A thoughtfully disturbing, sharp sociological study.
A professor of English and creative writing reflects on sexual assault and female embodiment.
Situated at the intersection of prose and poetry, Hume’s essay collection explores patriarchy’s ongoing war against girls and women. The author divides the book into two sections, the first of which deals with female physical and sexual vulnerability. In the opening essay, Hume muses on what it has meant to live in the city of, Ypsilanti, Michigan, where the weekend she moved in, “a stranger raped our neighbor in her home” and where “one in twenty-six men…are registered sex offenders.” Within a mile radius of her house, she notes, there are nearly 100 offenders. Her “horror” stems not just from the relative normalization of sexual violence, but also the way race perverts the situation even more, transforming her Whiteness into what she knows will “save” her in ways unavailable to women of color. At the same time, Hume also understands the predicament of registered sex offenders who, “treated as enemies rather than criminals,” lose the possibility of ever finding a way to be treated like community members. In the second section, the author meditates on how the male gaze has reduced the female body to a fetishized—and ultimately disposable—spectacle of body parts. Living under patriarchy transforms women into dolls like the Frozen Charlotte figurines she discusses in “Icy Girls, Frigid Bitches, Frozen Dolls.” Hemmed in by social expectations, they instead find themselves “perfected” in the many “deaths”—for example, of subjectivity, self-confidence, and self-worth—they are forced to endure from girlhood on. Provocative and intelligent, this book, which concludes with impressionistic, mordantly ironic prose-poems that capture the experiences of individual women who have lived through abortion and sexual assault, gives voice to the many ways females (and other marginalized people) are stripped of their power by (White) male misogyny.
A thoughtfully disturbing, sharp sociological study.Pub Date: March 23, 2023
ISBN: 9780814258620
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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