| BOOKS OF THE MONTH | |
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SEE BOOKS: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
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BOOK 8 Lillian Faderman's To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America--A History (2000) ISBN: 0618056971 |
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I borrowed this hefty tome from the library when it was originally published in 1999, and recently bought myself a copy now that it's out in paperback. The awkwardly wordy title may give the impression that this book is one of those rather shallow surveys that tries to cram decades upon decades of historical information into a slight volume. It is not. Nor is it one of those corny 'great and little known facts & contributions books'. What it is is a scholarly and exhaustively researched (mostly from primary sources) account of the lives of dozens of late 19th and early 20th century women whose eschewal of compulsory heterosexuality allowed them to pursue college and graduate /professional degrees and eventual careers. Resisting the "cult of true womanhood" allowed them to fight for the inclusion of women in heretofore all male institutions and professions like medicine and law. It allowed them to found and to sustain colleges for women like Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr and Spelman. It allowed them to fight for women's suffrage, for better working conditions for women and minorities, for the end of illegal child labor, for decent health care for poor women and children and for other social reforms. Faderman uses extant letters and journals of women on the vanguard of suffrage and anti-slavery, education, law, medicine, social work etc. to prove that many were unmarried and living in romantic/affectional and sexual relationships with other women. Faderman argues that the freedom from the duties of wife and mother in the traditional sense that these women enjoyed was key to them being able to make significant contributions to American life. We benefit from their labor today. A few of the women chronicled in the book are: Bryn Mawr's first female president M. Carey Thomas, Mount Holyoke president Mary Woolley, suffrage leaders Susan B. Anthony and Anna Shaw, social reformer Jane Addams, medical pioneer Emily Blackwell, among others. Faderman is a fantastic social historian here: she avoids overanalyzing things, but does a great job of giving the reader a clear sense of the cultural, political and historical elements bearing down on the women about whom she writes. Her prose style is scholarly, yet still highly accessible. Honestly, this is one of the more reader-friendly history books I've encountered. There is, though, a paucity of information about women of color. There is some mention of Mary Mcleod Bethune, Rebecca Jackson and NAACP attorney Paule Murray, but none of those portraits are in-depth. I don't think this was some kind of purposeful exclusion, though. Faderman relied heavily on letters between friends and sweethearts and on written journals. If the primary sources weren't left behind or made available, then Faderman couldn't include the women. Faderman talks at length about how common it was for potential historical subjects to destroy any written documents that might out them to the prying eyes of future historians. If white women were doing that, then for sure black women did the same but to the nth degree. Farah Griffin, in her text Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends (2001), writes about a mid-19th century romantic/affectional relationship between two African American women, Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown. Griffin's book relies heavily on Addie's letters to Rebecca. None of Rebecca's letters to her beloved could be found, and Griffin notes that they were likely destroyed because of their content. In any event, read both Griffin's text and Faderman's text. They are both deeply rewarding. The Faderman book (being the more expansive of the two), in particular, is so rich with buried history and stories heretofore improperly told that it warrants several re-readings.
