire de sorte que la pensée philosophique, déireuse de compenser ce manque, s’acharne compulsivement à la rendre visible, à produire et démultiplier son image, lui octroyant un pouvoir de révélation” (44). The reclamation project is a tenuous one because…

3. Masculine desire muddies the waters of the conversation.

Pelletier continues that “cette dynamique particulière met à jour le désir du sujet masculin” (44). That desire has a sexual layer, but also one that engages with knowledge: “le regard philosophique doit être bloqué, indirect, difficile, de manière à rechercher, continuellement, à se aligner avec le corps de la femme, puisqu’elle est le support d’un manque à voir, d’un <<n’être pas>> de la vérité.” Recalling the hermeneutics of suspicion or paranoid epistemes of Nietzsche, Derrida, and Lacan, the suggestion is that the lack is where the meaning lies, which means the depths can never be reached. In their world, the woman’s power relies also on her own lack of knowledge of the truth: “la possibilité même du pouvoir révélateur de la femme réside dans son inconscience ou son non-savoir de l’inexistence de la verité. Cet aveuglement à l'égard de son propre effet est la condition nécessaire à son idéalisation et son objectivation: c’est ainsi, <<en fermant les yeux sur elle-même, qu’elle devient la pure construction d’un regard philosophique>>” (44). The epistemic appeal of women (for men) depends on women’s lack of knowledge of themselves. It relegates women to a position of ignorance where they are the vehicle to, but never the recipient of knowledge. The passage ends as follows: “Cette posture attribuée à la femme releve d’une volonté théorique visant à destituer le sujet rationnel, idéalisé par les philosophes modernes. Pour ce faire, la femme se voit érigée comme la preuve théorique de la précarité de la raison, de la conscience et, corollairement, de la connaissance. Elle est un sujet qui n’en est pas un, qui ne se connait pas lui-meme. Le fait de sa féminité est à ce titre indicatif du procédé d'altérisation et de différenciation” (44-45). The female nude is defined by a paradox: to be an object of desire is to be unknowable. Or, in Pelletier’s words: “L’autre féminin est pris dans un paradoxe: sa réalité comme objet de désir dépend de son inconnaissabilité” (45).

4. Hence, philosophers come to see women as the limit of knowledge or an abstraction.

In turn, “La femme en vient à représenter la limite de ce qui est maîtrisable, de ce qui est pensable, et c’est en cela qu’elle constitue l’objet du désir épistémologique masculin” (45). In turn, “parce qu’ils l’imaginent occuper l’au-delà de la théorie, la femme figure l’ultime fantasme philosophique. La femme occupe la limite et l’excès de la pensée tout en demeurant, pour la philosophe, inaccessible” (45). Referring to Derrida and others, she suggests that “Dans le discours philosophique, la différence sexuelle est niée puisque la femme devient la véhicule, le support d’un désir <<hom(m)osexuel>> pour réprendre la formule d’Irigay: un désir autoeffectif du masculin. C’est dire que, chez ces philosophes, la méconnaissance est un fait fantasmatique, l’objet d’un désir qu’ils projettent sur une femme, plus qu’une posture qui concerne ou affecte les femmes” (45). The discourse around the female nude erases women in order for men to supplant their own ideas onto them. Misunderstanding becomes as important as actually understanding.

Pelletier continues on to note that when philosophy discusses women, “elle n’en parle pas comme d’une réalité matérielle” (49). Later, this becomes tied to an antiessentialist argument. It’s a timely addition to the conversation. Given how conservatives seem to be using “you can’t define a woman” as some kind of “gotcha” question, Pelletier offers an effective discussion of why all essentialist arguments fail—a woman is not just a being with a vagina and uterus; a woman is not just someone who has children; a woman is not even necessarily feminine. Womanhood is related to lived realities, “un cadre matérialiste, phénoménologique.” That is where feminine consciousness arises. Thus, traditional philosophy denies women their own identities: “Dans la résistance à engager leur pensée dans un rapport spéculaire, les philosophes refusent à la femme une existence subjective, matérielle dans le language et la théorie” (50).

