A well-rendered who’s-who guide to the contemporary women’s movement.
Four decades after their influential book, The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar offer a comprehensive, evolutionary update.
In their latest illuminating collaboration, the authors seek to show “how generations of literary women tapped the enigmas of their own lives to shape visions of cultural transformation.” In the 1950s, young women experienced “extraordinary confusions,” as their “lives reflected but also rebelled against the conformity of the decade.” “Feminism incubated” in the lives and writings of Sylvia Plath, Diane di Prima (the “feminist beatnik”), Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and Audre Lorde. It continued to erupt in the 1960s, especially with Adrienne Rich’s politically engaged poetry and Nina Simone’s “ribald jokes and daring garb,” which reflected “a shift in both racial and sexual attitudes.” The sexual revolution and the maelstrom created by the Vietnam War brought forceful voices to the forefront in the works of Gloria Steinem and Helen Gurley Brown. Susan Sontag welcomed the rise of new forms of female eroticism and leftist politics while Joan Didion “would deplore them.” Gilbert and Gubar call 1968 “feminism’s annus mirabilis” as protests sparked the women’s liberation movement, here and abroad. Denise Levertov’s activist poetry and clashes between feminism and the Black Power movement captured the public’s attention. The 1970s brought the publication of Kate Millett’s “landmark” book of feminist literary criticism, the controversial Sexual Politics, and bestselling feminist-infused novels by Toni Morrison, Erica Jong, and Rita Mae Brown. Ms. magazine and Judy Chicago’s “celebratory artwork,” The Dinner Party, were born. In the 1980s and ’90s, feminism would take hold in “parts of the entertainment world and in the academy.” Andrea Dworkin took on sexual violence, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler battled the “hetero-/homosexual divide.” More recently, Claudia Rankine, N.K. Jemisin, and others have worked to create alliances with the Black Lives Matter movement. Gilbert and Gubar deftly explore decades of political and cultural history to fashion this timely and valuable book.
A well-rendered who’s-who guide to the contemporary women’s movement.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-393-65171-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
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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