"all those decisions are always subjective, creative, and political"

February 25, 2015 10:57 PM

Masha Tupitsyn interviewed by Keaton Ventura for Sex Magazine:

What sort of trouble? Mainly the reaction was, what is this? What are you doing? This isn’t a novel. This isn’t fiction. This isn’t straight criticism. It’s all mixed up. Or this criticism is too personal or too critical about the wrong things. But the minute I would call Beauty Talk nonfiction people would accept the terms that I using. So it was always about how I was categorizing that book. What I was calling it. That would determine how people would respond to the book and its ethos, which I always thought was absurd. If I called it nonfiction, if I called it essays, if I called it criticism, people accepted the book more. But if I said it was fiction, people would say, Well, this is not what fiction does. Fiction does this and criticism does this, and you have to keep these things separate and clear. But I am really not interested in keeping things separate. Not in my work and not in my life either. I’m interested in looking at them and putting them together because I think one of the problems with Western culture in general is that everything is reduced to binaries and categories because it keeps us from fundamentally being able to make valuable links. To connect the dots.

and interviewed by Mairead Case from The New Inquiry: "In November 2011, the writer and critic Masha Tupitsyn started a blog called Love Dog. Like she said at the time, her stance was Hamlet’s: “You don’t let go of your object.” Love Dog — now also a book coming out soon from Penny-Ante, and the second volume in Tupitsyn’s trilogy of immaterial writing — is a project about love in the digital age, feminist love, and mourning. "

Case also interviewed Tupitsyn for bookslut: "The first time I read Masha Tupitsyn’s name was on a book, Beauty Talk and Monsters, at Spoonbill and Sugartown in New York -- its cover was all white, red text, save a rainbow stare-you-down photo of lips and a nose, bound in crystals and washed in paint and light. How did it stare me down if it didn’t have eyes? I don’t know! But it did. I got a crush like I was in seventh grade and it was the cool girl in eighth"

Tupitsyn was also interviewed by Jessica Hoffman for Bitch Magazine:

Queer is hardly just who you sleep with (it's more like how), so we need to get past those simple reductions. I don't think heterosexuality is always the same as heteronormativity, just as I don't think being gay is inherently radical anymore. I don't see a lot of relationship alternatives on offer even by gay culture these days.

Real love is queer when it's not purely tied to heteronormative status symbols, like marriage and children and the social arrangements that make it an acceptable project. As feminists we are mostly only allowed to talk about desire because desire is seen as transgressive and love is seen as old-fashioned. But I don't agree with that, and neither do other contemporary philosophers of love like bell hooks and Badiou.

posted by the man of twists and turns (2 comments total)

Wild. I first heard about Masha Tupitsyn yesterday when I was researching a filmmaker named Brian Pera, who has interviewed her and co-edited a book with her. And now here this is.

It's interesting, given what she says in the first block quote you've chosen above, that The New Inquiry describes her as a "writer and critic," as though those two things were mutually exclusive, but I guess she's a little hard to nail down.
posted by Mothlight at 5:23 AM on February 26, 2015

I'd never heard of her, but she sounds interesting. In the first interview I started being reminded of Kathy Acker, and then later in the piece she credits Acker as a major inspiration.

Real love is queer when it's not purely tied to heteronormative status symbols, like marriage and children and the social arrangements that make it an acceptable project. As feminists we are mostly only allowed to talk about desire because desire is seen as transgressive and love is seen as old-fashioned. But I don't agree with that, and neither do other contemporary philosophers of love like bell hooks and Badiou.

There is a lot packed into those three sentences -- I hope she goes deeper in the book because that interview felt like it was scratching the surface.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:30 AM on February 26, 2015