The Feminist Theory Reading Thread

Welcome. This is the place to share your suggestions, opinions, concerns, and general issues re. books dealing with feminist theory. There are many that get mentioned in other threads across this group, so please don't hesitate to cross-post those here as well, especially if wanting to discuss other aspects/themes from said books. Thank you and jump right in.

This thread on Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist is going on in another group but I thought I'd link it here for reference. I plan to read that book soon.

>2 sturlington::

Thanks for that. I wasn't even aware of that other thread. Bad Feminist is on my TBR list too. But, I'm happy to eavesdrop in any discussion related to it till I get to reading it.

>3 jennybhatt: You are very welcome to join in! I started the thread in the other group, because I don't have the background to situate my reading of the book in feminist theory, but Gay's book inspires discussion about a lot of feminist issues that I think could overlap nicely with this group.

As part of reading the books that Bad Feminist cites, I've started reading Gender Trouble by Judith Butler for the first time. My academic and professional background is in public policy/program evaluation, so I have some academic theory under my belt from social science courses, but it's in political science and sociology, not gender studies. As a result, there are some parts of Gender Trouble I'm really struggling with as I have never read Foucault, Zizek, and other "pure" theorists. There are passages I've had to reread to understand.

Have others read it?

>1 jennybhatt:

Thanks, Jenny.

>4 sparemethecensor:

No, and I expect to have similar problems, but I've already decided not to sweat it and try to understand "the big picture" (there's always one, isn't there?) first.

I expect to provide a lot of moments of light comedy to theorists. :)

>6 sparemethecensor: That's a good attitude! Yes, I'm getting the big picture takeaways. I'll also note that in my version, which is a recent revised edition, Butler's own introduction notes critiques of the book that have helped me understand it -- mostly regarding the evolving views of gender that young third-wavers interested in intersectionality (which is where I count myself) might better connect with. And I do!

In my 20s and early-30s, I was deeply interested in reading feminist texts. I started with the classics like The Second Sex and so on. But, it was the lack of an intersectionality perspective that put me off, I think. As a woman of color and a first-generation immigrant, I felt that some of those books I'd picked up really were not talking to me. I did agree with a lot of what they said and I appreciate that they were books of their times, but I didn't find I could "use" any of that knowledge in my everyday life -- if that makes sense.

I'm hoping that books like Bad Feminist, which I want to get to soon, are going to be different because feminism has evolved so much since those books I turned to were written.

>7 jennybhatt: Yes, today's books are much more interested in intersectionalit. I also appreciate when modern feminists are reflective about reasons why women of color and non-gender-conforming persons felt abandoned by feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. We need to reckon with that.

I will say, though, that Bad Feminist and other books like it I see today are not serious the way that books like The Second Sex or The Feminine Mystique are. Bad Feminist is, I think, aware that it has serious and not-serious essays.

Another trend I see in what I have read is that many books today are aimed more at policy prescriptions for specific issues than defining the problem (the problem with no name!) as early works were. I think this reflects the movement we've made in Western society, but I know older feminists who don't like the approach. I'm thinking, for instance, of The Purity Myth and Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, both of which are by younger feminists writing about specific issues facing young women. There is some theory and certainly plenty of philosophy about the way the patriarchy hurts women, but there are also propositions for change.

>8 sparemethecensor::

Yes, that makes sense that feminist theory has progressed from defining the problem to policy prescriptions for specific issues. In the corporate world, where I spent all my working life till recently, I've seen the shift from not having the right thoughts to describe certain behaviors even to myself, never mind to others, to now having much clearer understanding and richer language around gender bias issues in the workplace and having employee training around ways that both men and women can deal with the different causes, symptoms, and effects. That's just in my career span and I'm still getting used to it.

I have a house full of visitors at the moment so I don't have the wherewithal to post in too much depth, but I'd like to put in a plug for Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts for this thread. I just finished a second reading (it is the kind of book that, although short, demands that kind of attention and focus) and I am hugely impressed with her exploration into the nature of gender, the assumptions we make about it and about the people who don't identify with either of the two options most of us have always accepted were the only possible choices we had.

For a book that doesn't hesitate to quote Roland Barthes in great heaping handfuls, The Argonauts is relentless, inescapably physical -- it is all about the body. The author's body. Her baby son's body. Her husband's body as he transitions from female to male. ("I'm not going anywhere," he says when asked about "his journey"). About what it is, physically, to be comfortable or a stranger in your own skin.

I was enormously impressed with it. Nelson's passion is charged and erotic, her take-down of the assumptions we all make about what it is to be a woman, is sharp and wise and inescapably directed at that person we see in the mirror. More than once I found myself taking inventory of my own personal baggage and the many things I'm inclined to take for granted when I talk about what it is to be a woman.

So when >8 sparemethecensor: says feminist books......I see today are not serious the way that books like The Second Sex or The Feminine Mystique are I want to say that The Argonauts is indeed a "serious" book. It may be almost unbearably intimate in places, but its scope is wide. It is the epitome of the phrase "the personal is political."

>10 southernbooklady: Right, perhaps I didn't give my statement the nuance it needed -- there is no shortage of serious books, especially those about personal experiences. Many are deathly serious, especially for assault victims, women of color and LGBTQ populations facing violence and danger. I'm referring more to books like Bad Feminist that are philosophy and essays aimed at, I think, explaining feminism to young women and showing them its importance. Personally I find "personal is political" books more compelling for just the reasons you state.

>7 jennybhatt:

I've only read bits of The second sex so far (there was supposed to be a group read--perhaps even here, in this group? Don't know what happened to it...), but my impression is that it's a work of philosophy with universal import or at least intended as such, so I'd be very interested in what specifically you felt didn't speak to you. I presume it must be dated in some ways, to be sure...

>8 sparemethecensor:

Agreed, Bad feminist touches on many big problems but through a pop culture, "current affairs" lens. And the style is mostly breezy, chatty, social-media approach.

It's excellent there are such voices taking part and talking back to what happens in public, but it doesn't substitute theory.

>10 southernbooklady:

Sounds terrific.

>11 sparemethecensor: Many are deathly serious, especially for assault victims, women of color and LGBTQ populations facing violence and danger. I'm referring more to books like Bad Feminist that are philosophy and essays aimed at, I think, explaining feminism to young women and showing them its importance.

I don't disagree that personal experience books are "deathly serious" for the people doing the telling, but that wasn't what I was trying to get across. I think The Argonauts is a "big" book, a philosophy book, aimed at getting readers to come to a new understanding of gender and how it is socially expressed.

>13 southernbooklady: I understand. I shouldn't have assumed what the book was about. It's been added to my TBR.

>12 LolaWalser:: It's been more than a decade since I read The Second Sex. I'll have to get it off the shelves and revisit to be more specific re. what didn't speak to me then. But, I definitely intend to do that soon. I've been traveling a bit these days, so have only a limited set of books with me right now (hate that). Back home in early-April and should be able to respond sometime around then.

So, here's an essential list of "first-wave feminism" books. I would have added Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, as that book changed my life at around 18 years of age (I think I posted a review on LT at some point too.)

What else would you all add to this "first-wave feminism" list? I've only read the Wollstonecraft and bits of Sojourner Truth.

http://www.signature-reads.com/2016/03/essential-reading-on-first-wave-feminism/

>10 southernbooklady:

Thank you for your suggestion yesterday of The Argonauts.

There are, sometimes, advantages to living in a suburb. Toronto Public, with its hundred branches, has some sixty copies of the book in every possible format with long lists of holds on the circulating copies. But there it was waiting for me on the shelf of my three-branch local library.

The language is such a pleasure to read, and the ideas are rich and provocative.

>16 jennybhatt: I meant to add -- it was interesting to see Megan Marshall's biography of Margaret Fuller on the list of "first wave" feminists. It is book I recommend often and at the least provocation, it and its subject made such an impression on me. Fuller's feminist philosophy is often summarized as "marriage is institutionalized slavery of women" -- a statement on the surface so beyond the pale as to be practically incomprehensible to most people. But Marshall does a fantastic job of unpacking that statement to show Fuller's growing concern and rejection of the mold women were forced into in her 19th century society (it's alarming how much of it is still applicable today) and thus how such a view is radical only in its truthfulness. I think Fuller spent her life trying to be human, when every single person in her sphere wanted her to be a woman. And Fuller's life-long attempt to reconcile the two without sacrificing either is the reason her work belongs on any list of "first wave" feminist work.

Another person who might belong on such a list is Lou Andreas-Salome. She's a fascinating character in herself, and although I don't think she ever wrote much about women as a class of people in the sociological sense, she did write some of the very earliest stuff I know about on female sexuality -- recognizing women as sexual beings with legitimate sexual appetites. I think she even predated Freud (who knew and admired her) on the subject. And she lived her live in pursuit of a particular ideal -- to be "free" -- which as it turns out meant rejecting all the usual relationship models allowed to women and the roles they were supposed to fill (always in service to some man). She lived in a menage a trois with Nietzche and Paul Ree but refused to choose between them or marry either of them (they both asked). She did marry Friedrich Carl Andreas, but refused to have sex with him. She once wrote to Nietzche that her dream was to live together each of them with their own apartments, but meeting in a central room or library where they could all work in company. "To be free to work" seems to have been Salome's version of what Fuller called "reaching her potential" and what in both cases seems to me to be a desire to simply be human.

> jennybhatt Since no one else has mentioned Audre Lorde, I'll put Sister Outsider out there as essential feminist reading. Also Adrienne Rich's collection On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Both addressed intersectionality long before mainstream feminism got to it.

Frankly, I have absolutely no interest in reading Bad Feminist . . . the one interview I heard with Roxanne Gay was more than enough. Don't even remember now why I was so annoyed with it . . .

My collection of feminist theory related books is mostly from the 80s and 90s, but they should all be tagged "feminist" or "feminist theory" so feel free to have a search through my library catalog . . .

I definitely agree with the above recommendation of Woolf's A Room of One's Own . . . and would add Three Guineas . . . I re-read that one every few years and am amazed at how current some of the economic analysis is.

I did try to get a group read going of the new(er) translation of The Second Sex but didn't get any takers. I've been struggling through it on my own, but only can manage a little at a time and then I get pulled into other reading . . . Might be willing to give it more focus if others are interested in discussing the aspects that still seem relevant today (sadly, much IS still relevant).

>20 LucindaLibri: I've never read it, and I'd be interested in a group read. I am quite certain I'd be like you, though, managing only a little at a time. Not sure how conducive that is for a group read.

>21 sparemethecensor: I wonder if we might identify specific sections (or a specific section) to read as a group. e.g. I totally skipped over a whole section where she used famous novels to illustrate the depiction of women (because most of the novels were totally unfamiliar to me and may not be famous anymore). I did enjoy her critique of psychoanalysis (which unfortunately, someone on LT had mis-read as SdB adopting the psychoanalytic view).

In any case, I'm on the last section in Volume 1 Facts and Myths. Volume 2 is Lived Experience. I'm using the Borde and Malovany-Chevallier translation that Vintage published in 2011.

I'd be interested in the read too, but I MUST read A-Z or I'll develop a twitch or something. :)

Depiction of women in literature, for instance, sounds fascinating to me (I've been doing a thread about character representation in the science fiction group and this is a big part of it).

>23 LolaWalser: I agree, but the works she analyzes are listed as: "Montherlant or the Bread of Disgust, D. H. Lawrence or Phallic Pride, Claudel or the Handmaiden of the Lord, Breton or Poetry, Stendhal or Romancing the Real" . . . so I'll let you summarize that portion for me. I'm pretty sure I won't have much argument with the notion that many male authors present a sexist view of women. :)

>18 southernbooklady:: Thanks for recommending Margaret Fuller and Lou Andreas-Salome. I've heard of both but not read anything by or about them. The latter sounds fascinating. I will add both to my TBR list.

>19 LucindaLibri:: Thanks for Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. I've read a bit of their work but not to any great extent. And, yes, Three Guineas should be on this list too -- that, I have read. Although, as I mentioned A Room of One's Own left a more lasting mark.

I'll add that I'd be interested in a group read of The Second Sex too. With help from you all, I might even finish it and actually "get it" this time. :) Maybe we plan for mid-April or even May? To allow folks to finish their ongoing/urgent reads?

>25 jennybhatt: What's interesting about Salome was how she steadfastly refused to be "the muse" of the men in her life. Rilke tried to dedicate a book of love poetry to her and she rejected the idea out of hand. She didn't want to be the inspiration of men, but their compatriot:

“I dreamt that we were sharing a large apartment. There is a study and a library in the center, filled with books and flowers, and bedrooms on either side. We all lived and worked together in perfect harmony, and it made no difference at all that I was a woman, and you were men.”

One of my more fun writing projects a few years ago was a kind of tour through the lives of Tina Modotti, Frida Kahlo, and Lou Andreas-Salome -- who turned out to have a kind of serendipitous connection to each other in a "six degrees" kind of way:

http://www.willreadforfood.net/2016/03/wandering-among-the-muses-modotti-kahlo-s...

I found the thread where a Second sex group read was discussed previously (and yes it was in this group):

http://www.librarything.com/topic/93393#4256146

Perhaps it could be used for the read? There are only eight posts...

>25 jennybhatt:

Maybe we plan for mid-April or even May?

Either is fine with me.

>26 southernbooklady:

Great post.

>26 southernbooklady:: How terrific -- that quote. And, the post too -- I did not even know about the Rilke-Pasternak connection. Nor, for that matter, did I know about Tina Modotti. And, I'm definitely getting those Rilke-Salomé letters. :)

>27 LolaWalser:: Oh, yes, we should absolutely use that previous thread. Let's plan for May because mid-April is just round the corner. I'll add a post to the thread shortly to see if there's more interest to get going.

