collection

The Offensive Internet: Speech, Privacy, and Reputation

beth — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Saul Levmore, Martha C. Nussbaum

The Offensive Internet is a collection of essays that focus on abuses made possible by the freedoms provided by the Internet. The essays deal with the issues of privacy, free speech, cyber-bullying, misogyny, and anonymity. Each essay focuses on one issue to discuss and concludes with what can and cannot be done legally at this time to solve a particular Internet issue.

The book is broken into four parts and each of these parts is comprised of multiple essays on a specific topic. The first is titled “The Internet and Its Problems” and features essays that explore how anonymity on the Internet has lead to widespread cyber-bullying and civil rights abuse. These essays focus on the objectification and abuse women suffer due to these issues (according to one study cited, between the years 2000 and 2007, 72.5% of cyber-harassment victims were women) and what effect this has not only on the victims of these abuses but on society as well. While the authors of these essays are mainly concerned with women's rights, they do also acknowledge that other minority groups (homosexuals, racial minorities, religious minorities) are often targeted by cyber-mobs, signaling a violation of civil rights all around. The real life examples of harassment and slander that these authors reference are disturbing and appalling, and as a reader, one begins to wonder why there are not more laws to regulate and punish cyber-harassment.

The second section of the book is “Reputation.” As the title suggests, these essays deal with how people's reputations can be damaged by the Internet through social networks, Googling, and rumor spreading. These essays address not only the issues we are having currently (for example, people getting fired for things they post on a Facebook page), but also how these issues will shape our society in the future.

The third section, “Speech,” is probably the one topic that is the most controversial. It deals with free speech, a topic that is as debated in the real world as it is in the cyber one. How much free speech should there be on the Internet? What constitutes as free speech and what is slander? Should people be allowed to use foul language or should some censoring be done? And if there is censoring done, who should be responsible for it? These questions and more are posed and discussed throughout the three well thought out essays on speech.

The last section, “Privacy,” concentrated on what information should be considered private, how that privacy should be protected, and what effect the Internet is having on our social norms in terms of privacy. I found the essay on social networks to be the most interesting. The fact that many people consider the information they post onto a social network page to be private, despite being displayed on the very public Internet, is an intriguing phenomenon in our society and this section explores the reasoning and consequences of this train of thought.

While I found many of the topics and issues discussed in this collection to be fascinating and intellectually stimulating, my favorite thing about it was that it didn't so much offer answers as questions that society needs to be asking. Whether you agree with the opinions expressed in it or not, this a book that makes you think, making it a worthwhile read for anyone.

Written by: Victoria Granado, March 28th 2011

The Girls’ History and Culture Reader: The Nineteenth Century

payal — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Miriam Forman-Brunell, Leslie Paris

University of Illinois Press

In 1982 Harvard professor Carol Gilligan published In a Different Voice, a revolutionary body of research articulating the unique psychological experience of being female in America. Responding to research that drew conclusions from studying boys, Gilligan’s exploration of the female experience was one of the first to focus on girlhood as an independent site for research rather than as a sub-category of Women’s Studies.

Since this formative publication, much headway has been made in researching girls’ lives both in and out of the academy. Following the format of a traditional academic collection, editors Miriam Forman-Brunell and Leslie Paris have succeeded in compiling a thoughtfully organized collection of girls’ historical research published in the past few decades. Though limited to American history and culture, the The Girls’ History and Culture Reader includes a diverse selection of essays that explore both the personal and political aspects of girls’ lives and lends itself to deeper reflection of girls’ participation in contemporary American Society.

A thoughtful introduction by the editors suggests, “In the nineteenth century, girlhood took many forms, reflecting the nation’s diversity, its divisions, and the particular circumstances of individual girls’ lives.” The The Girls’ History and Culture Reader explores the significance of age, education, race and class structure and the ever evolving and diverse experiences girls have with their bodies. Developing almost chronologically, each essay in one way or another leads up to the one that follows making for a coherent and well-executed read.

The collection begins with “The Life Cycle of the Female Slave” by Deborah Gray White, which documents adolescence on the plantation and the shift of younger girls’ socialization in sexually integrated atmosphere to a more strict separation when entering the workforce. This piece is followed by Anya Jabour’s “Grown Girls, Highly Cultivated,” a biographical telling of two sisters that offers an insightful look into female education in the Antebellum South. An insightful reflection on prostitution, Christine Stansell’s “Women on the Town” investigates the complex reasons for girls’ participation in this still stigmatized profession such as homelessness, companionship and autonomy. However, the essay I found to be most thought provoking and relatable was Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s exploration of “The Female World of Love and Ritual.” Smith-Rosenberg highlights the importance of female relationships and the safety of female intimacy. The text relies on diaries and correspondence between females whose affections, though not physical, would challenge contemporary sexual categories. This essay also pays particular attention to mother-daughter relations positing a mother’s stable domestic role created a “closed and intimate female world” for girls to grow toward womanhood.

