A review by emily_bronte
BFFs: The Radical Potential of Female Friendship by Anahit Behrooz

5.0

if female intimacy has always been determined by the patriarchy's desires, then the female and let nised body are the battleground through which this control has been wrested. The narratives constructed around these bodies - as sexual objects and maternal vessels and almost nothing in between - map directly onto the structuring principles of the patriarchy: the economic and social disempowerment of marginalised genders, the proliferation of the nuclear family, and the provision of free domestic labour.
Acts of physical intimacy and pleasure that don't directly reinforce these structures, that suggest the possibility of self-determi-nation, pose an immediate threat; we saw the panicked response to such progress in the recent global stripping back of reproductive and queer rights.
This was a blunt reminder to us all: the patriarchal state can, at any point, commandeer your body to dispossess you of political agency. You cannot act on the hedonism of your desires. You cannot divorce the intricacy of your gender from the supposed directive of your sex. You cannot move through society with the full knowledge of a physical and psychic reality that is yours to grasp.