>26 southernbooklady:: I have to ask... on your blog, there's a link to another reading community called BookBalloon. I recognize some of the names (DG Strong, tpc, Kat) as people I knew back in the day when I was a regular at Readerville. Were you, by any chance at Readerville too? It was run by Karen Templer. And, I so wish she hadn't shut it down but I understand that it was a lot of work to maintain. I even had a little something published in one of the Readerville Journals (it was a Jane Austen rant :)).

>29 jennybhatt: I was at Readerville back in the day. Bookballoon was started by a Readerville refugee and a number of folks have found their way there.

>30 southernbooklady:: I wondered if I'd run into past Readervilleans on LT. :) I used to be JenWren there but I wasn't as active as some of the older folks because work was crazier then.
__________

Here's an interesting interview with Rebecca Traister, who has a book out this month: All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation. I haven't read it other than the odd excerpt in interviews/reviews. It does speak to my particular demographic, so I might have to look into it soon enough.

http://www.signature-reads.com/2016/03/all-the-single-ladies-rebecca-traister-on...

>31 jennybhatt: There's a discussion of that book here:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/219988

>32 southernbooklady:: Cool, thanks for that. Will read through it.

Here's piece on Millett which might be an interesting reminder. I can attest to the period in the pre-internet early 90s when it was weirdly hard to buy a copy of Sexual Politics. For me at the time her take on Henry Miller was both eye-opening close reading and generally informative about the so-called "sexual revolution."

Link here: https://newrepublic.com/article/131897/kate

I would add this new book to the list: We Were Feminists Once by Andi Zeisler. I'm a fan of B*tch Media and their weekly podcasts. They're my source for what young feminists are thinking these days. FFI about the book: https://bitchmedia.org/bmart/we-were-feminists-once

>34 krolik:

I'm bookmarking that, I've had Sexual politics on the go (but stalled--no reflection on the book, just my messiness) for months now.

ETA: finished reading.

>35 LucindaLibri:

Never heard of the author, but if you recommend it, I'll try to get it.

>36 LolaWalser: I haven't read it yet, not sure it's actually out yet . . . it's just one I'm looking forward to . . .

There's a good article about Maggie Nelson and how she wrote The Argonauts in the Guardian from the other day:

“I like to think that what literature can do that op-ed pieces and other communications don’t do is describe felt experience,” she tells me, “the flickering, bewildered places that people actually inhabit. I hope my book has made a nuanced contribution to a conversation that is important but can be too clearly delineated.” She mentions that among her readers are people who don’t get it, and who “write to me to let me know that, in case I missed it, there are only two genders, and anything else I might think is wrong. I want to write back and say: thank you so much for this news! Thanks for clearing that up for me!”

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/02/books-interview-maggie-nelson-gende...

I have started Bad Feminist and I think her essay on privilege, "Peculiar Benefits," is required reading. I have never had this concept explained so clearly before.

A new book on feminism called We Were Feminists Once by Andi Zeisler, co-founder of 'Bitch' magazine. Here's a very interesting interview. Yes, feminism (or, at least, one version of it) is becoming cooler these days and there's a level of cultural saturation, perhaps, as she points out. And, I like how she says that the absence of misogyny does not mean we have feminism.

http://flavorwire.com/568635/bitch-founder-andi-zeisler-on-a-battle-that-remains...

>40 jennybhatt: yes. see >35 LucindaLibri: above :)

>41 LucindaLibri:: Oh gosh, sorry, Lucinda. I don't check in here every day and I had seen that earlier post but forgotten about it. Will check next time before posting a repeat. My apologies.

>42 jennybhatt: . . . no problem . . . great minds think alike! :) It was just that I saw your post and thought to myself . . . "didn't I mention that one?" . . . no worries

Rebecca Traister's book, mentioned above, will soon be a movie. It will be interesting to see how that's going to work.

https://variety.com/2016/tv/news/paramount-tv-options-all-the-single-ladies-from...

Interesting article re. The Feminine Mystique. There are many threads so I don't know which one to pull out for discussion purposes if anyone's interested here. The point about her book speaking mostly for white women has been mentioned too many times already.

I guess the point that interests me most is the one the article's title refers to:

"But why a book? Why not a court case, or a boycott, as in the case of the civil-rights movement—something that challenged existing law? There were plenty of laws enforcing the second-tier status of women in 1963. Why was a long and semi-scholarly study by a magazine writer the catalyst for a social change that might have got under way years before? The answer may have something to do not with the status of women but with the status of books. In the early nineteen-sixties, books, for some reason, were bombs."

Interestingly, I don't think I've actually read this book but it has been in my awareness and I've read quotes and excerpts over the years. And, sadly, I don't think books are quite the "bombs" or "totems" anymore as Menand says:

"But these books became totems. They even acquired reputations for policies and ideas they never proposed. “The Feminine Mystique” did not recommend that women pursue full-time careers, or that they demand their legal rights. It only advised women to be prepared for life after the children left home. “The Silent Spring” did not call for a ban on pesticides. It only suggested that their use be regulated. These are books whose significance exceeds anything they actually said. For many people, it doesn’t even matter what they said or why they were written. What matters is that, when the world turned, they were there."

Or, are they? What feminist book, in the last decade, has had the same impact as Friedan's or any other from that second wave of feminism?

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/01/24/books-as-bombs

>45 jennybhatt: I love Menand. His The Metaphysical Club is one of my very favorite books.

And curiously, the piece by him that was making the round of my social networks over the holiday weekend was this one:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/21/sex-amendment

A little run down on how women were included in the Civil Rights Act that most people either don't know or gloss over -- that the inclusion of "sex" along with race, religion, national origin was a ploy by opponents of the bill to scuttle it:

The amendment was a one-word addition, “sex,” to Title VII of the bill, which prohibited employers from discriminating on the basis of “race, color, religion, or national origin.” Opponents of Smith’s amendment, led by Emanuel Celler, of Brooklyn, the seventy-five-year-old chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the bill’s floor leader, regarded it as either a prank intended to expose the limits of liberal egalitarianism or a poison pill that would make the bill more difficult to pass in the House, which had twelve female members, and impossible to pass in the Senate, which had two.

In other words, equal rights for black people was as ludicrous as equal rights for women.

As far as "significant feminist book bombs" of the recent era, I suspect we'll eventually find them in the writings of the transgender community because sexuality and gender seem to be the two things we are focused on and re-interpreting for ourselves now. Part of the problem is that we're too close to see things with any sense of perspective right now -- lots of shouting voices and it is hard to tell which will have staying power. We also live in an age with little in the way of cultural cohesion - so it is hard to find the one story that speaks across all the lines of identity we have constructed for ourselves. I think Ta-Nahisi Coates might have done it with Between the World and Me, at least here in the United States.

>46 southernbooklady:

But Friedan's book (which I haven't read, btw) was, I understand, a bestseller that ushered the conversation about women's liberation into everyone's life. I'm not aware of any such title on gender. If there's a revolution going on in how we understand gender, it seems to be proceeding through news and social media chatter.

>45 jennybhatt:

In the early nineteen-sixties, books, for some reason, were bombs."

No mystery there, books were still a major medium for publication and dissemination of new ideas.

>46 southernbooklady:: Thanks for that other Menand article. I'd missed it somehow. Saving it to read shortly.

Re. "significant feminist book bombs" of the recent era coming from the transgender community -- I hadn't thought of that, but, yes, that is very likely for the reason you mention.

That said, the second part of your problem statement rings true for me -- re. lots of shouting voices. Too much noise is drowning out the signal. Social media and 24/7 online media amplifies so many ideas/opinions/harangues that we don't know what or whom to pay attention to anymore. The big "public intellectual" space is getting way too crowded. Ta-Nehisi Coates might rightfully belong there. But, there are many who might not. And, then, as Marlon James said in a recent FB note (https://www.facebook.com/notes/marlon-james/why-im-almost-done-talking-about-diversity/10153549746832077), we're all talking (liberals love to talk about issues, he says) but we're not effective at changing much of anything at all.

>47 LolaWalser: But Friedan's book (which I haven't read, btw) was, I understand, a bestseller that ushered the conversation about women's liberation into everyone's life. I'm not aware of any such title on gender. If there's a revolution going on in how we understand gender, it seems to be proceeding through news and social media chatter.

No, there isn't one yet. But if there is going to be, that's where I'd expect it to come from.

And I do think books will retain their spot as introducers of the big ideas. Social media is too quick-moving, too free-wheeling, to allow for a real in depth argument (especially one where we get our say without interruptions). We can float ideas on the internet, but they need a slower, more stable medium to be really developed.

>47 LolaWalser:: No, I get the idea that books were like bombs back in those times because they were the key medium for communicating important ideas and ideologies. I'm really more interested, I suppose, in the status of the book now -- does it still have the power to be a "bomb"? Sorry, this is veering a bit from feminist theory, I know. But, as I said earlier, Menand's essay has many threads and lines of thought. :)

>49 southernbooklady:: You know, I used to think the same about social media -- that it moves too quick to be meaningful enough (for me, that is). That's why I did not really start participating actively till last year. I didn't even have a FB or Twitter account till 2012. But, I'm seeing that, with social media, it's all about the quality of your network. I have a couple of friends who have managed to build their online networks in such a way that they have long-running dialogues about certain topics with experts. And, the fact that the online medium allows for asynchronous conversations means that people can go away and noodle on stuff and take their time in responding. Much like we're doing here. It's not the same as simply reading a book but it comes close. Now, it is the kind of communication that requires investing a lot more time than we might invest in a book -- at least, that's what I'm finding. But, I have learned as much from a handful such conversations as I have learned from reading a really good, thought-provoking book, I must add, both from participating and contributing. Sorry, I'm digressing from feminist theory. Maybe there's a better thread somewhere on LT to discuss "the bomb-like qualities of books vs social media". :)

>50 jennybhatt: It's not the same as simply reading a book but it comes close.

More to the point, it is not the same as writing one. :-)

I agree with you about developing networks -- more than a few of my opinions have benefited from and solidified based on the conversations I've had with some people online, here and elsewhere.

But these conversations, while very open and public, are only ever visible to the people who are looking for them. And if we find them, what they mean to us and what effect they have on us depends very much on where and when we come into the conversation. They are more self-contained and more insular than one might expect from something that lives on the internet -- like tends to attract like, we rarely tolerate voices opposed to the things we take for granted for very long. The conversations are also often more reactive than original -- nearly every post in Pro/Con, for example, starts with a link to some news story. We don't post topics that say "this is the place to discuss the limits of freedom of religion," we post links to dating sites that are getting sued for not offering same-sex matches, and then argue back and forth as to whether that's a good thing.

A book, on the other hand, is a medium that is very stable and for all practical purposes eternal. We can read them two, three, five hundred years after they were written and still have a genuine response to the author -- which is sort of miraculous, really. And unlike the internet, books are adapted to what we call these days "long format." If you want to say something with complexity and nuance and present it in its entirety, and want people to sit down and sit still long enough to read all of it, then the book still trumps the touchscreen. And sure, after all is said and done and we've read The Second Sex, we'll have lots to say about it, lots to think about it. But we'll react to the book as a whole, we won't be able to distract ourselves completely with its minutiae.

I'm biased, obviously, but I think the reason I hold most of the opinions I do comes not from exposure to other people with sympatico facebook feeds. It comes from pushing through books that I sometimes agreed with, sometimes didn't, sometimes liked, and sometimes hated. It was that kind of reading that taught me how to think critically -- not a skill in high demand in a highly reactive environment like social networks.

But these conversations, while very open and public, are only ever visible to the people who are looking for them. And if we find them, what they mean to us and what effect they have on us depends very much on where and when we come into the conversation.

I think this is very true. It's odd, because for years I had a "no unfriend" policy simply to force exposure to differing viewpoints. And my feed is still overwhelmingly liberal (whether that's a function of FB's display algorithm or my own unconscious biases (or the fact that jmy conservative friends unfriend me)), I can't say.


In other words, equal rights for black people was as ludicrous as equal rights for women


And yet, we've made very little progress in some sense. The recent law declaring women to be eligible for the draft in America was actually intended to sink the bill it was attached to, fwiu.

>51 southernbooklady:: I agree that, on social media, we still, for the most part, tend to live in our filter bubbles. Whereas, with a book, you don't know which direction the author might take it and you're on for the ride. But, that's why I commend the handful of people I know who have built their social networks with care -- they've picked people who will rip apart that echo chamber and make sure that different POVs are brought forward. It's rare, I admit, but I see it happening slowly.

That said, yes, all deep and long-held beliefs I have had to date have come from books and not from online news or social feeds. But, I've come to appreciate different nuances and opposing beliefs/opinions more because of these online conversations with strangers (so there's no relationship baggage and there's no visual distraction other than words on a screen).

I think the difference, for me, is more what you've said here: "If you want to say something with complexity and nuance and present it in its entirety, and want people to sit down and sit still long enough to read all of it, then the book still trumps the touchscreen." With a book, you try, mostly, to get to the end of it before responding to it. Whereas, with online conversations, you're responding/reacting all the way and that means you may not be fully digesting all the different connections to see the overall picture. This is why I often sit out many conversations on FB and LT -- just sit back and read them entirely. :)

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying social media is better than books or that it will replace books. I'm simply finding that social media has its own powers to invoke thought and influence belief systems and behaviors such that, before it came along, we attributed only to books. And, given that millennials and iGens have practically been raised on social media, as our generation and earlier ones were raised on books, it's interesting to ponder whether the next set of metaphorical bombs will come from social media rather than from books as the Menand article described.

"book bombs" tend to last longer than things that go viral on the internet, though.

>54 southernbooklady:: True. Can't argue with that. The internet moves on to the next sensation a lot quicker.

I remember borrowing theology books from a friend, a long time ago now. Sometimes I would pick books to get new information, but every few visits I would choose something we both knew would be outside my comfort zone. I would bring it back and I would indicate that I was really not comfortable with the content. She finally suggested that I not borrow books from those writers, but I insisted that I needed to be confronted with these opinions, if only to learn how to express why I didn't agree with them.