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The Bent Lens: A World Guide to Gay and Lesbian Film, 2nd edition edited by Lisa Daniel ad Claire Jackson (Alyson Books, 2003) ISBN: 1555838065 This is an updated edition of Daniel and Jackson’s good 1996 text of the same name. The book opens with essays by critics, filmmakers and film historians that provide context for what I like to call the 2nd Wave of New Queer Cinema. In 1990-91 film critic B. Ruby Rich coined the term New Queer Cinema. The explosion of films with queer content, and the relative acceptance of those films into the mainstream over the past 5 or so years, suggests that we’ve entered a new phase in queer film. Whether that’s good or bad, radicalizing or de-politicizing, diversifying or homogenizing, has yet to be determined. I, for one, am hopeful and overjoyed by the number of films being made for/by lesbians. For so long gay film meant either white boys coming out of the closet, white boys dealing with AIDS or both. Some of those early films were beautiful and affecting, but alienating at the same time because I never saw myself in them. We’ve come a long way with respect to the kinds of stories being told and the gender of the characters at the stories’ center. Where we still seem to be lagging is with number of queer films that have characters of color at their center and not just at the periphery as token friends or as almost mute love interests. As I write this review I am revisiting the film guide for Philly’s 2003 Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, an annual festival that I faithfully attend every July. The lack of color in the films screened this past July still overwhelms me. 2003 was supposed to be The Year of Lesbian, if you believe Festival hype, but most of the girl pics were marginally interesting at best. What I’m wondering is where were the Black and Latino folk? Three documentaries (Brother Outsider, Audre Lorde…Sisters in Cinema), while all quite good, are not adequately representative of the queer eye and queer imagination of color in cinema. Okay, diatribe over…I wasn’t being completely desultory there because my latest pick for Book of the Month, The Bent Lens, points me in the right direction in the search for shorts, documentaries and features that highlight lesbians and/or people of color. This text provides mostly descriptive synopses of more than 2600 titles. Let me take this opportunity to plug Ray Murray’s film guide, Images in the Dark (revised and expanded ed: 1996). This text is a bit old and no subsequent edition was ever produced, but it made it to press before the first edition of The Bent Lens and was, for a while, the only text of its kind in relatively wide circulation in the mid 1990’s. My copy is well worn and quite marked up. Murray’s text surveys 3,000 titles and his comments are critical, if idiosyncratic, insightful and funny. Murray certainly privileges the gay male film subject in the book, but that’s to be expected as we all tend to write from our own centers. I don't have a problem with writers, filmmakers etc...who write what they know. I do, however, take issue with an insurgent, radicalizing industry (like the indie, queer film industry) that allows itself to become just as narrow, hegemonic and homogenized as the beast (Hollywood) it railed against in the beginning. In any event, I keep losing my focus. Murray's selections also lean toward films from the US and Britain. Murray was able to list 3,000 films in 1996 because his definition of “queer film” was more expansive than most hardcore cineastes would allow for now. Murray included quite a few films where the queer characters were languishing at the margins and/or where the queer content was deeply subtextual. The fact that he did so was, I think, really a sign of the times. The Bent Lens, then, has the good fortune to be surveying a filmic landscape that is overrun with films with central, significant and positive queer content. The editors also look at the genre from an all-encompassing global perspective. In this updated volume, 2,600 films are indexed alphabetically by title, but also by country of origin, by filmic genre and by gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender interest. My one reservation with this text’s is the fact that the blurbs for the films are mostly descriptive and devoid of any critical analysis. I am not expecting full NY Times style reviews of these films, but some criticism would make it easier for readers to gauge which films are really worth viewing. I’m the kind of film nerd who is a completist at heart: who wants to see everything irrespective of quality, but the more casual spectator may require more guidance. The editors do aid viewers in locating some of the more obscure titles in the book. Helpfully, for those titles that will not be in stock at your local video store (and the lion’s share of these films, especially the shorts, simply won’t be), the editors provide a list of distributors with contact information. Overall, this text is a film buff’s dream come true and also a handy, if somewhat flawed, reference tool for even the most infrequent queer film viewer.
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BOOK 6
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Abha Dawesar's
Babyji
(2005)
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The queerest, most hysterical and lucidly astute piece of fiction I've read in quite some time is Abha Dawesar's second novel, Babyji. Nowhere else in literature will you find a more erudite, quick-witted and audacious female character of color. Do yourself a favor and get to know her.
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BOOK 5
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Morris, a Women's Studies professor at both George Washington U and and Georgetown, writes about her life long love of movies beginning as a pre-adolescent in Southern Cal and in North Carolina in the late 60's and 70's. She tracks her developing consciousness of her lesbianism and nascent feminism through the prism of the films she watched over and over. Besides being an engaging and funny writer, Morris provides a great case study for how one can be "other" (in her case a Jewish, lesbian feminist) and still really love Hollywood films where the white, straight male is the constant subject. Her story offers a first hand account of how to allow yourself to escape into a film, but also engage it critically and provide resistant readings to it. Morris provides astute critiques of films and her oppositional relationship to them without much of the academic, theoretical language that might have made this book less accessible to the casual reader and film lover. Now I can give my friends or family members this book when they question me yet again as to how I can sit through all of those movies where there aren't any women, or any Black people or any Latinos or any queer folk. This text is the handbook for the ethnically/racially/sexually, gendered minority cineaste with dissociative personality disorder like me. Yay!
