The personal-as-political mode works only when grounded in curiosity about others’ lives.

Evidence

What set Wolf’s writing apart from these kinds of movement intellectuals was an apparent paucity of curiosity about the lives of women who were not her, and whose lives were markedly different from her own. This came up in her first book, which somehow managed to be a study of the impact of white, European beauty ideals without engaging with the particular and acute impacts of those ideals on Black, Asian, and other nonwhite women (let alone queer and transgender women). — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 66

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how Klein’s doubling device works: Wolf’s failure is precisely the lack of curiosity about the ‘other’ that Klein’s device forces her to cultivate.