* Letter to the Editor

Anne Summers posed the question of whether you can be a political conservative and a feminist. Her answer was yes. I disagree. At its heart, feminism is about acknowledging the systemic oppression of women coupled with a desire to do something about it. It is about recognition of the need for a collective social movement to bring about societal change.

This definition of feminism also influences how one views the contentious issue of abortion. For Summers, abortion is just about individual choice. An alternative feminist approach is to question the role of abortion in alleviating the inconvenient consequences for men of sex. At a time when we are so prepared to acknowledge the massive emotional and spiritual ramifications of children given up for adoption, children born through donated sperm or egg (with many of those children desperate to find out about their biological origins), the forced surrender of babies born to young unwed mothers, and the loss of a baby through miscarriage and stillbirth, why is it that abortion must be reduced to the realm of a simple medical procedure without consequences?

To deny the impact that abortion has on many women is to give men a free pass in terms of their sexual responsibility. After all, if men can undo pregnancy by putting the onus on a woman to have a medical procedure to solve the inconvenience of a baby, where is the justice in that?

Anne Summers equates women’s ability to be independent with the right to control fertility. She says that “women might choose periods of dependence on a husband or someone else while they raise children...but the key is that this is a voluntary state.” How appalling that motherhood can be diminished in this way as a regressive time from which one quickly recovers and bounces back to independence (which sounds suspiciously akin to being more like a man). What feminism must and should advocate for is that women in all our states of being— old or young; married or not; with children or not; gay or straight; sick or well—are equally worthy to any man. Feminism must speak to those in poverty as well as to those who “can choose periods of dependence”, and this means challenging the operative social norms that privilege the individual, and personal financial success, at the expense of community well-being.

Women, especially those who may be reliant on social welfare such as single mothers, should not be demeaned for relying on others for financial support. Indeed, in a just society, that is what we do, just as we should do for the unemployed, for refugees, for those with disabilities, and for those who are aged or infirm. To deny the role of a society in looking after its own citizens and to put financial independence as the pinnacle of achievement is to deny the collective nature of feminism and the characteristics of the social structures that hinder or support women’s choices.

Women’s empowerment must happen but that cannot take place in an environment where our bodies are demeaned and become our enemies. Medical procedures have consequences, including emotional ones and this truth cannot be denied. Let women choose abortion, but to present it to them as a bland option about “freedom of choice” is to reinforce a lie. Put abortion where it belongs—in a social context, and as a consequence of sexuality that involves both women and men. It is frankly not good enough to absolve society of its obligations or to deflect attention from the social structures that impel many women to seek an abortion. If workplaces-and attitudes to women, motherhood and community were different-so might be the choices that women make.

Pauline Hopkins

* This piece was originally a letter to the editor, in response to the Anne Summers article 'There is no such thing as a pro-life feminist', which appeared in The Age on January 22, 2012.

by Lise Weil




Several nights ago, on Facebook of all things, I happened on the news that the writer Christa Wolf had died—on December 1, in Berlin, at the age of 82. I am still reeling from the shock, not just the shock of her death but the shock of my not having known about her death for over six weeks. How could this have happened? Christa Wolf, originally of the GDR, is a writer whose words I have lived by, more or less consciously, for almost thirty years. No other living writer did as much to shape my literary consciousness and political imagination. The only book I possess that’s as beat-up as my copy of To the Lighthouse is her novel The Quest for Christa T (Nachdenken uber Christa T.). The Reader and the Writer is a close second. Passages from her novels and essays still return to me on a weekly basis. Not only that, she used to make regular appearances in my dreams. How could she have passed from this world without my having a clue?? This despite the fact that I regularly, sometimes for an hour or two at a stretch, immerse myself in the information-drenched world of cyberspace. (Now that I know of her death of course I’ve been drowning in blogs, commentaries, obituaries, interviews). How did this vital piece of information fall through the cracks?

 I subscribe to U.S. and Canada-based feminist listserves, where deaths of literary figures in the U.S. and Canada are fairly well covered—though occasionally there are cracks here as well. But what of writers on another continent?  I’m talking about women writers of course and most particularly feminist writers.  Thirty, twenty, maybe even ten years ago a women’s magazine or newspaper would have brought me news of an important death (there was a feminist press then and it knew no borders). Or if not that a friend who had read it in one of those papers. There were gatherings then, often centered around books, if I hadn’t already found out from a newspaper or a friend it would certainly have come up at one of them.

