{"title":"The collapse of dialogue, consent, and the controversy over Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person”","authors":"Natalie Roxburgh","doi":"10.1075/ld.00111.rox","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n This paper provides a Bakhtinian reading of Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” in order to register the status of\n dialogue pertaining to questions of sexual coercion and consent in the wake of the #metoo movement. I identify two prominent\n discourses in the short story: feminist critiques of domination (perspectives that account for structural imbalances that tend to\n put men in a hierarchy above women) and sex-positive feminism (a worldview that promotes female sexual agency). These two\n discourses, this paper argues, are relevant to understanding why a collapse of dialogue ensues in the narrative. I then use “Cat\n Person” to propose a way of contemplating the contemporary media landscape as a generator of failed dialogue.","PeriodicalId":244145,"journal":{"name":"When Dialogue Fails","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2022-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"When Dialogue Fails","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00111.rox","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper provides a Bakhtinian reading of Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” in order to register the status of
dialogue pertaining to questions of sexual coercion and consent in the wake of the #metoo movement. I identify two prominent
discourses in the short story: feminist critiques of domination (perspectives that account for structural imbalances that tend to
put men in a hierarchy above women) and sex-positive feminism (a worldview that promotes female sexual agency). These two
discourses, this paper argues, are relevant to understanding why a collapse of dialogue ensues in the narrative. I then use “Cat
Person” to propose a way of contemplating the contemporary media landscape as a generator of failed dialogue.