My life in books

Jill Lepore’s The Secret Life of Wonder Woman isn’t about Wonder Woman, so much as it is about the way that she became not just the perfect realisation of the lives and passions of the incredible group of people who were involved in the lives of her creators, but the crystalisation of the early suffragist, feminist, and to some degree socialist views of a generation of women and men who fought for women’s rights. Where Wonder Woman is Amazonian royalty, her creators were influenced by some of the fiercest voices for women,’s equality, suffrage, reproductive rights, and sexual freedom that existed during the early years of the 1900s. Where Wonder Woman fought for truth, one of her creators spent much of his professional life studying how to determine truth from deception in criminal cases, and determine the reliability of testimony in court.

Four people may be said to have taken a hand in creating the crucible in which Wonder Woman, the symbol of female power - who wears bracelets of iron to remind her and all Amazons that giving oneself into the power of a man means giving oneself into slavery - was shaped.

These four people, three women and one man, lived their own secret lives, and it was from their common experiences, beliefs, and philosophies that the idea of Wonder Woman took form. The feminist hero was a collaborative effort between William Moulton Marston and his three partners, Elizabeth Holloway, Olive Byrne, and Marjorie Huntley, all feminists, suffragists and free love radicals like himself - a polyamorous family collective.

Marsdon was a professor of philosophy and psychology, the two fields not being seen as particularly different at the time, who focused on the psychology and physiology of emotion, observation, and deception in his research. He was, with much input from his long-time partner and colleague, the inventor of the lie detector machine.

Something else he shared with his partner Elizabeth Holloway was a lifelong commitment to feminism, whom he met when they were both in grade school. Neither seems to have ever thought seriously about a future without the other, though both were often to be found in circles that approved of female emancipation and free love. Holloway, like Marsden, spent much of her early adult life in study, beginning her university education at Mount Holyoke, a hotbed of feminism and suffragette agitation, and earning both an MA from Radcyffe and a law degree.

Olive Byrne, who lived with the family in the role of nanny to the Marsdon children - hers and Holloway’s - was the one with the strongest ties to radical feminism. Her mother, Ethyl Byrne, sister of Margaret Sanger, was a suffragist, birth control advocate and socialist, who nearly died in prison in a well publicised hunger strike. Even when Sanger compromised with eugenicists and conservatives to get her arguments for birth control mainstreamed, Byrne remained a free love radical socialist, and Olive had much of her uncompromising spirit. Olive met Marsdon, several years her senior, when she took a course in experimental psychology with him at Tutfs, where she was majoring in English. She later became his research assistant and at some point his lover.

Marjorie Huntley was perhaps the most open-minded of the household, and more of an intermittent member of the household, the eccentric aunt who wanders off but keeps her home base with the rest of the family. Through Huntley’s radical and mystical ideas and connections, Marsdon, Holoway and Byrne became involved in a new age mix of feminism, bondage, free love and theosophy, a cult of female superiority through submission, that is frankly not particularly coherent in its principles and may have been a way for the four people involved to give themselves justification for the kind of relationships and family they wanted despite its extreme variance from not just convention, but some of the more established radical ways of organising sexual relationships currently being explored.

Marston wanted his wife and his lovers - all of them strong, intelligent women not easily manipulated - without having to work hard at it, and he wanted relationships where he could explore his interest in domination and submission. Holloway wanted Marston, but she also wanted to be both professional woman and mother in a world where one woman doing both was hard to imagine. Byrne wanted Marston, and after a childhood of insecurity, with mothers and aunts protesting and organising, being in prison, politically active, and dropping Olive off wherever someone could take care of her, wanted a committed family, and Huntley wanted lovers she could live out her unusual beliefs and bondage fantasies with. Some evidence from the letters and personal remembrances of surviving family members suggests that most if not all of them were at least open to the idea of bisexuality. With Marsdon as the nexus, they created an intentional family.

