In this candid interview, Leora Fridman opens up about the themes of power, trauma, and identity in her latest work Bound Up. From her exploration of kink and chronic illness to her reflections on race and privilege, Fridman shares how personal experiences and political activism shape her writing. With humour and an autotheoretical approach, she confronts uncomfortable truths, offering readers a complex, honest look at the intersections of history, oppression, and intimacy.

Your writing often delves into issues of identity and belonging. Can you share how your personal experiences have shaped these themes in Bound Up?

Bound Up continues threads I explored in previous work about disability and chronic illness, particularly the possibilities that these open for new understandings of power and strength that rely less on mastery or domination. My companionship with artists and thinkers working with these themes led me towards the consideration of kink and role play, and their possibility to hold social conditioned roles both more loosely and more rigorously.

My other entry into the themes of Bound Up came in a period of my life when I was going back and forth between Oakland, CA and Berlin, Germany. In Oakland, I was learning a lot from Black Lives Matter movements and trying to understand myself as an ally to Black-led movements against police brutality. Part of that work involved coming to terms with the realities of my own whiteness as an assimilated light-skinned, Mexican American Jew in the United States, and how much power that assimilation has assigned to me within carceral systems, particularly regarding who those systems “protect” from whom. It was a crucial part of my own politicization to come to understand the way my whiteness interpolated me into systems of oppression on the side of the oppressor. At the same time, when I travelled to Berlin, I was immediately understood as a victim--historically, and in a way also contemporaneously, with a kind of deferring to Jews as the “ultimate” historical victims. I found this very troubling and found it troubling to switch between the roles of victim and oppressor so quickly when switching between nation states. I was trying to understand how the idea of the nation mediates individual and interpersonal power, and how a body can catch up to the current time reality of their own lived experience of power systems, even as we acknowledge and grapple with what we have inherited in terms of history, trauma and narrative.

What does your typical writing process look like, especially for a project as complex as Bound Up, which intertwines historical context with personal narrative?

Whenever I get interested in something, I start to read widely and obsessively. When I first got interested in kink and role-play and specifically erotic practices that engage with racialization, I began to read critical, literary and popular texts about these themes. It’s important to Bound Up that I work with a (bizarrely!) wide range of genre in terms of the texts I’m pulling from. I use critical theories of race and queerness, texts and languages that may traditionally not seem accessible to certain people who don’t training to read those, but I also engage with so-called “low culture” in terms of Nazi furry erotic novels,” Nazisploitation films and other work.

I read and write expansively, always too much, always may more than the book project or an essay can contact. This is part of what this book is about: the experience of obsession. What it does to our attention and what it can help us learn about who we are, who we have been and who we are becoming. I write into some fragments of personal experience related to what I’m obsessed with, and then I layer in what I’m reading to see where it can expand my thinking, push against or expand what I think I know.

In Bound Up, you explore challenging subjects such as trauma and power dynamics. Writing about these sensitive topics can often evoke discomfort for both the writer and the reader. How do you navigate the tension of addressing these uncomfortable themes while maintaining a sense of honesty and humour in your work?

Humour is a huge part of how I navigate discomfort. I’m a big laugher in general and I’m often caught in public laughing too loudly. I feel that humour is a key part of grappling with and considering how to newly engage stuck histories that are shot through with trauma. When I feel like I can encounter something as funny, I understand I have a new kind of power over it, more power than I feel when I am totally frozen in my engagement with it.

For me, the absurd allows me to push myself into subject matter and thinking that I would be too afraid to address otherwise. I write in the book about how pushing myself into the ridiculous or campy version of a scene or a thought allows me more courage. If I’m not trying to be a perfect zipped-up intellectual, I can see outside of the bounds (pun intended) that have kept certain possibilities in my thinking blocked-off or sealed away.

There is a lot in this book that is also particularly engaging what it means to write nonfiction and want my reader to feel comfortable inside of that nonfiction, even when I am writing about things that make a lot of people uncomfortable. Part of how I try to do that is to cultivate a form of nonfiction that is inclusive, conversational, and porous in its forms, presenting one way that I have addressed these themes, but making no claims that they are a form of expertise or that they are right for everyone. They are an example, a jumping-off point for the reader’s own continuation—hopefully in the direction of what serves that reader’s own liberatory projects and relationships.