I think it was easier reading these things from a book, lent to me by someone whose opinion I respected, than just from internet sites. Yes, a lot of garbage gets into books, too, but these were books that had not only made it into print, but were respected textbooks in main stream seminaries, and my friend had not only bought them, but shipped them to Europe when they moved here. It's not just the space to really make the arguement, but the long process of writting, rewriting, editing... that goes on before publishing, and reception afterwards. I knew that the book was solid. So much on the web is fast, hard to tell how serious it is. Whether or not I was convinced, I learned to respect the authors.

According to wiki, The Feminine Mystique has sold over 3 million copies, and has been translated into many languages.

Also according to wiki, the victim statement letter from State vs. Turner was shared over 11 million times in the four days after it was released to the public.

Decades later, we see the results of Betty Friedan's book -- thousands of women cite it as an influence in their lives, one that changed the way they thought.

It remains to be seen what effect Jane Doe's letter will have, if any, beyond the immediate anguish and outrage it made us feel.

>57 southernbooklady: Well, but her letter is not the same as a tweet or Facebook post. It is a document that could conceivably become an important and influential text. Think of letter from a Birmingham jail. It doesn't have the same ephemeral quality that much of social media has.

Think of letter from a Birmingham jail. It doesn't have the same ephemeral quality that much of social media has.

Well, no.

But taking one of the most famous and influential pieces of correspondence in recent history, and saying it is less ephemeral than most modern correspondence, slightly misses the point. Most paper letters are and always have been ephemeral as well.

I think social media has demonstrated significant societal influence, but it's in a different form than a particular text that gets widely read and discussed (though there is absolutely zero reason why that couldn't happen); the potential for geographically disparate but like-minded people to organize is something made much simpler with social media. I don't think Black Lives Matter could have gotten off the ground to the extent that it has without social media, especially Twitter; in earlier decades you'd have had groups protesting police violence in their city, but not the national scope and the increasing awareness of a systemic problem and a pattern.

>58 sturlington: So the letter's staying power comes from the fact that it exists as a "text." -- Something that exists in multiple mediums, some of which have to have longevity, like a court document.

I suppose I think of important texts as touchstones, things we can return to again and again -- to reconsider, to remind ourselves of something, to see if they still answer our questions, or raise new ones. Social media doesn't really allow that kind of interaction between a person and whatever is being posted.

>59 lorax: I think you are right about the nature of social media's power. The more important thing is that the conversation is happening so broadly and so inclusively rather than what precisely is being said or even who is saying it. Also social media incorporates the power of the image. We don't necessarily think of any particular news coverage of the Vietnam War being what turned public opinion against the war rather than the fact that news coverage was happening, it was video, and it was coming into everyone's living rooms. The medium is the important thing.

>60 southernbooklady: Yes, exactly what I meant.

The problem with important things that are said only on social media is that they're difficult to use as touchstones. Everything is out there and never disappears, but it becomes buried and difficult to find. Storify seems to be trying to find a way to deal with that, by providing a way to pull various social media posts into a "text."

It seems to me that the most power comes when text and medium work together to introduce and amplify a message in effecting widespread change. Ta Nehisi-Coates plus the social media-fueled Black Lives Matter movement, for instance.

>59 lorax:: "I don't think Black Lives Matter could have gotten off the ground to the extent that it has without social media, especially Twitter; in earlier decades you'd have had groups protesting police violence in their city, but not the national scope and the increasing awareness of a systemic problem and a pattern. "

Right. Social media is the metaphorical bomb that has more impact on overall culture and society as we are living it now than a book like Ta-Nehisi Coates'. I hate to say that, but it's true. Now, the social media stuff will not stand the test of time, true. But, it is helping to change minds and hearts now -- and at a pace that we have never known before. The dissemination of ideas -- good or bad -- is happening in small and large explosions everywhere. And, for people in countries where they cannot go out and protest in cities, it is doing so even more.

>60 southernbooklady:: "I suppose I think of important texts as touchstones, things we can return to again and again -- to reconsider, to remind ourselves of something, to see if they still answer our questions, or raise new ones. Social media doesn't really allow that kind of interaction between a person and whatever is being posted."

True there too re. books as media we can return to again and again vs social media as an endless, flowing stream, never to be stepped into the same "place" again.

But, the kinds of people who will want to return to touchstone-like books vs those who will want to get swept along with the latest social media wave of outrage or bliss -- these are going to become more and more distinctly separate. And, one kind will, inevitably, dominate over the other. Also, as happens in most social groups, the dominant group will, increasingly, dictate the cultural norms and biases more than the non-dominant one. What that will do to us as human beings, I don't know. I imagine some people a lot smarter than me have already been noodling this and made some predictions.

Deleted original post

Never mind, I wanted to share a link but I can't figure out how to get it to display properly in the forum here.

This is an interesting reading list -- recommended books/materials for men before they talk about feminism. Agree/disagree? What would you add or remove?

Sorry. Link not working. Might try again later.

It's because it had an @ sign in the URL which LibraryThing interprets as a username link. To read it, Google "Medium List of Books Men Must Read Before Messaging Me About Feminism".

The article is a bit tongue in cheek but actually offers an interesting reading list for those learning about feminism.

Because I am now on a real computer and not my tablet, I was able to copy and paste her list.

Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit
The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
Nimona, Noelle Stevenson
The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women, Jessica Valenti
Whipping Girl, Julia Serano
Feminism Is For Everybody: Passionate Politics, bell hooks
Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters
Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, Inga Muscio
The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, Oyeronke Oyewumi
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, Sarah Grimke
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs
On Woman’s Right to Suffrage, Susan B. Anthony
The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf
Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer
Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
Fat is a Feminist Issue, Susie Orbach
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
Gender Trouble, Judith Butler
The Bust Guide To The New Girl Order
We Should All Be Feminists, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, Marjane Satrapi
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel
Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, Daisy Hernandez
Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, Melissa V. Harris-Perry
Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, Andrea Lee Smith
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, Meg Elison
Invisible Man Got the Whole World Watching, Mychal Denzel Smith
Shrill, Lindy West
Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters
The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

Bonus Materials (Speeches, Articles, etc) -- note: these are all linked but I don't have the patience to copy and paste the links; they are probably google-able

Ain’t I a Woman? speech, Sojourner Truth
Letter The Stanford Victim Read Aloud To Her Attacker
Men Still Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit
All of My Work: https://laureneparker.com/
If Hermione Were The Main Character In Harry Potter
Jessica Valenti: my life as a ‘sex object’
Ask Not For Whom The Bell Trolls; It Trolls for Thee
“Yes means yes” is about much more than rape

Here are the articles, with links:

Ain’t I a Woman? speech, Sojourner Truth

Letter The Stanford Victim Read Aloud To Her Attacker

Men Still Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit

All of My Work

If Hermione Were The Main Character In Harry Potter

Jessica Valenti: my life as a ‘sex object’

Ask Not For Whom The Bell Trolls; It Trolls for Thee

“Yes means yes” is about much more than rape

>67 southernbooklady: Thanks!

Here's another article that deserves to be in the list:

Game of Fear

it's about the origins of Gamergate

Thank you, >66 sturlington: and >67 southernbooklady:. :)

I still have to look through all these books myself. I'm pretty sure I haven't read most of them. So, I would not dare to hand them to the men I know. I definitely fall within Roxane Gay's definition of Bad Feminist, based on the excerpts I've read of that book.

Oh, surprised to see that Thomas Pynchon book there. Did not realize it dealt with feminism.

>70 jennybhatt: Well, I've only read 6 of them, and 5 were fiction! I'm familiar with others from study and reading excerpts but never sat down and read them all the way through (The Second Sex, A Vindication on the Rights of Women, etc.).

I'm surprised that A Room of One's Own isn't on the list. I was curious to see The Crying of Lot 49 there. I have it but haven't read it yet because I'm a bit afraid of Pynchon. I wasn't aware it was feminist...

ETA cross-posted with >71 jennybhatt: (great minds...)

Also omitted but that I would add:

The Awakening by Kate Chopin
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Pynchon is never in my list of "feminist" writers, but the book itself is satire of that strange creature known as "the American housewife" that only seems to exist in the minds of men.

>72 sturlington:: Ha, yes, re. Pynchon. I have that book on my shelves too but not got around to it yet. Based on what you said, >74 southernbooklady:, I'll give it a try.

And, yes, A Room of One's Own should have been there. Then again, it was addressed specifically to women and, as this list is for men to learn about feminism, maybe... Not sure.

>73 sturlington:: Yes, I'd have added all of those too. But, again, maybe it's because this list is targeted towards non-feminist men and their education re. feminism, some feminist fiction may well just read like "chick-lit" to them unless they come to them with a somewhat pro-feminist attitude.

>75 jennybhatt: But, again, maybe it's because this list is targeted towards non-feminist men and their education re. feminism, some feminist fiction may well just read like "chick-lit" to them unless they come to them with a somewhat pro-feminist attitude.

I dunno. It's hard to see why Sister Outsider would make the cut but A Room of One's Own wouldn't. It seems like Tipping the Velvet is a must read though -- it's on there twice! :)

If the goal of such reading is to get men to see the world differently, to see the world as if women were active and integral presences within it, here are some other possibilities:

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me -- contemporary writers turn most of the fairytale princess stories on their head

The Sacred Hoop -- this is the book where Paula Gunn Allen makes the case that Native American cultures, at least her own, are if not gynocentric, also not patriarchal. We've asked on other threads what a non patriarchal society would look like, she delves into the question here.

Women Who Run with the Wolves -- all the rage when I first started working in bookstores, I think everyone was reading it. It is a little woo-woo for me, but there is something to Estes' contention that we each have something inside us that can't be contained or corralled by social mores. She calls it a "seed of wildness" (she's very Jungian) but she might be talking about that which makes us, us.

>76 southernbooklady:: Ha. I didn't notice that Tipping the Velvet was there twice. :)

And, I love that one you've added with the fairytale retellings. I love that entire sub-genre. I just finished reading some Angela Carter. Will add this one to my list. Thanks.

I think I've also read most of the fiction on this original list but not much of the non-fiction. I do read a fair bit of non-fiction so I'm not sure why I've avoided the well-known works on this list. But, I'm fully intending to make my way through this list. Certainly, before I point anyone else to reading it.

Dumb question, but I'm a dumb white male...

Is there any way to sticky a cultural literacy reading list for feminism somewhere?

We have a thread dedicated to "the books men should read":

http://www.librarything.com/topic/212989

should I make a "list"?

Why not? Canonise that shit.

Speaking of Woolf, I got the other day Feminism: a very short introduction, and in the introduction there is an interesting note on Woolf's hostility to the term:

Curiously, one of the sharpest attacks on the word 'feminism' came from Virginia Woolf, whose A Room of One's Own is such an effective and engaging plea for women. In Three Guineas, written in 1938 in the shadow of fascism and approaching war, and probably nervous about any '-ism', she rejects the word out of hand. No one word can capture the force 'which in the nineteenth century opposed itself to the force of the fathers', she insists, continuing:

Those nineteenth century women were in fact the advance guard of your own movement. They were fighting the tyranny of the patriarchal state as you are fighting the tyranny of the Fascist state.

They were called, to their resentment, feminists, she claims (she is historically inaccurate--the word was unknown in the previous century), and she goes to insist that we must

destroy an old word, a vicious and corrupt word that has done much harm in its day. The word 'feminist' is the word indicated. That word, according to the dictionary, means 'one who champions the rights of women'. Since the only right, the right to earn a living has been won, the word no longer has a meaning. And a word without a meaning is a dead word, a corrupt word.

(p. 2)

Which showcases very well Woolf's own limitations as a feminist.

>81 LolaWalser: Since the only right, the right to earn a living has been won, the word no longer has a meaning. And a word without a meaning is a dead word, a corrupt word.

There's some unstated context behind that excerpt. It comes in the first half of the third section, and in the pattern following the previous two sections is a sort of extended question as to why a woman should subscribe (ei, send money) to somebody's peace fund. And the conclusion -- that a woman who can earn her own living is free to participate in society, uh, freely is steadily picked apart in the rest of the chapter, to the point where she concludes that the only thing a free-thinking person can do is reject all such subscriptions, committees and organizations:

For such reasons compact as they are of many memories and emotions--for who shall analyse the complexity of a mind that holds so deep a reservoir of time past within it?--it seems both wrong for us rationally and impossible for us emotionally to fill up your form and join your society. For by doing do we should merge our identity in yours; follow and repeat and score still deeper the old worn ruts in which society, like a gramophone whose needle has stuck, is grinding out with intolerable unanimity "Three hundred millions spent upon arms."

You could make a case that Woolf's condemnation of the word "feminist" is tinged with the same sense of satire that permeates the entire book -- that ultimately what she is pointing out is that being "equal" to men in this male-created society, with its wars and its "photos of dead bodies and ruined houses" is not a thing to aspire to.

Woolf goes on to suggest something worth aspiring to:

Let us then draw rapidly in outline the kind of society which the daughters of educated men might found and join outside your society but in cooperation with its ends. In the first place, this new society, you will be relieved to learn, would have no honorary treasurer, for it would need no funds. It would have no office, no committee, no secretary; it would call no meetings; it would hold no conferences. If name it must have, it could be called the Outsiders Society. That is not a resonant name, but it has the advantage that it squares with facts — the facts of history, of law, of biography; even, it may be, with the still hidden facts of our still unknown psychology. It would consist of educated men’s daughters working in their own class — how indeed can they work in any other? — and by their own methods for liberty, equality and peace. Their first duty, to which they would bind themselves not by oath, for oaths and ceremonies have no part in a society which must be anonymous and elastic before everything would be not to fight with arms ...

