Chris Performing Chris: The Function of Performance in Chris Kraus' I love Dick

Abstract

Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick blurs the boundaries between life and fiction by using the fictional character Chris Kraus to perform her lived experience. Fragmented by her role as both the author and character in the novel, Chris Kraus is able to be contradictory. This allows Kraus to understand her personal and subject experience through an impersonal framework as something social and structural. She weaves in the remediation of the character Gabi Teisch and the life of Hannah Wilke to uncover the structural denial of female complexity, and add their stories to her own narrative that resists the assumption that the female lived experience can only be personal.