Kraus insists that all sorts of experience—even romantic obsession, dependence, and desperate pursuit, stereotypically “female” states of abjection—hold universal significance. They carry truths that radiate beyond the bedroom, the finger-fuck, the House of Pies parking lot. She wants to push back against the limited ways in which vulnerability and self-exposure are read: “Why do people still not get it when we handle vulnerability like philosophy, at some remove?” In “Aliens & Anorexia,” she thinks about artists who accomplish some version of this remove: Damien Hirst putting his sliced carcasses behind glass, his desire to “create emotions scientifically.” Emotion is “just so terrifying,” she writes, “the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form.” Analyzing vulnerability is not the same as enacting it; describing positions of pain and longing isn’t an admission of powerlessness but an act of assertion, a way of saying, this female consciousness can hold these states of pain and longing as well.
more here: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/this-female-consciousness-on-chris-kraus
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