Despite his credentials, intelligence and charisma, Marsdon was the sort of person who was constantly getting involved in situations that seemed at best not well thought-out or unreasonably self-promoting and at worst vaguely unethical. Instead of rising in the ranks of academia, he slowly dropped, and soon was unable to keep a professional appointment. He tried and failed in a number of business ventures. Ultimately, he proved utterly incapable of supporting his family in any normal occupation. The household of three, sometimes four adults, and four children, was primarily supported by Holloway, with occasional lecturing fees from Marston and some money from Byrne’s writing as a regular contributor to Family Circle. The family made up its own amusements, many of which involved writing and drawing of comics - then in their infancy - by the children.

As Lepore describes the household at this point, “The kids read the comics. Holloway earned the money. Huntley burned incense in the attic. Olive took care of everyone, stealing time to write for Family Circle. And William Moulton Marston, the last of the Moultons of Moulton Castle, the lie detector who declared feminine rule a fact, was petted and indulged. He’d fume and he’d storm and he’d holler, and the women would whisper to the children, ‘It’s best to ignore him.’ “

In 1938, Olive Byrne’s brother, Jack Burns, who had been working in pulp publishing (and tried but failed to get Marsden an ‘in’ to pulp fiction writing), started a comics line that featured strong women like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and Amazonia of the North in his new product, Fiction House’s Jumbo Comics. Superman and Batman had become icons for Maxwell Charles Gaines’ comic lines, but no one else was writing female heroes. As comics became more popular, the also received criticism for their violence and sexuality and its effect on children. After Olive Byrne wrote one of her ‘ask the psychiatrist’ articles for Family Circle in which Marsden was strongly approving of comics as long as they never showed successful murder or torture - trust bondage enthusiast Marsden to approve of stories of women tied up but rescued before anything bad can happen - Gaines hired him as a consultant. And Marsden convinced Gaines to introduce a new superhero - and thus, after development work in the Marsden household and the DC comics offices, Wonder Woman was born. Marsden wrote the story, and handed it over with the warning that none of the feminism was to be altered. It wasn’t, though there was opposition from many corners during the comic’s early years. Wonder Woman was a popular success, but its enemies were powerful, and there were many people, including some of those who later worked for Gaines at DC Comics after Marston contracted polio and became less able to be involved in the production of the comic, who rejected not just the comics in general, with their violence and crime, but Wonder Woman’s obvious feminism and rejection of traditional female roles.

And what about the bondage? At one level, they were using a visual language of woman in chains familiar to anyone who had lived through the era of women’s suffrage and extending it to include all women’s struggles. They were also putting into images their own family mythologies about the need for women to submit in order to gain full superiority. And they were playing out their family dynamics in public.

The Marsden family was a unique environment from which a genre-changing comic emerged, but there’s no hiding the strange dynamics and ethical choices here - and I’m not talking about either polyamory or bondage. First, there’s the obsession with lie detection, which strikes me as a consequence of the hidden lives and connections among these four people. Then, there’s the overwhelming focus on self promotion, and promotion of Marsden’s projects. And the utter lack of professional ethics. Holloway advances Marsden’s chances to write for the Encyclopedia Britannica without disclosing their relationship; Olive praises his psychiatric gifts and his projects without disclosure either, and even - before it’s known that he created Wonder Woman - solicits his advice to concerned parents about comic for their kids. Their authorial interrelationships are intricate, covert, and unethical.

And, yet, for all their flaws, these four people encapsulated a generation’s need for change, for freedom, for women’s independence and created a feminist icon that still resonates today, despite all attempts to diminish it.

