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Article published In:
When Dialogue Fails
Edited by Anja Müller-Wood
[Language and Dialogue 12:1] 2022
► pp. 54–71

The collapse of dialogue, consent, and the controversy over Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person”

| University of Hamburg

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.

Keywords: feminism, Bakhtin, (sexual) consent, #metoo, short story, social media, twenty-first century, narrative
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Politics, polarization, and the demise of dialogue
  • 3.Two discourses: Critiques of domination and sex-positive feminism
  • 4.“Cat Person” as failed dialogue on consent
  • 5.Aesthetic distance in the era of the filter bubble
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 7 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00111.rox
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