Amanda Montei is the author of Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, & Control, as well as the memoir Two Memoirs and a collection of prose, The Failure Age.
Her work has been featured at The New York Times, The Guardian, ELLE, TIME, and in numerous literary journals. She was a 2020 Best American Essays notable.
At Lit Hub Montei tagged "seven novels that deal with questions of consent and coercion" and which "offer new ways of understanding what it’s like to live in a culture of male control, showing how narrative can be a tool for expanding the language we have to describe women’s pain, as well as for resistance." One title on the list:
J.M. Coetzee, DisgraceRead about the other entries on the list.
I write about one scene from this novel in my book, Touched Out. In the scene, a student, Melanie, “moves of her own accord” during a sexual experience with an older male professor, “but not quite of her own volition,” as philosopherof misogyny Kate Manne notes in her book, Entitled. The scene, referred to by the male professor as “not rape, not quite” shows how, in Manne’s words, a woman can be “cast into a cultural script in which a man’s sexual desire has outsize ethical importance,” how a lack of agency can lead her into unwanted sex, and how, in the aftermath of such a violation, she may even feel obligated to protect the man who has mistreated her.
Disgrace also appears on Roxane Gay's six favorite books list, Adam Ross's five best list of books on cruelty in fact and fiction, Ian Holding's top ten list of books that teach us about southern Africa and among Yann Martel's five favorite books and T.C. Boyle's four favorite books to turn to for comfort; it is one of Vendela Vida's favorite books of the last ten years.
--Marshal Zeringue
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