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sigelphoenix) wrote2008-07-07 08:39 pm
sigelphoenix) wrote2008-07-07 08:39 pm
Entry tags:
Book talk
With the conference over, I decided to take a break from the heavy theory reading and go for something "lighter." I thought that Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism, edited by Daisy Hernandez and Bushra Rehman, would fit this description because it's a collection of personal essays.
That was a somewhat unfair evaluation - yeah, short essays aren't as able to develop strong ideas as the longer, academic books I've been reading - but just because they're not expressed in theoretical jargon doesn't mean they're less capable of expressing truth. It's true that some really successfully developed theory like Patricia Hill Collins' stuff will really get you thinking and give you aha! moments. But this stuff, these personal writings, are really good at sharing the feeling of that aha! moment, at conveying the emotion and humanity. And how many books out there do that for womanists/feminists of color? (Not a damn lot, lemme tell you.) That part of feminist writing is just as vital.
One of the strong points of this collection is the variety of women of color represented within it - Asian women (especially South Asian), Native women (only one essay, though), queer women. The women in the book display a variety of relationships to race and racial organizing, which helps ensure that most women will have something to relate to here. There was also a spectrum, from women who came to feminism through traditional academic routes, stumbling upon it through a Women's Studies course and then moving on to explore a more racially inclusive feminism (which is what I did), to women who went from practice to theory, first experiencing feminism as an aspect of racial struggle through the strength of their single/working-class/sex worker/etc. mothers before arriving (sometimes reluctantly) to the technical theory of sex-based oppression.
Some noteworthy essays from the book: Siobhan Brooks' "Black Feminism in Everyday Life: Race, Mental Illness, Poverty and Motherhood" exemplifies the latter part of the aforementioned spectrum, doing a really good job of juxtaposing 'lived' feminism with 'studied' feminism. Kiini Ibura Salaam's "How Sexual Harassment Slaughtered, Then Saved Me" is an interesting suggestion of how women can rethink their perspectives on men's street harassment to preserve their own strength. Bhavana Mody's "Lost in the Indophile Translation: A Validation of My Experience" is a wonderfully perceptive treatment of exoticism (probably more appealing to me because, on an individual scale, I am more likely to run into that into typical racist degradation). Cristina Tzintzun's "Colonize This!" from which the title of the volume is taken, will just make you cry.
This is a book that I think works well for both women (and men) of color, and white people who want to learn more about women of color's experiences. I would recommend it to anyone and, once again, I'm happy to loan it to any of my local friends (though I've got a coworker with first dibs on it).
I also got my hands on the final volume of Y: The Last Man this weekend, only it's been so long since I read the previous volumes, I decided to start over again from the beginning. I just finished re-reading volume 1 today.
I was reminded of two things that annoyed me when I originally read the volumes. The first is the use of the Amazons as the extremist feminist villains. On the one hand, yes, I could see some women taking opposition to male sexism too far (though it's questionable whether Victoria, the leader, truly believes the pseudo-feminist theory she spouts, or if she's just using the rhetoric to gain a following) and becoming sociopathic man-haters. On the other hand, the Amazons are, as I recall, the only representation of anti-sexist critique. No other, reasonable, characters make mention of male sexism. (I seem to recall some "it's not men who did bad things, it's people" speeches too.) I'm looking for something to keep us away from the "feminists = crazy man-haters" fallacy, and I don't remember finding it in the first nine volumes.
The other thing that bothered me (which isn't actually in volume 1, but begins in volume 2) is the way Yorick goes the Odysseus route: he has much more reason to think his female partner is alive than she does him, and yet he's the one who keeps hooking up with other women. (At least he doesn't mimic Odysseus' blatantly hypocritical assertion that his female partner ought to remain faithful to him even if she thinks he's dead.) There is some narrative censure for Yorick's behavior, in the form of other characters criticizing him, but I remember there also being a strong sense of, "Well, he can't help it."
I wonder, if the sexes were reversed and we were reading about the last woman on Earth, would the writers have made our protagonist be unfaithful? And would they (and the readers) accept the behavior as natural?
(This also raises the question of, if the sexes were reversed and we were reading about the last woman on Earth, what kind of story would that be?)
