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Short Story Review: "The Catgirl Manifesto" by Richard Calder
You can read "The Catgirl Manifesto" online in its entirety through Google Books just by clicking this link. As I will explain, for many of you, there is no excuse not to do this. This is a short story that opens with an extended quote from Foucault, for God's sake. It's a fictional theoretical introduction to a fictional manifesto about a mutant race of highly sexualized females calling themselves catgirls and engaging with critical theory. No, actually. Yes, really. It falls under the "experimental fiction" heading --- there isn't really a plot per se, and the character is the impenetrable narrator of an academic paper, so there's no growth --- but it's still a fascinating exploration of how people might respond in such a situation and puts real authors in conversation with the fantastic through the subversion of academic discourse. Can you say: SQUEE!!!? The story is a Tiptree Award winner, and volume 1 of the Tiptree Award anthology is available really, really cheap used if you'd like to own a copy in print. Seriously, it will take you like fifteen minutes and it's sitting right there for free on the Internet. If any of that pushed any of your buttons, go read it.
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Maybe, but it was totally what your Catgirl Goth Rave invitations reminded me of.
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Experimental fiction: success!
It might require a bit much background for many people to Get It (it reads a bit like an in-joke) but it is still neat.
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Yes, what you said pushed my buttons, so I came out angered.
I can't tell whether it's an imitation of bad academic writing or a bad imitation of academic writing.
It's fanfiction. Foucault fanfiction, complete with the assumption of a shared world and a periodic return to the matters which absorb the original author. And something feels wrong about fanfiction for non-fiction.
Not only that, it's bad fanfiction. Good fanfiction develops aspects of the original world which were latent or underdeveloped in the canonical work. Bad fanfiction exaggerates the already well-developed parts and in doing so destroys whatever subtlety they once had. Here, the author describes a movement in which Foucault's ideas about sexuality, and its relationship to power and knowledge, are not only manifest but obvious, in which the government must scramble to react (along Foucauldian lines), and in which virtually every person's life is unmistakably affected by an overt manifestation of Foucault's ideas. This is the equivalent of Star Trek fiction in which the Enterprise simultaneously makes peace with the Romulans, Klingons, and whomever else I'm forgetting, a piece of fiction in which the main characters accomplish every single goal that have been established for them.
This is harmful to Foucault. In an insignificant way, I can grant, but the poor man is already harmed by his imitators. Foucault's books are like graduate-level textbooks in subjects for which nothing at all more basic exists. Foucault is a ruthless writer who will happily leave his readers in the dust, and it took me some time to appreciate the fact that his writing style is justified. He couldn't otherwise have covered so much in his curtailed life. But the academic writers inspired by him keep the ruthlessness while lacking the insight to justify that aspect of his style.
Few people can use sentence fragments effectively in fiction, and far fewer can use them effectively in academic prose. Foucault could. Few people can concisely show how great works of art relate to the ideas of their time. Foucault could; his imitators end up just name-dropping. Few people have the insight into prevailing metaphors to steadily develop and deploy new ones. Foucault did. But this guy, fuck him.
A few years ago I would never have thought I could hold Foucault in high esteem. His writing was just too abusive -- not Derrida abusive, but abusive nonetheless. But even though my grasp of his work is pitifully tenuous, I've seen enough both to see that there is much of value present, and also that its historical arguments are very thorough and subtle. Foucault, like Nietzsche, is an unmasker, who must carefully scrutinize philosophers and other thinkers until they finally slip and reveal the emotional motivations for their arguments, then seize those slips and bring them to light. But Foucault's (bad) imitators act as though his insights are manifest in everything, as though unmasking were fucking easy!
I can already tell that I would disagree with many of Foucault's conclusions, if I thought yet that I understood them adequately. In particular, when reading The Order of Things (the only one of his works I've made it all the way through), I found it telling that he shied away from a discussion of physics. That book was overambitious, and he overextended himself in it. Nonetheless, at least I respect Foucault.
Aagh! I'm really sorry to overreact like this. I believe, deeply, in the promise of academia and the pursuit of knowledge, and lack of respect for the humanities tends to sicken me -- if only all these people in other fields could experience the moments when elements of far-flung, disparate works of literature suddenly come together in a shared revelation! But they don't, and all they know of the humanities are their instances of bad prose. But as a result, I'm really touchy and opinionated about academic writing.
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I recognize this instance of wit.
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I have a guess, I guess.
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Okay, now that I've calmed down a little, the idea of academic fanfiction isn't so bad. But bad academic fanfiction looks to be even worse than bad academic prose, and the latter is already enough to piss me enough.
Going now, I need to think more about why this story elicited such a strong response. Sorry about the intrusion.
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