ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses Frisk's narrative recursions and repetitions as they transform some objects of desire into media. Dennis Cooper's queer objects, illustrate a queer narrative theory whose absence in current writing across fiction and autobiography by Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, and Sheila Heti is instructive for its disclosure of their problematic over-investment in the authenticities of subjectivity. Frisk, Dennis Cooper’s formally perfect novel, uses a first-person narrator named Dennis, also a writer, to explore violent sexual obsession in the age of AIDS. Cooper’s work, demands to be understood as theory, for it melds queer content with its own narrative practice to produce a queer sort of queer theory. Cooper’s use of repetition as revision in his treatment of the photos also indexes a key difference between the powers of narrative and visual media. Objects associated with Art Rock of the 1970s shape porn-star and occasional hustler Pierre’s experiences of the sex industry, as detailed in “Spaced 1987–1989.”.
