Tag Archives: essays

The Audacity of a Point of View: Opinions by Roxane Gay

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the cover of Opinions

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In Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business, Roxane Gay (she/her), author of New York Times bestsellers Bad Feminist and Hunger, delivers an expertly curated collection of her opinion writing on a host of different topics from approximately 2013 to 2023, or what she describes as a “decade of massive social upheaval.” 

At the outset, I acknowledge that me sharing my opinions about Gay’s Opinions where she shares her opinions is confusing and meta. Stick with me anyway!

Opinions is timely and thought-provoking. It consists of sixty-six pieces separated into seven sections: Identity/Politics, The Matter of Black Lives, Civic Responsibilities, For the Culture, Man Problems, Minding Other Folks’ Business, and Solicited Advice. Each section contains several relevant pieces in order of original publication date. I really appreciated the way the book was organized because it set the tone for each piece before I read it and allowed me to experience the evolution of Gay’s thought process over several years. I also loved that each piece was between two and nine pages. It made the process of reading and absorbing each of Gay’s opinions much more manageable.

Opinions is provocative; Gay pulls no punches. Some of my favorite titles included: “No One Is Coming to Save Us from Trump’s Racism”; “You’re Disillusioned. That’s Fine. Vote Anyway.”; “I Don’t Want to Watch Slavery Fan Fiction”; and “I Thought Men Might Do Better Than This”. But Gay doesn’t just pen witty titles—her writing style is sharp and insightful. In “Cops Don’t Belong at Pride”, she discusses the history of Pride and her opinion that law enforcement should respect the boundaries of the LGBTQ community and not attend. In “Why I Can’t Forgive Dylan Roof”, Gay opines that Black people forgive because they need to survive and asserts that some acts are so terrible, they are beyond forgiving. In “Can I Enjoy Art but Denounce the Artist”, Gay weighs in on the longstanding debate of whether we should support the work of artists who behave badly.

Gay is bisexual and Haitian. As a fellow queer woman of color, I was so proud to read this book! Although I do not agree with every view Gay espouses, I respect her deeply as a pillar in the LGBTQ community and feel incredibly empowered by her audaciousness. Opinions is an engaging and worthwhile read that you can sit with and reflect upon over time.

If you want to get a flavor for Gay’s writing style, check her out on Twitter, where she shares her 280-character point of view on anything and everything, and on Goodreads, where she succinctly reviews her own books, as well as books from other authors.

Trigger warnings for all of the subjects of social upheaval in the last decade, including: child sexual abuse, sexual assault, rape, abortion, police brutality, mass murder, school shootings, racism, homophobia, and misogyny.

Raquel R. Rivera (she/her/ella) is a Latina lawyer and lady lover from New Jersey. She is in a lifelong love affair with books and earned countless free personal pan pizzas from the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! program as a kid to prove it.

What is “Queer Enough?”: Greedy: Notes from a Bisexual Who Wants Too Much by Jen Winston

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In their book of essays, Jen Winston (she/they) covers various topics about her bisexual experience, from the adoption of random behaviors as “bisexual culture” out of a desperation to be seen to the grief of friendships evolving when your best friend becomes a “we.”

Winston talks through internalized biphobia and not feeling queer enough to be part of the LGBTQIA+ community. Throughout her journey of accepting her bisexuality, they learn that it’s not just an identity, but rather a lens through which to reimagine the world. This speaks to the idea that one’s sexual orientation is about more than just sex. It’s about breaking systems that hold us down and don’t allow us to demand what we deserve.

A few essays, especially toward the end of the collection, begin to show Winston’s journey through gender identity as well. She comes to the realization that much of her identity in womanhood is performative and created based on patriarchal values. Accepting their bisexuality led to an understanding of their gender being on the nonbinary spectrum.

BEGINNING OF TRIGGER WARNING: RAPE AND SEXUAL ASSAULT

Winston also opens up about instances of rape and sexual assault in essays like “A Girl Called Rhonda,” “The Power Dynamic” and “The Neon Sweater.” She goes into quite a bit of detail about the events, working through the question that many who experience assault do: Is this really rape? The lines of consent feel blurred in different situations because of social conditioning that tells women not to make a fuss. They even discuss how active, verbal consent isn’t nuanced enough because everybody reacts differently to different situations. Not saying no doesn’t mean it’s a yes.