Written by: Alicia Sowisdral, March 17th 2011

Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic: The Essential Ida Craddock

tina — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Vere Chappell

Red Wheel/Weiser

One of the best things about reviewing books is the exposure I get to the fabulous females in feminist history who would otherwise be consigned to the cobwebby corners of academic obscurity had some enterprising writer not plucked them from the depths and held them up for the delight of feminist history nerds. This was what I experienced with Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic, which is part biography and part collected works of Ida Craddock. The editor and biographer intersperses five (long) chapters of Craddock's own writings with well-written biographical detail explaining Craddock's often puzzling rhetoric.

Ida C. Craddock was a writer and teacher and at the age of twenty-five, she challenged the status quo by being the first woman to apply for admission to the University of Pennsylvania. She passed the entrance exam and was recommended for admission, but the board of trustees quickly passed a resolution barring women from attending the school. Her career as a teacher would be limited as a result of this setback. She spent the next several years traveling, teaching stenography, and studying spirituality, until 1893 when the Chicago World's Fair opened. The belly dancers imported from the Middle East scandalized America—and Anthony Comstock in particular. Comstock was a powerful proponent of “blue laws” (laws created to enforce strict moral and religious standards of behavior) and the self-appointed postal inspector. Craddock took advantage of the scandal by writing an editorial in the New York World defending the dancers and poking gentle fun at Comstock. It's what she said at the end of the piece; however, that caught the attention of the world: Craddock claimed she had a “spirit husband” named Soph, with whom she had sex nightly.

Craddock’s editorial and claims of spirit-world sexual relations aside, she made a powerful enemy of Comstock by publishing and distributing “sex manuals.” Craddock, though an ardent freethinker, was not a proponent of sex outside of marriage and her sex manuals were intended for married couples only, but this was not good enough for Comstock (or Ida's mother). Both sought to have her institutionalized and jailed. Avoiding the asylum but not an arrest, Craddock refused to plead insanity and was sentenced to five years in prison for distribution of obscene material. Viewing this as a life sentence (she was forty-five years old then), Craddock penned a lengthy suicide note condemning Comstock and the society that judged her and then killed herself. Comstock, for his part, merely added Ida's name to the list of fifteen persons whom he proudly claimed he had driven to suicide.

Craddock's personal writings read as completely lucid, intelligent, and intense; they are not the scribblings of a deranged mind. Whether her “spirit husband” was a hallucination, a tale to prod her enemies, or (who knows?) a real experience, is anyone's guess. Her work was important to feminism, spiritualism, religion, history, philosophy, freethinking, and social reform, and her name deserves to be better known. I'm personally not a religious/spiritual person, but I loved Ida's utter outrageousness in her public claims of “spirit sex” and her audacity in flouting convention in her writings and speech. Her pieces are long-winded and full of references to obscure academia, but they are entirely absorbing. Craddock was clearly a learned woman with plenty to say. I think her suicide note, the last piece of writing she left the world, is my favorite. It's a nice “you can't fire me—I quit” and a scathing indictment of Comstock as well. Read Sexual Outlaw, Erotic Mystic so more people will know of Ida Craddock, and not just the warped ideas of Anthony Comstock.

Written by: Natalie Ballard, March 6th 2011

The Young Lords: A Reader

andrea — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Darrel Enck-Wanzer

New York University Press

Before reading The Young Lords: A Reader, I had never heard of the Young Lords Party. The original Young Lords were a loosely organized group that emerged from a street gang fighting the gentrification of Puerto Rican neighborhoods in Chicago. The New York chapter quickly dissociated themselves from their Chicago cousins, renaming themselves the “Young Lords Party” rather than the “Young Lords Organization.” The Young Lords Party, or YLP, are perhaps most famous for their takeover of a Methodist Church in East Harlem (“The People’s Church”) or their Garbage Offensive in the summer of 1969. Sanitation was nowhere near routine in the Barrio (East Harlem), so YLP officers pushed the garbage into the streets, forcing the city to clean it up if they wanted traffic to continue as normal. These types of actions, along with free tuberculosis and lead poisoning screenings, adult education classes, worker organizing, and a celebration of the many cultures of Puerto Ricans in New York were the backbone of the YLP.

As editor Darrel Enck-Wanzer states at the beginning of The Young Lords: A Reader: “This book offers a comprehensive collection of primary texts so that... you, the reader, can decide for yourself what the Young Lords might mean to us today.” True to his word, Enck-Wanzer presents many Young Lords’ original texts organized for the first time in one compilation. Although he clearly sympathizes with the original mission of the Young Lords Party, he presents the texts warts and all, including typos and dated language that a modern reader may not quite grasp.

Almost entirely youth-led, the Young Lords Party organized their friends, grandmothers, and neighbors to fight for rights that no one else was fighting for. Young organizers would do well to study this text, specifically Latino youth who may not identify with commonly lauded civil rights leaders. In one section on education, students describe the first-ever meeting of the Puerto Rican student union at Columbia University: “Workshops were held dealing with... the role of women in the revolution; high school students, college students, Latin American and Latin unity; the military... political prisoners; Third World unity; education, and the media...” This article was published in 1970 but easily could have described a conference held this year. If we are still battling the same demons, we would do well to learn from the mistakes of those who came before us.