...On the other hand the next duty to which they would pledge themselves is one of considerable difficulty, and calls not only for courage and initiative, but for the special knowledge of the educated man’s daughter. It is, briefly, not to incite their brothers to fight, or to dissuade them, but to maintain an attitude of complete indifference. But the attitude expressed by the word ‘indifference’ is so complex and of such importance that it needs even here further definition. Indifference in the first place must be given a firm footing upon fact. As it is a fact that she cannot understand what instinct compels him, what glory, what interest, what manly satisfaction fighting provides for him —‘without war there would be no outlet for the manly qualities which fighting develops’— as fighting thus is a sex characteristic which she cannot share, the counterpart some claim of the maternal instinct which he cannot share, so is it an instinct which she cannot judge. The outsider therefore must leave him free to deal with this instinct by himself, because liberty of opinion must be respected, especially when it is based upon an instinct which is as foreign to her as centuries of tradition and education can make it. This is a fundamental and instinctive distinction upon which indifference may be based. But the outsider will make it her duty not merely to base her indifference upon instinct, but upon reason. When he says, as history proves that he has said, and may say again, ‘I am fighting to protect our country’ and thus seeks to rouse her patriotic emotion, she will ask herself, ‘What does “our country” mean to me an outsider?’

In other words, Woolf's argument is a radical and wholesale rejection of patriarchy in its entirety. Which, let's be honest, is bit more ambitious than wanting "a room of one's own." :-)

>82 southernbooklady:

Yeah, I know the argument of Three Guineas, but I don't detect anything satirical about her condemnation of the word "feminist". That, of course, doesn't entail anything for our contemporary use of the word. Incidentally, I noticed Beauvoir also mentioning "feminism" unflatteringly--that is, "feminists"--as if she didn't count herself as one, as obviously neither did Woolf:

Cependant nous ne devons pas considérer avec moins de méfiance les arguments des féministes: bien souvent le souci polemique leur ôte toute valeur.

(However, we shouldn't regard the arguments of feminists with any less suspicion: polemic interest frequently empties them of all value.)

From my point of view both Woolf and Beauvoir are feminist writers and that they apparently set themselves apart from "feminism" in their time depends on their understanding of the word (theirs vs. ours). Semantic differences aren't important.

But there is perhaps another thing to note here, which may be significant. Both seem to strike a lofty "theoretical" pose as independent writers and thinkers, personally apart and aloof from any collective struggle. I have yet to learn about Beauvoir's life, but Woolf was hardly the type to join mass protests, picket, burn bras etc. It's striking to me that both in their (negative, disapproving) understanding of "feminism" link it, limit it, to practical fight, polemics.

>83 LolaWalser: It's striking to me that both in their (negative, disapproving) understanding of "feminism" link it, limit it, to practical fight, polemics.

And in the process they both were instrumental in the evolution of the word from a political movement into a philosophical position.

Monumental landmarks, certainly...

Perhaps the question of class is also part of the mix? Three Guineas is admittedly a late text, but for the younger Woolf, it's an interesting marker, re basic issues like suffrage. It's been a while since I've looked at these particulars but here's one sample from a readily available online source, to which the writer gives considerable nuance beyond this pull quote:

In Woolf’s early to middle years the women’s movement was dominated by the single of issue of suffrage, and her attitude to this was typically ambivalent. In principle she was in favour, and famously worked in a suffrage office, probably the People’s Suffrage Federation, for almost a year in 1910. But at the same time she continually expressed private reservations about both the individuals involved in the movement and the larger ethos behind it. Suffragists, with their ‘queer accents’ and ‘drab shabby clothes’, are derided in her letters and diaries, and her comments resonate with popular anti-suffrage propaganda, the chief tactic of which was ridicule. Woolf was also disparaging about the
motives of the suffrage leaders, as can be seen from the following, written to Katherine Cox:

I see at a glance that nothingexcept perhaps novel writingcan compare with the excite-
ment of controlling the masses.
...
if you could move them you would feel like God. I see now where Margaret and even Mary MacArthur get their imperial thread. The mistake I’ve made is in mixing up what they do with philanthropy. Why don’t you force yourself into some post when you get backin six months time you’d be driving about 6,000 helpless women in front of you.

Sowon S. Park, full text here: http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/woolf%20and%20suffrage.pdf

Ah. Interesting discussion re. the nuances of Three Guineas. I read it when I was rather young. And, as much as A Room of One's Own resonated, I remember the former leaving me a bit confused. Might be time for a reread.

Some of the quotes posted by Nicki reminded me of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland. A tiny novella about a feminist utopia with just women there. Then, when 3 men show up and assume that the perfect world must have men there too. Beyond that, I remember a lot of dialogue between these 3 men explorers and the women. I've pulled it off my shelves for a reread. She wrote things like:

“Patriotism, red hot, is compatible with the existence of a neglect of national interests, a dishonesty, a cold indifference to the suffering of millions. Patriotism is largely pride, and very largely combativeness. Patriotism generally has a chip on its shoulder.”

“Have you no respect for the past? For what was thought and believed by your foremothers?”
“Why, no,” she said. “Why should we? They are all gone. They knew less than we do. If we are not beyond them, we are unworthy of them—and unworthy of the children who must go beyond us.”

“Those “feminine charms” we are so fond of are not feminine at all, but mere reflected masculinity—developed to please us because they had to please us, and in no way essential to the real fulfillment of their great process.”

Ha. Must reread. :)

>87 jennybhatt: I have a Charlotte Perkins Gilman collection on my TBR stack... I should pick it up! (Got it at Goodwill for a dollar a few months ago but haven't gotten to it yet.)

>88 sparemethecensor:: I started reading Herland a few days ago but put it down due to other projects. Going to pick it up again this weekend. Liking it so far.

Here's another reading list. This is the 100 must-read titles about women's history. My goodness. All these reading lists make me feel like I've wasted all my life not reading most of these books.

https://bookriot.com/2016/07/11/100-must-read-titles-about-womens-history/

I haven't read very many of those books. Here's a few I'd add, though:

The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe

Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

For Her Own Good

Celestine: Voices from a French Village

Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis

I feel like there are also some histories of medieval women and religion with vestiges of goddess/great mother worship that I'm missing...

ETA... Pamela Berger! That's who I was thinking of! The Goddess Obscured.

Herland has me intrigued. The initial description reminded me a lot of a short story by Joanna Russ When it Changed. All the men die off and the women left behind procreate using science (it's a little hand wavy) and after some time has passed 3 men arrive, I don't find anything that links Gilman as an influence but I think she must have been. I had to go hunt down the short story collection I read to make sure what I read wasn't Gilman. Of course Herland is much longer and drastically different but I would be interested to know if anyone has read both or knows of similar titles.

>92 morwen04: That story is in an anthology I happen to have sitting beside me: Sisters of the Revolution. When I read it, I'll compare the two. I read Herland last year. They do sound similar.

>92 morwen04:: I wasn't aware of the Joanna Russ story. I will look into it as well. And, I look forward to what >93 sturlington: finds. :)

Another excellent reading list on gender, race, diversity, and so on.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/doree/the-intersectional-womans-reading-list?utm_term=....

>93 sturlington: that's the anthology I read that had it in there, but it's been around since the 70s in various publications. I enjoyed the anthology overall but you know as with anthologies some of the stories stuck around longer than others.

I posted this in the Girly Books reading thread, but I think it might belong here too:

I've been on a binge reading a series of graphic novels and comic books by Sabrina Jones in preparation for writing up a profile and review for her newest book, Our Lady of Birth Control. I've got to say, I'm impressed. Not just with her feminist-anarchist-humanist politics, though of course that appeals to me. But with how complex and personal her books are. I'm not really a big graphic novel reader, and have never been into comic books, but Jones is simultaneously irresistibly in your face about a lot of uncomfortable facts, and incredibly compassionate about her subjects.

Our Lady of Birth Control, which was just released, is her tribute to Margaret Sanger, in whose life Jones has clearly found parallels with her own as a radical in the Reagan era. And Sanger - whose life was defined by defiance -- is now on my list of people who I would have liked to know in person.

...pertinent to this thread, I found I was somewhat misinformed about Sanger's politics and feminist position. Regarding eugenics, certainly, but really more about her rejection of conventional and traditional marital institutions and her own ideas about sex and womens' relationship to men. I think I had always thought that Sanger advocated for birth control for economic reasons. Not that she didn't but a key part of her position was that adamant insistence that women are allowed to be sexual beings. Somehow, that had passed me by in the various dark mutterings of "eugenics" that had always surrounded her name.

>97 southernbooklady:

I recently read The Birth of the Pill, which introduced me to Sanger along with a few other feminists. It's not a perfect book by any means, but it makes pretty clear that Sanger was focused on how to help women fully realize their persons, which definitely included sexual beings.

Has anyone read Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice or Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy? Quotes from both were used in the latest Fem Freq ep, was wondering if they were anything worth reading.

>99 .Monkey.:

I had the first one but disliked it and didn't keep it. Don't remember why exactly--shallowness and triteness enter into it, but there was more.

A "history" of misogyny is a wrong-footed idea in my opinion, but if it's possible, it won't be written by a jobbing journalist in 200 pages.

Or a dude.

:)

Eh I don't see anything wrong with men understanding the long history of misogyny and reporting about it, so long as they actually get it. It really just depends how it's all presented. It could be done well, or awful, haha.

To my thinking, there's a vast gulf between a dude and a man, enough to reconcile the apparent discrepancy between >101 LolaWalser: and >103 .Monkey.:.

I don't trust a dude--or a man--to comprehend misogyny in all its complexity, for the same reasons I would not choose a white person to write a "History of Racism". Put in those broad terms it isn't a historical event or even ten thousand or million historical events or processes we are talking about but ALSO an ongoing social and intimate experience, which men simply don't have. Even women have trouble and need to work to understand the constraints we exist in--witness all the female misogyny. To say nothing of the technical historiographic problems in writing expertly about such a vast and ill-defined topic.

I suppose Holland's book may be useful to a complete ignoramus, someone who, like the white dude in Nicki's linked article elsewhere, is "blissfully ignorant" that people who are not like him aren't treated like he is by the society, but I think there are many other titles I'd turn to in preference, even if it means much more work since they don't pretend to being "total histories".

>105 LolaWalser: we are talking about but ALSO an ongoing social and intimate experience

The intimacy of that experience is exactly why diversity is so important at every level. Why it is not enough, for example for a few white gatekeepers to publish a few palatable writers of color. Or why it is never enough to pay lip service to the idea of anti-discrimination by avowing it is against policy, without also actively trying to confront it.

The truth is, we all need to hear from others -- we need to hear their intimacy of experience. We are trapped in the prison of our own assumptions unless we are constantly trying to break out.

I have, by the way, been reading Jesmyn Ward's The Fire This Time -- not the first book on race in America to carry that title, by the way. It is fascinating reading. Some of the pieces I like better than others, but the one the starts off the book is explosively good -- Kima Jones' Homegoing AD. Jones is a poet, essayist, and publicist on the west coast and she has some great things to say about diversity in publishing here:

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/08/09/483875698/diversity-in-book-pu...

She basically talks about her job as one of getting people to hear the new voice, the unfamiliar voice.

>106 southernbooklady:

The intimacy of that experience is exactly why diversity is so important at every level.

I feel like I should be "yessing" this but frankly I'm not sure I understand what you are driving at. Not only do we not all have the same experiences of things; we also don't all experience the same things. I have my perceptions of racism, which may be of more or less interest to someone else, but I don't experience racism--or, certainly not in the way a black person does (no matter how empathetic and compassionate, I'm at most an outside observer of it).

Similarly, I don't care how much a man "knows" about misogyny--I don't need him telling me about what misogyny is and feels like, because I'm the one subjected to it.

However, I would certainly be interested in hearing what men have to say about confronting their male privilege and misogyny from the point of view of the male perpetrator/contributor/beneficiary. That's an "intimate experience" that is legitimately their own.

Robert Jensen's The heart of whiteness : confronting race, racism, and white privilege imo represents a great example of how to write usefully about discrimination one is not experiencing oneself--going through his dissection of his own privileged position.

It's not about "gatekeeping" and barring anyone from writing about anything, but about recognising we don't all write from the same point of view, just as we don't think and live in the same conditions.

>106 southernbooklady: >107 LolaWalser:

These are great posts.

>107 LolaWalser: I feel like I should be "yessing" this but frankly I'm not sure I understand what you are driving at.

I suppose it's what I think of whenever I hear variations on either of these two things: "Things are different now" or "But I'm not a racist/misogynist/sexist/homophobic..."

...but mostly the former. It's this idea that the status quo is okay as long we say things like "we don't discriminate."

The truth is many of us can only say that because we don't recognize the imbalance of power even when it is staring us in the face. Our experience is too blinkered, too limited. We think "Well I got a job, so anyone who works hard can get a job." "I got published, so anyone can get published if they write well." We are slow to accept that isn't true. That the reason we got a job is because we didn't have to compete against entire segments of the population who had no chance in hell at that job. That our book was published because another person's book was considered unpublishable.

We need to be exposed to the realities of discrimination to even begin to grasp it much less understand how we've internalized it. And the best, maybe the only, way to do that is to shut up and listen to the people who have first hand knowledge of what it is like not to be like us. To surround ourselves with people who are unlike us, in effect.

People don't generally like to do that, I know. We congregate with other who think like we do, like what we like, value what we value. But if the things we value are founded on the repression of others, we need to let them go, find other things more worth valuing. But we won't get there if we don't surround ourselves with those other voices.

the only, way to do that is to shut up and listen to the people who have first hand knowledge of what it is like not to be like us.

What, can't we just... put on a sombrero?

:)

Yes, agreed. There's a basic and irreducible asymmetry between the oppressed and the oppressors a truckload of ethnic hats can't alleviate.

>110 LolaWalser:

Reminds me of the Bugs Bunny / Elmer Fudd cartoon, Bugs' Bonnets. It really is that simple.