 I don’t know how we’re all supposed to keep track of these deaths, today, the deaths of the feminist writers whose imaginations have rocked our worlds. No doubt there are fans of the great visionary Quebec writer Louky Bersianik in Europe, Australia, even in the U.S., who have no idea that she died also in December, two days after Wolf in fact, at the age of 81. Beyond keeping track of these deaths, how are we supposed to mourn them, dispersed as we all are?

 “Literature today must be peace research,” Wolf pronounced in her Buchner Prize speech. More than any other writer I know, she showed me what it is to be a writer of conscience.

***

For Christa Wolf, prose was an instrument of conscience and self-knowledge, a means of stirring up the hardened deposits of history, of laying bare lies and buried truths. She was a master diagnostician of the darkness of the 20^th-century. ”The main aim of my work in recent years has been the question of what it is that has brought our civilization to the brink of self-destruction” she once said in an interview. She understood that that self-destructiveness had its roots in dissociation: “How one could be there and not be there at the same time, the ghastly secret of human beings in this century,” she wrote in Patterns of Childhood [in Australia published as A Model Childhood], a novel in which she tried to comes to terms with a Nazi childhood. And later: “Sin in our time consists of not wanting to know the truth about oneself.” Countering that dissociation, which Wolf saw at work everywhere, was one of her self-appointed tasks as a writer. The words spoken by Christa T. in her early and best-known novel The Quest for Christa T. could just as easily have come from her:  “We must know what has happened to us . . .One must know what happens to oneself.” (“Hope begins,” Wolf once said in an interview, “when one faces reality, when one simply sees what is.”) 

 “In the age of universal memory loss,” Wolf wrote in Patterns of Childhood [A Model Childhood], “we must realize that complete presence of mind can be achieved only when based on a clear past.” Always as a writer her project was to remove blinders, her own and others’, to make herself and the reader aware of blind spots, to see clearly. The relentless questioning that characterized her narrative voice was often directed at herself (the authorial “I” and the narrative “I” often appeared to be identical); she seemed always ready to expose her own failings, to open up even her rawest wounds for closer inspection. In the aftermath of the response to What Remains (Was Bleibt), a novella about the day in the life of a GDR writer whose every move is monitored by state secret police agents, she would try to come to terms with the fact that for three years, as a young woman, she herself worked for the Stasi.

As an East German writer, Wolf took social engagement as matter of course. “I can’t abstract myself from [society],” she once said in an interview. “It is this sense of always being touched by what touches society, although it sometimes drives me to despair, that is the source, amongst other things, of my creative drive.” At a time when, Occupy Wall Street notwithstanding, unfettered capitalism seems to be the model towards which all societies are leaning, it is bracing to read a writer for whom an alternative existed. “We East Germans had a vision, a utopia,” she once wrote, and even after reckoning with the abuses of the regime she continued to cling to that vision. Beginning with the collection of essays The Reader and the Writer, published in 1968, Wolf would develop a body of writing about writing marked by a steadfast refusal of alienation and a fervent wish that literature be effective, be useful, that it might help to bring about a more livable world, “help ensure that the things of this earth endure.” She considered hers an “aesthetics of resistance.”

In the 1980’s, Wolf’s social critique, along with her poetics, took a feminist turn. In the process of researching the figure of Cassandra for her novel of that name that appeared in 1983, she began to study archaeology and ancient matriarchal cultures. Travelling to Crete, she was amazed and outraged to discover that women were the original seers, prophets and poets, that their powers had been usurped by priests of Apollo who took over the temple at Delphi, that women were subsequently either excluded or turned into objects. She began to consider the implications of the fact that for two thousand years women were barred from any significant role in shaping culture. “Does it seem misguided. . .to believe,” she wrote, “that if women had helped to think `thought’ over the last two thousand years, the life of thought would be different today?” 

