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A review by notwellread
Boys Like Her: Transfictions by Ivan Coyote, Anna Camilleri, Taste This, Lyndell Montgomery, Kate Bornstein, Zoë Eakle
4.0
4.5 stars.
I’m definitely too young to remember this era of queer lit and culture, but I loved the style of this anthology: it’s full of explorations and take-downs of gender concepts, both straightforward and ambiguous, prosaic and poetic. I will be honest and say that Ivan is my favourite writer (and pretty much my favourite living writer in general) but none of the other three let down the standard at all – though they might seem to be coming from alike perspectives on the surface, in practice they all had unique perspectives to contribute. They also bring them together in the comparison of gender ‘crossing’ (hence the ‘trans-' prefix so ubiquitous today) and physical border crossing (which takes up a significant middle portion of the book, and provides its own ‘crossing’ between the more colloquial, anecdotal first half and the emotionally-heightened, bordering on avant-garde second half. The crossing challenges the validity of these categories – after all, both gender and national ‘borders’ are social constructs at their hearts.
On top of that, book mixes humour, sorrow, and rage, lightening and weighting the tone and mood and bringing the reader into their particular atmosphere as though you’re really watching a performance. I loved that Kate Bornstein’s Foreword made a serious point but was still so funny about it – after all, how many books start “Hi there, and welcome to the book”? I like to think it signposts a new approach to the book as a format for storytelling, since it’s pretty unusual to see performance art adapted for paper.
I have to say I felt it got saucier and more explicit as it went on, and I found myself a bit out of my element (I don’t read erotica, though arguably I sort of just did), but artistically these were some of the most evocative parts of a generally great read. The power-play aspects played in to the questions of gender dynamics in a very challenging way, and, though sexual content in books tends to get dated quickly, it still remains daring and provocative. The aesthetic charm of the time marks it out as ‘of its era’, but the contents are just as pressing and relevant as if they were written today. (It made me want to see the performances they describe, too, but I don’t think they’ve been recorded.) I think the most telling thing in all this is that the authors didn’t have to pull out all the stops for a book only meant to correspond to their live performances, but even flicking through this book and glancing at all the effort put into the photographs, formatting, and written content demonstrates what a labour of love this must have been.
I’m definitely too young to remember this era of queer lit and culture, but I loved the style of this anthology: it’s full of explorations and take-downs of gender concepts, both straightforward and ambiguous, prosaic and poetic. I will be honest and say that Ivan is my favourite writer (and pretty much my favourite living writer in general) but none of the other three let down the standard at all – though they might seem to be coming from alike perspectives on the surface, in practice they all had unique perspectives to contribute. They also bring them together in the comparison of gender ‘crossing’ (hence the ‘trans-' prefix so ubiquitous today) and physical border crossing (which takes up a significant middle portion of the book, and provides its own ‘crossing’ between the more colloquial, anecdotal first half and the emotionally-heightened, bordering on avant-garde second half. The crossing challenges the validity of these categories – after all, both gender and national ‘borders’ are social constructs at their hearts.
On top of that, book mixes humour, sorrow, and rage, lightening and weighting the tone and mood and bringing the reader into their particular atmosphere as though you’re really watching a performance. I loved that Kate Bornstein’s Foreword made a serious point but was still so funny about it – after all, how many books start “Hi there, and welcome to the book”? I like to think it signposts a new approach to the book as a format for storytelling, since it’s pretty unusual to see performance art adapted for paper.
I have to say I felt it got saucier and more explicit as it went on, and I found myself a bit out of my element (I don’t read erotica, though arguably I sort of just did), but artistically these were some of the most evocative parts of a generally great read. The power-play aspects played in to the questions of gender dynamics in a very challenging way, and, though sexual content in books tends to get dated quickly, it still remains daring and provocative. The aesthetic charm of the time marks it out as ‘of its era’, but the contents are just as pressing and relevant as if they were written today. (It made me want to see the performances they describe, too, but I don’t think they’ve been recorded.) I think the most telling thing in all this is that the authors didn’t have to pull out all the stops for a book only meant to correspond to their live performances, but even flicking through this book and glancing at all the effort put into the photographs, formatting, and written content demonstrates what a labour of love this must have been.