Daddy Issues

A searching essay on the fraught bonds between daughters and their fathers from one of our most perceptive feminist writers and the author of Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again In Daddy Issues, critically acclaimed writer Katherine Angel examines the place of fathers in contemporary culture with her characteristic mix of intellectual boldness and capacity for nuance, and her elegant, searching prose. In this long essay, Angel asks how the mixture of love and hatred we feel towards our fathers--and patriarchal father figures--can be turned into a relationship that is generative rather than destructive. Moving deftly between developmental psychology and psychoanalysis (Winnicott and Freud), cultural visions of fathering from King Lear and Virginia Woolf to Ivanka Trump, and issues from incest to #MeToo, Angel probes the fraught bond of daughters and fathers, women and the patriarchal regime. What, she asks, is this discomfiting space of love and hate--and how are we to reckon with both fealty and rebellion?