Dykette: A Novel

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A blast of defiant frivolity, Dykette is so perceptive it hurts and as fun and decadent as wearing Gaultier in a bubble bath.

THIS is how and unreliable narrator should be done - so unabashedly projecting her own insecurities while wildly aware of how absurd she is being. Her lesbian boyfriend, who is on T and uses he/him and she/her pronouns interchangeably, is at the whims of Sasha's projections, that range from strict gender roles, to non-consensual-roleplay during sex. This is not my problem with the book, though it sometimes read like the internal argument one has with their imaginary enemy. There is gender diversity here that feels actually accurate, with a masc nonbinary person and a butch who uses he/him pronouns along with she/her and still identifies as a lesbian.I'd gladly recommend this book and can't wait for publishing to give us more of these queer stories that aren't focused on the cis-hetero gaze. Jesse would think bristly nipples were hot, so she snapped a half-hearted picture, but the image on the screen horrified her, and she deleted it quickly. And when mainstream hetero culture glorifies marriage and the nuclear family, most of us tend to grow up believing that our parents, followed by our romantic partners, should be responsible for our emotional well being, our safety, our financial security — everything. It occurs to me, sadly, through the interactions of these characters, that lesbians can be just as catty as anyone else, and twice as competitive. She imagined eleven tiny green pups suckling at her green teats while Jesse waited anxiously at her side, peering from time to time to see if a tendriled green head was emerging yet from her furry green crotch.

It's clear that the older couple are in charge of every last detail of this vacation getaway, even when they appear to be accomodating. So Sasha is your average normcore pick-me girlie performing her gender and conforming to societal expectations, she's just also a lesbian. Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. What most impressed me about this work is that it feels written for queer readers and doesn't shy away from more nuanced aspects of queer identity and culture; it's rare to see a he/him butch in traditional publishing, for example, but it works so well here. For being so graphic and explicit with the "livestream" scene, the rest of the encounters were just meh and felt very wrong/uncomfortable to be "witnessing".Every page is like butches must do this and femmes must do that, and you may think that it’s a critique of academia etc, but actually the main character is repeating the author’s real opinion (and her real weird sex life). There's not nearly enough tenderness or humor to even begin to balance out all the nonstop fraught, uncomfortable exchanges.

This is, truly, a victory and perhaps the most important accomplishment for a queer novel these days. 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. Dykette is a riveting and often darkly funny novel that accurately examines New York queer culture with an insider's authenticity.Sasha starts off well, being able to occupy her most comfortable space, as an observer, she remains separate from the crowd, away from all the puffing and preening. It produced an image that was visionary rather than literal, a trancey interpretation of what “woman” might mean in a blurry sense. It has a lot to say about the generational divides, the difference between a 20-something queer person and a 40-something queer person can be ridiculously vast and Davis spends much of the novel turning this over and looking at it from angle after angle. Sasha doesn’t get what she wants, but through her, Davis gives us honest if sometimes jumbled insights into a queer domestic fantasy stuck in a version of the past that has never really existed. Through Sasha, Davis constructs a field guide to queer dynamics, making sharp observations about generational divides, the butch/femme dynamic, and what it means to perform your gender or sexuality (as exemplified by an explosive plot about performance art).

She typed the words come back to me in white font, massaged the text down to its tiniest possible size, and implanted it, subliminally, in the gleam of the Grinch’s pupil. The Big Chill goes gay in Davis’s raunch-com about six queer Brooklynites spending the holidays at a Hudson farmhouse.Vanity Fair spoke with Davis about trends in queer fiction, femme studies, and the “spiritual center” of her novel. It might be a little bit inevitable to confront homophobia and transphobia and all of the things that are definitely coming, so it’s scary, but it’s also exciting and fun. Performing gender as Sasha does, with her exhaustive lesbian processing, vintage head scarves and hunger to be worshipped as a pretty angel-baby bimbo princess, can be so much fun. Is there any greater fantasy than the expectation we should get our most fundamental human needs met by a single person?