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[booklog 2005]
Nov. 25th, 2005 11:39 pm74. Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, & Literature, Dorothy Allison. almost entirely powerful, amazing writing, the first and last few essays especially. about class, gender, sexuality, writing, about learning how to tell the truth, about living with and through terror and shame of many kinds and coming out the other side, about remaking the world. about family and community, about that sense of home and belonging and the ways in which it can make us strong and rip us right apart, be our hearts and our roots but still allow such betrayals.
i got bogged down in some of the essays more concerned with second-wave feminism and what she dealt with as being first a part of that community and then her ostracism from it (for being anti-censorship, into S/M, butch/femme, for not being anti-pornography, etc)...i suppose it's a very good thing that at least in my life i haven't seen much of that particular ostracism, that the world has changed some, in ways that help heal that rift. but it's worth reading, to me, even if some bits seem more foreign to me ("Public Silence, Private Terror" was a good one) -- many of the essays poke at my brain in ways that it needs to be poked at. and, as always, there's her sharp humor woven through it; "The Theory and Practice of the Strap-on Dildo" made me laugh out loud in the bookstore.
i got bogged down in some of the essays more concerned with second-wave feminism and what she dealt with as being first a part of that community and then her ostracism from it (for being anti-censorship, into S/M, butch/femme, for not being anti-pornography, etc)...i suppose it's a very good thing that at least in my life i haven't seen much of that particular ostracism, that the world has changed some, in ways that help heal that rift. but it's worth reading, to me, even if some bits seem more foreign to me ("Public Silence, Private Terror" was a good one) -- many of the essays poke at my brain in ways that it needs to be poked at. and, as always, there's her sharp humor woven through it; "The Theory and Practice of the Strap-on Dildo" made me laugh out loud in the bookstore.
