47 I keep waiting for feminist theorists to start talking about deterioration as a textual phenomenon; it would be the sort of wry joke that captures truths: “deterioration” is essentially “deconstruction” made passive, observed rather than performed, the reader the ultimate “absentee” in the post-structural totem of absence: one of the things Kate’s story unpacks is the terrific power of writer-as-witness, utterly passive, unheard: it might be this more than what’s argued in the main body below that’s skepticism’s feminist vishna.