We should also give credit where credit is due. The YLP, more so than many similar groups, made an effort to recognize the intersectionality of different oppressions, an idea that is much more acceptable now than it was decades ago. They placed a special emphasis on the inclusion of women and the destruction of misogyny within their movement. This should be the norm by now, even though sadly it’s not. This anthology is a learning tool because most texts are presented honestly, with leaders candidly discussing their struggles, goals, progress, and failures. I cringe when older activists speak of the lack of passion nowadays, because I don’t think it’s any less prevalent today than it was in the sixties. The Young Lords: A Reader helps demonstrate part of that passion/frustration/ dedication, and helps guide young activists today with the same drive towards long-term change.

Written by: Colleen Hodgetts, March 4th 2011

The Affect Theory Reader

brittany — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Melissa Gregg, Gregory J. Seigworth

Duke University Press

As the first definitive collection of essays on affect studies, The Affect Theory Reader demonstrates how the affective turn in academia has been, and continues to be felt, throughout a variety of disciplines. Studies on affect produce qualified and valuable effects in the realms of aesthetics, ethics, and politics—to name just a few. Affect, in other words, is all pervasive, and the efforts of editors Gregg and Seigworth focalize on this estimation, while at the same, as evident in the gamut of essays, they emphasize that affect is readable in specific bodies and spaces.

What is “affect”? The editors offer a working (and, unfortunately, longwinded) definition on the first page of their introduction: “Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to those forces—visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us…across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability.” One, arguably feminist, value of affect in academic studies is that it has allowed the body (human or otherwise) to function as an epistemological site of knowledge and inquiry. The body, sloughed off and pushed aside by decades of poststructuralist and deconstructivist studies, has new value as both producer and product of affect. The essays by Elspeth Probyn (“Writing Shame”), Lauren Berlant (“Cruel Optimism”), Patricia T. Clough (“The Affective Turn...”), and Megan Watkins (“Desiring Recognition, Accumulating Affect”), all, in subtle or explicit ways, pronounce the underlying feminist register of studies on affect.

The collection of essays, while thematically varied, almost upon a spectrum of the materiality of affect (from the emotion of “happiness” to the commodity-fetish of affect in consumer culture), all philosophically and methodologically derive from a handful of prominent theorists and critics: Spinoza, Bergson, Freud, Deleuze and Guattari, (Raymond) Williams, and Lawrence Grossberg, who is figured as the inspiration behind the editors’ decision to create this volume and who is interviewed in the piece that bookends the volume. Grossberg, they claim, is “the principal figure in cultural studies to have recognized ‘passion, emotion, and affect as the new frontier for politics,’” and the interview offers a genealogy of Grossberg’s own affective turn.

In addition to the aforementioned essays, especially Berlant’s, whose “Cruel Optimism” made me squee—internally—at my own naïve “cruel optimism” about my sexual attachments (“‘Cruel optimism’ names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic”); Sara Ahmed’s “Happy Objects” is a standout piece that opens the volume. In this essay, Ahmed studies how happiness “functions as a promise that directs us towards certain objects and how, in turn, there are bodies—such as feminist kill-joys, unhappy queers, and melancholic migrants—who thwart collective societal happiness by refusing to reproduce happiness-norms. Ahmed shows us how happiness is indeed socially produced but at the same time idiosyncratic; happiness is subjectively experienced and qualified individually, by each body. The result, as she notes in her analysis of the “unhappy queer,” is that “[a]lthough we can live without the promise of happiness, and can do so ‘happily,’ we live with the consequences of being a cause of unhappiness for others.”

C’est la vie.

Written by: Marcie Bianco, February 16th 2011

I'm a Registered Nurse, Not a Whore

tina — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Anne Purdue

Insomniac Press

My grandmother was a nurse. She's retired now, but I remember how she used to chastise her grandchildren, scolding us about washing our hands, eating certain foods, and getting exercise. Above all, she was straightforward about our bodies. When we were too shy to put on our swimsuits in the changing room at the pool, she used to say, "We all got the same thing you got.” Another time she scolded me for cringing at a violent scene in a crime show, "Well, we all have to go sometime, sweetheart."

Because of her, I have always associated nurses with a sort of grandmotherly sass and frankness about the human body. This immediately came to mind when I picked up Anne Perdue's I'm a Registered Nurse, Not a Whore and I can honestly say I was not disappointed by the book. With episodes ranging from dental self-surgery to an accident involving a vat of wax, Perdue's plots often revolve around physical crisis. Her stories are not for the squeamish. Perdue uses unhesitating honesty for her descriptions of people and their bodies, offering up characters that are flawed and deeply compelling. The result is a collection that shows us the painful—and often darkly funny—conflicts of friendship, marriage, and parenthood.