>105 LolaWalser:

Presumably you're using "man" here interchangably with "cisgender man"? I suspect a trans man may have quite a good understanding of misogyny. (I'm thinking about cases like that of Ben Barres, a scientist who overheard someone remarking that "{Ben's} work is much better than his sister's"; Ben has no sister, but was active in his career as a woman prior to transitioning, and the speaker was referring to Ben's own previous work, done under a female name.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/12/AR2006071201883....

The above link is to an article about Barres. Thanks for bringing him up, Lorax.

>112 lorax:, >113 susanbooks:

Not a revelation, perhaps, but fascinating to read both of Barres' perspectives, and the reactions to same.

I agree with Pinkers' stated point (the moral question of fairness is separate from the empirical question of sameness), but cannot help but wonder at his inclusion in the debate. Perhaps he is merely responding to a question posed him. But that aside, "who says he is a feminist", got me bristling. Again, that may be the journalist's inclusion into the conversation, not Pinkers'. At the very least, Pinker is not rhetorically astute, to allow these intrusions into the discussion. I think it would have been better to have declined to comment for the article, and that is a caution to me, should I ever find myself in similar circumstances.

>112 lorax:

Right--if Holland had been a trans man, I'd have considered his writing on misogyny from a different angle, no doubt.

That said, I no more expect automatically that a trans man would be feminist or particularly attuned to misogynistic insults than I do of any random cis-woman.

They've finally published the piece I was working on about Our Lady of Birth Control -- Sabrina Jones's graphic novel/biography of Margaret Sanger.

I actually really enjoyed the book -- both the subject, whom I knew very little about, and the artwork, which is generally upbeat, and also researching Jones herself. She's of my generation, so her coming-of-age was very familiar to me.

Less enjoyable, but no doubt one of the points of the book, was the realization that most of hostility Sanger faced is still very much with us today. Birth control may be legal and (supposedly) accessible, but the cultural attitudes that vilify women for wanting it haven't changed all that much.

Here's a link to the review, if anyone is interested:

https://bloom-site.com/2016/10/18/margaret-sanger-game-changer-sabrina-joness-ou...

>116 southernbooklady:: That was a most interesting essay, thanks. There's a lot I did not know about Sanger, to be honest.

And, yes, the negative cultural attitudes towards women who choose birth control or who choose not to have kids are still there today, more so in developing countries.

>117 jennybhatt: In truth, I have a love/hate relationship with The Pill. I totally took the fact that I could get it in college completely for granted. It never even occurred to me that not so long ago it would have been impossible. I think because I grew up on a diet of Judy Blume books. And I was absolutely positive I'd be having sex all through college with whomever I wanted, so the pill was a necessity. I got it off campus at a PP clinic (I was at a Jesuit college).

But the truth is, I reacted really badly to it. At the time, I think the hormone levels in it were really high or something, because it gave me "morning sickness" precisely 12 hours after I would take it -- something that was exhausting to deal with alongside schoolwork, exams, extra jobs, etc. I was in and out of that clinic like six times trying to find a prescription that would work for me, but never did. It was a real relief to be able to go off it altogether.

But I never questioned the need for every woman to have it if they wanted it. And it infuriates me that now we have people who equate birth control with sexual license, and complain about including it as part of a minimal standard of women's health care.

>116 southernbooklady:

Thanks. I learned only last year my grandmother had six abortions that involved bleach, coat hangers and similar implements, until she became sterile (an outcome she welcomed).

My god. It's a miracle she lived to talk about it.

>120 southernbooklady:

It was my brother who told me, and from what I gather, she considered her experience fairly common and ordinary, for the times. This would be late forties, early fifties (my mum was born in 1946, my uncle in 1947, the last kid), before abortion was made legal in 1952.

Although, I'm guessing a lot of women still ended up with back alley operations. Most, even.

1952 sounds early, but looking it up I realized that abortion was classified as a felony in 1967, and prior to that the legality was a state-by-state question. One wiki statistic said doctors performed something like 800,000 per year in the 30s. So you have to figure the number is higher given how many could not afford doctors.

>122 southernbooklady:

Oh, not the US--Yugoslavia.

Ah. Yes. I'm still mentally with Magaret Sanger. Sorry.

The thing that kills me whenever abortion comes up is the idea that Roe v Wade somehow created abortion, that women weren't having extremely dangerous abortions prior to that ruling or using abortives (some more effective than others) for the entire history of women.

I don't know if this is a concept/argument outside of the USA but it's a frequent one in my experience.

>125 morwen04: There is so much myth and disinformation around abortion. Donald Trump was arguing just last night that prochoice means supporting abortion up to the day of birth. I think he described it as "ripping the baby from the womb." To be fair, he doesn't seem well educated on how women's bodies work and may have been confusing C-sections with abortions.

I didn't watch the 3rd debate (or the 2nd, the 1st almost gave me an aneurysm) but yeah I'd be an aborted babe under that definition (emergency C-section so ripped from the womb is a super apt expression my birth)(they also tried to rip me out with forceps)(I'mma just start describing my own birth as ripped from the womb)

Actually though, does anyone have any recommendations on the history of women and abortions (particularly pre-legal) that aren't America-centric? I've only been able to find America-centric texts and while I'm no stranger to research and hunting I figure it can't hurt to ask on the reading thread for book recs.

So one of the few feminist bookstores left in America (one of thirteen, I think) posted this reading list and I thought it deserved mentioning here:

Feminism is for everybody:
http://www.charisbooksandmore.com/feminism-everybody

I thought this essay about Gilman's story "The Yellow Wallpaper" was very well done. It ties the history of hysteria to last year's election.

http://lithub.com/hysteria-witches-and-the-wandering-uterus-a-brief-history/

...the construction of she-devil, foul-mouthed Crooked Hillary who extremists berated with hashtags like #Hillabeast and #Godhilla and #Witch Hillary. How could we not compare the campaign season to the witch-hunts when folks at rallies started chanting “hang her in the streets” in addition to the by-then familiar “lock her up.” In short order, we witnessed a shift from the maligned diagnosis of a single individual to an all-out mass hysterical witch-hunt against a woman who dared to run for presidential office.

Yeah, the full postmortems of this thing haven't come in yet.

>127 morwen04:

Contraception and abortion from the ancient world to the Renaissance "impeccable scholarship", Choice

Eve's herbs : a history of contraception and abortion in the West "fine, scholarly book", Choice

I was pleasantly surprised by Otis T. Mason's Woman's share in primitive culture (1894), starting with the dedication: "To all good women, living or dead, who with their brains or by their toil have aided the progress of the world..." Brains and toil! Recognised in women!

It goes on to describe objectively and sympathetically the diverse and enormous burden of work on women in cultures in which they are invariably also mothers and housekeepers, with no scope for choice (the most poignant anecdote, to me, concerns the fate of an Inuit girl who decided she didn't want to marry but, being a capable hunter, set up house with a female friend--they were continually harassed until finally, when they came back from a long hunt to find their home destroyed, they capitulated to the community). It's interesting how idle in contrast are the men, especially as hunting and pillage become ever rarer.

Perhaps most interesting to us today, he makes the point several times that even in the conditions of worst discrimination and oppression, it is wrong to assume the women are generally utterly abject and powerless, and gives various examples of women taking lead over men even in such circumstances. So many fine and nuanced observations.

A great find. I admit I got it for the photographs, never expecting it could be anything but another patronising screed; then the dedication piqued my interest. Respect, Dr. Mason! If only more were like you, then or now.

>132 LolaWalser: I think this would make an excellent review. Please post it there for others who may stumble across the title.

I feel Rashid el-Daif's Qu'elle aille au diable, Meryl Streep! (Who's afraid of Meryl Streep in American translation) deserves a mention here for its topic, which would be, to borrow Kamel Daoud's scathing phrase, "the sexual misery of the Arab world"--something that I at least blame squarely on the treatment of women. That said, Daif isn't scathing, he's humorously critical and very gently ironic, so maybe it's no surprise that some of the reviews I've seen (on GR) seem to have missed his point entirely and complain about the lack of woman's perspective etc.

The unnamed narrator is a thirty-five year old man whose marriage of one month has fallen apart, the wife having left him and gone back to her parents. The Husband is mulling over the experience, hilariously un-self-aware, and gradually lays out in front of us the genesis of the catastrophe, in which after each episode and accumulating commentary he and the Lebanese society look that much worse. Must say I was glad the book was so short because every new revelation was harder to take and I had stopped feeling any desire to grin about half-way. But although short, it's a complete and exhaustive catalogue of misogynistic, ignorant, traditionalist opinions and prejudice about women, sex and sexuality, typical not just of that one region. Funny to read (up to a point) but the more sad the more you think about it.

I have several books by women from the region, that I expect to cover or touch on the same theme, but I'll be surprised if they broach it with Daif's explicitness. Recommended for anyone interested in the basic tenets shaping the worldview of the average Arab man concerning sexual matters.

>133 Taphophile13:

Aw, thanks, it's just slapdash remarks... but you are right Mason deserves props--I'll make an effort.

This sounds like an interesting book: Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong by Angela Saini.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/06/inferior-how-science-got-women-wro...

"With Inferior, Angela Saini sets out to examine the research, looking at everything from whether little boys really do prefer playing with cars rather than dolls, to whether the structure of the female brain is different from the male, and even whether it was inevitable that humans would end up with a patriarchal society. “This doesn’t always make for comfortable reading,” she warns from the off, pointing out that not all studies overturn the stereotypes.

The upshot, Saini writes, is clear: “There is no biological commandment that says women are natural homemakers and unnatural hunters, or that hands-on fathers are breaking some eternal code of the sexes.”

Likewise, the notion that females are the demure, chaste sex while men are naturally promiscuous gets short shrift. Besides evidence in nature and from various societies around the world, perhaps most compelling is the “obvious when you think of it” point – namely, that if females of species, including humans, were naturally coy, males wouldn’t need to police them. As Saini writes (alongside issues ranging from the attitudes of ancient Greece to the horrors of FGM ), by the Victorian era “female sexuality had been suppressed for so long that scientists didn’t even question whether this modesty and meekness might not be biological at all.”"

I think this news might belong here:

Jamia Wilson is the new executive director at the Feminist Press at CUNY

I don't pay as close attention as a should to who is heading up the feminist and woman-centric presses, but I had no idea that Feminist Press had never had a woman of color as director before. I don't know Jamia Wilson at all, except that she did a children's book "Young, Gifted and Black"

I started reading Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serrano and was liking it, when I hit a definitional problem on page 18. Anyone have strong opinions on whether it's worth staying with?

The definitional problem on page 18 (in bold):

Instead of attempting to empower those born female by encouraging them to move further away from femininity, we should instead learn to empower femininity itself. We must stop dismissing it as "artificial" or as a "performance", and instead recognize that certain aspects of femininity (and masculinity as well) transcend both socialization and biological sex--otherwise there would not be feminine boy and masculine girl children. We must challenge all who assume that feminine vulnerability is a sign of weakness.

I agree with Serano that femininity should not be despised (I don't know that I understand how one can "empower" it, but maybe it's just my allergy to the word "empower"). Then the disagreement starts. First, recognizing that femininity and masculinity are social constructs that are in large part learned and performed isn't the same as "dismissing" them or the idea that there are sex differences (statistically). As I've discussed many times before, there are no genes for liking pink satin dresses or sandwiches with pears and Brie, there are genes that drive sexual expression and appetite.

But what really gets my goat:

Why is vulnerability labelled "feminine"? Why are children exhibiting certain traits described as "feminine" and "masculine"? Why is she gendering traits that occur in all variety of people? She's simply reaffirming traditional stereotypes. This is no different from the traditional pre-defining intelligence as a masculine trait and thereby judging smart girls to be masculine. Why can't a boy who is vulnerable (sensitive would be a better word, I suppose, as we are all, to say nothing of children, vulnerable in several ways), simply be THAT, a vulnerable or sensitive boy, without being labelled "feminine"?

Why can't a smart girl simply be smart, why does she have to be labelled as a "masculine" girl? Why shouldn't girls like boats or to climb trees and run without being called boyish? What does labelling them a gender they are not serve other than to chastise and corral them into their "proper" gender roles? To remind them at all times they are somehow wrong, strange, do not belong?

Another problem I see arising from this banging on traditional binary stereotypes is that it leaves no room for the so-called genderfluid, genderqueer, genderless, etc.

>138 LolaWalser: and instead recognize that certain aspects of femininity (and masculinity as well) transcend both socialization and biological sex

if they transcend social construct and biological sex, doesn't that mean such "aspects" are neither feminine nor masculine, but simply "human"?

>139 southernbooklady:

Nnn, I don't think that's what she meant, she is saying there is some absolute femininity and masculinity, that people are born feminine or masculine regardless of socialization and regardless of their biological sex.

Like yin/yang or something?

No, either/or. I'll edit.

Huh, serendipity, this video is on The Guardian's front page:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2017/jul/28/gender-beyond-the-binary-vid...

Well, I finished the intro and I 'm certainly behind the call to end traditional and oppositional sexism, so I'll continue for now. It's true that the way I summed up her idea in >140 LolaWalser: isn't all that different from what we talked about before, that there is some "kernel" of gender identity that we are born with.

But I remain bothered by gendering traits other than biological sex and by labelling boys and girls, men and women, "feminine" or "masculine" according to these prejudicial stereotypes.

Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

Adichie offers her suggestions for how a baby girl should be raised as a feminist. This is in a Nigerian context, which makes it even more interesting.

This is just beautiful! Short, too. Just 35 pages the way I have my iPad set up. In general, my library's new choices on OverDrive included lots of feminist nonfiction this month. So if your library offers OverDrive, you might want to look/ask for this.

Hm, it's been weeks and I almost forgot--adding my recommendation to MarthaJeanne's of Testosterone Rex. I wish I could make everyone read this book.

Don't have the energy now to discuss details, mainly because I don't have the book with me to quote from exactly, and as I've harped on the main points so many times, I don't want to regurgitate my own posts. Fine is an expert in the field and she references hundreds of research papers.