END OF TRIGGER WARNING

One of the most fun essays was a piece written in the fairytale format. Winston tells the story of being attracted to emotionally unavailable men, an issue that stems from a culture of fairytales.

Overall, this is a funny, heart-wrenching and provocative collection of essays.

Danika reviews How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler

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This may be my favourite book I’ve read this year, and there’s been some stiff competition.

How Far the Light Reaches is exactly what the subtitle promises: a life in ten sea creatures. It weaves together facts about aquatic animals with related stories from the author’s own life. For example, the beginning essay is about feral goldfish: how these goldfish released into the wild—which we think of as short-lived, delicate animals—are actually extremely hardy, taking over ecosystems and growing to huge sizes. In the same essay, Imbler describes queer communities: “Imagine having the power to become resilient to all that is hostile to us.”

This is an immersive, gorgeous book that reminded me of Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller, which I also loved. Clearly, I need to pick up more memoirs infused with writing about nature and animals. I would be interested in either of these versions of How Far the Light Reaches, if the two had been separated: the memoir or the science. Imbler’s writing on marine biology is accessible and fascinating, so while it’s not my usual genre, I was completely pulled in. By braiding these two threads together, though, it’s more than the sum of its parts.

Essays structured like this could be gimmicky, but this book doesn’t use easy metaphors or simplify the biology side to lend itself better to the accompanying social commentary. Imbler, a science writer/reporter, shows their deep appreciation for these animals in their own right, and the two approaches complement each other without being reductive.

Their writing is in turns beautiful, funny, and striking, with so much packed into spare sentences. Like this passage: “Before the class, M knew how to draw whales and I did not. After the class, I was in love with M and they were not in love with me.” Even without any other context, it’s still so affective. And I had to laugh at their description of returning home to visit and checking dating apps: “I told myself I was there to see my old classmates, to see who was newly hot, newly gay, or both.”

While the queer content in Why Fish Don’t Exist was a bonus I wasn’t expecting later in the book, in How Far the Light Reaches, it’s at the heart of the book. It’s a gloriously queer narrative, exploring Imbler’s relationships, gender, and queer community more generally. They also discuss their mixed race identity, both personally and in relation to their mixed race partner. In one essay, they write about how to give a necropsy report of dead whales, and then they reiterate different versions of the necropsy report of a previous relationship (M, mentioned above), giving a different proposed cause of death each time.

I savored reading this book, looking forward to ending each day with an essay. It’s philosophical, curious, thought-provoking, and kind. It explores queer people as shapeshifters, as swarms, as immortal. I never wanted it to end. Even if you aren’t usually a reader of science writing—I usually am not—I highly recommend picking this one up, and I can’t wait to see what Imbler writes next.

Content warnings: discussion of weight and weight loss, fatphobia, war

Rachel reviews Girls Can Kiss Now: Essays by Jill Gutowitz

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Hilarious, poignant, and stunningly clever, Jill Gutowitz’s essay collection Girls Can Kiss Now was one of my most anticipated reads of 2022 and it definitely did not disappoint!

When I talk about this book (which is often), it usually goes something like this: “I’m reading this book, it’s called Girls Can Kiss Now. Have you ever heard of a title so excellent?!” Even if I had never heard of this book, if I saw it in a bookstore this title alone would induce me to buy it. It’s such a small phrase but it perfectly articulates the premise of Gutowitz’s collection: the boom in lesbian culture and media in mainstream society, and the social history of how we got here.

Through a series of witty and smart personal essays, Gutowitz explores popular culture’s treatment/representation of queer women throughout the last two decades in conjunction with her own life and her journey of self-discovery in relation to her own sexuality. The essays, alternately personal, deeply resonant, and hilarious (and sometimes all three at once) are truly a snapshot of the significance of popular culture in all of our lives—and how that significance has changed as the internet has evolved.

I have been waiting with very little patience to read this book since it was announced. A collection of essays about lesbianism and queer life written by someone who, like me, spent their formative years in the 2000s in a weird miasma of confusion and intrigue with only the internet to console you? Sign me up. This book recounts nearly every aspect of what it’s like to grow up in a very particular time in queer history: the moment when the marginal moves toward the mainstream. The moment where, suddenly, Ellen isn’t the only celesbian you can list. Gutowitz expertly articulates the strangeness and the delight associated with that shift, and even though a lot of these essays are personal and specific to her own life, they are so obviously relatable to queer experience that I found myself totally engrossed by the writing.