The question remains on how the image of the female nude in art engages with this discourse. It is not immediately apparent whether, by default, the nude form creates an abstraction or brings knowledge to the fore. I don’t know if Pelletier resolves this seeming paradox other than through individual treatments of the subject. It’s not as though there’s a set of rules that we seem able to apply consistently.

Returning to the matter at hand, Pelletier notes that representations create a challenging relationship to essentialism. One woman comes to stand for all women. She notes, “Cette différence exclusive entre femme (réele) et représentation (soit l’une, soit l’autre, <<ce n’est pas une femme, c’est une image>>, écrit Didi-Huberman) est essentialle à une réflextion universaliste, qui repose sur l’indifférenciation sexuelle (il n’y a pas de femme). C’est dire que l’image de la femme a plus qu’une fonction métonymique, métaphorique ou encore symptomatique; la femme – mise à nu – fait office de nouveau paradigme formel et représentationnel” (50). It’s a complex argument to follow, and I admit that I don’t fully understand the nuances. There’s a difference between real women and depictions of them; that much is clear. The image is not the thing, there’s always a distance. But that then becomes a universalist depiction that erodes difference. As an art form, then, the idea of a nude figure inaugurates a new way of thinking.

The subject becomes the site of a sexual difference: “En raison de la relation particulière des femmes au régime de la visibilité, on se trouve dès lors devant la nécessité d’engager une réflextion matérielle de l’image et l’intégrant à une pensée de la différence sexuelle” (50). Pelletier advances the idea that a woman’s image “convoque bel et bien l’existence des femmes, leur réel; cela les concerne, cela les regarde. La forme, et plus précisément la mise en forme des signifiants qui nous présentent une femme, a une consistance matérielle, une valuer de phénomene, une valeur référentielle sensible et empirique” (50). In this moment, the nude subject does seem to offer a perspective of the truth that corresponds to material realities. It becomes a window in itself.

The issue is often that sites of difference become sites of negation. Consider,f or example, the essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. That which communicates differently might as well be erased. So, Pelletier searches for a difference that is not at the same time a negation: “Le virtuel s’actualise en se différenciant, en procédant par une différence sans négation. Et de même, l’actuel peut se virtualiser, c’est-à-dire se déplacer de l’ici et maintenant, vers un autre champ spatio-temporel, dans un champ incorporel. Ainsi, l'actuel et le virtuel coexistent, et entrent dans un étroit circuit qui nous ramène constamment de l’un à l'autre” (66-67). There’s a kind of balance between the artificial representations and the real, a circuit of correspondence. Under the surface here is the primacy of individuality versus the archetypical: “Il a été commode pour la tradition de séparer le féminin à l'intérieur d'un rapport négatif où les femmes se différencient de la <<Femme>>, et où ces deux termes, par leur statut, ne peuvent jamais se rencontrer” (67). This places women once more in a precarious position that instantiates a new ontology, a kind of resistance to being perceived as anything “stereotypically” feminine. This individuation ensures that the collective and the individual remain separate: “L’une n’a pas à voir avec l'autre. L’une est idéale, un fantasme, une abstraction; l’autre est réelle, physique, matérielle. Une femme réelle peut bien penser, fantasmer, imaginer la <<Femme>>. Mais la <<Femme>> ne peut jamais être l’affaire des femmes” (67).

Pelletier’s response to the relationship of the Ideal to the actual is to ensure that the causal relationship is inverted. The idea of capital-W Woman and the existence of actual women are misaligned. In turn, the idea is that rather than having an Ideal Woman against which to measure oneself, the idea of an Ideal Woman can only emerge from the actual lived realities of women. It’s a materialist approach that strives, simultaneously, to go against essentialist discourse:  “je peux envisager le féminin, bien sur comme idéel, toutefois constitutif et existant dans le réel, comme vecteur de potentialités. Car (dans un retournement de la proposition de Malabou, <<le “féminin” doit bien quelque chose aux femmes>>), s’il ya quelque chose qui lie la <<Femme>> aux femmes, c’est peut-être ce qui passe et circule de l’une aux autre: quelque chose de féminin” (67).