Wolf’s Cassandra is a feminist parable. Even as her Cassandra comes to understand that the Trojan war, far from being an aberration, is deeply symptomatic of patriarchal consciousness, and that “we have no chance against a time that needs heroes,” she begins to feel a deep kinship with women from other layers of society. Wolf’s own feminist awakening is traced in her Frankfurt lectures, which later appeared as essays accompanying Cassandra. In terms of narrative, she writes in these essays, the necrophilia of patriarchal cultures is to be seen in the “strictly one-track-minded approach—the extraction of a single ‘skein’. . . a blood-red thread extracted from the fabric of human life, the narrative of the struggle and victory of the heroes, or their doom.” To these one-track stories Wolf suggests that we oppose something she calls “the living word”: “This word would not longer produce stories of heroes, or of antiheroes, either.  Instead, it would be inconspicuous and would seek to name the inconspicuous, the precious everyday, the concrete. . .Perhaps it would greet with a smile the wrath of Achilles, the conflict of Hamlet, the false alternatives of Faust.” 

In a speech she gave in 1980 on the occasion of receiving the Georg Buchner Prize (later published in a book of essays called The Author’s Dimension), Wolf indicted Western culture for its devaluing of women as sources of knowledge and insight, its idolatry of scientific thinking, its inner emptiness.  And she raised the question of the fate of literature, and of language itself, in a highly technologized world which increasingly seems bent on its own destruction. “Shall it then, the language of literature, fail us?” she asked. Her answer to this question comes in the following passage, and hinges upon the taking up a “simple, quiet word” – verkehrt (upside-down, reversed).  These words, I believe, ring truer than ever today.

“The condition of the world is reversed, we say tentatively, and notice: it is true. We can stand behind this sentence.  The word is not beautiful, only right, and it is thus a rest for our ears, which have been torn by the clamor of great words, a little relief too for our conscience, disturbed by too many false, falsely-used words.  Could it perhaps be the first word of another accurate language which we have in our ears but not yet on our tongues? Perhaps from it could develop. . .a chain of other equally accurate words which would express not only a negative of the old but an other, timely sense of values. . .  So that we can again speak to one another, and tell each other stories, without having to be ashamed.”

(Translation above is by Myra Love. I prefer it to Jan van Heurck’s in part because of the resonance of “reversed” with Mary Daly’s notion of “reversal.” Other translations are by the translators cited below.) 

REFERENCES

Christa Wolf, The Reader and the Writer: Essays, Sketches, Memories. Tr. Joan Becker (New York: International Publishers, 1977)

Christa Wolf, A Model Childhood. Tr. Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980)

Christa Wolf, The Author’s Dimension: Selected Essays. Tr. Jan van Heurck. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983)

Christa Wolf, Cassandra: A Novel and four Essays. Tr. Jan van Heurck (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994)

The Fourth Dimension:Interviews with Christa Wolf. tr. Hilary Pilkington with introduction by Karin McPherson (London: Verso, 1988).

 

Lise Weil lives in Montreal and teaches in Goddard College's IMA program. She was founder and editor of Trivia: A Journal of Ideas and later Trivia: Voices of Feminism. She has just completed a memoir, In Search of Pure Lust.

 

 By: Helen Lobato

I matured physically long before my friends. The signs of puberty, the underarm hair growth, the budding breasts, and the menarche – they all occurred prematurely. But the concern that developed about my breasts began well before puberty for my grandmother had breast cancer dying at the age of 47, leaving my mother to rear her siblings. According to Breast Cancer Australia, one in 11 women will be diagnosed with the disease before the age of 75 years. Our health rather than large, sexy breasts is the issue.

One of the first operations I ever saw was a radical mastectomy. This mutilating surgery, uncommon these days, removes all breast tissue along with the lymph glands on the affected side. As an apprentice nurse I watched as a young mother had her diseased breast hacked from her chest wall and plonked on a cold, stainless steel dish and when she died one Christmas Eve, I was there with her husband and her two young boys.

In 2008 more than 300,000 women and teenagers underwent breast augmentation with saline implants. All breast implants will eventually break with studies of silicone breast implants showing that most last seven to twelve years with some breaking during the first few months, while others can last more than fifteen years. The risks are many, ranging from scar tissue to breast or nipple numbness to breakage and leakage and even death. There have been 20 cases of cancer among French women who have received allegedly faulty breast implants. These are the French made Poly Implant Prothese silicone-gel implants, a non-standard cheaper variety.

