Abolitionist Book Review: What Cleat Cute by Meryl Wilsner Teaches Us About the Power-Knowledge of Psychiatry

Cleat Cute, a sapphic soccer romance novel by Meryl Wilsner (2023), has been living rent-free in my head for almost a year and a half. It is also, perhaps, my most hated book.

I don’t say this to be mean — I have a lot of admiration for Meryl Wilsner as an author and have enjoyed some of their past books. I’m hoping that their newest book My Best Friend’s Honeymoon is again a fun romp and not problematic and sanist like Cleat Cute.

So, if this post somehow reaches Meryl, hi! I know you poured your heart into Cleat Cute. From what I see on your socials I think you are an abolitionist-minded person, and I hope you will take this as a call in rather than a call out. Feel free to email me and let’s talk about it!

I’m going to break down a few areas where I found Cleat Cute problematic, sanist, ableist, and using carceral logics, culminating in a discussion of the power-knowledge of stigma and psychiatry.

Note: this post contains spoilers!

What I liked about this book

First, I want to start out by talking about a few things that I liked about this book. For starters: queer sports romance! Yay! I found the sports aspect of this book to be really fascinating. I love reading about behind-the-scenes of professional athletes, and the team dynamic.

And more importantly, nonbinary athlete representation! I have never read a book with nonbinary athlete representation before, and especially in gender binary sports. I would LOVE a POV book about a nonbinary athlete in “women’s” sports. As an agender person who won 2024 “Illinois Strongest Woman”, I have lots of thoughts and feelings and both would love to see that representation, and find it a really interesting inner battle balancing the joy of sports with the dysphoria of being forced to categorize myself into a binary that doesn’t fit.

The problem of medical autonomy

On to some of the juicier bits. The lack of respect for medical autonomy was the first real thing that bothered me about Cleat Cute.

Romance is extremely formulaic, which is part of why I find it so easy and enjoyable to read. Here’s the approximate formula that almost all romance novels follow: at 25%, the characters usually realize they have feelings for each other (or you, the reader realizes it). At 50% of the way through, they have a big confict and/or bbreak up. Then they get back together or make up. At around 85% of the way through they have their biggest conflict yet, leading into a grand romantic gesture at 90-95% of the way through.

Grace, one of the main characters, has an injured hip (which considering that she is a professional soccer player, is a big issue). Phoebe encourages her to see the team’s medical personnel, but Grace doesn’t want to, feeling that she will recover eventually and that seeking medical attention for it will bench her and risk her career.

So, for the first major conflict in this book, about halfway through, Phoebe “accidentally” spills the beans about Grace’s injury to the team trainer. Grace is benched, and understandably gets extremely mad when she finds out that it was Phoebe who tattled on her.

The “resolution” to the conflict was that Grace realized that Phoebe “had good intentions”.

Yuck!!!!

As a romance reader I found this resolution extremely weak. As an abolitionist I found the whole conflict and resolution to use carceral logic. This is where the concept of the “cop inside of you” comes into play. When you think of abolition, you think of police and prisons. While abolition is about getting rid of police and prisons, it’s equally about dismantling the carceral logics that allow for prisons to exist in the first place — including reflecting on our own desire to surveille and discipline our loved ones and people in our communities.

In this example, Phoebe takes it on herself to police Grace’s body and force her into medical care, effectively removing her agency and bodily autonomy. It can be so hard to see our loved ones make decisions that we don’t think are best fot their health, but somone else’s body is never your responsibility.

This would have been a great opportunity in the book for the characters to talk about expectations of privacy and bodily autonomy! Grace could have expressed that she was hurt and felt violated that Phoebe shared her personal medical information with someone in a position of power. Phoebe could have apologized profusely, sharing that she thought she was doing it in Grace’s best interest, but was wrong to disrespect Grace’s autonomy. They could have worked out their boundaries of care and concern.

So this section was where, my first time through, I DNF’d this book.

