Not anti-feminist at all, but also not: my body, myself

With titles like Scoo Boy, Skittles, Mustard, Sugar Smacks, and The Young Lady Who Fell From a Star, I can tell these women are smiling (or sneering) as they write. Their fiction is often irreverent toward the very issues women are concerned with, their styles and forms are at times quirky, droll, jocular, frisky, ironic, but still their fictions carry weight and power. And what do they write about? People who make life decisions by playing board games, male impotence therapy groups run by women counselors, an obese woman paying nickels and quarters for attention from teenage girls, a deranged hair stylist and her disloyal dog, a surreal landscape constantly producing the body of a woman's mother, a TV drama happening in front of the neighbor's television screen. Yet none of these are comedy, none written for laughs alone, the point not, in self defense, to turn laughter at a women's concerns into laughter with a woman. The debris of life can be funny, especially when, as writers, we're the ones in control. But irreverence is not mere dismissal nor a designation of insignificance. Maybe women are simply no longer afraid to honestly assess and define themselves without having to live up to standards imposed by either a persistent patriarchal world or the insistence that we achieve self-empowerment.

Alt-X