Not all of the essays are completely personal, though. This is a book about lesbian popular culture. Chapters like “The Ten Most Important Sapphic Paparazzi Photos in Modern History” and “The Current Lesbian Canon, as It Stands” are engaged with popular representations of queer culture. This book is such a clever and whip-smart collection. It’s so funny and insightful, and it’s required reading if you’re interested in the evolution of lesbian culture.  

I can’t recommend Girls Can Kiss Now enough for anyone interesting in queer culture, lesbian media, and the growth of the internet and social media over the course of the twenty-first century. This book couldn’t have been more clever!

Please visit Jill Gutowitz on Twitter and put Girls Can Kiss Now on your TBR on Goodreads.

Rachel Friars is a writer and academic living in Canada, dividing her time between Ontario and New Brunswick. When she’s not writing short fiction, she’s reading every lesbian novel she can find. Rachel holds two degrees in English literature and is currently pursuing a PhD in nineteenth-century lesbian literature and history.

You can find Rachel on Twitter @RachelMFriars or on Goodreads @Rachel Friars.

Kayla Bell reviews Love is an Ex-Country by Randa Jarrar 

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Love is an Ex-Country by Randa Jarrar

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Love is an Ex-Country is part memoir, part essay collection. It touches on a variety of topics, from racism to queerness to fatphobia to Arab identity, while always keeping an engaging, almost playful tone. There are many reasons why it worked for me so well. Before I get into the review, I want to say that as a white, Christian, American that has no interest in kink I am definitely not the reviewer to understand the intricacies of this memoir. I encourage you to seek out reviewers from different backgrounds than me to get a fuller picture of this book.

The memoir is in the form of various chapters examining the author’s travels. It takes place in the summer of 2016, when Randa Jarrar decided to take a solo cross-country road trip through the United States. However, most of the book has nothing to do with the road trip, and is a series of her reflecting on past memories. This book examines the reality of living as a fat woman of color in the United States. Jarrar has experienced a lot, including being doxxed by a mob of alt-right trolls after calling out white feminism in regards to Barbara Bush’s death. I truly respect how open and honest they were about this traumatic experience, even offering examples of the vile, racist hate mail she received. This authenticity carries throughout the narrative.

The first thing that stood out to me is that Jarrar never fails to examine her positionality in the situations that they describe. They are quick to own where they lack and have privilege, and never fail to call out bigotry in the situations they describes. One example that particularly stood out to me was when they were faced with the racism and xenophobia of a white woman at a rest stop. The woman assumed Jarrar was white and spouted off stereotypes about Black people and Syrian refugees. Jarrar did not entertain the woman’s bigotry and swiftly called her out. This book was a great example of how to think about intersectionality.

Another thing I loved about this book was Randa Jarrar’s matter-of-fact writing style. It is so refreshing to read a voice that is so unapologetic in the face of so many people that want her to hate herself, as well as tumultuous world events. Reading this book inspired me to start having more of that self-acceptance in my own life. While the things she did are not always likable, she does make the reader understand her thinking. This attitude makes the writing engaging throughout. At the same time, the unflinching look at Jarrar’s life events makes the parts of the book where they describe being abused and mistreated harrowing. I do not think this is a negative, I think this actually is a strength of the memoir. However, it could be a lot for some readers to handle.

Readers should know before they pick up this book that this memoir describes instances of racism, prejudice against Arabs, misogyny, violence, fatphobia, abuse from a parent and significant other (including child sexual abuse and domestic violence), forced dieting, and eating disorder behavior. It also includes graphic descriptions of sex and BDSM and instances of interactions with the police.

Overall, this book is a great examination of one woman’s experience of the world, made up of small, seemingly disjointed narratives that piece together beautifully. If you can handle it, you might enjoy it.

Sinclair reviews Untamed by Glennon Doyle

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I was skeptical about this book. Remember back in May 2020 when nearly the entire bestseller list was taken up by anti-racist titles such as How To Be An Anti-Racist, Me & White Supremacy, and My Grandmother’s Hands? Untamed was also on there, and I felt skeptical about a white woman’s voice being amplified so loudly during such a critical time. I knew it was a memoir, but someone told me it also addressed her personal journey with her own whiteness and coming to an anti-racist identity.

