Zine Friendship

Page 9 May–June 2008 Female without Fear Danielle evans Just like a girl: a manifesta! Edited by Michelle Sewell GirlChild Press http://www.girlchildpress.com 348 pages; paper, $20.00 Intheendthere’salwaysthegirlwhounderstands locksandabone-toothedcomb,theonewhocrawls under the table, cramsintothemouse-hole,theonewhogivesthe witch the wrong directions… There’s always one left, the one who cuts off her hair, tomakearope(ifthat’swhatittakes),theonewho talks the blue-belliedsalmonintocarryingheracrossthe river, the one whotakesthediamondsofhertearsandsellsthem for a good pair of boots. —Christine Hamm Just Like a Girl: A Manifesta! is an anthology dedicated to women like those in Hamm’s poem— women who have made themselves, women who have saved themselves, women who have fashioned their own heroines out of what they’ve been given to work with. One of the striking things about an anthology inspired by girls who bend, break, and rewrite the rules is how ever-present rules are—as if everywhere one turns someone or something is explaining, for better or for worse, how to be female. It’s no accident then, that so many of the pieces in the anthology find themselves in direct dialogue with history, popular culture, and the people who have publicly and privately presented themselves as authorities on how to be a woman. Paris Hilton, the superheroines who are required to wear impossible clothing while fighting evil, the institutional forces that deny women justice and don’t meet their material or institutional needs, and the media and music that tell women too much about what’s wrong with them and not enough about what they’re doing right all come under fire. Mary Williams’s “Manual for Female Writers” is a tongue-in-cheek reminder that there’s even a set of rules for how to write “like a girl.” But the forces of popular culture are not to be dismissed as uniformly pernicious. Barbie, for example, is reimagined as an impish being who schemes to lose her confining shoes, in the spirit of Hamm’s bolder, badder fairytale heroines. The authors are ready to salvage what can be salvaged and do away with what cannot. As Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai puts it simply but eloquently in her poem, “Letter to a Young Woman in Hip Hop”: give up on anything that tells you that you are not good enough to be you. The externally imposed or dictated rules are one part of what tells girls how they are supposed be girls; the body, and its internal and external cues are another. Later in her “Manual,” Williams wryly observes that “going through puberty automatically makes you a whore.” In an essay framed as a response to the complaints of small-breasted women, Lynette Mawhinney wonders if the origin of the term “hooters” is the noise and yelling that her newly emergent breasts inspire in men. Along with the way the body marks one as female, the anthology addresses the danger to which the female body can subject one—inappropriate attention, disease, rape, incest, and other uninvited trauma. However, this is not an anthology rooted in fear. Even when dealing with the most serious of subjects, the language manages a vitality and a wary playfulness, as in Trina Porte’s poem on what mammograms reveal of the inadequacy of women’s healthcare: would a man think his doctor competent if he needed metal markers to find his balls again Or in Ashkari’s updated womanist manifesto: “I believe more women should tell men their penises are big, so men can stop trying top prove it with their fists; and or lyrics.” This anthology addresses the danger to which the female body can subject one—but is not rooted in fear. The “danger” inherent in femaleness is obviously double sided. Many of the protagonists of the works in this anthology are skilled in the art of revenge , from falsely “confessing” the illicit behavior of an overzealous nun, to reporting the bad behavior of a mother’s philandering boyfriend on a popular radio show, to driving off an abusive stepparent with a shotgun. But power here goes beyond the refusal to be a victim— whether of violence, exploitation, or overregulation. The ultimate power is to be joyful, to demand...