Shelving: Rereading Women by Sandra M. Gilbert

I really wanted to like this books. Feminist criticism, whether in music, literature, or even mainstream pop culture, remains marginalized, but Gilbert's book just left me with more questions than answers, primarily, what place does academia have in feminism? (Not the other way around.)

Though most of the essays in Rereading Women date from the 80s to the late 90s, in the introduction she writes on becoming a feminist in the 50s and 60s, and touches on the rift between second and third wave feminists:

"Students and interviewers often ask such questions, eagerly wondering, 'How did you...?' 'Why did you...?' and 'When did you...?' Many of them, participants in the Riot Grrrl Revolution that's part of what's now known as Third Wave feminism, have some stereotypical ideas about those of us who rose to consciousness as the Second Wave crested and flung new ideas all over the world."

I wish I didn't have to, because I've more than once written about riot grrrls insularity, but isn't pretty stereotypical, too, of older feminists to lump younger ones into easily defined categories? If every woman born after 1970 who identifies as a feminist is, by default, a "riot grrrl" feminism,  then I want a different word to describe what I am. This is a huge pet peeve of mine.

She also disagrees with Jessica Valenti, who in her book, Full Frontal Feminism says, "When I started coming home from grad school with ideas and theories that I couldn't talk to [my mother] about, academic feminism ceased to be truly useful to me. I think feminism should be accessible to everybody. no matter what your education level. And while high theory is pretty fucking cool, it's not something everybody is going to related to."

Exactly, which is the biggest problem I had with this book. Working-class and women of color were given nary a footnote. Trans and gay women are nowhere to be seen. While its a pretty powerful thing to have a feminist literary canon, it's becomes nullified by its exclusion -- in essence, it's no better than the patriarchal one before it.

Shelving: Reading Women

I'm of the generation that was "born into feminism." And although my mother was never actually identified as feminist herself, I directly benefit from the gains made by the women of her generation and the ones that came before. I entered into the word of feminist literature shortly after high school. As far as I know, my small local college didn't offer a women's studies course, so I sort of devised my own curriculum. This was during the era of Backlash, The Beauty Myth, The Morning After and the burgeoning "third wave" feminist movement spearheaded by women my redefining what it means to be a feminist. Yet, very little of it resonated with me. I never had a "click" moment. Other books written by women did, and while they weren't explicitly feminist, I saw pieces of myself in those books: Lynda Barry's multi-cultural family was much like my own, and Dorothy Allisons's strong, southern women reminded me a lot of my grandmother and her sisters. Though the "F-word" was never uttered, their work informed my feminism as much as any academic tome. Years later, reading Gloria Anzaldua's essays about writing, I felt the same surge of recognition, but not being Latina, it felt too much like appropriation.  Scholarly feminists texts remained something to deconstruct, not glean knowledge from.

So I was genuinely surprised by how much I liked Stephanie Staal's Reading Women: How the Great Books of Feminism Changed My Life. I'll admit, I was apprehensive -- the early reviews were mixed. The Washington Post  was particularly harsh, and Feministing's Courtney said it was missing, "a genuine investigation into topics outside of Staal’s comfort zone. She’s Ivy League educated, economically stable, heterosexual, cisgendered, able-bodied–you name it, she’s “normative” on it. This presented a problem, as the analysis largely grew out of her own life, her own struggles. What emerges is a very woman-centered version of feminist texts. Though Judith Butler was mentioned, for example, she gets short shrift as too academic, too radical, to be fit into the narrative of “regular” life." White I absolutely don't disagree, I don't want to vilify her for it either.

I took Reading Women at face value as a reading memoir -- one woman's account of reconnecting with the feminist literature that shaped her thinking as a college student, and how it resonates with her current life as a writer, a wife, and a mother. One overlooked area of feminism I'm glad she explored was the ideological differences between the now middle-aged second wavers and their younger counterparts, especially when it comes to sexual politics:

In college, my generation couldn’t get enough of carving out private spaces and identities, but this generation has grown up in the age of public consumption in which life can be viewed as one great, long reality-TV show. Their adolescence unfolded on MySpace and Facebook, where they could post photos, comments, even their innermost thoughts and feelings for anyone to see. Perhaps with so many women today taking the lead in objectifying themselves, cries of objectification no longer carry the resonance.

I spend a fair amount of time reading the words of younger feminists, and it's always hard to bite my tongue and not fall into the "back in my day" trap, but it's irresponsible to ignore that the ways in which we interact with each other have changed tremendously in the last couple decades. The comments from the twenty-something feminists in Staal's "Fem Texts" class scattered throughout the book were at times infuriating because it seems like we haven't come very far at all. To be fair, I know plenty of younger women capable of nuanced discussion, but it's disheartening, to say the least, to hear twenty-somethings say things like "Well, sometimes no doesn't always mean no."