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Sep. 13th, 2017 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsJuliet Takes a Breath was our book club book for the month of August. I am glad for the existence of this book in the world and I am glad I read it, and with that said my experience of reading it was largely one of OVERWHELMING CONTACT EMBARRASSMENT.
Juliet Takes a Breath is the coming-of-age story of Juliet Milagros Palante, a young Puerto Rican lesbian from the Bronx who's spending the summer of 2002 interning in Portland, Oregon! with international feminist sensation Harlowe Brisbane! author of "Raging Flower," a book about VAGINA POWER!
Unsurprisingly, pretty much every time Harlowe Brisbane spoke a sentence I wanted to retract my head all the way back inside my nonexistent turtle shell until a million years had passed and womyn power white lady feminism was a thing that could be discussed with distant scholarly complacency, like galvanism or the Cathar heresy. This is completely expected and indeed clearly intended by the book, but nonetheless, OH LORD.
Anyway, not everything is Harlowe Brisbane being exactly the way you'd expect; a great deal of the book is Juliet dealing with a wide range of family reactions to her coming-out (the width of the range in particular is really good!), and Learning New Vocabularies, and finding comfortable queer POC spaces, and attending lectures about intersectional solidarity in the wake of 9/11, and making romantic gay teen mixtapes full of Ani DiFranco songs! But oh, lord. At least one book club member said it rang extremely true to their experience and memories of Portland in 2002. Myself, in 2002 I was nowhere near Portland nor any of the Cool Yet Problematique gay spaces that Rivera is writing about here and it's PROBABLY just as well, but it does seem quite likely to me that walking around Portland in 2002 was a lot like walking around a physical manifestation of certain bits of tumblr, and that is indeed the sense I got of it from this book.
[a sidenote: the acknowledgments in the back include pointed thanks and reference to the time that the author spent with Inga Muscio, author of 'Cunt: A Declaration of Independence.' I'm not necessarily saying this book was a callout post, but .... anyway Inga Muscio also cheerfully blurbed the book on the front so it seems there were no hard feelings on her part and all is well.]
Juliet Takes a Breath is the coming-of-age story of Juliet Milagros Palante, a young Puerto Rican lesbian from the Bronx who's spending the summer of 2002 interning in Portland, Oregon! with international feminist sensation Harlowe Brisbane! author of "Raging Flower," a book about VAGINA POWER!
Unsurprisingly, pretty much every time Harlowe Brisbane spoke a sentence I wanted to retract my head all the way back inside my nonexistent turtle shell until a million years had passed and womyn power white lady feminism was a thing that could be discussed with distant scholarly complacency, like galvanism or the Cathar heresy. This is completely expected and indeed clearly intended by the book, but nonetheless, OH LORD.
Anyway, not everything is Harlowe Brisbane being exactly the way you'd expect; a great deal of the book is Juliet dealing with a wide range of family reactions to her coming-out (the width of the range in particular is really good!), and Learning New Vocabularies, and finding comfortable queer POC spaces, and attending lectures about intersectional solidarity in the wake of 9/11, and making romantic gay teen mixtapes full of Ani DiFranco songs! But oh, lord. At least one book club member said it rang extremely true to their experience and memories of Portland in 2002. Myself, in 2002 I was nowhere near Portland nor any of the Cool Yet Problematique gay spaces that Rivera is writing about here and it's PROBABLY just as well, but it does seem quite likely to me that walking around Portland in 2002 was a lot like walking around a physical manifestation of certain bits of tumblr, and that is indeed the sense I got of it from this book.
[a sidenote: the acknowledgments in the back include pointed thanks and reference to the time that the author spent with Inga Muscio, author of 'Cunt: A Declaration of Independence.' I'm not necessarily saying this book was a callout post, but .... anyway Inga Muscio also cheerfully blurbed the book on the front so it seems there were no hard feelings on her part and all is well.]
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Date: 2017-09-14 04:00 am (UTC)my mind did in fact go directly to Inga Muscio and Cunt, so this was at least a satisfying scroll-down experience.
edit: Wait, I need to talk more about Cunt. My 2010 goodreads status updates complain a lot about vague goddess mumbo-jumbo, which I actually do not remember anything about. What I do mainly remember about Cunt was Muscio's section on PMS, which began with stating that she had been told many times that PMS was all in her head and not real. I personally had never encountered this particular line before, but okay, it's a pretty standard attitude to Hysterical Woman Stuff. She then went on to talk about how much negativity and stigma surrounds menstruation in our culture. Sounds right. But then, she actually learned to love and respect her period! Cool! AND JUST LIKE THAT, HER TERRIBLE CHRONIC PMS WENT AWAY, WAIT A GODDAMNT SECOND INGA MUSCIO DID YOU JUST REBUT THE SEXIST ARGUMENT THAT PMS WAS ALL IN YOUR HEAD BY TELLING AN EMPOWERING TALE OF HOW YOU DEFEATED PMS WITH THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING????????????!!!!!!!!?????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?@!
