For disobeying is a metafictive take on the power dynamics of sexuality and the roles we as humans are expected to play, the directives we’re expected to obey, in seeking approval. By focusing a candid yet critical lens on Marlon Brando and other notable men, the author flips the script on gender, age, race, inheritance, and societal status, luridly exposing the mechanisms by which trauma and mental illness destroy and reinvent the concept of self. By inhabiting Brando’s body, the author replicates the dysphoria of abuse, cathartically acting out not only through the perspective of a lover and idol, but a father figure, a person of status, someone that has proudly given you a chance at a life, but at the same time resentful of the parts of themselves they see in you that they incestuously want back. We compassionately experience both sides of the sexual violence—recepient/victim and giver/aggressor—and through this bipolar method-acting we can cope and understand the bodies/roles given to us at birth, bodies that seek approval from figures other than their own.
"Whatever I say about For disobeying will fall short of its scope, its genius, its arrested particulars. Sasha Hawkins is an unusual writer in every imaginable respect: form, style, voice, approach, subject, and the sheer force of her imagination. This full-length debut is a kind of counterhistory to classic film, a phenomenology of cinematic speech, and the voices it summons are uncannily alive, ferociously tender, searing in every shadowy rendering that Hawkins unveils under her unflinching eye. Sex, tears, laughter, madness, regret, and ecstasy—it's all here in a perfected ventriloquy of excess."—Joshua Marie Wilkinson