In How Sex Changed: A History of Transexuality in the United States, Joanne Meyerowitz defines transexuality as well as a once used but now outdated term, transexualism, as “conditions in which people hope to change the bodily characteristics of sex. (The terms apply whether or not the individual has undergone surgery.)” She goes on to say that, in modern usage, “transsexuals are a subset of ‘transgendered’ people, an umbrella term used for those with various forms and degrees of crossgender practices and identiacations. ‘Transgendered’ includes, among others, some people who identify as ‘butch’ or masculine lesbians, as ‘fairies,’ ‘queens,’ or feminine gay men, and as heterosexual crossdressers as well as those who identify as transsexual. The categories are not hermetically sealed, and to a certain extent the boundaries are permeable.” (This book was published in 2002; since then, the term ‘transgendered’ has fallen out of usage, to be replaced by transgender, or simply, trans. In discussing the book, I will use some of the terms that Meyerowitz uses, such as transsexual defined specifically as a trans person who has had, or is seeking, medical intervention toward gender confirmation. I will avoid other terms which in my opinion are now too outdated to be respectful of trans experience, or which define a trans person solely by their type of transition, which Meyerowitz does throughout the book. Readers are therefore cautioned that they may find the terminology is this book to be reductive, outdated, or even traumatic.)

Thus, the book focuses on a particular subset of trans individuals, specifically, those who feel that some degree of medical intervention or body modification is part of satisfying their personal sense of their gender identity. It looks at the history of expression and fulfillment of this desire in the North American context - those who have sought to ‘change their sex,’ and those who have provided, or sometimes withheld, that process.

There have always been people who did not feel that the gender assigned to them based on their physical sexual anatomy was who they really were; in some cultures, there have been acceptable social avenues for them to take on the gender they identified as, in others, some have simply lived in discomfort, or found individual ways to ‘pass’ as their true gender. But it has only been in the past hundred years that the idea of devising surgical procedures that could give a person at least a semblance of functioning sexual organs that matched their gender identity has been part of the conversation, and only in the past 50 or so that the techniques have become relatively available to most of those seeking a physical change.

Meyerowitz notes: “ ‘transsexualism,’ defined in part by the request for surgical sex change, did not appear as a medical category until the late 1940s and early 1950s, when doctors David O. Cauldwell and Harry Benjamin first coined and publicized the English term transsexual and when Christine Jorgensen first appeared in the press.

But the concepts of ‘sex change’ and ‘sex-change surgery’ existed well before the word transsexual entered the medical parlance. In the early twentieth century European scientists began to undertake experiments on ‘sex transformation,’ first on animals and then on humans.”

Much of the early European research and experimentation into what is now referred to as gender confirmation surgery took place in Germany, home of such leading researchers into the psychology and physiology of sex as Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, but this research was abruptly halted when the Nazi party came into power. Still, many individuals had by this time received various kinds of surgical treatment intended to remove unwanted sexual organs and in some cases, create functional vaginas for transexual women.

Many of these techniques had already existed for some time - it was the use of these techniques to help transgender individuals that was new. “Sex-change surgery, then, did not take root when and where it did because of new or unusual medical technology. It took root in part because Germany had a vocal campaign for sexual emancipation. In Berlin, Hirschfeld and others worked to remove the legal and medical obstacles to sexual and gender variance, to enable homosexuals, crossdressers, and those who hoped to change their sex to live their lives as they chose.”

However, while the awareness of surgical possibilities became part of the American sexological landscape, beginning in the early 1930s, most American physicians did not offer the procedures, despite a large number of individuals seeking such surgery. In a few cases, sympathetic surgeons were warned that surgery to remove healthy organs was illegal and could result in serious ramifications if they attempted such procedures.

Meyerowitz devotes several chapters to accounts of early transsexuals whose stories were extensively covered in the media - such women as Christine Jorgensen, Charlotte MacLeod, and Tamara Rees - noting how these stories made the public - including other transgender people who might otherwise have thought themselves alone, the only person with such feelings - aware of trans people and the possibilities of gender confirmation surgery. Unfortunately, publicity did little to distinguish between transvestites and transexuals, or transsexuals and intersex persons seeking surgery to establish their chosen biological sex, nor did it affect the prevailing notion that transsexual women were more akin to gay men than cisgender women. And curiously, there was little interest in the stories of trans men. In fact, most physicians who provided care for trans people believed that trans men were rare, perhaps as few as 10 percent of trans individuals, and some questioned “whether there should be such a diagnosis as ‘transsexualism’ for females.”