Perdue's stories typically begin by introducing us to a common scenario: a couple on vacation or a family at dinner, but then she shows us how the character’s smoldering inner desires and regrets build up into a violent climax. In "Inheritance," a Botox-injected car salesman fantasizes about his youthful dreams of becoming a musician while building a deck for his house. As he’s working his children torment and disobey him, but we are privy to his inner thoughts. The story culminates in a relative's fall, a lost tooth, and a backyard grill tragedy. "Inheritance" introduces two of Purdue's common themes; one is regret. Characters in I'm a Registered Nurse, Not a Whore lament a youth subculture ("Theories of Relativity"), bad marriages ("CA-NA-DA," "Inheritance"), and failed careers in musical theater ("The Dry Well"). The other common theme is parenthood. There are some sympathetic parent-child relationships in these stories, but parenthood in I'm a Registered Nurse is often more painful than it is fulfilling: Children are distant and unappreciative, defying their parents' efforts at reconciliation.

Perdue's prose is crisp and direct, presenting fresh ways to describe our physical selves ("Bodies aren't a whole lot different from houses. They're made of matter and they crack and tear and sometimes things grow in them that shouldn't") and reinventing old clichés ("If we are what we eat, Leona was oxidized, fused to the vegetable crisper, ripe for fruit flies"). She writes engaging dialogue, transferring from one character's head to another with a sometimes absorbing and sometimes vertigo-inducing speed. Perdue is at her best when she stays with one or two characters throughout a story, as in my favorite piece from this collection, "Pooey." "Pooey" follows the relationship between Jackie, a single woman pursuing artificial insemination, and her sick and aging mother, Leona. "Pooey" masterfully blends pathos and dark humor—you cringe as Leona takes a drunken fall on her seventieth birthday, as Jackie falls over the punch bowl at a bridal shower—but you root for these women all the way. In "The Dry Well," the marriage between new homeowners Heather and Keith slowly unravels as the house around them floods and falls apart. The story transitions between Heather’s and Keith's thoughts, using crawling mice, leaking roofs, and sinister repairmen as the backdrop for the story.

At times I wanted to know more about the victims of the violent outbursts in these stories, about the world after the catastrophe. Perdue's structure can feel a bit redundant—near the end of I'm a Registered Nurse, Not a Whore I found myself patiently waiting for the fire, the fistfight, or the flood that would come and sweep the story away. But these stories also give us splendid moments of release, moments where the passion of inner life mirrors the explosive and painful physical action of the stories. Perdue's stories are edgy and fresh, providing just the right dose of sympathy and satire.

Written by: Barbara Barrow, January 30th 2011

Firebrands: Portraits from the Americas

priyanka — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Justseeds Artists' Cooperative

Microcosm Publishing

I was initially unimpressed by Firebrands, but that was because I approached it wrong. I tried to sit down in my living room and read it cover-to-cover, and that's not what this book is for. It's a pocket-sized compendium of amazing people—people "left out of the schoolbooks because they were too brown, too female, too poor, too queer, too uneducated, too disabled, or because they daydreamed too much." Each firebrand gets a page-long description, a lovely illustration, and a number of suggestions for further reading.

Firebrands reads somewhat like a reference book, and it could function that way—one could keep it on the shelf in case one heard the name of a lesser-known abolitionist, revolutionary, or what-have-you; then one could simply look that person up. As a blogger, though, I see it as much like a themed blog. It's best opened at random pages, read in fits and starts. It might have been interesting to include some kind of decentralized theme-organization within the book—something along the lines of a blog's tags. A few blog-inspired books have done things like that in recent years, such as the sex-positive anthology Yes Means Yes, which attaches a number of tags at the end of each essay, then lists all tags and their associated entries at the beginning of the book. (Firebrands does have a very nice index, however, so it's possible to navigate the book by themes in that way.)

Once I started reading the book at random and in small chunks, I started liking it a lot. The authors have done a great job of digging up pithy quotations and interesting anecdotes. A few entries lack vividness (it's hard to be enthralled by vague sentences like "She did a lot of community organizing"), but for the most part, these firebrands really sound inspiring. One of my favorite quotations came from the description of Latino baseball player Roberto Clemente: "Clemente's motto was, 'If you have the chance to help others and fail to do so, you are wasting your time on this earth.'" And I was charmed by an anecdote about the singer Nina Simone: "During a recital when she was twelve years old, Nina's parents were asked to relinquish their front row seats to a white family, and Simone refused to perform until her parents were returned to their original seats."

I was also impressed by the book's genuine inclusiveness—it covered a wide array of warriors, artists, leaders, and it did so while pushing beyond the typical "inclusive" boundaries. For example, as a sex-positive activist I was thrilled to note that the painter Frida Kahlo was acknowledged to be both bisexual and polyamorous.

The illustrations add a lot to Firebrands. I particularly love the images by Roger Peet. It goes with the last biography in the book, Zumbi dos Palmares, a Portuguese slave in Brazil who led an insurrection in the 1600s. Firebrands was produced by an artists' cooperative called Justseeds, and it's clear that the whole group pitched in for this book and thought carefully about each element. So you could benefit a bunch of artists by giving this charming collection as a gift! What’s not to love?