This emphasis on the feminine (over, I suppose, the female), problematizes the idea of the Ideal. The feminine exists as “fantasme, comme idée, comme représentation, comme souvenir ou comme discours” (67) and“problématise le réel qui présente, sous diverses actualisations, la contingence de l’identité et de l’existence des femmes” (67). The notion that the real destabilizes the Ideal serves as an effective philosophy which restores the primacy of specific instantiations of womanhood. Returning to the idea of nudity, “La nudité féminine, comme cadre, comme mise en scène, virtualise le féminin; elle interpelle, concerne, regarde et rejoint les femmes dans la réalité de ce qu’il y a chez elle de féminin, de ce qui entretient un rapport avec la <<Femme>>” (67).

In terms of specific instantiations of femininity, Pelletier has several extended sections about the author Marguerite Duras [anecdotally, I want to to read her work and at  Type Books I saw that they’re doing a book club with her book The Lover. But I digress.

In short, the central premise regarding Duras is that she refuses to show: “Elle n'offre aucune image de la Vérité; remet même en doute la présence d'une Vérité” (85). The arboreal interpretation of womanhood (cf. the criticisms of Deleuze and Guattari) is thus subverted. The secret at the core of femininity is not exposed and instead “Elle offre un point de vue depuis le noir de la chambre, sur la <<chambre nue>>, là où est étendue la femme. Elle fait paraître en périphérie ce qui ne se capte que dans un fondu de lumière ou un mouvement de matière” (85). Having not read any of Duras’ work, I’m ill-suited to comment. That being said, Pelletier offers a really compelling and engaging discussion of Duras’ work. There’s a mystery at the core of the work and in refusing to reveal a secret she seems to resist the paranoiac episteme that everything has a deeper and deeper core to explore. In turn, she does not collect truth like a butterfly pinned to its display but instead hovers around them: “Avec Duras, je me permets de penser la nudité féminine comme ce qui flirte avec le fantasme de l’origine – celle du monde, mais surtout celle de la femme –, et ce qui rend visible dans l’écriture le désir de la femme, et sa méchanique proper, qui consiste à mettre en échec le fantasme de la connaissance” (85). It’s a compelling inversion where the male gaze is de-centered in favour of feminine desire and understanding.

Pelletier focuses on “les divers rideaux et systèmes de caches qui ont recouvert la toile de Courbet ont longtemps renvoyé à la volonté des spectateurs masculins de voir et de savoir le sexe de la femme, et de maintenir dans sa potentialité ce désir épistémologique spécifiquement phallique” (85). Hearing this commentary about curtains is particularly interesting, especially given the connection to Lynch. In another recent read of mine, The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher comments on Lynch’s obsession with curtains and, while Pelletier doesn’t comment on it here, it is nonetheless interesting to consider the idea of disclosure in relation to the symbolism—particular because Lynch seems to give voice to the voiceless Napalm Girl.

The curtain is something that conceals, but could also be projected upon. In the work of Duras, Pelletier comments on how “En revanche, le drap blanc qui dit et s’étale dans la chambre de La maladie de la mort figure la toile mise a plat, le voile déjà tombé et absent sur lequel rien ne peut plus se projeter. Seul demeure le corps exposé, exhibé, de la femme qui n’offre rien sinon, peut-être, dans la fausse profondeur de son sexe, par sa plasticité et sa capacité à changer de forme en fonction de la mise en scène, son irréductibilité” (85). It’s paradoxes like these I feel compelled to read Duras’ work—perhaps these sections of Pelletier’s work are best revisited after experiencing Duras’ novels first hand.

Overall, Nudités féminines. Images, pensées et sens du désir offers a fair amount of thought-provoking commentary. I really appreciate how Pelletier gives a nearly chronological narrative, ranging from defining Woman, but then replacing that discourse femininity, bridging into trans and racial experiences of femininity. Dealing with the particular art works is probably where Pelletier most shines. Looking for a comprehensive philosophy is much more challenging throughout the book, but is, after all, not really the point. The materialist, antiessentialist philosophy is worthwhile, even if I sometimes lose the thread of the overarching thought.

For me: a gold star for reading French philosophy. For you: happy reading!