ARGH
So anyway Inga Muscio seems like a nice enough lady and capable of change (the original edition is obviously wildly cissexist but a hefty afterword in the edition I read makes a pretty good start at acknowledging these flaws) but also jesus christ it is tragically hilarious a QWOC feminist had to write an entire YA book subtweeting her.
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Date: 2017-09-14 05:16 am (UTC)Inga MuscioHarlowe Brisbane is like "LOVE YOUR PERIOD, let's CELEBRATE THIS TIME" and poor Juliet is like "yes but I just, I just would like a tampon please?"And right? RIGHT. I think my favorite part is that in 2005, Inga Muscio then goes on to write "'Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil: My Life and Times in a Racist Imperialist Society,' which examines and critiques white privilege, racism, colonialism among other issues," quoth Wikipedia.
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Date: 2017-09-14 05:21 am (UTC)Oh, Inga.
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Date: 2017-09-14 01:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-14 09:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-14 10:36 pm (UTC)"Sure, there were women's magazines. There were even feminist women's magazines. But there were no magazines for us."
.....
"Feminism is about men and women being equal..."
"No. Feminism is about women doing whatever they want."
It's broad comedy with a few good zingers per episode; it feels like it gets a few things really right, like the conflation of a certain Etsy aesthetic with the tenets of feminism, the insularity and rationalizing common to any media property catering to a particular subculture, and a particular way feminist groups have dysfunctional intra-group and multigroup conflict.
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Date: 2017-09-14 01:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-14 03:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-15 07:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-14 04:01 am (UTC)I am impressed.
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Date: 2017-09-14 05:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-14 11:10 am (UTC)And my impression is that I would run one-eighty away from that title, thank you.
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Date: 2017-09-14 05:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-14 05:27 am (UTC)may I link?
Date: 2017-09-14 01:08 pm (UTC)Re: may I link?
Date: 2017-09-14 09:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-15 12:59 am (UTC)So basically: I kind of want to read this book? But I think the contact embarassment plus the memories of contact embarrassments past might KILL ME.
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Date: 2017-09-15 03:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-15 12:50 pm (UTC)The culture Juliet discovers and affirms was pretty toxic for *me* in my first half of college, both in the kind of people I met there (the characters in the Miami chapter(s) are probably the closest textual depiction I've ever read of them – the things they talk about, how they speak) and the kind of person I found myself becoming, and this book was cathartic in that I kind of... forgave?... that culture, finally. The book is good about portraying how exactly that same environment is really affirming and coming-home-y to someone else.
Also, it was cool that Juliet is someone who was genuinely affected by Harlowe's book – I feel like I've never met someone who finds that kind of stuff valuable (because strong social bubble and generational stuff, probably) and it's kind of touching to be reminded that this DID resonate with and affect lots of people. I'm glad about that.
Aside from the hippie spirituality, the culture described is bizarrely identical to 'mainstream' college queer culture I found in 2014 – did very little change in the twelve year gap (that would surprise me, queer culture in America strikes me as very rapidly evolving) or were people having the same conversations about intersectionality / genderqueerness in 2002, beat for beat?
I did get an annoyed jolt re: Every POC Person Is Educated About Race And Not Racist In This Book (And White People Will Fundamentally Never Get It) around the time Kira The Librarian said she was half Asian just in time show solidarity about racism and share her microaggressions. I mean... minor point, definitely personal, but the majority of racism I've witnessed in my life has come from Asian, and I'm super jaded about 'black, Latinx, Asian people welcome! no white people!' events as a safe space of any sort re: racism, especially when in my personal experience the 'we don't police biracial people's presence here' is conditional on said biracial people not disagreeing with the community leaders. I MEAN. AS I SAID. THIS EXACT COMMUNITY WAS A TOXIC PLACE FOR ME.
Also, really good emotional insights about agency and reconciliation being thrown around throughout!
I should probably reread this book in ten years and see how it strikes me, after a decade of evolution for both me and the queer community I still have a ton of second degree connections to.
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Date: 2017-09-15 10:15 pm (UTC)I had the same reaction you did, surprised by how contemporary the conversations felt and wondering if it could possibly have been the same -- like, I sure wasn't having these conversations in 2002, if you'd asked me what my pronouns were I would have blinked in exactly the same confusion as Juliet. But the person in the room who was there at the time and part of the scene said that, yes, it was like that, so maybe it's just taken 15 years for those conversations to thoroughly permeate outwards with the spread of the internet.
I also noted the book's trend of Every POC Person Is Thoroughly Woke but also felt like it is probably not my job to say how well that does or doesn't work as a white* person.
*-esque
I was sort of charmed by some of the really wish-fulfillment elements thrown in to temper the more difficult stuff, like, Kira is just SO PERFECT as a temporary summer girlfriend, perfect in every way, and it's kind of adorable!
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Date: 2017-09-16 01:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-17 01:53 pm (UTC)