Basically (and as you probably suspect already) literally everything that is being peddled as scientific arguments proving women's essential difference and inferiority is bullshit. Same goes for myths of masculinity (the "testosterone is king" concept, as Fine talks about it).

But you want to read this book to see what and why exactly.

I recently read How to Suppress Women's Writing which is excellent and infuriating. Russ gives shape to arguments that have perturbed me but I never knew how to explain, before now. Though this is dated (certainly could use an update) none of the arguments are, and in fact every single one is still levied against women writers regularly.

Question for those here who may possibly have insight: The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. There are 3 editions. The first 2 are single-volume, while the 3rd is 2 large volumes. The 2nd (and 1st) can be had used for a nice very low price. The 3rd is, naturally, insanely priced. Does anyone happen to know if the 3rd really contains that much more content? Is the content really worth the fortune it costs, over the previous ones?

Sorry I can't help regarding the content, but about the pricing--are we talking new or used copies for that 3rd volume too? If used, I wouldn't read anything into drastic price differences and simply wait, I'm afraid. Sometimes later volumes fetch more because they may be printed in smaller numbers (especially with textbook-type things), or they are issued later and therefore are "newer" than the earlier volumes. Sometimes (if arranged chronologically), the last/latest period is the most sought after so command higher prices legitimately.

But sometimes it's just chance, and waiting pays off.

>149 .Monkey.: Essentially both, as there's surprisingly few used ones and they're hardly even cheaper (like $35+ (and then shipping), per volume, vs $92 from bookdepository). The 2nd ed can be had for under $5. Lol.

Actually I just had an idea. Abe links back to GR with the ratings, and since GR has basic edition pages only, they therefore include physical properties like pages.
*checks* Okay, it looks like 2nd ed has about 2500 pgs and 3rd has about 3000. That's not as huge a difference as I was fearing, given the split into two large fancy-looking volumes. God knows when the price will drop at this rate (bd says it's from 2007, so over 10yrs by now), probably not for some time, so I think I'll just settle for the older one now. Maybe in another decade they'll come out with a 4th and I can upgrade, hahaha.

>150 LolaWalser:

Ack, my stoopid, sorry, I'm waiting to complete some sets and totally mixed up that situation with your editions. Yeah, it sounds as if the 3rd ed. is different.

Doesn't Amazon give page numbers too? And sometimes contents! (I know you dislike Amazon but for checking out this info...) Perhaps the publisher site too?

No worries!
I totally didn't think about checking the publisher, or amazon actually lol since I was looking on bd and they're just part of amazon anyway. Bd usually has that and I swear I looked and didn't see it, figuring the multi-volume thing threw them off or something, but I must've been completely out of it, lol. Bd claims 2452 but I'm pretty sure that's the amount GR has for the 2nd ed, and they have each volume for the 3rd at about 1500. Sooo one of the two is off. And amazon owns them both. SO that's fun. LOL. I guess publisher would be best, but I'm not sure that they'll have the info for the older one anymore? Oh well, I will go check!

Okay, Norton says 1504+1616 for the two separate volumes, but on the page with the set they give the same 2452 number. Color me perplexed, lmao. They do also have a smidgen of useful info though: "UPDATED APPARATUS; A MORE READABLE PAGE; NEW ENDPAPER MAPS
The period introductions, headnotes, annotations, and bibliographies have been updated and fine-tuned. A new, bolder typeface and heavier paper stock make for a more readable page. New endpaper maps highlighting places of importance to North American Women Writers, Women Writers of the British Isles, and Women Writers in English Worldwide provide useful references for students.
FLEXIBLE NEW FORMAT
Now in two paperback volumes, the Third Edition can serve a variety of courses organized by period or topic, at levels from introductory to advanced. Instructors will appreciate the added flexibility, while students will welcome the new portability." so that's what they're saying is updated. I think I'll be fine with the nice $5 edition for now. :P

I posted this review in my Bookballoon group, but feel like it belongs here as well. The book would make a great feminist book club choice:

So, finally getting around to give my thoughts about Her Body and Other Parties -- it has set the bar pretty high for books this year. I was impressed and the range of reactions it evoked in me -- the intensity of my responses to each story in itself demands that I acknowledge the book as something special, even though I had very different feelings about every story. Some, like the extended re-interpretation of every episode of Law and Order SVU, left me cool -- very aware of the brilliance of Machado's style, and intellectually impressed with her imagination. But not so emotionally engaged, perhaps because I've never seen an episode of that show in my life and have no plans -- even after reading this -- to start watching reruns.

But others gripped me tight and left me feeling both profoundly exhilarated and deeply unsettled. "Eight Bites" -- the internal and external journey of a woman who undergoes one of those stomach reduction surgeries to become thin -- well, it gave me very bad dreams. And "Inventory" -- a woman's description of her lovers as a epidemic spreads across the country and empties the landscape of people -- was erotic and beautiful and scary. The first story in the book, "The Husband Stitch" is a tour de force and possibly my favorite. It's a retelling of the fairy/horror story of the man who marries a beautiful woman who wears a ribbon around her neck, and refuses to take it off -- the retelling is, naturally, from the woman's perspective and is brilliant. That ribbon becomes....I don't know....that vital part of us which belongs only to us, and which the people in our lives can't let be, but must own and control.

Is there such a genre as feminist horror? Because that is the only label I could give this collection and as umbrella terms go it is a tattered, lacy one, full of ripped holes. Her Body and Other Parties is a direct descendant of The Yellow Wallpaper, only more -- more physical, more frightening, more sexy, more mad. I really, really loved it.

>153 .Monkey.: Wow, that sounds impressive! Will definitely have to keep an eye out for it.

>153 .Monkey.: "Is there such a genre as feminist horror?"
Apart from "The Yellow Wallpaper", Angela Carter's dark fairy tale retellings spring to mind. And of course Frankenstein has been read as being, among other things, inspired by the particularly female experience of motherhood.

>155 southernbooklady: My understanding about horror as a genre -- I'm in no way an afficianado -- it that it is about the corruption and decay inherent in us. The worm in the apple. The apple's helplessness as it is eaten away.

What that would look like from a feminist perspective is something I think Machado paints disturbingly well. In her stories, all the rhetoric of the colonization of the female body are made explicit and visceral. There's a lot of blood and guts, but not in a slasher-fic sense. Instead, we get image after image of what is left of the female body that lives in patriarchy. In some of the stories, it fades into transparency, ghostliness. In others, it is left as a bag of soupy organs -- what is leftover after she has surrendered herself to social expectations and had inappropriate parts of herself removed.

I'm really not explaining it well, but I was enormously impressed with the book.

>153 .Monkey.: Wow, thanks for sharing this! I can't wait to find this book.

>153 .Monkey.: thanks for the review! I'll definitely check that out. I think I'm discovering the feminist/horror genre (in addition to Shelley and Carter). Janice Galloway's short story collection Blood is amazing & fits the description. And I'm in the midst of a nonfiction book that calls itself feminist horror & is incredibly smart & surprising -- she makes these crazy connections & then you see that, yes, sanitary napkin bags are indeed part of the globalist/corporate/anti-woman/anti-earth agenda: Body Horror by Anne Elizabeth Moore. If anyone else reads either I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Not sure if this best fits here or misc. or whatnot but, it's a book, by women, discussing becoming accomplished authors while dealing with patriarchy and such, so I'm dropping it here!

Anyway I was browsing the University of Chicago Press sale catalog and saw A Story Larger than My Own: Women Writers Look Back on Their Lives and Careers, which sounds like it could be pretty interesting.

In 1955, Maxine Kumin submitted a poem to the Saturday Evening Post. “Lines on a Half-Painted House” made it into the magazine—but not before Kumin was asked to produce, via her husband’s employer, verification that the poem was her original work.

Kumin, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, was part of a groundbreaking generation of women writers who came of age during the midcentury feminist movement. By challenging the status quo and ultimately finding success for themselves, they paved the way for future generations of writers. In A Story Larger than My Own, Janet Burroway brings together Kumin, Julia Alvarez, Jane Smiley, Erica Jong, and fifteen other accomplished women of this generation to reflect on their writing lives.

The essays and poems featured in this collection illustrate that even writers who achieve critical and commercial success experience a familiar pattern of highs and lows over the course of their careers. Along with success comes the pressure to sustain it, as well as a constant search for subject matter, all too frequent crises of confidence, the challenges of a changing publishing scene, and the difficulty of combining writing with the ordinary stuff of life—family, marriage, jobs. The contributors, all now over the age of sixty, also confront the effects of aging, with its paradoxical duality of new limitations and newfound freedom.

The paper edition is on sale for $7 found here, with their sale promo code "AD1647" in case anyone might be interested. I'm tempted.

With the 100th anniversary of some women in the UK being given the vote, I've signed up to an online learning course, https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/womens-rights
Part 1 is the background. One of the sections was to read pages 1 to 5 of Barbara Bodichon's 'A Summary of Laws Concerning Women'. Well.
It's available here: https://ia800205.us.archive.org/30/items/briefsummaryinpl00smit/briefsummaryinpl... if you need your blood pressure raising any. Published in 1856, it is prior to any of the acts in the late 19th century improving women's legal status. We've moved on, but I suspect, from her tone, Barbara would not think far enough.

Here's a really good article on Machado's story "The Husband Stitch" -- my favorite in the book -- by someone who tries to teach the story in a class:

https://electricliterature.com/what-i-dont-tell-my-students-about-the-husband-st...

In class, I don’t say to my students, “Do you feel it, too? Or can you imagine it? The perils of living in a world made by a different gender? The justified and unjustified mistrust? The near-constant experience of being disbelieved, of learning to question your own sanity? How much more it hurts to be let down by ‘one of the good ones?’” Instead I say, “What effect do the horror tales have, placed associatively where they are in the story? What effect do the stage directions have? What would be lost without them? Do you see how they’re braided together?

It makes me think of Adrienne Rich saying that women live, lying.

>161 librorumamans:

I had not heard of Machado, but, my god!, does she always write like that? Wow!

And thank you.

The title refers to the extra stitch sometimes given to a woman after the area between her vagina and anus is either torn or cut during childbirth. The purpose of the extra stitch is to make the vagina tighter than it was before childbirth in order to increase the husband’s pleasure during sex.

At least there's the "sometimes". I find this whole article problematic and manipulative. I'll try to explain why the best I can although I admit immediately there's a lot on which I don't have clarity.

Here's the thing... indisputably, millions of women suffer physical violence for men's sexual pleasure (among other reasons). Including the violence of surgical procedures independent of childbirth. (Ask me about my two cousins and their total nine operations for tit augmentation and dealing with the consequences of complications.) Infibulation and female genital mutilation in general is partly defended as a practice that increases man's sexual pleasure.

Also indisputably, male assholery is infinite and that two (or twenty or two hundred etc.) male medical students/doctors/men in general could laugh at women's misery and prop each other in a quest to objectify women in the name of men's pleasure, is something I can easily believe because I observe it.

And yet when it comes to stories like these, especially given the conclusions, the slant the writer wishes to impose on me as a reader, I want evidence, I want numbers, I want names, places, the where when who how. Because it is true that childbirth is a traumatic physical experience and that many women suffer injuries and lacerations, and that these injuries are treated--as they SHOULD be, as we normally expect such injuries to be treated. What we don't expect is to hear that this treatment is actually (again, how often? Where?) used to render the vagina tighter than it was before childbirth. Really? Meaning that every next pregnancy would be even more difficult and entail even worse injury?

I'm having difficulty expressing a scientific concern regarding this story while acknowledging the reality of the misogyny that is its core concern.

I believe her report of her friend's story and I believe millions of men think nothing of abusing women for their own pleasure. But these things can be true and yet the "extra" stitch a hideous anomaly. Not an anomaly globally as an example of cruelty to women for the greater good of the men (of which we of course have millions of examples), but an anomaly within medical practice.

If there is so little information about this "extra stitch", it may be because it is that rare, not because of a conspiracy. But what bothers me maybe the most, is the way she posits believing this story as a litmus test for believing women. It's one thing to believe things like that happen, they do indeed, but another to imply they happen routinely. Or is another implication that the "extra stitch", unlike, usually, FGM, happen to "women like us", Western women, privileged women? Is that why the student in the last paragraph is so shocked? Is that supposed to make it especially scandalous?

I'm breaking off here and apologise for this muddled and unfinished commentary. Maybe I'll do better later.

I had an episiotomy for my first two births, and I am very happy about the second one. It was done at the same place, and after it healed I no longer had pain at the site of the scar every time we had sex.

>163 MarthaJeanne:

If you do revisit the topic, Lola, could you perhaps sort out where you're responding to Machado's fiction and where to Dykema's classroom experience? That's not clear, at least to me.

>161 librorumamans: thanks for sharing the story, which I hadn't been familiar with.

>165 spiphany: I'm not LolaWalser, and I didn't have quite the same negative reaction to the article, but I can tease out a few things that I find unsatisfactory about it.

The article feels a bit condescending. I was bothered by the bit at the beginning about "For one thing, the men in class don't speak". As though men can't deal with it when they are confronted with this evocation of feminine experience. As though it's something only women can understand. (Perhaps I'm overestimating the average male fiction workshop attendee. At any rate, her claim doesn't fit with what I recall of my upper-level literature classes.)

Or to take the bit that southernbooklady quotes -- In class, I don’t say to my students, “Do you feel it, too? Or can you imagine it? The perils of living in a world made by a different gender? The justified and unjustified mistrust? The near-constant experience of being disbelieved, of learning to question your own sanity? How much more it hurts to be let down by ‘one of the good ones?’” -- I would certainly hope she doesn't say that to her students, it strikes me as not very good didactic practice.

