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Juliet 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.]

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international feminist sensation Harlowe Brisbane! author of "Raging Flower," a book about VAGINA POWER!

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.

Edited (cunts still run the world) 2017-09-14 04:17 (UTC)

Defeating PMS with the power of positive thinking and masturbation is in the book!! ~~Inga Muscio~~ Harlowe 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.

BUT IF YOU CAN DEFEAT IT WITH THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING THEN YOU'RE ADMITTING THAT IT WAS IN FACT IN YOUR HEAD, INGA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh, Inga.

Incidentally, did you ever see the web comedy miniseries Vag Magazine?

No, I don't think I've ever heard of it! What is it?

It's a six-episode web video comedy, so, about 30 minutes total. The eponymous magazine is a third-wave feminist quarterly magazine. The series satirizes a certain kind of white feminist media culture. To quote their description, "Meghan (the lone holdover from fashion magazine Gemma, which the Vag founders bought out with the proceeds from their Etsy shop)" is the point of view character. Kate McKinnon's one of the stars. A chunk from the first episode:

"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.

Isn't that also the book where she intentionally miscarries with the power of her mind?

And coexists in an intentional, mutually peaceful state with the cockroaches in her apartment? Unless that's Blue Eyed Devil.

I very much do not remember this AT ALL (but it's possible).