ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 is interested in Wallace’s portrayal of sex and gender in the post-industrial period, which has seen and continues to see the commodification, and therefore modification of desire. This is perhaps the most contentious area of Wallace studies; there are few critics that do not read both Wallace and his works, and often his readers, as misogynistic. Indeed, Amy Hungerford refuses to read or assign Wallace, partly because of a perceived coercion to do so. Hayes-Brady has approached the subject with an acute awareness of the need not to ignore but to critically evaluate those aspects of writers and their texts that are deemed to be ‘problematic.’ Undoubtedly, Wallace’s personal and literary experience of interpersonal intimate relationships is often troubling, devoid of affection, vacuous in the most literal sense. For Wallace, I argue here, gender binaries support a vision of intercourse that has to do more with domination than it does love, or even desire, which I suggest is absent in Wallace’s fictional universe. However, Wallace is also a sophisticated and informed reader, and much of his fiction evidences a studied knowledge of precisely the kinds of asymmetrical power relations that we find in his works. If his portrayal of women is disturbing, it is so because of the hideousness that he identifies in his male characters. But, there is something of a redemption, I conclude, in his representations, rare as they are, of homosexual intercourse.
