Chick Lit: Postfeminist Fiction.Cris Mazza, co-editor of Chick Lit: Postfeminist Fiction and Chick Lit 2: No Chick Vics, says in the Introduction to the first of these works that she intended the label "postfeminist" almost as a joke, an icebreaker icebreaker, ship of special hull design and wide beam, with relatively flat bottom, designed to force its way through ice. When the icebreaker charges into the ice at full speed, its sharply inclined bow, meeting the edge of the ice, rises upon it, and the weight of . Going on to provide some descriptive criteria for the term, initially she defines postfeminist fiction by what it is not. Among these "nots" are stories in which the writer or protagonist laments: "my lover left me and I am so sad," "what's happened to me is deadly serious," or "society has given me an eating disorder/poor self-esteem/a victim's perpetual fear." While the back cover of Chick Lit states that it aims to "contradict the myth that women don't write experimental fiction," this goal seems secondary. For one thing, we already know they do; women writers from Woolf to Acker have been instrumental in defining new literary movements in this century. Instead, the question at hand seems to be whether much contemporary "experimental" fiction can legitimately be called feminist, a question that has, of course, prompted debate around Acker's work for the past two decades. What the editors of Chick Lit have done is to abandon such no-win debates, to jump ship and, like the founders of a religion, establish a new world order in which feminism is passe pas·sé adj. 1. No longer current or in fashion; out-of-date. 2. Past the prime; faded or aged. [French, past participle of passer, to pass, from Old French; see and "postfeminism" is hip. This leaves the reader to decide whether writing that doesn't whine must indeed fall outside the realm of feminism, and also surely begs the question: Whose feminism are we talking about anyway? The good news is, the twenty-two authors in Chick Lit, and the eighteen in Chick Lit 2, encompass such a wide range of voices that it is impossible to classify them - except perhaps to say that there are none I can think of that wouldn't fall within somebody's definition of feminism. Dont't get me wrong: this project, which might aptly be subtitled The Nightmare of a Common Language, slams forty additional nails into the coffin of that dogmatic and constricting beast popularly known twenty-five years ago as "women's truth," offering instead multiple truths, often from the mouths of unabashed liars. The stories in both anthologies are, as Mazza promises, quirky, droll droll adj. droll·er, droll·est Amusingly odd or whimsically comical. n. Archaic A buffoon. [French drôle, buffoon, droll, from Old French drolle , and jocular joc·u·lar adj. 1. Characterized by joking. 2. Given to joking. [Latin iocul , but they are also erotic, angry, floundering, nostalgic, courageous, and poignant. They mark a momentous occasion not because they close the door on victimhood or feminism, but because they are among the most inclusive compilations of fiction by contemporary American women. Interestingly, the four most powerful stories in Chick Lit are not the most "experimental," but instead arise from the familiar tropes of mother-daughter relationships, the devastation of violence, and the perils of psychotherapy - albeit, like everything in Chick Lit, therapy of an unconventional sort. "Rescue Fantasies," by Laurie Foos, is comprised of surreal snippets in which a woman pursues her suicidal mother across both a brutal natural landscape and a horrifically banal suburban one, time eternally running out before her. "Stage Fright," by Lisa Natalie Pearson, slowly reveals a disturbingly "invited" act of sexual violence through the day-to-day lives of a man and woman performing for a lonely neighbor who watches their television - and them - through the window across the way. "Up There," by Lily James, depicts a men's impotence group run by a female therapist, in which macho posturing is stripped bare, simultaneously robbing the cult of the cock of its power and shedding an uncomfortably sympathetic light on the misogynist mi·sog·y·nist n. One who hates women. adj. Of or characterized by a hatred of women. Noun 1. misogynist - a misanthrope who dislikes women in particular woman hater group members, who are unable to integrate sexuality with the rest of their humanity. Finally, "A??I," by Thalia Field, is a tour de force through the mind of a client in the midst Adv. 1. in the midst - the middle or central part or point; "in the midst of the forest"; "could he walk out in the midst of his piece?" midmost of a tense and nearly wordless therapy hour, where silence has become her only weapon, the only possible route to an urgently needed moment