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ygraines's review
may, 2020:
in the four years since i read this, i've become more sensitive to the modes of argument being made by certain radical feminists in the seventies & eighties -- even when they're arguing for the construction of gendered behaviour, their positions are biologically essentialist & robin morgan isn't an exception. i did some research & found that she's been aggressively hostile abt the inclusion of trans women in feminist & lesbian circles, and used horrifyingly transphobic language in her demands to exclude women from communities to which they belong.
i'd never gone back to this review, even though my personal position on this book & its author has changed with further reading & awareness -- a comment on it reminded me of its existence, and motivated me to remove the star rating & add this edit. this book had some value to me when i read it, but i can't in good conscience let my response stand as is, because i was blinkered by not being familiar enough with trans-exclusionary rhetoric to realise that her visions of community were very different to my own.
i wouldn't argue for people reading, or not reading, this book -- i think reading it with an awareness of how morgan has weaponised the values in it against other vulnerable members of the communities it argues for might reveal some of the weaknesses that weren't apparent to me on first reading, & therefore might be useful? but i also think there are many more feminist authors writing about community and myth-making and political violence in ways that incorporate trans & gender non-conforming identities, and their accounts are, for that reason, more nuanced, more sensitive to lived experience & more important. i don't regret having read this one, but i also don't regret having moved past it.
september, 2016:
this was a book i inherited from my mother, would never have read if she hadn't first experienced it a few decades earlier; for a book so utterly invested in a community of women sharing experiences, communicating with clarity and vulnerability, passing on their knowledge and investing in a politics of love and transformation, the inheritance from mother to daughter feels important and precious.
morgan's attribution of the death drive to masculinity & those that identify with it, and the libidinal, erotic drive to femininity & those that identify with it, has been a very useful dichotomy for me in terms of narrative and archetype; the hero is a figure who must self-destruct in order to retain ideological integrity and if he lives it is with a sense of compromise and impotence or the threat of becoming the tyrant that he supplanted. if this is the cultural norm, as it is in much of the fiction we consume, the myths we internalise, then we raise generations of men who conceptualise politics, and the world, as cycles of violence in which, to become singular, one must become a martyr.
the flip-side of this todestrieb is the feminine drive towards survival and a love for life, ecstasy in being rather than ecstasy found in oblivion. this is the way in which mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, women who exist in the peripheries of masculine politics and masculine conflict and yet are ultimately always its victims, find meaning, by investing themselves in other women, by making change happen in unpredictable shapes.
in the four years since i read this, i've become more sensitive to the modes of argument being made by certain radical feminists in the seventies & eighties -- even when they're arguing for the construction of gendered behaviour, their positions are biologically essentialist & robin morgan isn't an exception. i did some research & found that she's been aggressively hostile abt the inclusion of trans women in feminist & lesbian circles, and used horrifyingly transphobic language in her demands to exclude women from communities to which they belong.
i'd never gone back to this review, even though my personal position on this book & its author has changed with further reading & awareness -- a comment on it reminded me of its existence, and motivated me to remove the star rating & add this edit. this book had some value to me when i read it, but i can't in good conscience let my response stand as is, because i was blinkered by not being familiar enough with trans-exclusionary rhetoric to realise that her visions of community were very different to my own.
i wouldn't argue for people reading, or not reading, this book -- i think reading it with an awareness of how morgan has weaponised the values in it against other vulnerable members of the communities it argues for might reveal some of the weaknesses that weren't apparent to me on first reading, & therefore might be useful? but i also think there are many more feminist authors writing about community and myth-making and political violence in ways that incorporate trans & gender non-conforming identities, and their accounts are, for that reason, more nuanced, more sensitive to lived experience & more important. i don't regret having read this one, but i also don't regret having moved past it.
september, 2016:
this was a book i inherited from my mother, would never have read if she hadn't first experienced it a few decades earlier; for a book so utterly invested in a community of women sharing experiences, communicating with clarity and vulnerability, passing on their knowledge and investing in a politics of love and transformation, the inheritance from mother to daughter feels important and precious.
morgan's attribution of the death drive to masculinity & those that identify with it, and the libidinal, erotic drive to femininity & those that identify with it, has been a very useful dichotomy for me in terms of narrative and archetype; the hero is a figure who must self-destruct in order to retain ideological integrity and if he lives it is with a sense of compromise and impotence or the threat of becoming the tyrant that he supplanted. if this is the cultural norm, as it is in much of the fiction we consume, the myths we internalise, then we raise generations of men who conceptualise politics, and the world, as cycles of violence in which, to become singular, one must become a martyr.
the flip-side of this todestrieb is the feminine drive towards survival and a love for life, ecstasy in being rather than ecstasy found in oblivion. this is the way in which mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, women who exist in the peripheries of masculine politics and masculine conflict and yet are ultimately always its victims, find meaning, by investing themselves in other women, by making change happen in unpredictable shapes.
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