Dr Marilyn Yalom, author of A History of the Breast states that ‘the size of a woman’s breast has become one of the identifying markers of her entire persona’. And it’s not just happening in ‘Tinsel Town’, she said. In 2005 Darlene Watkins was fitted with the French-made PIP implant and she told the ABC’s 7.30 program ‘I just wanted to feel a bit more sexy’. Five years later her surgeon warned her that French authorities were concerned about the high rupture rate and recommended an ultrasound which revealed breakage and leakage.

I’m content with my breasts and even if I needed a mastectomy I would decline reconstructive surgery. Why have more surgery and post-operative pain?  Why risk complications and death just to look sexy or even normal for that matter.

Lesbian feminist and poet, Audre Lorde had a mastectomy and rejected the imposition of post-mastectomy prostheses and reconstructive surgeries, arguing:

Prosthesis offers the empty comfort of 'nobody will know the difference.' But it is that very difference which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it, and survived it, and wish to share that strength with other women. If we are to translate the silence surrounding breast cancer into language and action against this scourge, then the first step is that women with mastectomies must become visible to each other.

It would not be easy to lose a breast or breasts through cancer but to risk your health or even your life in order to placate personal and societal dissatisfaction about your breasts is a tragedy.

 

Helen has a blog: http://allthenewsthatmatters.wordpress.com/

 

 

 

the disturbing trends of YA cover girls

By: Stephanie Campisi

 

Wandering the young adult literature shelves these days is a Warholian experience: selecting a handful of books within the same subgenre and placing them side by side can yield results not unlike Andy's multi-coloured Campbell's Soup print.

At first glance, the plethora of similar covers speaks merely of a combination of slashed design budgets and a “me-too” mindset. But further analysis shows that these covers are not simply perpetuating the overuse of iStock photo images, but also a number of highly problematic messages.

The first of these is the headless heroine, which though perfectly suitable for a retelling of Sleepy Hollow is less so for other types of fiction. This approach to cover design involves photographic covers depicting women whose heads have been either partially or wholly cropped. Ostensibly this is to allow the reader to “imagine” the character, but in reality the result is objectification and dehumanisation—and often with lashings of frothy bubblegum pink.

Fortunately, these types of designs have been subject to a high degree of scrutiny and criticism, and is slowly waning as the stylistic choice du jour. But that's not to say that the subsequent trends are any more positive.

Currently rife throughout the paranormal subgenre is the “sicky lass in pretty gown” cover trend. These covers--and owing to the overall popularity of this genre there are a disturbing number of them--typically comprise a pale-skinned girl dressed in a formal gown and being positioned in such a way that she seems utterly without agency. It's not unusual for these covers to depict girls swooning, lying helplessly on the ground, or leaping—one presumes—to oblivion. Indeed, Rachel Stark (assistant marketing manager of Bloomsbury and Walker Books for young readers) describes these covers as as representative of our “obsession with an elegant death”.

Such covers go beyond the issues raised by the headless heroine trend in that not only do they objectify the subject, but they seem to be normalising violence, and particularly romantic violence—which in this genre is all too often depicted as an “all-consuming” relationship to the detriment of (most usually) the heroine.

However, while some elements are overrepresented in young adult cover design, others are underrepresented, one of which being the use of people of colour in cover design. Admittedly, there are proportionally too few POC in young adult fiction generally, but even taking this into account the representation of such characters on book covers has been one that has invited much discussion and debate. Anecdotally, it seems that covers featuring POC main characters are less likely to receive a photographic cover. In addition, cases of “white washing” aren't unheard of: Justine Larbalestier's Liar Liar, which was originally released (in the US) with a white cover model despite having a POC main character is one case that received a good deal of attention.

But not all publishers are getting it wrong. In the past year there have been a number of evocative covers that don't rely on any of the above in their appeal to their audience. Take, for example, the stunning The Sky is Everywhere, which is elegant and evocative, Cath Crowley's eye-catching Graffiti Moon (which won an APA book design award) or Lia Weston's The Fortunes of Ruby White, or the two examples below of Laurie Halse Anderson's Chains. These, of course, are just a few of the many excellent designs out there—and with luck publishers will consider the issues raised by their cover designs and ensure that covers like these prevail.

 

Stephanie is a reviewer for 'Read in a Single Sitting'