Content-wise, I was bothered by the way that the author of the article switches back and forth between two mutually exclusive positions: One the one hand, she suggests that there are facts about the world that can be true or false and condemns the practice of hiding these truths; she talks about gaslighting (although she doesn't use the word), about male language being used to distort female reality, about women not being believed. On the other hand, she seems to suggest that everything is relative, that truth is always filtered through perception, and we can't know what is real. It feels like, in the rhetoric of the article, her mother's "flexible relationship with the truth" to express emotional realities is not a fundamentally different situation than the person who smells a gas leak that may or may not actually be there. But there are different types of truth claims and different ways to respond to unverified statements. Taking something seriously is not the same as believing without question.

This all ties in with how the "husband stitch" is presented in the article: she talks about it as a real, established practice by which men use their power over women, and the fact that apparently nobody documents it is indicative of how women's experiences are suppressed or hidden. At the same time, the "husband stitch" is treated like an urban legend, something that exists in the form of stories passed from person to person but cannot, by its nature, be verified. This makes her insistence that "but it is real nevertheless" sound rather conspiracy-theory-ish.

For me -- as a literary scholar -- the biggest problem with the article is the fact that she completely misses the folkloric elements of the story. All of the "horror stories" interwoven in the narrative are urban legends. The ribbon that the husband musn't touch is a well-established folklore motif, the taboo that, in the fairy tales, is inevitably violated: Melusine's requirement that her husband not look at her in the bath, Bluebeard's locked room, etc.

>166 southernbooklady: This all ties in with how the "husband stitch" is presented in the article: she talks about it as a real, established practice by which men use their power over women, and the fact that apparently nobody documents it is indicative of how women's experiences are suppressed or hidden. At the same time, the "husband stitch" is treated like an urban legend, something that exists in the form of stories passed from person to person but cannot, by its nature, be verified. This makes her insistence that "but it is real nevertheless" sound rather conspiracy-theory-ish.

It's a little hard to disentangle the teacher from the taught in all this, but I think it does call into question what we mean to accomplish when we read a "feminist" version of a folk tale or urban legend. It did not occur to me that Dykma was making a case for the reality of the medical practice of "the husband stitch" but she is certainly talking about the reality and persistence of the story as it moves through our lives. Machado said something like this in an interview once:

Like so many millennials, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and the related books that were edited by Alvin Schwartz, were a huge part of my childhood. I think a lot about those stories. Growing up, I was a Girl Scout and told those stories around the campfire. I was horrified by the illustrations. I feel like they are a part of my life. In some ways, those books shaped my aesthetic sensibility in adulthood.

https://themuse.jezebel.com/carmen-maria-machado-on-her-new-book-the-surreal-hor...

I would have said, by the way, that despite the title of Machado's story, that medical procedure is only one milestone in the life of the narrator. Ultimately the story, all of Machado's stories, are about how surreal it is to be a woman in our patriarchal culture. "We live in a real-life horror story." she says in the same interview.

>164 librorumamans:

Thanks for speaking up about the topic. Much appreciated.

>165 spiphany:

I have no access to the story so I'm not responding to it at all. Unless you count my agreement that, reduced to incident, things such as it is said to describe do happen. I'm objecting to the way the article writer writes about it (or how she uses it etc.)

>166 southernbooklady:

Among other, you express at least two things I too thought but couldn't choose what to say about, how to say it.

1. The remark about the male students bothered me too, and for multiple reasons. One, does she think they SHOULD be silent, is that something she expects or aims for (not precisely to shut them up for good, but to stun them?) I didn't think of condescension but there's an air of "mystery" here, or scandal-mongering (I keep feeling my terms are off but can't think of better), something... cheap and trite. Grasping for some effect like a bad horror movie. "I tell this story and everybody falls silent and men don't know where to look because THEY DID IT." Maybe it's a better classroom experience than I perceive from her writing, I don't know. Two, what you say about her teaching methods. I can't put a finger on it, but there is something, in her attitude if not in some actual, deliberate policy, that strikes me as downright unethical. As if she wants to or counts on chastising these male students.

2. The phrase "urban legend" occurred to me too but I didn't know what to about it; what you say about "the way that the author of the article switches back and forth between two mutually exclusive positions:(...)" helps--I felt there was a problem with her mixing of fact and fiction, how she used them.

There is the fact of what her friend told her another person observed in medical class--a doctor telling the husband of a woman who has just given birth that he would sew her up "nice and tight for you". I said I accept this for a fact--not because I was there and can vouch for this specific incident in its specific details, but because other incidents of the same nature and import are happening to women as we speak.

And then there is the fiction whose theme is such an incident.

And yes, my unease stems definitely from the way, as you say, musings about fiction are brought to bear on what is supposedly "fact"--when the fact is of a nature that, in my opinion, constitutes a crime, something one should report and prosecute. Not something to be used in a game of smoke and mirrors.

And for me her emphasis completely fails. I don't give a shit about her manipulative direction to think about how women are "disbelieved" and teasing us to disbelieve HER, I want to know what happened with the facts. Did her friend's classmate or her friend call the police? Did they alert the hospital and the ethics committee? Did they call the press? Where is that doctor today and what is his current position? Did he go to jail? In short, did they make a fuss, a riot, did they make heads roll?

Or is that incident just to be used for her B-movie punchline to her student(s) that "yes the extra stitch is REAL"?

>167 LolaWalser:

You are talking about Machado, but we (I at least) are reacting to how this other person is using her work.

>168 LolaWalser: There's a link to the story at the top of the article.

I liked the story; it's quite effective.

It may be relevant to note that I read it _after_ reading Dykema's article and was expecting something rather different. It may be my folklore-trained brain, but green ribbon and the anticipation of the inevitable taboo-breaking stood out for me in the story a lot more than the medical procedure -- or rather, the betrayal, the stitch made without the narrator's consent, felt inseparable from this larger framing. Of course not everyone is going to read the story the same way, but it feels odd to me that this ribbon (featured so prominently in the image at the top of the article) isn't actually mentioned in the article at all.

>170 LolaWalser:

Oh, right, thanks, I overlooked that the title's a hyperlink.

>168 LolaWalser:

Okay; I hadn't realized that you'd missed the link to Granta.

>172 LolaWalser:

But it doesn't matter in the least for what I was saying.

If anything, having read the story, the article seems even more perplexing and (to me) confusing. >170 LolaWalser: very pertinently points out one reason.

I doubt I can express this well, so I'll try at least to be brief: IMO, Dykema ignores the "fairy tale" and goes for the scandal of the "factual" in a way that does disservice to both the fiction (which does not need the stamp of reality to express a truth) and the fact (which ought not to be enfeebled by doubts of its authenticity).

>173 librorumamans:

As I gushed earlier, I find the story much more impressive than the article. The richness of the story resides, to my mind, in the idea that each woman has her personal ribbon that is attached to her somewhere visible but is not part of her body. It's the integrity of this ribbon, not the integrity of her hymen, that's essential to her well-being (perhaps not the perfect word). Alienation from her growing son is less important than protecting it.

So the focus of Dykema's article seems misplaced. And yet, there's the title: "The Husband Stitch", a term that meant nothing to me before I read the story. My immediate reaction is to consider that the story is mistitled; obviously, though, Machado knows her job. I would need, likely, considerable thought to reconcile the richness of the various images and symbols of wholeness that are at work in the story with the physical and medical literalness of this one, temporally insignificant, detail.

(The conclusion with the narrator's head falling off after the husband looses the knot rings a very faint bell somewhere decades in my past, but I can't place the source at all. I don't have your background in European myth, spiphany.)

in the idea that each woman has her personal ribbon that is attached to her somewhere visible but is not part of her body.

I'd agree with your reading of the symbolism (that the ribbon in the story represents personal integrity) but I'm very hostile to the notion that it's something women would have but men--apparently--don't. (If that's your understanding.) I mean have "naturally", like some sort of female-inborn Achilles' heel--touch it, and, oopsie!--the woman falls apart. As for its visibility, I think that's simply a structural requirement for the tale, the narrative mcguffin, not sure what other special meaning you ascribe to it, if you do?

To me it makes sense to see the ribbon as a bandage on the wound that the world inflicts on women before and beyond any personal relationship does or might. The woman in the story is pre-broken (or primed, sensitised to breakage), and the husband who keeps blindly sniffing around this mystery is mainly the naif who lifts the curtain. He didn't put the ribbon there, nor did he CAUSE what it hides. It's true he too does some "breaking"--of her hymen (which, by the way, is one of the most hateful metaphors of all my hated metaphors--somewhere on this forum there's a great video on the sheer falseness and stupidity built into the idea that hymens, ergo women, "break", during "first time" or sex in general), and of course in the hospital scene. But note that it's ambiguous whether (in the story) the thing happened or was only joked about. The stitching happened--as it would routinely when lacerations occur--but it's not clear that the "extra", "husband" stitch happened. In any case, it's enough that the protagonist thinks it's plausible that her "good man" might have seriously wanted and asked for such a thing and in such a moment no less.

Going back to the article:

I would need, likely, considerable thought to reconcile the richness of the various images and symbols of wholeness that are at work in the story with the physical and medical literalness of this one, temporally insignificant, detail.

We may agree that Dykema's focus seems odd and that perhaps she is in some way misreading the story. Perhaps, as you note, the very fact of the title legitimately leads one to think that the story is "about" the "extra stitch". In any case, there's the fact of her reading and teaching the story in the way she chose, to classrooms of students, and that, I would argue, isn't insignificant.

>175 librorumamans:

I, too, wonder about the universality of the ribbon. Men receive their own wounds, as does her son after she rebuffs him by shaking the can of coins in his face.

The story is so narrowly the woman's experience, and she so unquestioningly accepts the ribbon's existence and its vital importance, that it's hard to know how restrictive Machado intends the image to be. And since she does not allow her character much latitude to interpret her own experience, I suspect Machado wants the ambiguity.

When I consider together the woman's need to protect the ribbon at any cost, and her son's and husband's apparent incomprehension of its importance, I draw — as one interpretation — the idea that the story is about the unbridgeable gulf that isolates all of us from each other and that ultimately can alienate us from those who are most important to our continued existence. Taken farther, we are led to see that we are fated to destroy whom we most love.

Men receive their own wounds,

As individuals, not in the name of their sex, inflicted by, well, the entire WORLD. The "narrowly women's experience" is the experience of a misogynistic world in which women are deemed other, inferior and subservient to men. There is no parallel to anything a man might experience, no symmetrical male-female situation, because we live in this kind of world, without alternatives--although analogies that might familiarise one with an experience one doesn't come by on their own can be drawn sometimes, for example, between discriminations against sex and race.

Women everywhere and non-white people in various degrees (depending on immediate environment) are born into a world that hates them as women and non-whites.

It's not a "universalisable" experience.

>176 LolaWalser: The story is so narrowly the woman's experience . . .

If I were revising my post, I think I would write "so specifically the woman's experience".

>174 LolaWalser: I recognize nearly all the stories she mentions within her story, along with that of the green ribbon, from the Scary stories to tell in the dark books, which Schwartz pulled from general folklore/urban legends.

>177 librorumamans: As individuals, not in the name of their sex, inflicted by, well, the entire WORLD.

I'm not so certain as you about that individuality of male wounding.

Citing Baldwin risks deflecting the conversation away from Machado's story, but his remark in "Here Be Dragons" that the American ideal of masculinity (and with Machado I take it we are talking about America)

is ... so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden — as an unpatriotic act — that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood

indicates a cultural wound inflicted on men qua men (by men?).

>179 librorumamans:

That's great to know. Thanks. That series came along after my time.

>180 librorumamans:

You are missing the point. If someone wants to claim victimhood for men for how they are brought up, go ahead--but that upbringing serves to establish them in privilege over women. It's the fact of this unequal, lopsided power and value relationship that gives rise to what "the husband stitch" story expresses. To the story itself.

Maleness is universally valorised above femaleness, and at the expense of women.

This situation simply doesn't have a parallel, there is no symmetrical counterbalance in which the relationship of the sexes is reversed.

I know it's been awhile, but I'm finally getting a chance to come back to this discussion, after a couple of weeks of really hellish work schedules.

I had almost a completely opposite reaction to LolaWalser and @sisphany about the Dykema's article! I suppose I take her title "What I Don't Tell My Students About The Husband Stitch" literally -- that it is meant to be an almost confessional account to what Machado's story brings up in her. As such, when she starts off by saying

"For one thing, the men in class don’t speak. I’m not sure if, like me, they don’t know what to say, something I admit before we begin. “I don’t quite know how to discuss this story,” I say. “I’m really having us read it because I love it.” Or maybe they feel like they shouldn’t because it is, among other things, a story about being a woman. The conversation limps along, uncharacteristically weighted with all the things the students are thinking and not saying.

I took that at face value. It didn't feel condescending to me, just matter-of-fact. It pretty much describes a dozen classroom situations I've been in where we students were confronted with a work we didn't know how to respond to. You know that feeling when something resonates within you, but you can't articulate why? Dykema's whole article seems to me to be talking around that feeling, poking at it, trying to clarify it.

As such, it seemed natural to me that she'd slide between fact, urban legend, and fiction without stopping to define or deconstruct any of them. That is what Machado does, throughout her whole collection, and reading her stories kind of makes one regard one's own life as a constant slip-slide between what's real and what we think is real and what's important about what we think is real, and what our "real" looks like to others. That "relativity" is a, uh, "fact" of existence, something Machado emphasizes in her writing.

Ultimately I think the crux of Dykema's piece is in the quote from Baldwin: "He cannot afford to understand it. This understanding would reveal to him too much about himself, and smash that mirror before which he has been frozen for so long." Baldwin is talking about white people being afraid to look at the reality of black people. Dykema talks about people too afraid to look at the reality of women. But it applies to anyone needs to have that mirror in front of them.

And incidentally, I think the point of the green ribbon is that everyone (in the story, "everyone" being "men") sees it as ornament, something separate from the body, but it isn't. Take it away, and the body is destroyed.

