In this provocative and intensely personal new book of essays about love and language, desire and drama, reminiscence and change, and fandom, William J. Simmons takes up Eve Sedgwick's reparative reading as a challenge to empirical and taxonomical approaches to art, music, and film and instead promotes new ways of discussing them that create community and empathy rather than hierarchies. Specifically, Simmons advocates for incorporating memoir, history, theory, poetry, and even "the cringey admissions of a fanboy" into criticism.

Love and Degradation argues for queer feminism's value to reading and thinking about works by creators as varied as Lana Del Rey, Charlotte Bront