Love and Degradation: Excessive Desires in Queer-Feminist Art

In this provocative and intensely personal new book of essays about love and language, desire and drama, reminiscence and change, and fandom, William J. Simmons takes up Eve Sedgwick’s reparative reading as a challenge to empirical and taxonomical approaches to art, music, and film and instead promotes new ways of discussing them that create community and empathy rather than hierarchies. Specifically, Simmons advocates for incorporating memoir, history, theory, poetry, and even ＂the cringey admissions of a fanboy＂ into criticism.

Love and Degradation argues for queer feminism’s value to reading and thinking about works by creators as varied as Lana Del Rey, Charlotte Brontë, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and filmmaker Steve McQueen. It also includes essays on Glenn Ligon, Barbara Kruger, and Kristen Stewart and a poem on Sally Mann. In essence, the essays in this volume represent a series of the author’s ＂saviors, obsessions, and losses.＂

A compelling read for students and scholars of art history, queer and gender studies, creative writing, and the study of film, television, and pop culture, this book encourages readers to embrace fandom and raises important questions about the state of queer and feminist discourse.

William J. Simmons is a writer based in the Santa Clarita Valley. He is the author of Queer Formalism: The Return.