Meyerowitz also discusses the development of better surgical techniques over time. Since surgeons mostly saw trans women in their practices, techniques in vaginal construction were a major point of concern. Trans women, however first had to find doctors willing to remove the penis and testicles. This was a major roadblock for some time. Some trans women were so determined to receive confirmation surgery that they attempted to remove their own penes and testicles, leaving doctors with no choice but to complete the desired surgeries. Trans men were less likely to seek out surgery in the early years, perhaps because hormone treatments were sufficient to help most achieve a body they could feel somewhat comfortable in, and phalloplasty techniques at the time were notoriously unsatisfactory. Trans men did seek out mastectomies and hysterectomies, but the reluctance to remove healthy, but unwanted, organs made these surgeries difficult to obtain.

The media focus on transsexuals also brought about a debate, in both the public and professional spheres, over the nature of sex and gender. Among the European sexologists who pioneered gender confirmation surgery, the predominant concept of biological sex was of a universal bisexuality, with individuals located on a spectrum. The transsexual person simply moved along the spectrum, bringing out more if the characteristics associated with the other end of the spectrum. This concept, however, was not common in America, nor did it find much acceptance when proposed.

What came to predominate, and to influence future thinking about sexual identity, was the idea of a psychological sex that was distinct from, though usually in accord with, biological sex. This was the ‘invention’ of gender as a concept.

“In the first half of the twentieth century the theory of human bisexuality had, for some doctors and scientists, redefined sex and legitimated sex-reassignment surgery; in the second half of the century a theory of immutable gender identity came to replace it. In the 1940s and afterward, scientists who studied intersexuality adopted the concept of a deeply rooted sense of “psychological sex.” Some of them suggested that hormones or genes created psychological sex, but others considered it conditioned, imprinted, or learned. In any case, they claimed that no one could change an adult’s psychological sex. Once established, they asserted, the sense of being a man or a woman remained armly entrenched, immune to both psychotherapeutic and medical interventions. They applied this conception of psychological sex—which they later labeled “gender role and orientation” and “gender identity”—first to people with intersexed conditions and then to transsexuals. In this view, the mind—the sense of self—was less malleable than the body.”

However, instead of bringing about an acceptance of surgical intervention to match biological sex to gender, the overall response was to promote the enforcement of rigid standards of gendered behaviour in childhood and support psychotherapy to correct apparent gender non-conforming begaviour, to ensure that the child developed the ‘right’ psychological sex by adulthood. Interestingly enough, the same attitudes prevailed among those who thought that human were to some degree bisexual, in that everyone had some characteristics of the “other” sex - firm education in appropriate gender roles was necessary to minimise the consequences of this bisexuality. Few questioned the necessity of a clear demarkation between male and female. The result was the pathologising of transsexuality as a psychiatric disorder.

Physicians were already gatekeepers, due to their power to offer or withhold available surgical procedures. Pathologising trans people further added to the adversarial relationship developing between doctors who had the technical knowledge to do the surgeries desired, and trans people who sought surgical interventions. Many doctors tried to ‘cure’ their trans clients first. Trans people tried to figure out what they had to say and do to obtain surgery. Many trans women sought to appear hyperfeminine to persuade doctors that there was no way they could live as men. Discussing sex was a dangerous topic - acknowledging desire for men, while appropriate behaviour for a straight trans woman, ran the risk of being diagnosed instead as a gay man, ineligible for surgery. For trans lesbians, the problems were even more difficult, as their sexual orientation could be read as male heterosexuality, and cause for attempting treatment rather than surgery. Many insisted they felt no sexual desire. The need to tailor their life experiences and presentation to convince doctors to approve surgery led to an assumption among doctors that trans people were inherently deceitful. And so the gatekeeping became a major obstacle in the quest of trans people to reshape their bodies to match their identities.