of intimacy via nonverbal connection. This is ground we know well, but it is captured here with the wit, bravado, and healthy dose of perversion that it takes finally to solidify a new, more irreverent era. Perhaps this is why the only story in the first anthology to stand out like Andrea Dworkin in a leather bar is Peggy Shinner's "Our Bodies Spoke in Tongues," a 1970s-styled piece of deadly earnest lesbian erotica erotica - pornography that seems to have taken the wrong turn in New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. and ended up here instead of alongside Adrienne Rich's "Twenty-One Love Poems" two generations ago. Chick Lit 2 is, overall, even more sure-footed than the first anthology, while continuing along similar themes. There are again two stellar psychotherapy pieces. The more poetic of the two, "The Many Tenses of Waiting," by Rikki Ducornet, hauntingly chronicles the last chance of a sensual but frigid woman who turns to a new psychiatrist to help her fulfill her lifelong quest for the perfect union of sex and love. Cynical of the therapy culture into which she's been indoctrinated, she can only confide in a man who will not "bludgeon me with terminology, demand that I worship in the Holy Temple of Freud, look for the goddess within, mother me, seduce me - or allow me to seduce you." Her plea is one for salvation through severing "the knot of my perplexed (my perpetual) infancy," her final hope to "help you rob my own grave so that I may steal away with my own intrinsic capacity to be someone." Ducornet provides a central character who is anything but a "neat" symbol of contemporary American or Middle-Eastern femininity; numbed by childhood guilts and betrayals in Babylon, and suffering from jaded ennui in post-sexual-revolution New York City, the narrator NARRATOR. A pleader who draws narrs serviens narrator, a sergeant at law. Fleta, 1. 2, c. 37. Obsolete. can experience no arousal, and feels pain only over her inability to feel. A grittier shrink story, "from Loving Dora," by Lidia Yuknavitch, is an Ackerean piece of hysterical prose that redefines both the literary study of Freud's "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" and the l'ecriture feminine revisions by theorists like Helene Cixous. Full of chilling maxims - "I cut therefore I am," "Illness is the most useful form of love," and "hysteria is an occasion for sexual excitement" - the unflinchingly unsentimental Dora asks us, "[w]hat else is sixteen but pure excess?...I mean, you want to live life on the edge, right? You want to take the order of things and abandon it, replace it with pain and risk." She hangs out at one of Seattle's seedier underage clubs; her friends are pierced, tattooed, and dying of AIDS; she's got scars on her stomach; she sucks the nipples of her father's mistress because the older woman is "tired of being made love to like Emma Bovary"; she thinks Freud's "j'appelle un chat un chat" is "the fucking funniest thing she has ever heard in her life." Horny horn·y adj. 1. Made of horn or a similar substance. 2. Tough and calloused, as of skin. , needy, edgy, and wise, Yuknavitch's Dora highlights the very question inherent in the anthology: What constitutes victimhood and what constitutes choice? The lines between complicity and violation blur as they so often do in life. Such pieces are welcome exceptions to the editors' agenda of excluding "victims" from Chick Lit 2. The editors' real concern is to demand that stories be more than mouthpieces for New Age inner-child healing or feminist anger at patriarchy. Victimhood does not preclude collaboration, abuse does not preclude desire. What constitutes a victim is contingent. Christal McDougall's "An Ad for Murder" could, after all, be accused of falling back on the old Freudian standby of the oppressive mother, rather than liberating us from the feminist cliche of the abusive father. Here we must ask why having a judgmental judg·men·tal adj. 1. Of, relating to, or dependent on judgment: a judgmental error. 2. Inclined to make judgments, especially moral or personal ones: , cold mother is insufficient to render one a victim, but having been abused by a man does grant (or condemn) one to victim status. Yet these "lapses" are strengths: they show the messiness, the permeability of boundaries, definitions, experience, and perception - which is what these anthologies are all about. sBetter Sensualchicksonline Ru Product Topsellers Cfm Format Cds Sensual Chicks Online Chick Lit: Postfeminist Fiction. - Free Online Libraryp r Sensual Chicks Online Single n Sensual Chicks Online Sensual Chicks Online lBetter Sensualchicksonline Ru Product Topsellers Cfm Format Cds Sensual Chicks Online Chick Lit: Postfeminist Fiction. - Free Online Libraryd u Girl x x Sexual Sensual Sensual Chicks Online |