Go Forth (Vol. 38)

Go Forth is a series that offers a look into the publishing industry and contemporary small-press literature. See more of the series.

An Interview with Cassandra Troyan

Cassandra Troyan’s writing, described by Blake Butler, “takes the Sade-ian end of the oversharing shtick, turning one’s own private human pain into a diorama reflecting the environments and brains that birthed it.”

Troyan’s books are THRONE OF BLOOD (Solar Luxuriance, 2013), BLACKEN ME BLACKEN ME, GROWLED (Tiny Hardcore Press, 2014), KILL MANUAL (Artifice Books, 2014) and the chapbook HATRED OF WOMEN (Solar Luxuriance, 2014). Forthcoming in 2016 is a chapbook from Kenning Editions’ Ordinance series, entitled “FREEDOM & PROSTITUTION.” You can read more here.

—Brandon Hobson

BRANDON HOBSON: At the beginning of Kill Manual, you say that pain is a type of love. The narrator in Hatred of Women also seems to be interested in this same idea. At one point she talks about weaponized masculinity and the sexual assault by police officers, followed by the lines: “Ma’am I’m gonna need you to step to the side / Ma’am I’m gonna need you to stop filming me / Ma’am I’m gonna need you to stop filming me unless it’s my cock.” Can you talk a bit more about your interest in this?

CASSANDRA TROYAN: I think of weaponized masculinity as an atavistic turn to recover a primal essence construed as male since transgender, non-binary, and non-conforming folks, along with queerness and intersectional feminism have threatened the security of men’s hegemony by calling into question the validity of a sexed and gendered class society. (Or, why do feminists have no sense of humor?) In cultural phenomena this manifests as: obsessions with 1950’s American culture (Mad Men), forms of sport and exercise privileging survival-like skills (CrossFit, Tough Mudder, The Paleo Diet), Libertarian ideology, ammunition hoarding, along with the near sovereign status of the military and police (including the militarization of the police), which Foucault would see as an extension of “pastoral power.”

(On a side-note, this is not to create false binaries between the cerebral/physical, feminine/masculine, since I am personally invested in fitness and learning different techniques as a generalized practice in the diversification of all skills, more in lines with something like a post-left materialist dexterity rather than pure brute force. My critique is concerned with when these practices adopt a reductionist purview which reproduces forms of violent engagement uncritically or views their practice as an end in of itself.)

A study by the ACLU in June 2014 tracked the rise of military policing through the Department of Defense’s...