And after all that, here's why I really came back to this thread:

In defense of Social Media poetry

Kaur, the young, Indian-Canadian poet and bestselling author of milk and honey and the sun and her flowers, has by far born the brunt of these critiques. For every positive review of Kaur's work there is at least one scathing critique, ranging from actual engagement with her writing to cheap shots claiming she's commodified her South Asian heritage. But the writers who join her on the poetic pillory are almost always also young and female themselves — and, as even positive reviewers will sanctimoniously note, their readers are as well. (“Young” and “female” to mean “too young” and “too female”, and therefore not capable of or interested in engaging with serious poetry.)

I don't find the cited examples very compelling, personally. I like poetry because it is dense, nuanced, and multi-layered. Something social media communications tend not to be. But I love it when people put inspiration to paper, (or post!), regardless of whether they are trying to create deathless prose or just capture an ephemeral feeling or thought.

It's not lost on me that the person who wrote the article says she stumbles across Instagram poetry when she's looking for cat memes.

>183 southernbooklady:

For my part, I think adding more to what I said above will only add to the confusion (the confusion I feel regarding Dykema's article and the confusions arising from our disjunct ways of looking at it), so I'll just say that while I'm agreeing with bits of what you say, it doesn't seem we are talking about the same things. But perhaps we can agree that the story itself is more important anyway.

On the green ribbon, however, I think I can at least say that yes, I agree the man sees it as something separate from her body, but that's not the point. The ribbon, as I see it, indeed ISN'T her body, but its relevance lies in her need of it and in keeping it inviolate. Which of course the man will try to violate because his wife is supposed to give herself over to him entirely--anyway, that's an attitude she encourages when she tells him to do with her as he pleases (on their wedding day).

(Speaking of which, I found the woman's voice infuriatingly passive and retro throughout. The tale may be "feminist" in some way that mostly escapes me, but that lady sure wasn't.)

Hey, Nicki, Shakespeare--I immediately thought of you! ;)

Margot Robbie is rethinking Shakespeare’s women. It’s about time

>185 LolaWalser: I found the woman's voice infuriatingly passive and retro throughout.

The passivity of women -- both embraced and enforced -- is one of the in-your-face horrors in every story in that book. It makes everything appear corrupt or diseased, somehow.

>186 southernbooklady: the reader has to really work at it to find anything that looks like "agency" in Shakespeare's women. But I think it is an open question whether he wrote female stereotypes or whether his plays were responsible for creating many of them.

whether his plays were responsible for creating many of them.

Surely not! Just look at the folk tales from anywhere around the world.

>188 southernbooklady: Shakespeare's plays, more than any other piece of literature with the possible exception of the Bible, suffer from being so ubiquitous they've been turned into cultural tropes. I think Lady MacBeth is one of the more fascinating literary characters to have been invented, but you have to peel away about 400 years of stereotyping to really appreciate it.

I finished Terese Marie Mailhot's Heart Berries this week. Wow, what a book. I had to read it several times. It's an indigenous woman's memoir of poverty, abuse, and mental illness but its also about how she became a writer:

"In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution." -- which is as close to a summary of the book as I can get: a ceremony of reconciliation with a life of pain and grief that nevertheless doesn't let anyone off the hook, least of all the reader. It's really something.

>189 librorumamans:

Irreverent and perhaps irrelevant as it may be, I am reminded by your post of Maggie Smith's take on the Scottish Lady in A Private Function (1984) opposite Michael Palin, and with a wonderful cast including Denholm Elliott, Richard Griffiths, Pete Postlethwaite, and others.

I think it's time to watch it againl

I finished A Vindication of the Rights of Woman I think I wanted to find that this spoke to my heart, but it had a lot that I simply couldn't get behind. There's a lot of ambition in this but, in some ways, it has a narrow focus. Just a very different time and place.

Nicki et al. who read Machado's stories, some interesting remarks here:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/279151#6443137

I haven't read The Female Persuasion yet, (it's on my list with about eighty other books), but here's an article about Wolitzer and sexism:

Wolitizer isn't as good as Franzen, she's better

The literary establishment probably has been wary of Wolitzer not only because of sexism, but also because of its corollary, fear—not what women can't do, but what women might do.

Also:

The Second Shelf: On the Rules of Literary Fiction for Men and Women

>192 southernbooklady: I just saw her on PBS, last night, and found myself nodding yes to everything she was saying. Amazing woman. The ending sentences from the article you posted are worth repeating:

"In recent years, there has been a flood of blog posts about reading only books by women for a year. But you don't even have to do this as some kind of ethical project. In light of where we've been and where we are, in light of fiction's imperative to unleash truths and change perspectives, you can just read them because they're better."

Amen.

So, Circe by Madeline Miller. Oomph. What a book. It's a great example of feminist interpretation of an ancient myth -- the goddess/witch who turns men into pigs because, let's face it, when a boatload of lost and hungry pirates ends up foundering on the shores of her island and find a woman living there alone, with no father or husband to protect her, well, what do you think they are going to do? And what do you think they deserve?

My over-riding impression of the book is that it is scalpel-sharp, a centuries-long condemnation of the fate of women in a world dominated by the capriciousness of men and gods. It's pretty fierce and more than a little bloody, but honestly, I really liked the voice of Circe. Especially after she is exiled to her island and is forced to grow out of her naivete. But be forewarned, for all her circumscribed existence and quiet "exile" the book seethes with violence.

I'm really impressed.

>194 southernbooklady: Thanks for posting your impressions of this novel. I had seen it and made a mental note since I collect reinterpretations of classical mythology (and I've had Miller's "Song of Achilles" on my tbr shelf for far too long...). However, the explicitly feminist agenda made me a bit hesitant, since I've found other similar projects to be rather hit or miss.

I'm not a big fan of either Christa Wolf's Cassandra or Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad -- both were rather too tendentious for my taste. Obviously they're completely correct that ancient Greek society was incredibly patriarchal, oppressive towards women, and violent, but I don't take a lot of joy in reading stories whose point seems to be to say, look how horrible these people were. ... Because at the same time there's something in the Iliad and the Odyssey that I find incredibly beautiful and that still speaks to me even as a feminist, and so the more strident confrontations with the mythic material don't feel quite true to the spirit of the text they are responding to.

On the other hand, I loved Ursula K. Le Guin's Lavinia and Inge Merkel's Odysseus and Penelope (which bears the title "An Ordinary Marriage"!). They're not radical in the sense that the protagonists don't necessarily reject or fundamentally challenge the gender roles assigned to them, but they do allow the women to find a certain amount of freedom within these societal limitations and to take charge of -- and tell -- their own stories in a way that is empowering. Merkel's Penelope forgives her husband's transgressions (i.e., abandoning her for 20 years and having affairs with various other women while away) and, while she is ever-critical, she is able to maintain a certain loving tolerance and even understanding for this behavior, in part because Odysseus values her and recognizes that she is his intellectual equal. I suspect some feminists would find this problematic, but the novel worked for me in a way that Atwood's version didn't.

>195 spiphany: I'm more tolerant than you of didactically feminist perspectives on myths. I really liked Cassandra, for example. But it comes from a basic feeling that the scary women in religion and myth are made such things of horror because patriarchal societies are just plain afraid of them -- afraid of the woman who rejects their dictates. Such women are monsters by default, so the stories give them snakes in their hair and have them eat their children.

But that's not how Circe reads, exactly. For one thing, Miller never pretends Circe is human (although she's clearly a woman). So this isn't one of those retellings that imagines mythological figures as if they were once "real people." Circe is the daughter of Helios. A somewhat odd daughter, to be sure, but an immortal who, like the rest of her kind live eternally in the present because they never need to think about the future unless some uncomfortable prophecy makes itself known or unless they become entangled with some mortal being's life. In which case all hell breaks loose.

So it's really a story of patriarchy "writ large" and the cruelties it inflicts, and the way it twists those who live in it. Circe, banished for rebellion, becomes whole in exile. Which if you think about it, is a pretty bleak and radical prospect -- this assumption that a woman cannot be whole in current society. She has to actually remove herself completely to become herself.

Still, as relentless as Miller is in her condemnations, I wouldn't call the book didactic. It's really a pretty good adventure story and the ever-present violence is always laced with real feeling. The brief romance between Circe and Daedalus was touching. And Circe's attempts to save Medea from her fate were sort of desperately sincere.

Also, Penelope is awesome.

>196 southernbooklady: Yes, Circe does sound like a good choice for a character who works well as a feminist character even in the context of ancient society -- as an outsider and witch who transgresses prescribed gender roles.

I should add that I didn't entirely dislike Cassandra. I liked it, and I didn't. There are certainly some aspects of the story which are quite compelling. But I have a rather ambivalent relationship with Christa Wolf's writing in general. It's a bit difficult to articulate why, but some of it has to do with a certain valorization of victimhood; some of it has to do with Wolf's criticism of propagandizing even while she tends to insist fairly inflexibly on the authoritativeness of her own version. From the perspective of a German scholar, it's also hard not to suspect that Wolf is to some degree actually writing about WWII and/or East German socialism, and some of her positions become more problematic in this context. (I *really* had a problem with Medea: Wolf's Medea is essentially an innocent victim of slander who never wanted to harm anyone, and this totally misses the point -- like Lady Macbeth, it's the fact that she as a woman is capable of violence and brutality that makes her such a fascinating figure.)

With Atwood I think it wasn't the didacticism per se that bothered me. Actually, I'm not sure "didactic" is quite the term I would use here -- I would say, my sense that she had an agenda in writing; an agenda can be expressed in the form of the author lecturing the reader, but it can also take the form of the author's focus on one idea or ideology to the exclusion of nuance and multi-facetedness. It's been a while since I've read the Penelopiad, but it felt like she tried to drive her point home just a little too hard, and I was left with an impression of rather unrelenting negativity.

...and since I'm on the subject of women in ancient Greece, I want to mention Froma Zeitlin's study of Greek drama (Playing the Other), because she makes an argument that I find very interesting.

It picks up on some of the questions that came up an earlier discussion we had (I think in another thread? I can't find it at the moment) about otherwise highly praised literature with misogynist content and how we decide whether it is worth reading -- or not -- in spite of this content.

There's a certain paradox in classical Greek literature: Athenian society was incredibly androcentric and restrictive in terms of the freedom and status available to women. And yet at the same time this society also produced a body of drama which contains some of the most eloquent and powerful literary portrayals of women's passions and suffering. One of Zeitlin's arguments is that playing the "other" -- i.e., the female, or feminine-coded roles -- allowed men to confront challenges and experiences that weren't permitted or acknowledged in the code of masculine identity. So in the process of negotiating these gender codes and the consequences of the transgression thereof (women acting too much like men, men acting too much like women, etc), they also engage in an insightful way with stories that can speak to us as women.

This is maybe part of my answer to why some sexist (racist, etc.) attitudes in literature bother me and in other places -- in Shakespeare or Euripides, for example -- I can, not overlook it exactly, but find that it is outweighed by other merits of the text. And some of it I guess is simply about compassion, about not dehumanizing the characters and avoiding the dynamic of (male) dominance and entitlement vs. (female) oppression that makes contemporary misogyny so repulsive.

>197 spiphany: I don't mind "agendas" so much -- I equate them in my mind with whatever it was that drove the author to write the book. What it is they felt they had to say. But you're right that a clear agenda doesn't make up for a lack of craft. That's not the case with Miller, I don't think. She tells a good story. She tells a great horror story. I think I said on another thread that the book wins the prize for most number of self-performed c-section deliveries.

I'm also with you on abhorring the "valorization of victimhood." Which thankfully is almost non-existent in this book, except for Prometheus. What is it with our obsession with martyrs and self-sacrifice?

>199 southernbooklady: This discussion has certainly convinced me to read the book.

>199 southernbooklady: >200 sturlington: Ditto, I am adding this to my library list now!

Thank you, sturlington, for making me aware of Christa Wolf. Inge Merkel is not available hereabouts, unfortunately.

This discussion reminds me of Rita Dove's The Darker Face of the Earth. I've not read it since it first appeared in 1994, but I still remember the powerful effects of Dove's verse and her storytelling. It deserves to be much more widely known.

It might also be interesting to read comparatively some of the titles mentioned here alongside Til We Have Faces — a male retelling of a feminine myth.

Posted this in my other group, but I realized it probably belongs here as well:

I've been reading Under the Udala Trees with mixed feelings. If ever there was a story that should appeal to me, then this is it -- a young Ibo woman's account of coming of age and into her sexual identity in a Nigeria still shredded by Civil War, tribal and religious conflict. So it is disconcerting to find myself struggling to engage with the main character. I think the book is top-heavy with "theme," at the cost of allowing the reader to really connect with the story.

That said, there is a story in there. It comes through the cracks between other, larger concerns: For example, in Ijeoma's (she is the main voice) complicated relationship with her mother, and in the blooming of her first girlhood love affair -- which is just beautifully done. So I know Okparanta can write. This is her first novel (she also has a collection of short stories) and I find myself interested in reading other things she has written.

Ultimately it feels to me like the novel was written in response to -- or at least, owes its final form to -- the anti-gay legislation Nigeria enacted in 2014. It is a defiant voice against the much-touted polls that 98% of Nigerians think homosexuality should not be accepted by society. And I find I can't fault the author for that. But weirdly enough I think the book would be stronger and serve her purpose better if it had a more narrow focus instead of its overly-ambitious attempt to get it all -- religion, war, sex, love, ethnicities, class, education -- jammed into the life of a girl who is becoming a woman with all of existence arrayed against her.

>203 southernbooklady: I tried to read that, too. Couldn't get past fifty or so pages. As you say, it has all the right ingredients for a book I'd love, I just felt there was a huge chunk of whatever it is I need in novels that was missing. So frustrating!

I find it very common for first novels to try to deal with all the issues at once. You want to give the writer a hug and say, 'You'll get a chance to write other books, and you need to leave some issues for those books.'