No, not writing an essay, just reading it.
Oh dear - suddenly feel compelled to say: no spoilers please!
I am interested in it from a feminist perspective - in that there is hardly anything about men's bodies, and so much about women's - and yet I am guessing (have not finished it yet, though nearly, and when I have I will have only read it once) a tiny fraction of it is about women's bodies from their own perspective. We get some interiority of Kiki's experience of her body. a lot of looking at it, and looking at Zora's body, and looking at Victoria's body, and looking at Claire's body. A little of Jerome's body and Carl's body, to look at (not to be in). When we are "in" the men's bodies it is largely as they are sexually experiencing (through sight or other senses) the women's bodies.
This is uncomfortable for me, especially in an academic setting, because it reinforces a status quo in whcih men stride about naturally and comfortably in their unremarked bodies, and there is always some sort of hoo-ha, angst, frisson, discomfort, something, about women's. It reminds me of being at college where I worried about my own body, in particular a. its sexual safety and b. the size of my arse, about 679% more than my actual studies. Here are all these men thinking about rap and protests and politics and their rivals' lectures, and women's bodies, and all these women dressing up, worrying about their weight, struggling to walk in heels, and so on.
It has a finely tuned feminist perspective in some areas and yet it is totally unchallenging of the literary tradition of the male gaze.
Even Zoras's lust for Carl is somehow about his beautiful face as much as, or more than, his presumably delicious arse.
I am white and perhaps (probably) racially clueless but it does seem to me to contain more racial sophistication than the pitiful minimal standards of literary fiction (by recognising race at all it coudln't fail to do that I suppose) (I am not criticising its racial sensibilities, I am saying I am not qualified to judge them)