You mention an autotheoretical journey in your latest work. How does this framework enhance your exploration of kink and its relationship to historical oppressions?

I use the term auto theory because I think it’s the best one we have for what I am trying to do, even as I don’t think it entirely describes or encloses the form and it also holds its own historical problems and exclusions. That said, part of what is happening in this book is a person trying to figure out something as they go along. I’m asking my reader to sit on my shoulder, so to speak, as I think through, as I read, as I watch. I do this to invite you into a process of continuous, always-opening thinking. This is part of what I find most useful in an autotheoretical mode… We read something or we engage with a text and with it we find new ways of understanding ourselves. Thus, both the self and the text are becoming a form that is unlimited, an un-enclosed site for new consideration and evolution, which is true to how I experience the self – not as a static character in process of near resolution.

In this book, when I invite people to try to update histories of trauma with their own current-time experiences, I am relying on traditions of autotheory that have encouraged writers and readers to take live experiences as material for developing new philosophies and understandings of the context in which they find themselves.

Given the current sociopolitical climate, how do you see Bound Up contributing to conversations about fascism, trauma, and intimacy? What do you hope readers take away from it?

I finished Bound Up before October 7, but its themes are particularly relevant now. The stakes of my own exploration into victimhood narratives and what they do to a person are particularly relevant to the ways that many different political groups and parties are competing in the public fear to be the most oppressed. There is a sense that victimhood is the only way to be deserving of care and attention and power. In this book and beyond, I’m advocating for a space in which everyone deserves attention and care, no matter their victimhood status. This is of course not in any way intended to take away anyone’s right to acknowledge, explain or confess their own painful histories and traumas. I want space for those, but I do not want that to be a competitive space.

As an American Jew, I am particularly concerned with the Israeli genocidal assault on Gaza and the weaponization use of Jewish fear and historical trauma towards an extremely violent militarized society. In Israel’s military actions, we see the outcome of victimhood narratives: If you believe that you are always a victim and will always be under attack, you need to arm and protect yourself at all costs. There is only good or evil and anyone who isn’t on your side must be destroyed. Zoé Samudzi wrote in a Parapraxis newsletter: “This canonical binarization of the sacred and the profane is what makes genocide denial possible, easy, and frequent.” If we are only sacred, everyone outside of sphere is profane and thus not deserving of care. I’ve been meditating on this Samudzi line as a helpful extension of why it’s so important to me in Bound Up to touch the possibilities of evil in all of us. I am encouraging my readers towards an understanding that we are all partly good, partly evil, capable of horrors and capable of love and greatness. If we isolate and exceptionalize evil we are destined for the kinds of interminable horrific divisions and wars we see all around us today.

As a writer and educator, how do your teaching experiences influence your writing? Are there specific moments or interactions with students that have sparked new ideas for your work?

My work is extremely relational, even at the few moments when its not engaged in citation. I learn from my friends and students and collaborators all the time. I’ve never been a writer who wants to make work isolated inside of my own brain. I don’t share specific interactions with my students straightforwardly in my work (or here) because that’s beyond the ethical code of my pedagogy, but I can say that teaching in the student uprising of spring 2024 was profoundly meaningful to me—that’s one recent moment that has sparked a lot in me that I’m still in the process of integrating. I closely witnessed my students’ desire to be a part of mass collective action and how incredibly helpful that can be in a world filled with apocalyptic despair narratives. It was also difficult to try to hold a classroom space (with the expectations of class meeting, learning outcomes, etc) in the context of this uprising, and I had to experiment with meeting the moment in balance with meeting shared goals with students. This continues to be something I am working into what I understand as my own anti-hierarchical pedagogy: the paradox how I can both offer thorough educational structures to my students and at the same time deconstruct hierarchical methodologies and mechanisms of social control inside of higher education. I’ve written more about this in Full Stop. There I focus specifically on the impossibility of neutrality in the classroom, a theme which is of course also relevant to Bound Up: I don’t believe in a neutral, pure political space, and am instead in search of the fertile, messy eros of relations and interactions that acknowledge the systems, processes and histories at work on us in each moment.

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