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Long time Rolling Stone music journalist Gerri Hirshey's We Gotta Get Out of This Place has finally been released in paperback. Read this book! It is the best and most ambitious treatment of women in popular music in the modern era. Hirshey is an intelligent writer, insightful music critic and pop culturalist of the highest order. She has interviewed everybody who's anybody in pop music and brings decades of experience and observations to bear on the subject of women who live and breathe music. Hirshey didn't just throw together some interviews but interweaves them with social historical research and her own road tales and winds up with an engaging, pithy narrative. Everyone is here: Ronnie Spector, Carole King, Aretha, Janis, Tina, Ruth Brown, Cher, Diana Ross, Bette Midler, Carly Simon, Laura Nyro, Glady Knight, Dusty Springfield, Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill, Whitney Houston, Cissy Houston, Missy Elliott, the Go-Go's, Salt and Pepa, Courtney Love, Madonna, Patti Labelle, Linda Ronstandt, Karen Carpenter, Mary J. Blige, Lil' Kim Annie Lennox and on and on and on. I can't recommend this book strongly enough.
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BOOK 3 Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's, The Dirty Girls Social Club (St. Martin's, 2003) ISBN: 0312313829 |
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I have to admit that when I first heard about this book's premise, 6 former college girlfriends lament about life and love, I thought, "oh brother...this is just Sex and The City or Waiting to Exhale, but with Latinas set in Boston." The book is reminiscent of both of those multi-media hits, but it is so well written and funny that it doesn't matter. The women in Valdes-Rodriquez's novel quickly move from being types (the beauty queen, the career woman/entrepreneur, the perfect and multi-tasking stay-at-home mom and wife, the artist etc...you get the idea) to being real, complex people that the reader cares about deeply. To her credit, Valdes-Rodriguez manages to give equal time to each woman and goes to great pains to disambiguate the umbrella term, "Latino." The women in the book are Cuban, Puerto Rican, Mexican/Chicano, Colombian or some combinations of the above. Through the characters, the author is able to tackle color politics (light vs. dark skin), class differences and language issues, among other heady themes. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of the women is a lesbian. How and why she comes out of the closet is a major sub-plot of the novel. Valdes-Rodriguez, who is straight and married with a child, has crafted a smart and funny novel that is also very queer positive. This is definitely one book you want to have on your summer reading list.
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BOOK 2 James Keller, Queer Unfriendly Film and Television (McFarland and Co., 2002) ISBN: 0786412461 |
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This text is a quasi-academic look at queerness on TV and in film. In it Keller brands the current state of queer TV and films as "accomodationist and not at all revolutionary." Keller looks closely at TV's Will and Grace, HBO's Oz and Showtime's Queer as Folk. He also examines recent Hollywood and Indie films like Beautiful Thing, I Think I Do, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Gladiator, Gods and Monsters, The Next Best Thing, Kiss Me Guido, Billy Elliot, and on and on. The book is fairly accessible with respect to critical language (mostly post-structuralist and cultural materialist), meaning it's not too heavy on theory. For the most part it's just good, clear and accessible writing. Also, Keller uses queer in this instance to mean just gay male.
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BOOK 1 Rhonda Wilcox, Fighting the Forces: What's At Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) ISBN: 0742516814 |
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In this volume academics and theorists write about the deeper levels of meaning, symbolism and narrative structures at work in the popular UPN television series. There's some great stuff here: there's a reading of Kendra, the West Indian Slayer, as a tragic mulatta figure; there's a discussion of why the Buffy/Willow relationship resists a queer reading; there's a provocative id/superego dyad posited for Faith and Buffy and, of course, some thoughtful discussion of Christianity in the face of rampant demonism, sexual taboos, gender disruptions etc... great, great book. I found it useful to juxtapose some of the essays here (especially the ones that look closely at the female figure in the horror genre) with Barbara Creed's seminal work, The Monstrous-Feminine : Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1993). If you're into film theory, queer theory and feminist theory, you'll wanna, perhaps, put these two works in conversation with each other.
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