Adding to the problems faced by trans people seeking surgery was the confusion of the medical establishment between transsexuality, transvestitism, and homosexuality. Some felt that trans women were gay men so horrified by their homosexuality that they needed to erase it by becoming women. The debated how to distinguish true trans people from gay people or cross-dressers. Similar discussions developed in the queer community, with various groups - gay men, lesbians, drag queens, heterosexual transvestites - arguing over how trans people should be viewed. One of the difficulties her was that some people who had identified as gay men, drag queens, or butch lesbians, eventually realised that they were in fact trans women and men. Meanwhile, trans peoples’ attempts to define themselves simply as people assigned a gender that was not congruent with their identity were often ignored.

In the 1960s, one consequence of the general ‘sexual revolution’ was a relaxation of defined gender roles, and an openness toward sexual experimentation, that on the one hand, gave many young people the chance to explore androgyny and even living as another gender, and on the other, made it easier for distinct subcultures to emerge, drawing distinctions between those who were gay or lesbian with marked preferences to adopting behaviours associated with another gender, and transexuals who identified as a gender other than the one socially assigned them. Lines of demarkation grew up between those who sought gender confirmation surgeries, and those who identified as ‘fairies’ or ‘butches’. Transsexuality was at least for some distinguished from homosexuality.

Unfortunately, the medical profession was making distinctions based on the path patients had followed to an awareness of their gender identity. They tended to favour the person who had tried to live a conventional life, followed the heterosexual rules for their assigned gender, and lived lives of quiet desperation. Those who came to a desire for gender confirmation surgery through experiences as living as gay men and drag queens, who had been sexually adventurous, were often seen as poor candidates for surgery.

Another consequence of sexual freedom was the eroticisation of trans people. Pornographic images of the feminised bodies of post-surgery trans women began appearing. This was accompanied by erotic images of ‘half-men, half-women’ - trans women who had received hormone treatments and thus had both breasts and a penis. “The sexualization of MTFs went hand in hand with the legalization and commercialization of sexual expression. In this changing sexual climate, the tabloids and pulps presented their stories as less concerned with what the main-stream press dubbed ‘desperately unhappy lives’ and more concerned with titillating adventures.”

Meyerowitz records the low changes in the mainstream medical profession’s attitudes toward gender confirmation surgery, and the work of transgender activists in bringing about greater awareness and acceptance for their situation. Slowly, hospitals began to open gender identity clinics where surgeries were performed on trans men and women, starting with Johns Hopkins in 1965: “By the end of the 1970s more than a thousand transsexuals had undergone surgery at the hands of doctors based at American universities, and fifteen to twenty “major centers” conducted transsexual surgery in the United States.”

Unfortunately, demand far exceeded supply, and the doctors running these clinics set up strict conditions. Again, professional gatekeeping came between the transgender individual and their right to control their own body: “By the end of the 1960s the doctors required psychological evaluation to ascertain that patients had longstanding crossgender identiacation and no severe mental illness. The doctors also wanted patients to live as the other sex and take hormones for a number of months or years before undergoing irreversible surgery. They looked for patients with the intelligence to understand what the surgery could and could not do, and with what they considered realistic plans for the future, especially employment.” Preference was given to those whom doctors felt could most easily ‘pass’ and who presented as ‘quiet’ and highly conventional in their gender expression. Trans lesbians and gay men were unlikely to be approved.

As the availability of surgery grew, legal issues became more important, and courts were increasingly asked to rule on whether a trans person could change their birth certificates and other key documentation from their assigned gender to their true gender. Thanks to the supportive testimony of a number of doctor-advocates, a series of precedents were established where the courts did order the official change of sex on birth certificates, which was the first step to obtaining new documentation of other kinds, and offered a trans individual the ability to provide legal proof of their gender when required. However, where the courts were tending to define gender by reference to genital appearance, governments held onto older ideas and defined gender by (presumed) chromosomal composition. And even the courts provided no hope fir trans people who had not, or could not, have surgery. This was particularly onerous for trans men, for whom phalloplasty remained an unsatisfactory option lacking in both sensation and function.