Hmm, I thought.

I was disappointed to see so little of that in the book, but that’s not Glennon’s fault — I had bad information. It does have a little bit about it, but it’s just one medium-length essay among dozens of others — not even a major theme, really.

I was skeptical because I knew who Glennon Doyle was: a white, feminine woman with a conservative Christian background who fell in love with a (famous, queer) woman (soccer player Abby Wombach — who also wrote a book, Wolfpack) and left her husband. I knew she had quite the social media following, and my impression was that she was in that category of inspirational speakers and motivational self-help that is usually geared toward white wealthy mainstream women, and of which I tend to be very critical for the ways it reinforces capitalism, hegemony, beauty standards, and even patriarchy.

I struggled to relate to a lot of her work because she is so mainstream. I have been out as butch and queer since 1999 — more than half my life now — and my entire adult understanding of myself comes from counter culture, activism, being critical of the overculture, and and being very actively against indoctrination. I not only came out into counter culture, I grew up in it, outside of the contiguous US, and have never had a mainstream US world view. So when she describes her process of expanding and transforming outside of her mainstream world view, I applaud her — but parts of it are not all that radical or even all that interesting to me. Those things seem kind of like a baseline, not a revelation.

What was really interesting — fascinating, moving, and even inspiring — was the ways she describes that transformative process.

I am so impressed and have much respect for her process in general, and how much she had to trust herself in order to re-build her life, going against almost everything she’d known. So many of the short essays that make up this book are about how she trusts herself, the personal process of naming her inner Knowing, the consequences, the social expectations of placing trust somewhere outside of one’s self in order to know what’s right.

The major takeaway for me was about the cost and construction of abandoning one’s self. I know from early childhood development theory that our attachment styles, and sometimes relational trauma, are wrapped up in how we abandon ourselves to seek outside approval. For some of us, we have a pattern of others overriding what we know to be true and right for ourselves, and that often, for me personally, when resentment brews and gets directed at others, it is a clue that I have not been being true to myself at some deep level.

I am surprised to be so moved by this book. If you like personal transformative reflections, parenting, spiritual seekers, truth seekers, you may enjoy this book. I found it very easy to read and digest, with many profound moments.

Meagan Kimberly reviews Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby

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Wow, No Thank You audiobook by Samantha Irby

I listened to this collection of essays on audio, in which Samantha Irby herself reads, which is how I highly recommend you consume this book. Irby brings her biting wit and raw honesty to each essay, making them feel more like confessions. But they create a lifeline to so many who feel the way she does, making readers feel more connected and less alone. And she does it all with great humor, never taking herself, or anything, too seriously.

She covers various topics, from critiquing personas and performances on social media in “Into the Gross” to how over she is of the criticism of people being addicted to their phones in “Hung-Up!” Irby has no problem calling out others who act like they’re better than the rest of the world. She understands that at the end of the day, everyone is a mess pretending to have their ish together.

“Girls Gone Mild” is by far the most relatable and funniest essay in the collection, in my opinion. She gives a hysterical rundown of a typical girls’ night out for women 30+ who can no longer handle spontaneous outings and drinking too much. Her elaborate, minute-by-minute detail of how she plans her nights out now that she’s older sounded all too familiar and had me laughing so hard I cried.

In “Late 1900s Time Capsule,” she breaks down a typical mixtape from her youth track by track, annotating how each song captivated her teen angst, pretentious thoughts and intense emotions. As she talks about including the Indigo Girls on her mixtape she declares, “What do you mean you’re surprised I ended up with a lady?” proving there is a way to joke about queerness without being offensive. She even talks about those bygone days when you really had to be sure you wanted to invest in buying a whole album, because you couldn’t just purchase a single track.

Irby doesn’t shy away from topics often considered taboo, especially for women. She freely discusses sexuality alongside romance and relationships. She even tackles the horrors of getting your period in “Hysterical!” While hilarious in its unabashed humor, it’s also a critique on how any talk that does happen around the menstrual cycle centers on white women’s bodies and experiences, thus neglecting BIPOC bodies.

