I just finished a second reading (it is the kind of book that, although short, demands that kind of attention and focus) and I am hugely impressed with her exploration into the nature of gender, the assumptions we make about it and about the people who don't identify with either of the two options most of us have always accepted were the only possible choices we had.įor a book that doesn't hesitate to quote Roland Barthes in great heaping handfuls, The Argonauts is relentless, inescapably physical - it is all about the body.
I have a house full of visitors at the moment so I don't have the wherewithal to post in too much depth, but I'd like to put in a plug for Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts for this thread. There is some theory and certainly plenty of philosophy about the way the patriarchy hurts women, but there are also propositions for change. I'm thinking, for instance, of The Purity Myth and Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, both of which are by younger feminists writing about specific issues facing young women. I think this reflects the movement we've made in Western society, but I know older feminists who don't like the approach.
Bad Feminist is, I think, aware that it has serious and not-serious essays.Īnother trend I see in what I have read is that many books today are aimed more at policy prescriptions for specific issues than defining the problem (the problem with no name!) as early works were. I will say, though, that Bad Feminist and other books like it I see today are not serious the way that books like The Second Sex or The Feminine Mystique are. I also appreciate when modern feminists are reflective about reasons why women of color and non-gender-conforming persons felt abandoned by feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. >7 jennybhatt: Yes, today's books are much more interested in intersectionalit.