As the era of liberal sexual freedom that marked the 60s and 70s began to change, Meyerowitz documents shifts in acceptance among both gays and lesbians, and feminists, toward transgender men and women. The prevailing gay culture had adopted the “cult of the macho” and rejected the drag and fairy culture that had supported trans women in transition. At the same time, lesbian culture began to see trans men as butches who were deserting the fold for a safer, moe privileged life. Feminists critiqued trans men and women as reactionaries who reinforced gender stereotypes that the women’s movement was fighting to change, and distrusted trans women who, they believed, had grown up with male privilege and could never be, culturally or psychologically, women, thus establishing the trans-exclusionary (TERF) streak in feminism which remains a problem to this day.

As the conservative 80s set in, the few legal victories trans activists had achieved were rolled back, and existing surgical clinics came under attack from both the right, with a renewed insistence that surgery enabled mental illness and that trans individuals required treatment to restore the ‘proper’ gender identity, and from the left, with a strong critique of the rigid gender roles doctors required of prospective surgical patients. But as their rights were being denied and the few gains made eroded, trans people fought back, forming advocacy organisations, building communities and working to educate both the public and the medical profession on the realities of being transgender.

As Meyerowitz says, “The rise of the transgender movement capped the century in which sex change arst became a medical specialty and transsexuals arst emerged as a visible social group. From the early twentieth-century ex- periments on changing the sex of animals to the liberationist move- ment of the 1990s, the topic of sex change had served as a key site for the deanition and redeanition of sex in popular culture, science, medi- cine, law, and daily life. In a century when others had challenged the social categories and hierarchies of class, race, and gender, the people who hoped to change their sex had brought into question another fundamental category—biological sex itself—commonly understood as obvious and unchangeable. In the modern push for self-expression, they had taken the meanings of self-transformation and social mobility to a new level, and from the margins of society, they had grappled with the everyday ways in which unconventional individuals confounded and provoked the mainstream. In the process, they had engaged with doctors, scientists, reporters, lawyers, judges, feminists, and gay libera- tionists, among others. Together, these various groups had debated big questions of medical ethics, nature and nurture, self and society, and the scope of human rights. None of them could ax the deanition of sex, which remains a topic of debate in medical journals, courtrooms, and television talk shows, and none of them could settle the question of the interconnections among sex, gender, and sexuality. Still, by the end of the twentieth century, the transgender activists could hope at least for a future in which the variations of sex and gender might no longer elicit stigma, ridicule, harassment, or assault.”

Doing some reading of bell hooks, because it’s been a long time since I read Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, and because I have a few other books by her on hand that I’ve not yet read.

Hooks’ critique of second wave, white feminism, remains as trenchant today as it was when she first wrote about it in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Her analysis of the deadly flaws of liberal feminism - its focus on individual rights and achieving equality within the existing social and economic structure - has been borne out by the stalling of real progress on eliminating sexist and other forms of oppression over the last 30 years. As she notes in this foundational work, “The lack of any emphasis on domination is consistent with the liberal feminist belief that women can achieve equality with men of their class without challenging and changing the cultural basis of group oppression. It is this belief that negates the likelihood that the potential radicalism of liberal feminism will ever be realized.”

While some of her analysis is specific to the time, so much of what she writes here is still relevant, particularly when she looks at white liberal/bourgeois feminism and its failures to embrace a struggle against all forms of domination and oppression, settling for an increased degree of social and economic equality between white women and white men.

“Many feminist radicals now know that neither a feminism that focuses on woman as an autonomous human being worthy of personal freedom nor one that focuses on the attainment of equality of opportunity with men can rid society of sexism and male domination. Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.”

Hooks unabashedly connects oppression to capitalism, demanding that feminism address the structural inequalities that come from an exploitative economic system as well as the oppressions based in gender and race. She calls for a change in values, a new conception of power that does not include domination over others, and predicts - sadly, with pinpoint accuracy - that a feminism that seeks equality for women within the existing social and economic structure is a feminism that will fail.