In essays like “Body Negativity” and “Hollywood Summer,” she tackles issues with body image and lack of representation of fat people. Or rather, the dismal representation of fat people. Although she takes on the topic with her signature humor, it’s clear it’s a subject that cuts to the core, and anyone who’s ever lived as a fat person in this world can relate.

Overall, this essay collection will make you laugh, but also make you think. It’s smart, witty, sarcastic, and filled with tales of horror about living as an anxious individual. You can’t help but laugh alongside Irby’s commentary on everything from making a living as a writer to moving to the country from the big city.

Danika reviews Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

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Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha cover

This is a book that I will be processing for a long time. It is beyond almost anything I’ve read before. I’m not proud to say that I have very little knowledge around ableism and disability activism, which is part of why I picked up Care Work (The other being that Bodymap, Piepzna-Samarasinha’s book of poetry, is one of the best books I’ve ever read.) This work is about disability justice: disability activism that centres queer and trans black, indigenous, and people of colour. It encourages leadership by the most impacted, people who are experts in ableism and the other interlocking oppressions that they live with every day, and who have spent years fighting a system that works against them. Disability justice sees ableism as intertwined with colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy and all of the others ways that bodies are policed and evaluated.

I am having trouble writing this review, because there is so much here to think about. I will muddle through and share some highlights, but I definitely recommend picking this up for yourself.

Care Work is a collection of essays, and it’s packed full of ideas, ranging from theory, history, memoir, advice and tips, and more–that I have to stop frequently to digest it. Here are just a few ideas that really stopped me in my tracks and made me think:

  • Piepzna-Samarasinha refers often to her “bodymind,” which seem to relate the mind as part of the body, an integrated whole–it reminded me of The Body Is Not an Apology, which discusses how policing of the body is a commonality of many types of oppression, including ableism against neurodivergent people.
  • The concept of “crip doulas” to guide disabled people into the community and share resources and tips for navigating the system. This is such a powerful idea, and I see the echo of it in queer communities, where many people would have loved to have a queer elder to provide wisdom in navigating their new identities. This is a beautiful vision of a future where interdependence is celebrated, and community is guaranteed.
  • Care Work talks about Octavia Butler’s books as disability justice narrative, which really made me think about that story in a new light.
  • I love the idea of “prefigurative politics:” acting as if the revolution has already happened. . Spending more time building than attacking, and focusing on power and not powerlessness. I think this is a powerful idea in activism, to not spend all of our time and energy criticizing a terrible system, and instead using some of those resources to build our own networks.
  • I was intrigued by the way that parents are talked about in this text, as not being directly targeted by ableism, but being restricted by much of the same system. Disability justice includes accessibility not just for neurodivergent and disabled people, but also for parents (by making sure that child care is provided).
  • A quotation by Qwo-Li Driskill, which says that one way ableism works is that disabled people “are not even present within the imaginations of a supposedly radical future,” really stuck with me.
  • Care Work does not present a monolith of ideas or opinions. Although these are all essays by Piepzna-Samarasinha, she pulls in works and ideas from other disability justice activists, and details differences in opinions. For instance, she advocates for strong personal networks of care while also recognizing the difficulties in maintaining them, and mentions a friend of hers who explains not wanting to rely on a personal network because she doesn’t want to have to be well-liked in order to use the washroom.

Reading Care Work required me to sit with some discomfort, because it helped me to face my own ableism and try to confront that. It reminded me in how many careless, thoughtless ways I prioritize abled people and fail to consider people whose bodyminds differ from my own. When I came across a mention of the “ugly laws” and looked into them, I was appalled that I had never heard of them, which from the mid-1700s to the 1970s across the United States and other cities and countries around the world made illegal “any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself to public view.” This such an obvious and horrific injustice–to dictate which bodies are allowed to be seen in public life–that it is a profound statement to me of how much I have to learn when I didn’t know this basic, crucial piece of history. I am angry at myself for not learning this, but I am also angry that this was never taught to me in my education.

Another takeaway I have from this book is how much disability justice is fighting a world that would be better for every single person. Piepzna-Samarasinha’s love letter to femmes made me think about how everyone should live in a world where we can feel safe and valued no matter what. It made me think of Elana Dykewomon’s quotation:

Almost every womon I have ever met has a secret belief that she is just on the edge of madness, that there is some deep, crazy part within her, that she must be on guard constantly against ‘losing control’ — of her temper, of her appetite, of her sexuality, of her feelings, of her ambition, of her secret fantasies, of her mind.

