--Marisa Meltzer, author of Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, on DoubleX's "Exile from Grrrlville"
Monday, February 15, 2010
Girls Take 3
One of my favorite quotes about the female adolescent experience comes from the musician Rachel Carns, who said in an interview that "girls have this private thing about themselves—diaries, your room—that is really isolated and you don't share it with anybody else." If the second wave of feminism was about getting wives out of the kitchen, then maybe Riot Grrrl was about trying to get girls out of the bedroom and into something more like action.
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and then (maybe, I'm not sure if this isn't a stretch to connect) the likes of Plath and Tracy Emin and all bring the diary, and force the politicisation of this private experience, force an engagement with the causes of the suffering, a recognition of the joy, an acceptance of the legitimacy of the feminine experience within that, and its wider socio-political context and interactions.
ReplyDeleteDamn, all you grrls are making me binge on plath again! (an then get worried about gender appropriation and the like... sigh. I'm going to go make another Lady Gaga post now)
I wouldn't worry about appropriation! I mean, think of all the long centuries when there were no women poets to read at all (besides, say, Sappho and Elizabeth Barrett Browning). For me, it's exciting to live at a time when there are so many women poets doing so many wildly varied things, and it would be wrong to say guys can't tap into that tradition now, too. You'd be the pioneers, really. Or/and, sometimes you just love what you love and that's that.
ReplyDeleteAs for the diary going public -- yeah, I think that's the movement a lot of confessional poetry (and 90s lady rock?) makes. My own tastes want a transformation to happen when a piece of diary-text becomes a "poem," but I think there's a political act in there no matter what (and I spose it depends on what kind of diary you keep).
It wasn't that long ago when women's feelings were considered a straight-up mystery. I'm taking a class called "Modernity, Sexuality, and Women's Consciousness in British Fiction, 1890-1940" right now, and let me tell you, just one century ago, women's most salient collective characteristic was "enigmatic." Maybe that's still true. But the writing I consider feminist shatters the enigma and puts something in its place that was unimaginable before -- whether that's Plath's dark humor, or someone else's startling candor, or a gurlesque poet's in-yr-face frill.
i just like the part of this quote where it says "into something more like action." YEAH! action is where it's AT.
ReplyDelete