Gender Across Borders

This is a book about nobodies. The narrator, Mary Murphy, is a silent observer to the destructive forces around her that ultimately shape the outcome of her life. As invisible as her ubiquitous name, Mary is a shy, and at times optionally mute, child and young adult who cares for very little. As silent as she may be to the people in her life, as a narrator she is bitingly, viscerally descriptive and engaging. I found myself completely immersed in her world; I was always rooting for her despite her many shortcomings. The prose in this novel are engrossing and her world is one the reader will fully embrace despite its overwhelming bleakness and the constant disappointment with the people she loves most.

If the majority of the book was engrossing, the end left much to be desired. This woman who had never found inspiration in anything- music, reading, working, even eating and talking- suddenly became a wonderful teacher of underprivileged youth and an effortless mother in the span of a few pages. The most destructive, and formative, relationships in her life (with her mother and older sister) are terminated without closure, and she seems to heal from them effortlessly right in time for the last pages of the book. The reader has already come to accept Mary despite some loose ends; it would have been nice to see a more realistic, albeit less pretty, ending to the story.

This is not the cheeriest book you will read this summer, but Mary is a nobody that everybody will root for.

Elaine Beale’s Another Life Altogether begins with a lie that, like so many of the other lies the protagonist, Jesse Bennett, tells throughout the novel, is meant to protect but ultimately only makes things worse. Jesse has a lot to hide from her sometimes cruel peers, especially when her family moves to the countryside from Hull and she finds herself at the fringes of the popular, but cruel, crowd at her new school.

Her family moves after her mother, who has a bipolar disorder, returns from the hospital after a suicide attempt. At her first school, Jesse explained her mother’s absence by claiming that she had won an around-the-world cruise from a cereal-box contest. The eventual discovery of the truth by Jesse’s classmates is handled with the sort of heartbreaking humour found throughout the novel:

I soon discovered that there were more euphemisms for madness than there were for sex. I also discovered that being the center of attention was not necessarily all it was cracked up to be.

It isn’t only the truth about her family that Jesse has to hide in order to avoid harassment from classmates, however: it is also the truth about herself which, in some ways, she is only beginning to understand. Read the rest of this entry →

Welcome to GAB’s first monthly book club! Feel free to use this post as an open thread for discussion of the novel and to post any comments or questions you have about it here, but if you’re not sure where to start, here are some ideas to get the discussion going:

• What did you think of the characters?

Hiroko Tanaka is of course the most clearly drawn; I found her at once remarkable and remarkably average. Her greatest strength seemed to come from her ability simply to keep moving, while the extraordinary nature of her experiences is what makes that movement extraordinary. Then again, the seemingly extraordinary things she experiences happened to many people: that is what makes them historical events. This tension between the ordinary and the remarkable not only makes for a compelling protagonist but also suggests a more thematic issue related to the question of what happens when history becomes personal. Read the rest of this entry →

The next time you hear someone say “I’m not a feminist, but…” put this book in their hands, sit them down, and don’t let them get up until they’ve read it. (Bathroom breaks are allowed. It’s 300+ pages long.)

Sadly, I was already well aware of many of the disturbing phenomena Douglas describes in the book- namely the rise of eating disorders, the dissociation with the word “feminism” among younger women, and an increased focus on a hyper feminine, white, rich, hetero  appearance for all women at the expense of personal happiness. Through examining different radio and TV shows, commercials, print ads and other social media, however, Douglas argues quite persuasively that these trends are all connected to the grotesquely warped portrayal of women in the media. Reading this book is an even more concentrated version of the usual onslaught of images. So much so that I, emerging after hours without putting it down, went to catch up on the news and had to forcibly redirect my outraged energy from depictions of women in reality TV shows to, for example, the systematic rape of women in the DRC.

The crux of her argument is that enlightened sexism is a newer, smarter, more discreet but equally destructive form of sexism that acknowledges the gains of feminism over the years and folds them into its rhetoric to truly strip women of any outlet, solidarity, or empowerment. Take, for example, the TV show “The Swan”, which Douglas dissects (pun intended) in great detail. On the show, “ugly” women beg altruistic plastic surgeons to fix them. Emerging after several painful surgeries, including, for almost all of them, breast augmentation, the women commonly react by saying “That doesn’t even look like me” to their reflection. Success!

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As mentioned yesterday, we’re starting a global feminist book club here at Gender Across Borders. Every month, we will choose a new book to read and discuss. The book for April will be Kamila Shamsie‘s Burnt Shadows. This sweeping book tells the story of the postmodern age, beginning with the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and ending after 9/11, through the remarkable and at times agonizing life of a Japanese woman. Hiroko Tanaka fits none of the stereotypes Westerners often hold about Japanese women. She is, like all of us, at times helpless against the brutal forces of history and the decisions of the powerful but she faces the world recreated by those forces with determination and daring. Her bravery at first may come from a certain naivete. By the end, however, after surviving calamity after calamity, her ability to move on in life and to new countries, comes from another kind of calmness and self-possession.

