The Mixed Pleasures of Geek Love

The Mixed Pleasures of Geek Love Anna Mae Duane (bio) This past summer, I had the great pleasure of sitting around a campfire with friends discussing sentimentalism's coercive power over us. As nineteenth-century scholars, we were all well versed in how images of children have been deployed to evoke both tears and donations. Yet we all admitted to crying at sappy plane movies, at fundraising appeals, and at manipulative Hallmark commercials. As students of the era, we shouldn't be surprised by how fully the nineteenth century is still with us, pulling on tender heartstrings we thought we had fortified by years of critical thinking. We were all familiar with Adam Smith's discussion of the sentimental as our capacity to imagine that we are feeling the pain of another, and everyone at that summer gathering knew quite well that we were not really accessing the emotions on display, that the pain or joy we had witnessed on screen were old scripts designed to hack into our sympathies.1 Yet, no matter what our brains tell us, the tears still come, betraying how susceptible our emotional chords are to manipulation. I thought of that campfire conversation when I first sat down to write about how Katherine Dunn's 1989 novel Geek Love pulls visceral reactions out of the reader, revealing how powerfully our hearts are entangled with cultural stories we thought we had left behind. And in truth, when I began this article, I thought it was going to be a story about the great pleasure of repeatedly teaching this book. Year after year, student discussions of this text move from shock at the novel's blasphemous portrait of the American family to a dawning respect for the author's skill, to a begrudging, almost involuntary, love of the book's problematic characters. I've never found another text that quite does [End Page 11] what Geek Love pulls off. Of course, as Peter Coviello argued so beautifully in the first installment of this feature, the "pleasure of 'pleasure reading,' after all, isn't simple. Often it is made up of an unstable compound of fascination, resistance, captivation, disquiet, dislike."2 In other words, we take pleasure in what books pull out of us, often without our conscious consent. And that's why, once I finished the first draft of this essay, I knew I had been telling only half the truth about the pleasure I've taken from this complicated, irreverent novel. Like the tears that spring up, unbidden, shame-tinged, at a sappy commercial depicting familial bliss, the reactions Geek Love elicits reveal how vulnerable we are to the seductions of domesticity, selling us love in ten easy steps. One of the reasons I find myself happily reassigning this book stems from the decidedly mixed pleasure of recognizing, again and again, the depth of my own investments in the sort of parental martyrdom that generates both the shock and the recoil at the center of Geek Love. But let's start with my students. In my class on disability studies—the class in which I routinely teach Geek Love—the grip of the sentimental is tenacious. In one of my opening exercises, I ask students to post an image or narrative about disability and discuss it briefly. Invariably, at least the third of a class will post a picture of a disabled child, designed to elicit tears of inspiration for what those children have "overcome" or tears of pity for what they can't. One week later, we read Rosemarie Garland Thomson's essay "The Politics of Staring," in which she describes four visual modalities that media narratives tend to impose on disabled bodies. Invariably, Garland-Thomson's section on "the sentimental" mode receives the most discussion. In that section, she argues that sentimental portrayals of disability provide emotional payoff for the viewer, rather than benefiting the subject of the narrative. The innocent disabled waif, she contends, enables "viewers' own narratives of progress, improvement, or heroic deliverance and contains disability's threat in the sympathetic, helpless child for whom the viewer is empowered to act."3 While many students are struck with the accuracy of her...