It made me think of how that fear is driven by the way we treat the “mad” or “crazy.” About how Piepzna-Samarasinha refers to the “not(yet)-disabled.” I think about all the disabled and neurodivergent people who are being prevented from living their lives, through denial to care and inaccessibility and stigma. And also those people who don’t have a label for who they are, or who hide that idea even from themselves. And the people who are constantly afraid that they are “crazy” or not enough or too much, and that if they are found out they won’t be loved or valued or supported. Disability justice doesn’t have to benefit abled people to be worth supporting, of course, but I am inspired by this movement that is fighting tooth and nail to try to inch towards the future we all should be aspiring to, and am infuriated by the system that counters them at every turn.

In case it isn’t already obvious, this is a powerful, brilliant book. I can imagine it would be life-changing for so many people, and even if it isn’t directly applicable to your own experience, I highly recommend giving it a try and absorbing what you can. I’m grateful that Care Work exists, and I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.

Danika reviews We Still Demand!: Redefining Resistance in Sex and Gender Struggles edited by Patrizia Gentile, Gary Kinsman, and L. Pauline Rankin

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We Still Demand edited by Patrizia Gentile

A weird thing about living in Canada is that you tend to know US history, laws, politics, etc more than you know your own. Reading We Still Demand! was a wake-up call that I actually know very little about Canadian queer history and activism, and that’s something I want to fix. Unfortunately, I had some issues with this particular text on the subject. For one thing, it is a very academic text, and it becomes dense to the point of being unreadable at several points. They do give a rough timeline of Canadian queer activism, but the focus is mostly on talking about radical vs neoliberal/homonormative/transnormative/homonationalist/human rights activism, and they seem to immediately dismiss out of hand anything that could be included in the latter category.

I will say, this is first time I’ve read anything and thought “I wish this was less radical.” Generally I am completely for radical activism. In this collection, though, it looks backwards at activism of the 70s and 80s and seems to neatly divide any work being done then as being either radical (worthwhile) or neoliberal (counterproductive). At times, this seems to require some odd mental gymnastics, such as defining 70s same-sex marriage activism as purely radical, but the same-sex marriage activism that followed as purely homonormative.

The essay that really got under my skin was about the beginning of trans activism in Canada (as an aside, this collection uses “trans*” “transman” and “transwoman,” even though it was published in 2017. Not sure why.) Instead of celebrating Raj and the work he did for trans representation, while also acknowledging the problems/limitations, this seems to drag him through the mud for not being radical enough, despite him publicly changing his stance on gay trans men (he originally posits trans men as being in opposition to butch women, so he paints all trans men as straight, but after backlash he became quite active in including gay trans men in his magazine, helping them to make connections with each other). It leaves a bad taste in my mouth to say that fighting for trans rights is homonormative or transnormative–that fighting for human rights isn’t worthwhile, because it doesn’t singlehandedly fix every problem.

Another essay acknowledges that Doug Wilson, who was fired as a teacher for being gay, lost his court case because sexual orientation wasn’t covered under the human Rights commission, but the text seems to congratulate him for walking away from teaching and entirely into activism, instead of acknowledging that fighting for rights has a place in queer activism. It also mentions a quotation from a queer rights activist that change happened because lobbying for rights laid the groundwork, but militancy of gays in streets brought results. Instead of recognizing this as two sides to the same fight, the author seems to conclude that the lobbying was pointless, or at least not very important.

There also seems to be some nostalgia about 70s and 80s activism as being back when All Queer Activism Was Radical. I would argue that the reason for that is because at the time, being out at all was radical. The liberal queers were still in the closet. Now, more people are able to participate in the discussion, because there is less danger in coming out, especially for cis white wealthy privileged gay men, so it’s not surprising that the conversation has changed. I also disagree with this strict division between radical and neoliberal activism because there is so much grey area: is fighting to repeal anti-queer laws radical, but not fighting for human rights that would prevent those laws?

