King Kong Theory

A novel of lesbian identity and motherhood, and the societal pressures that place them in opposition. 

The daughter of an illustrious French family whose members include a former Prime Minister, a model, and a journalist, Constance Debré abandoned her marriage and legal career in 2015 to write full-time and begin a relationship with a woman. Her transformation from affluent career woman to broke single lesbian was chronicled in her 2018 novel Play boy, praised by Virginie Despentes for its writing that is at once "flippant and consumed by anxiety."  

In Love Me Tender, Debré goes on to further describe the consequences of that life-changing decision. Her husband, Laurent, seeks to permanently separate her from their eight-year old child. Vilified in divorce court by her ex, she loses custody of her son and is allowed to see him only once every two weeks for a supervised hour. Deprived of her child, Debré gives up her two-bedroom apartment and bounces between borrowed apartments, hotel rooms, and a studio the size of a cell. She involves herself in brief affairs with numerous women who vary in age, body type, language, and lifestyle. But the closer she gets to them, the more distant she feels. Apart from cigarettes and sex, her life is completely ascetic: a regime of intense reading and writing, interrupted only by sleep and athletic swimming. She shuns any place where she might observe children, avoiding playgrounds and parks "as if they were cluster bombs ready to explode, riddling her body with pieces of shrapnel."  

Writing graphically about sex, rupture, longing, and despair in the first person, Debré's work is often compared with the punk-era writings of Guillaume Dustan and Herve Guibert, whose work she has championed. As she says of Guibert: "I love him because he says I and he's a pornographer. That seems to be essential when you write. Otherwise you don't say anything." But in Love Me Tender, Debré speaks courageously of love in its many forms, reframing what it means to be a mother beyond conventional expectations.

La philosophe Sara Ahmed se présente parfois comme « une rabat-joie féministe, une alienne affective, une femme queer racisée en colère ». Depuis plus de dix ans, elle tient un blog, feministkilljoys.com, où elle publie des morceaux de ses livres et de ses conférences. Dedans, on trouve des bouts de rages - contre le harcèlement sexuel à la fac où elle enseigne, contre le racisme institutionnel, contre le capitalisme carcéral... — mais aussi des célébrations des solidarités et des activismes transféministes. De là sont extraits les trois textes rassemblés dans ce court recueil, « Vandalisme queer », « Usage queer» et « La plainte, méthode queer»; des textes qui ont tous pour point commun de réfléchir aux potentiels d'interruption du mot queer. Queer, oblique, pas droit.e.s, déviant.e.s : des termes pour se mettre en travers des chemins trop bien tracés. Des textes comme autant d'appels à multiplier les existences vandales.

Un tuyau percé peut mener à un autre; il peut le faire et il le fait. Il suffit parfois de desserrer un écrou, un petit peu, juste un tout petit peu, pour que l'explosion ait lieu. Et nous avons besoin de plus d'explosions. Les usages queers, les usages obliques, décrivent ce potentiel d'explosion. Ils décrivent la manière dont les petites déviations, les petits desserrements, la création d'une issue de secours, l'ouverture d'une échappée, peuvent aider à multiplier toutes sortes de fuites et de sorties.

BEAUTY KIT – AN ECO-EROGENOUS ART PROJECT by Isabel Burr Raty with contributions by Kristin Rogghe, Elke Van Campenhout, Gosie Vervloessem, Pablo Diartinez and Tim Vets, is an experimental catalog summarizing Isabel Burr Raty’s research on conceptualizing and manufacturing eco-erogenous para-pharmaceutical products. It tells the story of the BKFF, a mobile farm where she and other females harvest their orgasmic juices to produce beauty bio-products, used for treatments in the BK Spa, critically discussed in the BK Focus Group and moving forward into becoming a village, where every-body harvests each other. The catalog comes with contributing text, “Harvesting bodies – The Farm as Paradox” by Elle/Elke Van Campenhout, and other reflections on the project.

Isabel Burr Raty is a Belgian-Chilean artist, filmmaker, and Media Art History teacher in ERG (École de Recherche Graphique), living between Brussels and Amsterdam. She is currently developing her second feature film, about the colonial impact on Easter Island, and creating live art and new media installations that queer production understandings, such as the Beauty Kit Project. Her works have been shown internationally.

First French translation of Shulamith Firestone's first novel.

Originally published by Semiotext(e) in 1998, Airless Spaces is Shulamith Firestone's first novel. She writes this short stories gradually moving away from a career as a feminist activist; while finding herself increasingly close to a state of breathlessness. The stories center around people in the grip of a seemingly endemic poverty in New York, worn out by the back and forth of psychiatric hospitals and a sclerotic daily life. On the back cover of the original edition, we read the words of the poet Eileen Myles: “In the century I'm most familiar with, the 20th, the explosion was never-ending, the pieces tinier and tinier. Shulamith Firestone, in her radical insider's tale, informs us repeatedly like lightly pelting rain that all of us are vanishing in a century of institutions that take and take until everyone has gone away and there's no one left to shut the door.”

The French edition that we offer here, in a translation by Émilie Notéris, is accompanied by a text by Chris Kraus, author and first editor of the book.

Shulamith Firestone (1945 - 2012) is a feminist writer, activist and artist. After studying painting at the Art Institute of Chicago, she moved to New York where she co-founded the feminist groups New York Radical Women (1967), Redstockings (1969) and New York Radical Feminists (1969). In 1970, when she was only 25 years old, she publieshed the book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for a Feminist Revolution. Firestone theorizes cybernetic communism as a system that enables the liberation of women, while at the same time putting an end to biological and social inequalities linked to reproduction and the education of children, in particular through technological emancipation.

published in May 2020

French edition
12,5 x 19,5 cm (softcover)
154 pages

To Become Two: Propositions for Feminist Collective Practice offers a narrative of artist Alex Martinis Roe’s research into a genealogy of feminist political practices in Europe and Australia from the seventies until today.

These practices include those of the Milan Women’s Bookstore co-operative; Psychanalyse et Politique, Paris; Gender Studies (formerly Women’s Studies) at Utrecht University; a network in Sydney including people involved in the Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative, Feminist Film Workers, Working Papers Collective, and the Department of General Philosophy at Sydney University; and Duoda – Women’s Research Centre and Ca la Dona, a women’s documentation centre and encounter space in Barcelona.

Drawing from their practices and experiences, Martinis Roe’s research forms a proposal for a transgenerational approach to feminist politics. This is further developed as a practical handbook of twenty new propositions for feminist collective practice, which were formed in collaboration with a network of contributors through experiments with these historical practices.

From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story—mostly lesbians and including women of color—measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability.

At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people's lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.