Written by: Clarisse Thorn, January 28th 2011

Why Study Talmud in the Twenty-first Century?: The Relevance of the Ancient Jewish Text to Our World

mandy — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Edited by Paul Socken

Lexington Books

Lending a somewhat contrarian voice to this collection of essays extolling the virtues of Talmud study, the rabbi Dr. Pinchas Hayman takes umbrage at the question Paul Socken poses in the book’s title: “Why should the indescribable depth, beauty, and challenge of authentic Jewish literature require apologetic essays?” He concludes with his own “more relevant” and “far more difficult” question: “Who needs the twenty-first century if one learns Talmud?”

For Hayman, and several of the contributors to Why Study Talmud in the Twenty-first Century?, the life-long process of learning Talmud provides a safe haven against the threats and anxieties of contemporary life. Talmud study is, as Shaye J.D. Cohen puts it, “what a (male) Jew does.” For Cohen and others, the Talmud is a “feast for the mind,” a “brain teaser” that not only affords intellectual sustenance but also, in the process, constructs one’s Jewish identity. Another contributor, Michael Chernick, echoes Hayman in lamenting a “world focused on ‘now,’” one in which many Jewish people have found Talmud study “old-fashioned” and no longer relevant.

The first (and I believe most compelling) section of the book, though, is written by women who have taught and studied Talmud. As Chernick acknowledges, “patriarchal societies do not tend to preserve women’s thoughts and concerns more than they must,” and he acknowledges that while the view of Talmud as uniformly misogynistic is misguided, much of Talmudic law is problematic for women, to say the least. How do women devote themselves to the study of texts whose rules for women would seem to reverse what many who do live in the twenty-first century would deem desperately needed progress in the areas of women’s rights?

In responding to this question, Devorah Zlochower admits that Talmud study is “a mixed blessing as I find myself engaged in an impossible dance between delight in the tradition and its foundational texts and discomfort with its limitations and exclusions. It is essential for me to understand the texts of our tradition but I cannot do this without wrestling with the tradition simultaneously.” Her description of this uneasy dialog with the past is exciting and unsettling, and it is clearly informed by her twenty-first century feminism. In reading texts on marriage and divorce, and their asymmetric treatment of women, she refuses to ignore the “woman who is chained to a dead marriage by a husband unwilling to grant her a divorce.”

The most universally accessible part of this paean to these foundational texts of Judaism is the joyful and life-affirming process of study, the hard-won, patience-testing, identity-altering commitment to studying the Talmud, page by page, often in study groups and with a partner. The process teaches a tolerance for ambiguity, exercises the intellectual faculties in a way that is transformative, and places participants in a tradition that is thousands of years old. Devora Steinmetz compares the practice of regular study to prayer in a way that all those who interpret texts should be able to appreciate: “But study is different from prayer—or at least from the ways in which most of us experience prayer—in that in study I must open myself to the voice of the other.”

The book is intended primarily for Jewish readers. As Jane Kanarek puts it, “the Talmud gives me a place to be a Jew,” and the collection is a reminder of the “daily Sinai” of Talmudic study, a discipline that leads to revelation and, often, challenge to authority and received opinion. In their polyvocality and contradictoriness, these texts teach the kind of subtlety of interpretation, appreciation for challenge, and an awareness of the “minds of the past” that forged Jewish law and tradition. For non-Jewish readers, the sense of awe and discovery the writers describe as they relate their own experiences with Talmud study, even with brief examples of the kind of exegesis involved, must be taken largely on faith.

The reward for taking up this practice, according to several of the contributors, is a kind of direct access to the divine. While this sort of intense grappling with ancient and very difficult texts is not for the faint of heart, the rewards these writers describe are appealing to all who have felt the allure of textual criticism. Chernick writes, “There is a contemporary sense (malady?) that if a text is very old it must be irrelevant.” An even worse tendency is to view old texts—whether ancient sacred writing, Shakespeare, or the U. S. Constitution, for example—as inviolable, immune to multiple interpretation, subject only to some imagined “literal” meaning. This disciplinary model described here is one that promises to invigorate the study of virtually any challenging text.

As is often the case with such collections, the essays do not speak to each other very successfully, and the order of presentation seems somewhat haphazard. The pieces reflect many of the conflicts that have arisen between Reform and Orthodox Judaism, as well as the broader intellectual divisions of our time. But the book succeeds in making its invitation, and this ancient but vibrant dialectical tradition will surely endure.

Written by: Rick Taylor, January 24th 2011

Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry

mandy — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Christine Sneed

University of Massachusetts Press

Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry is a collection of short stories by Christine Sneed, the winner of the Grace Paley Prize in short fiction. The book is one of the most well-written, heartrending, and remarkably real collections I've ever read. Nothing is left to do after reading Sneed's collection except go back to read the same stories over again for their raw, hard, and gritty overwhelming of the senses.