Homonormativity/transnormativity also assumes that queer people can be easily absorbed by the system–that same-sex marriage did not change the institution of marriage at all. Can’t there be some space between revolution and assimilation? Isn’t it possible that same-sex marriage complicates the institution of marriage even as it reinforces other aspects? I agree that we should be fighting for big, radical change, for dismantling the system, but I also think there is merit to people trying to change it from within in the meantime. This collection seems to suggests that anything less that revolution is misguided. It made me think of the Trevor Project, which seems calls skyrocket after things like trans people being barred from the military–policy changes have real immediate effects for some people. Same-sex marriage may not have ended queer oppression, but it did change people’s lives: for the people able to see their partner in the hospital, for people able to bring their partner into the country, for kids who saw the world as a little less hostile to their existence.

All of this is not to say that I disagree with centring the most marginalized members of our community. One of the later essays describes how gay activism dropped issues of class and poverty after gay community was labelled as the “pink market” (white, middle class, cis, etc), and I do see how this plays out in ignoring the most vulnerable people in our community. I do believe that we should be prioritizing the most pressing, life-threatening issues the queer community faces, even if it’s not politically expedient (such as acknowledging that the issues of safety in sex work and the rate of murders of trans women are intertwined). I think we should be fighting on all fronts, though, and not promoting further fracturing inside the community by sorting people into Good Queer Activists and Bad Normative Activists.

I feel a little silly going into such depth in my issues with a book that very few people have even heard of, but it got me thinking! And honestly, that’s a good thing in itself. I do like exploring academic texts every once in a while as a way to stretch and test my own thinking on a topic. A few other notes that I have on this one: the introduction acknowledges that there is no indigenous perspective offered in the collection, and says that it’s a huge gap, but… I don’t feel like that’s good enough. It seems strange to me to say that an indigenous viewpoint is crucial, and then go ahead and publish your collection without one. Isn’t that your job to find that contributor?

I liked the later chapters much more than the first section. The “passing” chapter introduces the difficulty of “reading” people in the past as either trans men or butch women, and the problems that these categories suggest, as well as the ones present in the language of “passing.” I was also really interested in the chapter about dyke s/m in Canada, and how the “lesbian sex wars” debate on BDSM didn’t really exist in Canada (unlike the US), possibly because Canadian censorship of lesbian SM material could have allowed for solidarity in lesbian communities in fighting censorship. The later section also seems to be less concerned with the division between neoliberal and radical activism–for instance, the sex work chapter has a very different attitude towards police coalition than earlier chapters did.

I definitely want to explore this topic further. I want to know more about both the past and present queer activism in my own country, without just swapping in the US queer history that I know and assuming that it’s the same. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be seeking out these particular editors in the next books on the topic I pick up, because I didn’t think that their lens added to the topic.

Greetings From Janeland: Women Write More About Leaving Men for Women edited by Candace Walsh and Barbara Straus Lodge

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It’s hard to believe that it’s been 6 years since I wrote my review of Dear John: I Love Jane. The Lesbrary was still a baby! In that review, I talk about how fascinated I was with it, namely because of it addressing sexual fluidity. In fact, the author of Sexual Fluidity wrote the foreword, and that inspired me to add it to my TBR. I wouldn’t read for 5 more years–not until I was experiencing my own sexual fluidity. Perhaps it’s a good thing that I waited that long: it was extremely helpful to read at that point in my life (review here).

Needless to say, I had some expectations starting the sequel to that pivotal book. And perhaps those expectations were a little too high. As I sad in my original review, I have a personal interest in those essays where authors address sexual fluidity: having their attractions shift over time. The majority of stories in the first book were not about that. They were about realizing that they were gay later in life, or at least coming to terms with it after having serious relationships with men. That’s even more true in Greetings From Janeland. The focus seems to have shifted to really be representing women who come out later in life. (Later than teenager, I mean.)

These are still interesting stories! They’re about how compulsory heterosexuality can cause people to live decades without owning up to their own desires and pleasure. They show the many different paths that people take to find their truths. They show the ways that their relationships with the men in their lives change: some are still close to them, and some have completely gone separate ways. Some follow up stories from the first book. For the most part, though, they follow a pattern: I was always a lesbian, but I didn’t come out until later. There are a few bisexual writers, but not a lot, and even fewer that address fluidity.

So this collection didn’t cater to my interested quite so closely, but I still think this is a great resource. The editors reference how women have written to them to say how life-changing the first book was for them. We do still have a very rigid idea of what a lesbian looks like, what a queer woman looks like, what coming out looks like. It’s good to have stories that stretch that, and show that it’s never too late to live your truth.