The power-knowledge of stigma

I came back to this book a year later knowing that I wanted to analyze it critically so that I could talk about it.

What I didn’t expect was for this book to turn even harder in the direction of disrepecting personal autonomy!

So, Phoebe and Grace make up and basically get back together.

Then, as we get to the 85% conflict, it’s Grace’s turn to be a gigantic piece of shit.

Throughout the story, Phoebe’s character is portrayed as being flightly, always late, forgetful, and scattered. The soccer team they’re both on has their first game of the season, and Phoebe gets kicked out of it for acting out in anger.

After the game, grace makes a comment about Phoebe needing to adjust her medication to fix her “disorder”, referring to her perceived ADHD. Understandably, Phoebe is like wow, that’s an extremely fucked up thing to say.

Again, this is a moment where we could have had a reflection and lesson about pathologizing the people in our life, which effectively removes their agency. But instead, Grace leans harder into Phoebe’s “need” for a diagnosis to take medication to “control her disorder”. As the “resolution”, Grace helps Phoebe make an appointment to go get diagnosed.

This, to me, becomes a fascinating illustration of the power-knowledge of stigma and anti-stigma. At first my interpretation was that, likely with the goal of destigmatization of the ADHD diagnosis, Meryl Wilsner instead has created a situation of increased stigma. But when we look at it through a Foucauldian lens, I think it’s actually a beatiful illustration of exactly how stigma works to reinforce and necessitate the power of psychiatry.

Foucault suggests, “…we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power-relations are suspended and the knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and interests… we should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another” (p. 27). With destigmatization, we can clearly see the feedback loop where power creates knowledge, which reinforces the necessity of that power. In this case, the knowledge is messages of destigmatization — it’s okay not to be okay. It’s okay to get diagnosed. It’s okay to take medication. This, of course, means that psychiatry itself is necessary to serve these needs. In the example of Cleat Cute, Grace pathologizes Phoebe and insists that she has ADHD. But she solves the “problem” for Phoebe by insisting that it’s okay because she can get diagnosed and take medication to regulate her behavior. So, in this case, psychiatry (power) produced the knowledges of mental illness and destigmatization, and that knowledge (destigmatization) legitimized the necessity of psychiatry (power).

But my initial interpretation of the feedback loop was that it was a mistaken logic — that this isn’t destigmatization — because instead of normalizing Phoebe’s human experience, it continued to alienate Phoebe’s experience in the absence of pathology. I realize now that this is not a mistaken logic; instead, it is the exact function of destigmatization in the ways it is commonly expressed. Destigmatization has a generally positive connotation because it “frees” us from stigma (which has a negative connotation). But by utilizing Foucault’s theories of power, we can see that it does so not by invalidating the foundational claims of stigma (you’re mentally ill, there’s something wrong with you), but by reinforcing psychiatry as the needed solution to stigma.

Through research, we can see that know that psychiatric diagnoses that are more commonly associated with biological and hereditary causes (like schizophrenia) are linked to higher stigmatization, while diagnoses more commonly associated with sociopolitical causes (like depression) are less stigmatized.

That is, the medicalization of the human experience — in this case, Grace’s insistence that Phoebe is disordered and needs to get a diagnosis, is in itself what creates the stigma.

But wait — isn’t telling people not to get diagnosed removing their agency too, Annie?

I want to be clear here that it is not my intention to make people feel judged for their decisions to get diagnosed or to take medication for “ADHD” or any other mental health label. There are hundreds of valid reasons that someone might feel empowered by a diagnosis, or might feel that medication benefits them, and no one should ever have to justify their decision to seek a diagnosis or take medication.

This is not a pro-RFK-taking-away-your-antidepressants analysis. On the contrary, it is equally important that we respect people’s autonomy in choosing to take a medicalized approach to their human experience, I would only caution that people should make informed decisions critically assessing the implications of both diagnosis (surveillance, possible future loss of rights, possible future loss of medical autonomy) and medication (don’t address the situational causes of human suffering, side effects are poorly communicated).