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I also thought about this book in terms of materials and materialism. How do you think of objects as a performance of nonconformity and normativity? As the late December afternoons blur together in a haze of debaucherous homecooked feasts and sweaty sauna confessions, so too do the guests’ secret and shifting motivations. When Jesse and Darcy collaborate an ill-fated livestream performance, a complex web of infatuation and jealousy emerges, sending Sasha down a spiral of destructive rage that threatens each couple’s future.
Vanity Fair spoke with Davis about trends in queer fiction, femme studies, and the “spiritual center” of her novel. Straight people are going to be downright confused by a lot of this book and queer people are probably going to fight about it. This is, truly, a victory and perhaps the most important accomplishment for a queer novel these days. The market really wants a more friendly, watered-down queerness instead of the mess it really is, so I am delighted this novel was published. The woman/bird painting—like most of Wilde’s work—is about a dynamic: two things in conversation with each other, each yielding to the other. Yes, the nude woman has rendered the bird flightless, holding fast—perhaps too tight—to its feathered body. But why did the bird come so close to her in the first place? And why did he stay? Like a John Wilde painting, it suddenly seemed possible, in my writing, to blow up and compress details, making some huge and others tiny, until you’re left with a singular, incommensurable relation among the book’s components, its characters, its sensibility.
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It’s through Dykette’s Sasha, an insufferably needy high femme in her mid-20s (think Girls’ Hannah Horvath if she wore vintage pink nighties and was “straight for butches”) that Davis lays out her curiosity with queer domesticity. Sasha has the hots for Jules, a tall butch news anchor clearly inspired by Rachel Maddow, and both envies and pities Jules’s longtime partner, Miranda, for being old and boring, for having settled down in comfort and style. Though her own gaze might wander, Sasha comes totally undone whenever her boyfriend isn’t looking at her in a way that makes her feel truly seen — especially if Jesse is looking at someone else, like Darcy, his best friend’s girlfriend. Attention is Sasha’s lifeblood. If a butch isn’t looking at her, is she even there at all? In the queer world, where language, concepts, and terms describing sexuality and gender are both supremely important and constantly in flux, new additions to the lexicon are lapped up feverishly. Davis’s Dykette reads like a taxonomy of queer theory, references, and history, while offering up wholly new words and takes on contemporary lesbian life. Chief among them is the eponymous dykette, which Davis describes as “a dyke with frills and bows and ruffles. An accessorized, aestheticized, decorated dyke. The most extreme, exaggerated version of a femme. So exaggerated that it kind of perverts itself and becomes weird.” It feels like the queer world is constantly evolving. Maybe we're all too terminally online? But the struggle of being queer is the general outsiderness one experiences from the rest of the world. Yet at the same time, some people are just ~more~ or less gay than others, and their outsiderness exists in a different spectrum. This a major factor for Sasha, who is very feminine, versus Jesse who is masc, and other characters in the story who have had top surgery, go by they/them, etc. With all that said, ultimately I could not tell if this was a book that is trying to skewer the performance of aesthetics or if it is trying to celebrate them. I did not like any of these characters, which is fine. But Sasha and her constant need to be admired, to be petted and coddled, is exhausting. It is hard to say whether Darcy, Sasha's rival, is actually more genuine or if she is putting it all on as much as Sasha is, much to Sasha's chagrin. It is rather fascinating to see the two of them try to one up each other (and occasionally, when she puts in the effort, both get showed up by Miranda) but then you wonder what is it all for? There’s something really interesting with this book with the creation of self against media or other people. It’s a mechanism for the self to coalesce.
Sasha, for all her baggage, does understand more than she gets credit for. She has a keen intuitive sense for real vulnerability, and the kind of gender fluidity reserved for those one really trusts. The trouble is, none of these characters are all that trustworthy.Soon, all the personalities are sorted out for us, but Sasha remains our lens through which all events unfold. And one puzzling particular trait stands out: Sasha's obtuseness when it comes to art, whether created or found in the natural world. We begin to see that sonething has happened in her life to derail the way she relates to beauty. It's as if she distrusts the beautiful so much that she can no longer stand to see it.
Even the lane that is Dykette's birthright, that of Maggie Nelson and Michelle Tea-esque queer or queered femme writing, isn't improved by this addition to the genre. Vanity Fair: So much of queer fiction seems to be acutely sincere, or only about oppression and hardship. It’s as if we believe that unless we’re peddling our suffering, we don’t have literary value, or won’t be taken seriously. There’s a place for all types of queer literature but I’m very excited that you aren’t doing that, and that you wrote a fun, funny lesbian book. what little there exists of a plot mostly revolves around the dynamics between the protagonist, histrionic high-femme Sasha, and her stoic butch bf. it’s made clear that Jesse, the butch, feels sexually unwanted & pigeonholed because of the rigid constraints of the butch-femme dynamic on which Sasha gets off. Rather than the book being an arc of Sasha empathizing with her partners needs more, the book seems to double down on the idea that Jesse should empathize more with Sasha and her High Femme Camp Antics. the Big Conclusion at the end is just that these two are bad for each other and like—no shit. Yes, it’s embarrassing to be femme. It’s embarrassing to try to be femme. It’s embarrassing to not be femme. It’s embarrassing to not want to be femme. There’s so many layers to it and all of it is mortifying.I couldn't decide between going for my MFA or my PhD in literature. Having the protagonist be in a PhD program was a way for me to cosplay as a PhD student, see what it would be like to merge academic theory and scholarly texts with campy, fun, gossipy novel writing. I'm still dreaming about getting a chance to go into a super academic program and shut myself away for, like, five years and read all of the theory and historical documents and get into the archives, all of those things I’ve always been really obsessed with. Sasha and Jesse, alongside another couple, were recently invited vacation at an "elder" lesbian couple's home. The other couple is in their 40s, and the divide between them is vast despite being only a generation apart.