Thanks to Caroline Crew — who just fucking gets us — you can hop over Kenyon Review for a brilliant examination of of Elizabeth Hall’s I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris. (TS 2016).
“The most rapturous joy in Elizabeth Hall’s I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris is its lack of interest in love,” begins Crew’s review.
The book-length essay is bullet-focused (while there is much joy to be found in its chapters as stand-alone essays, the slim volume functions ecstatically as a single rampage). This narrow questioning, like the clitoris, spreads beyond its surface concern to encompass historical, political, legal, medical, philosophical, artistic, and personal contexts. As Hall expounds in the eponymous first chapter: “The clitoris is small except when it is not.” . . .
Philosophers and theorists have always asked what the body is — Hall just goes further than the classical ideal of the male body, beyond the woman as a vessel or victim, past genre as gender, to the clitoris. And we should follow her.