Authors Gina Frangello and Emily Rapp Black discuss “Literature of the Body” at Desert General

This Saturday at Desert General in Twentynine Palms, authors Gina Frangello and Emily Rapp Black will be discussing their approach to Literature of the Body, and the body as a vessel of truth and resistance in both fiction and non-fiction. Reporter Gabriel Hart spoke to Frangello and Black about their respective approach to this unique angle. 

Gina Frangello celebrates the re-releases of her two earliest books of fiction: My Sister’s Continent and Slut Lullabies from Northwestern University Press, which earned her reputation as a risk-taking and subversive explorer of desire, class, feminism, and psychosexual power dynamics.

“In my work I write very kind feminist cultural critique then hybrid it into fiction and nonfiction. I’ve always been very interested in addressing the truths of women’s bodies, the variances. I write a lot about illness and there’s also a lot of psychosexual work. I come up from a tradition of French feminist theory and psychoanalysis. I’ve always been very interested in this imperative of writing the body as a way of an alternative to traditional patriarchal discourse for women, and also at this point for people of color, for queer people, and for people with disabilities like Emily’s work,” says Frangello.

In Emily Rapp Black’s new craft book, I Would Die if I Were You: Notes on Art and Truth Telling, she explores the themes of disability, loss, and the saving power of story that made her a New York Times bestselling author, resisting the narratives that others have tried to impose on her life.

“The book title comes from a phrase I’ve heard a lot during my life which is ‘I would die if I were you,’ when I’ve told them my life story. Yes, there’s a lot of sadness in the book vis-á-vis my life story. However, I will say too, that it’s a very funny book, it’s a very hopeful book, and it’s not so much about any one being as it is about the act of writing as a salvific thing for people and creativity as a way of managing all of the resident miseries of our world in a creative and joyful way,” says Black.

Gina Frangello and Emily Rapp Black discuss Literature of the Body this Saturday (5/16) at 4:00 p.m. at Desert General in Twentynine Palms, located at 6427 Mesquite Road, next to Kitchen in the Desert.

The event is free and open to the public.