This isn't to say that I didn't enjoy/am not enjoying the series, though. There weren't any moments of blatant stupidity that made me drop the book (like Fables), and I'm still eager to read the final volume.
That was a somewhat unfair evaluation - yeah, short essays aren't as able to develop strong ideas as the longer, academic books I've been reading - but just because they're not expressed in theoretical jargon doesn't mean they're less capable of expressing truth. It's true that some really successfully developed theory like Patricia Hill Collins' stuff will really get you thinking and give you aha! moments. But this stuff, these personal writings, are really good at sharing the feeling of that aha! moment, at conveying the emotion and humanity. And how many books out there do that for womanists/feminists of color? (Not a damn lot, lemme tell you.) That part of feminist writing is just as vital.
One of the strong points of this collection is the variety of women of color represented within it - Asian women (especially South Asian), Native women (only one essay, though), queer women. The women in the book display a variety of relationships to race and racial organizing, which helps ensure that most women will have something to relate to here. There was also a spectrum, from women who came to feminism through traditional academic routes, stumbling upon it through a Women's Studies course and then moving on to explore a more racially inclusive feminism (which is what I did), to women who went from practice to theory, first experiencing feminism as an aspect of racial struggle through the strength of their single/working-class/sex worker/etc. mothers before arriving (sometimes reluctantly) to the technical theory of sex-based oppression.
Some noteworthy essays from the book: Siobhan Brooks' "Black Feminism in Everyday Life: Race, Mental Illness, Poverty and Motherhood" exemplifies the latter part of the aforementioned spectrum, doing a really good job of juxtaposing 'lived' feminism with 'studied' feminism. Kiini Ibura Salaam's "How Sexual Harassment Slaughtered, Then Saved Me" is an interesting suggestion of how women can rethink their perspectives on men's street harassment to preserve their own strength. Bhavana Mody's "Lost in the Indophile Translation: A Validation of My Experience" is a wonderfully perceptive treatment of exoticism (probably more appealing to me because, on an individual scale, I am more likely to run into that into typical racist degradation). Cristina Tzintzun's "Colonize This!" from which the title of the volume is taken, will just make you cry.
This is a book that I think works well for both women (and men) of color, and white people who want to learn more about women of color's experiences. I would recommend it to anyone and, once again, I'm happy to loan it to any of my local friends (though I've got a coworker with first dibs on it).
I also got my hands on the final volume of Y: The Last Man this weekend, only it's been so long since I read the previous volumes, I decided to start over again from the beginning. I just finished re-reading volume 1 today.
I was reminded of two things that annoyed me when I originally read the volumes. The first is the use of the Amazons as the extremist feminist villains. On the one hand, yes, I could see some women taking opposition to male sexism too far (though it's questionable whether Victoria, the leader, truly believes the pseudo-feminist theory she spouts, or if she's just using the rhetoric to gain a following) and becoming sociopathic man-haters. On the other hand, the Amazons are, as I recall, the only representation of anti-sexist critique. No other, reasonable, characters make mention of male sexism. (I seem to recall some "it's not men who did bad things, it's people" speeches too.) I'm looking for something to keep us away from the "feminists = crazy man-haters" fallacy, and I don't remember finding it in the first nine volumes.
The other thing that bothered me (which isn't actually in volume 1, but begins in volume 2) is the way Yorick goes the Odysseus route: he has much more reason to think his female partner is alive than she does him, and yet he's the one who keeps hooking up with other women. (At least he doesn't mimic Odysseus' blatantly hypocritical assertion that his female partner ought to remain faithful to him even if she thinks he's dead.) There is some narrative censure for Yorick's behavior, in the form of other characters criticizing him, but I remember there also being a strong sense of, "Well, he can't help it."
I wonder, if the sexes were reversed and we were reading about the last woman on Earth, would the writers have made our protagonist be unfaithful? And would they (and the readers) accept the behavior as natural?
(This also raises the question of, if the sexes were reversed and we were reading about the last woman on Earth, what kind of story would that be?)
This isn't to say that I didn't enjoy/am not enjoying the series, though. There weren't any moments of blatant stupidity that made me drop the book (like Fables), and I'm still eager to read the final volume.