If you find yourself detached from your emotions, read one of Sneed's short stories, and it will cause you to look at yourself from a new view. From story to story, the author delivers truth and meaning to the reader, who can't help but be absorbed into the world of each protagonist. With an underlying feeling of selfishness, the characters prove that life is painful, regardless of a role one plays in the world. The angst-ridden, trying personalities intensely attempt to assert their power and needs, laying their story open raw. Displaying her characters flaws and insecurities, Sneed exposes us to thoughtful and caring people who question life, yet proceed in living.

Sneed teaches creative writing and literature courses, and you may imagine her creations spring from the classroom. The slices of life may be drawn from her experiences and her characters may be extensions of her students. When faced with life's confrontations, compassion and sensitivity pour into every page, garnering steps towards redemption. Thoughtful and introspective artists and everyday people arise in the stories, which simply demonstrate the struggle of everyperson. Subtle and solemn, Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry will knock you out again and again.

Written by: Carolyn Espe, January 23rd 2011

The Vintage Book of American Women Writers

mandy — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Edited by Elaine Showalter

Vintage

Anyone who has taken their share of English literature survey courses will tell you that the women considered great enough to be included within the literary canon are few to be found, as women writers have been marginalized throughout history. Even today, the title “great American novelist” is one that has yet to be bestowed upon a woman, and many women writers whose work has literary significance find their work disregarded as "chick lit." The Vintage Book of American Women Writers helps to give women their due. The 848-page book traces the history of women writers in America, beginning with Anne Bradford, the first woman to be published in Puritan America, and ending with such contemporary writers as Amy Tan and Jhumpa Lahiri.

Among the most noteworthy additions on the table of contents is feminist Kate Chopin, who was revolutionary in her time for depicting women who hungered for an independent life outside of the confines of marriage and children and who sought out their own sexual fulfillment. Included within this anthology are “Story of an Hour” and the two connected stories: “At the Cadian Ball” and “The Storm.” “The Storm” was particularly groundbreaking; written in 1894, it presents a woman who, in the throes of lust, commits adultery during a violent thunderstorm. Due to the sexual explicitness of the story, it was never published until 1969, over seventy years after Chopin originally wrote it.

Continuing along the same vein are works by Dorothy Parker (“Big Blonde”) and Edna St. Vincent Millay (“First Fig,” “Second Fig,” and “What My Lips Have Kissed”). Both writers also portrayed women who expressed sexualities that challenged societal mores, although this specific story by Parker displays a woman who becomes trapped by the limited role she is left to carry out in society.

Even with multiple English degrees under my belt, I found there to be many stories and writers within the anthology I had not read, or even heard of. Among the writers whose legacy has been somewhat left to obscurity is Alice Bradley Sheldon, who posed as a man and wrote under the pen name James Tiptree, Jr. in order to better her chances of publication. Tiptree, who once belonged to the CIA, wrote compelling science fiction works. The included selection, “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain,” reflects both her background in the CIA and the knowledge she gained through her Doctorate degree in experimental psychology. Also included within this collection (and one could not imagine any anthology of women in literature not including them) are a selection of poems from Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich.

The Vintage Book of American Women Writers makes note of the struggle women have fought in order for their voices to be heard within the literary world. Of course, many people are apt to argue that there are many wonderful and historically significant women writers who did not make it into the collection, but there is only room for so many in one book. In the end, this anthology successfully underscores the overlooked importance women have played in literary history.

Written by: Adrienne Urbanski, January 17th 2011

I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t and Other Plays

barbara — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Sonia Sanchez, Jacqueline Wood

Duke University Press

It has always been Sonia Sanchez the poet I’ve known and loved, with strong works like Wounded in the House of a Friend, Does Your House Have Lions?, and Like The Singing Coming Off the Drums. Sonia the poet, a towering figure in my mind when I think of the powerful black woman poets that still get me through this life and inspire me to write. But there is Sonia Sanchez the playwright too, and I’m so glad to meet her in this critical new collection I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t and Other Plays. This collection finally brings together all of Sanchez’s dramatic works, previously published and unpublished, spanning from 1969 to 2009.

As one of the major writers of the Black Arts movement, Sonia’s bold and creative voice demanded to be heard among an intimidating arena of popular black male writers, many of whom nurtured chauvinistic ideals. We are all now aware of the rampant misogyny that permeated this period during the sixties and seventies, when sadly too many black men saw the possibility of liberation through the destructive lens of patriarchy and inflated notions of manhood. Sanchez unflinchingly addressed such issues in her drama, which can best be described as poetic fire infused with hope for a better reality for black people in what she would term “this place called America.”

1974’s Uh, Uh; But How Do It Free Us? is a play that only a woman with a deep love for her people and a real desire to save them could write. It painfully shines a light on the damaging effects of addiction and the open degradation of women in the militant black community. The play is broken into three groups of characters, each with different stories that reflect the problematic behavior prevalent at the time yet often hiding behind “revolutionary” rhetoric. In “Group II” we meet five men riding white rocking horses who revel in physically and verbally abusing two women, “White Whore” and “Black Whore.” Although the men proclaim to espouse revolution and progress, they are abusers as well as slaves to their drug addictions and sexual appetites.

