PositiveFull StopLim’s novel, published earlier this year by Coffee House Press, proceeds by this logic, one that promises the disorientation of a house of mirrors. Some books aim to catalog their themes—to provide an accounting of the extent of loss or pain. This is useful in the cases where the existence of a thing remains contested; Claudia Rankine’s Citizen does this for the kinds of antiblack injustices suffered by a well-to-do Black person. But we do not need such a catalog—it would take no more than to watch the news or check the weather to understand the scope of our ongoing losses. Lim’s goal is more ambitious: not to be a cataloguer but to ask what genre of grief could ever serve as an adequate response. What language or gesture can respond to the scale of this loss? To its senselessness? ... Search History is contemporary, but it is the magic of a cassette tape that it would be virtually unplayable \'because then the cassette would become only a totem, some kind of emanating if impractical object.\'
Amia Srinivasan
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksThe end of the subordination of women is wrapped up with the end of categories that seek to contain and name desire — the categories of gender, sexuality, and race, among others. This is a bold claim, and one of its logical conclusions is that the goal of feminism is the abolition of women as a category. But Srinivasan arrives at this idea over the course of five essays, in which she rigorously deconstructs today’s dizzying array of gender and sexuality discourses ... What Srinivasan implies but leaves unsaid is that the right to respect subtends another right — the right to be loved. And not only as an object of romantic or sexual desire, but as a refutation of the horror and disgust that whiteness and patriarchy instruct us to feel about Black people, fat people, and ourselves ... While The Right to Sex and its coda are the most polemical and expansive in their understanding of feminist politics, Srinivasan’s other essays demand comparable degrees of reflection ... Though her analysis is clear and bracing, the fact that Srinivasan appears to punt the decision is disappointing, all the more profoundly because she achieves such clarity in The Right to Sex ... Srinivasan is a meticulous and rigorous logician, so much so that one is forced to ask if the problem is not with the clarity of her writing but instead with the fact that \'politics,\' in signifying such a wide array of structures and processes, signifies very little after all.