What makes this book so powerful is that the tension comes not from wondering what is going to happen but from knowing and being unable to stop it. In this way, Shamsie personalises the experience of reading history.

Please join us on April 1 when we will open up a thread for discussion of this striking work of contemporary fiction.

We are very excited to announce a monthly book club on Gender Across Borders! All of us are avid readers as well as writers, and would love to engage more with our readers (that means you!) through a monthly book club. Each month we will announce our text of choice, giving readers a month to read and prepare for discussion on the first day of the following month. We hope to promote dialogue, inspiration and also have some fun. Since we welcome a global audience who could not all gather in the same physical space, we will share our ideas together on the blog.

To get ready for next month’s discussion on Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows, all of the editors have contributed a book they find important to the global feminist discourse. (Check back tomorrow for a post from Elizabeth who will lead the discussion this month.) Read below for our Editor’s Picks.

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This collection of four essays from different female philosophers presents as an introduction to “New Feminism”. The publisher explains that “aspects of the female experience are in the focus of the texts” and by offering a female perspective, the publisher hopes “to encourage women who so far have not thought about writing to hand in their ideas and have them published through [the website].” (The site is published in German and English.)

Excited to read from a female perspective, I was disappointed by all the essays except “The ‘Plath Syndrome’- or Why Intellectual Women Do Not Eat Figs,” by Maria Isabel Pena Aguado. The final essay in the collection explores the frustration of intellectual women. The problem, the author argues, exists because female artists seek to redefine themselves using male rhetoric and constructs, thus trapping themselves and further perpetuating a male world instead of creating their own female experience. Esther, the protagonist of Sylvia Plath’s iconic The Bell Jar, stands paralyzed by choice, comparing each choice (family, travel, work) to a ripe fig ready for her to eat. Unable to choose, she starves to death in the midst of plenty.

“Death occurs because Esther is incapable of finding a language in which to express her own experiences as a woman in a coherent way. [...] The Plath Syndrome refers partly to the fact that women have not yet developed their own imaginary- and therefore symbolic- world.”- Prof. Pena Aguado

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Image via http://base14.com/blog by Tyler J. Kupferer.

As I prepare to take the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) in a little less than two weeks, I have begun to think about the politics behind standardized testing. While I understand that colleges and universities need some sort of measure of how to test applicants, the standardized test continues to be sexist and racist. I can only speak from personal experience, but in browsing around the web I have found that other people have written about the problems with standardized testing. Here are some examples of blatant racism and sexism:

• Racism: I was told by many test-prep books that I should learn all sailing and opera/music words. Luckily I used to be a classical pianist, so I have no trouble with words such as “overture” or “aria.” But I wasn’t so familiar with sailing terms, such as  “sextant” ( which is a navigational tool used by sailors measuring longitude and latitude).
  • Sailing is usually associated with someone who comes from a wealthy background, and/or has access to a sailboat. Many underprivileged minority kids have never sailed a boat before; how are they ever expected to know this? Read the rest of this entry →

Last week, I wrote about Publishers Weekly selecting only male-authored books for their 2009 top-ten list. Today, I want to explore one issue that Lizzie Skurnick wrote about as contributing to this sort of skewed selection: perceptions of ambition. She describes what occurred in the process of judging a literary award:

Our short list was pretty much split evenly along gender lines. But as we went through each category, a pattern emerged. Some books, it seemed, were “ambitious.” Others were well-wrought, but somehow . . . “small.” “Domestic.” “Unam –” what’s the word? “– bititous.”

I don’t know about you, but when I hear the word “ambitious,” what I think is “Nice try. Better luck next time. Keep shooting for the stars!” I think many things, but never among them is the word Congratulations.

But, incredulous, again and again, I watched as we pushed aside works that everyone acknowledged were more finely wrought, were, in fact, competently wrought, for books that had shot high but fallen short. And every time the book that won was a man’s.

My question then is whether women do, in fact write less ambitiously. In other words, is the problem that ambition rather than success recognized or that our perception of ambition is off?

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Publishers Weekly (PW) recently released their list of the top 100 books of 2009. The good news for feminism: Yes Means Yes! is on their nonfiction list. The bad news: their top ten books are all written by men. This in a year in which, as a press release from Women in Letters and Literary Arts notes, works by Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Rita Dove, Heather McHugh, Alicia Ostriker, and others were published. Poet Amy King took a closer look at PW’s selections and concluded that it’s

[s]imple to observe that the content that “stood out from the rest,” according to PW, is all about mostly male protagonists and their realities: war, adventure, science, boyhood adventures, taming the wilderness, the male writer’s life, etc.  In other words, the novels that deal with women’s realities simply “don’t stand out”.

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