Sanchez’s love for the women who suffered during this period is honored in the 1969 play Sister Son/Ji. Son/Ji is eventually left alone to deal with the consequences of her commitment to a movement that, as Sanchez says “cannot catch her when she falls down in midnight solitude.” There were women who lost their minds as a result of choosing such a life, she says. Women like Son/Ji who threw themselves into the cause even while losing their children to war. In one of the book’s two essays, “Poetry Run Loose,” Sanchez lifts up Son/Ji as one who survived many years of death and sacrifice and chooses to speak in spite of her scars.

Placing these plays within their historical context is important, but they also hold up today as dramas that uplift and motivate their audiences and readers, dramas with messages that are still valuable. As this collection reminds us, there is Sonia Sanchez the activist too.

Written by: Natalie Maxwell, December 26th 2010

Being and Becoming Visible: Women, Performance, and Visual Culture

farhana — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Edited by Stacey Weber-Fève, Olga M. Mesropova

The John Hopkins University Press

This book collects an array of articles previously published in the National Women’s Studies Association Journal, brought together for the first time under the auspices of elaborating on the theme of visibility in both performance and visual culture. As with all such collections, some pieces stand out in caliber, notably "Practical Perfection? The Nanny Negotiates Gender, Class, and Family Contradictions in 1960s Popular Culture" by Anne Mcleer, "Fractured Borders: Women’s Cancer and Feminist Theater" by Mary K. DeSchazer, and Vivyan C. Adair’s must-read piece "The Missing Story of Ourselves: Poor Women, Power, and the Politics of Feminist Representation."

I picked these three out of the rest because of their remarkable quality of questioning. These three theorists take nothing for granted in their articles, managing to question everything down to the marrow of their subject. They escape clichés of feminist critiques of art culture and add something truly important to the canon of thought.

One of the major pitfalls for many of the articles is a failure to complicate the viewer-viewed relationship. This is one reason Adair’s essay is such a breath of fresh air—she affords a much needed shift from the “educated” woman writing about the “disenfranchised woman” who presumably need to be made visible by the well-meaning author of the article. Adair, on the other hand, sensitively addresses the viewed body as text, which is simultaneously produced and read by policy-producing discourses. There is a need for some of the other authors to readdress the question of who is doing the looking, and who is being looked at. The simplistic tradition of the “male gaze” is no longer groundbreaking. What more can we say about the looker and the looked-at?

Throughout the different pieces, the theme of visibility effectively arises, but also the theme of invisibility. It becomes evident that what one does not see—in an Alice Neel painting, in a Lucille Ball show, or even in a feminist essay—that what is not seen and not said is just as important, perhaps more important than what is seen. The point of interest then becomes these cracks in visibility: looking and asking as much about “why absence” as “why presence.” Even beyond that, “becoming visible” is effectively related not only to telling a previously untold story, but complicating the stories that already do exist. “Visibility” comes to mean the visible(ness) of ambiguity, and each essay moves in its own way toward promoting understanding of that space that exists in between the dichotomies of dangerous thinking.

This is a valuable collection, which brings together articles that otherwise perhaps would never meet eye-to-eye. There is something integral in the attempt to bring together cross-cultural, interdisciplinary theory to address a theme which is so at the edge of both feminist and visual studies.

Written by: Beth Fagan, December 7th 2010

Lesbian Lust: Erotic Stories

payal — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Edited by Sacchi Green

Cleis Press

The stories featured in Sacchi Green’s edited collection of lesbian erotica are intensely sexual. As the name of the volume, Lesbian Lust, implies, each of the stories focus on the deep sensual and sexual desires of the characters featured in them. The narratives are varied in their settings, characterizations, and kinds of sex offered for the reader’s (and their companions’) interest. As Green writes in her introduction to the volume, “Variety is also the spice of lust.”

Many of the stories are not for the faint of heart; there are few typically “vanilla” sex acts and story lines included in Lesbian Lust. This said, the volume presents a wonderfully wide-ranging assortment of active, desiring lesbian subjects who are in charge of their own sexuality, whether they play out their own fantasies or submit at their own will to the desires of their partner(s). The stories are kink-friendly and as one might imagine of a collection written by and for lesbians, sex- and woman-positive. Overall, this was my favorite aspect of the collection of stories. Even if any one story didn’t fall within my own particular set of turn-ons, I appreciated reading the entire group of stories for their collective interest in portraying lesbians in powerful positions, engaging one another in both playful and serious emotional, psychological, and/or physical situations.

Perhaps my favorite story of the collection, “The Office Grind” by R.G. Emanuelle, brings sex to the boardroom as Casey secretly tends to Nina, company Vice President, while Nina participates in a business meeting with her pompous and oblivious male co-workers. The story is simultaneously sexy and funny, and makes the introduction of cunnilingus to the workday seem a brilliant idea to chase away the staid boredom all too typical of a desk job, especially for a female executive who is used to being treated as a second-class citizen both by her boss and her subordinates. “The Office Grind” turns on its head the conventional voyeuristic tale of men getting off on watching lesbians having sex, emphasizing Nina’s business and sexual power in the face of her ignorant co-workers. Using wordplay to drive the story home, “The Office Grind” brings a whole new meaning to the terms “powerpoint” and “working lunch.”

I highly recommend this story, and the Lesbian Lust collection as a whole to the reader looking for multi-layered tales of sex, romance, and power in all sorts of lesbian relationships.

Written by: Stefanie Snider, November 18th 2010

Making the Hook-up: Edgy Sex with Soul

alicia — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Cole Riley

Cleis Press

What business does a White woman like me have reviewing a collection of erotica by African American authors? I figure when it comes to erotica, it's matter of whether the story turns you on or doesn’t, and I can’t see that race has much to do with that.

As you’d expect, most of the characters in this eighteen-story collection are Black, and it's wonderful to see a full range of sexual expression within them. Making the Hook-up contains threesomes, lesbians, BDSM, a spanking fetish, and anonymous (and near-anonymous) encounters in movie theaters, public restrooms, and hotel rooms. There's something for everyone, and several damn good stories.

Reginald Harris’ “Keeping Up with the Joneses” is the amusing account of long-married couple Roy and Lynn, who are inspired to rekindle their sex life when they hear the nighttime romps of their new next door neighbors, a gay couple, through the wall of their townhouse. (Notably, the overheard sexual escapades of the neighbors are the only depiction of sex between two men in the book.) “Pharaoh’s Phallic” by Deepbronze is good for chuckles and some seriously erotic images when the protagonist learns the truth about his girlfriend’s secret lover. Zaji’s “Lights on a Cave Wall” combines Caribbean spirituality and mysticism with pulsing, sensual descriptions, while “Lonnie’s Licks” by Tenille Brown and “All Day” by Asha French are probably the best bets for turning on the ladies.

Erotica is an wildly unbalanced genre; some writers think describing a sexual act is enough to qualify while others devote attention to the story. I’m happy to say this collection favors the latter, and it’s clear these storytellers have bright futures as writers. “Strangers in the Water,” by R. Gay, details a Haitian immigrant’s complicated relationship with her homeland and her husband, and Fiona Zedde’s “Velvet” recounts a college freshman’s first sexual experience with another woman. Both are particular standouts for the complexity of the characters' feelings.

Making the Hook-up provides a varied menu of sexual titillation and compelling stories, so go ahead and take a bite.

Written by: Karen Duda, October 19th 2010

Cold Snap: Bulgaria Stories

mandy — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Cynthia Morrison Phoel

Southern Methodist University Press

There is hardly anything more satisfying to read than well-crafted short stories. Cynthia Morrison Phoel’s debut collection of tales from Bulgaria intertwines the stories of several families living in fictional Old Mountain, many sharing a concrete post-Communist apartment building, neighbors in crumbling plaster houses; and often, surviving similar struggles in their attempts to find love and meaning in life and to escape the poverty they have always known.

In Cold Snap, we meet unhappy couples who argue, then don’t speak because there’s nowhere to go, no way to leave the other person and the tiny space they have carved out together. An underemployed husband spends his summer earnings on a satellite dish; soon, his friends have filled the apartment, pushing out any space for reconciliation with his migraine suffering wife. Their son begins to fail his English class, where his teacher gives lessons on contextual words like heartbreak, forsaken, hanky, and drunk—words that feel funny to learn and nevertheless described abysmal realities and people at whom you should not laugh.

The beauty of these narratives is that they’re told across stories, in nonlinear ways. A young mathematician graduates and faces an uninspiring future. One woman compulsively knits extraordinarily beautiful sweaters, the kind that her friends joke could only be worn on shows like Dallas. Upon completion, she abandons them by the dozen in her cellar. The only woman who has made it out comes home for a visit, but leaves again for Japan before she is ensnared by her old life. The community dentist is busiest in cold months—the only time she is truly swamped—when the townspeople flock to the only place where they can sit in a well-heated room for several hours at a time. In the final story, after which the book is named, every character makes one final appearance as the entire village waits for the central heat to come on in the dead of winter with one powerful yet simple flick of a switch.

Phoel worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bulgaria, and it shows. She writes the way only a cultural insider can, with compassion and humor and insight into the lives of her characters and their unique struggles. Yet her forced distance is the best part of her work. Through her, we peer into the lives of others without ever fully inhabiting them. The balance is perfect.

Reading about the street dog affectionately called “Cucumber” because of his protruding rib cage—who shows up in every one of the book’s stories—I cried so hard one evening that I woke my sleeping partner. For a long time, we were both unable to sleep. Even the less overtly sad of these bleakly charming stories kept me up at night, entranced, and haunted me still weeks later. If only everyone could translate the experiences from their time abroad into such compelling fiction.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, September 25th 2010