“Before women can work to reconstruct society we must reject the notion that obtaining power in the existing social structure will necessarily advance feminist struggle to end sexist oppression. It may allow numbers of women to gain greater material privilege, control over their destiny, and the destiny of others, all of which are important goals. It will not end male domination as a system. The suggestion that women must obtain power before they can effectively resist sexism is rooted in the false assumption that women have no power. Women, even the most oppressed among us, do exercise some power. These powers can be used to advance feminist struggle. Forms of power held by exploited and oppressed groups are described in Elizabeth Janeway's important work Powers of the Weak. One of the most significant forms of power held by the weak is ‘the refusal to accept the definition of oneself that is put forward by the powerful.’ Janeway calls this the ‘ordered use of the power to disbelieve.’ “

Hooks also looks at the relationship between domination and violence, in the context of the home and family, in social interactions, and in imperialism and war. She reminds us that violence is not inherently male, rather, that a society in which men are assumed to be dominant over women leads to male violence against women, just as other firms of domination and oppression lead to white violence against people of colour, and imperialist violence against the nations of the global south.

In the end, hooks is reaching toward the future of the feminist movement in this treatise, examining the ways in which feminist movements had taken wrong turns, and looking at what would be needed to keep feminism vital and forward-moving as an ideology and as a movement.

“To move beyond the stage of feminist rebellion, to move past the impasse that characterizes contemporary feminist movement, women must recognize the need for reorganization. Without dismissing the positive dimensions of feminist movement up to this point, we need to accept that there was never a strategy on the part of feminist organizers and participants to build mass awareness of the need for feminist movement through political education. Such a strategy is needed if feminism is to be a political movement impacting on society as a whole in a revolutionary and transformative way. We also need to face the fact that many of the dilemmas facing feminist movement today were created by bourgeois women who shaped the movement in ways that served their opportunistic class interests. We must now work to change its direction so that women of all classes can see that their interest in ending sexist oppression is served by feminist movement.”

She continues: “To build a mass-based feminist movement, we need to have a liberatory ideology that can be shared with everyone. That revolutionary ideology can be created only if the experiences of people on the margin who suffer sexist oppression and other forms of group oppression are understood, addressed, and incorporated. They must participate in feminist movement as makers of theory and as leaders of action. In past feminist practice, we have been satisfied with relying on self-appointed individuals, some of whom are more concerned about exercising authority and power than with communicating with people from various backgrounds and political perspectives. Such individuals do not choose to learn about collective female experience, but impose their own ideas and values. Leaders are needed, and should be individuals who acknowledge their relationship to the group and who are accountable to it. They should have the ability to show love and compassion, show this love through their actions, and be able to engage in successful dialogue.”

Jyn works as a stripper, and she’s very good at her job - albeit rather cynical about the nature of the business and the majority of the customers she encounters. Her real passion, however, is hunting UFOs - and finding evidence to support her theory that not only do aliens exist, and have an interest in Earth, they are actually involved in a vast biological experiment centered on mammalian reproduction. As Jyn explains it: “According to scientists, no more than 300 million years ago, one of the chromosomes in the identical X pair mutated into a male-determining gene. If this rogue chromosome was present, then the organism that carried it would be male, no matter what. Over time, that rogue chromosome altered even more, lost much of its genetic material, and became truncated. That’s where we are now. In theory, this process could go even further, and the Y chromosome could disappear entirely. In fact, this has already happened in other species. But not in humans. Or more generally, primates. Over the past 30 to 50 million years, there has been a sustained pattern of gene migration onto the Y chromosome among primates, and only primates. That’s backwards. Left to themselves, genes should migrate away from the vestigial Y chromosome.”

This is the basic conceit of Lori Selke’s The XY Conspiracy, a short novel published as part of Aqueduct Press’ feminist-focused Conversation Pieces series.

When Jyn notices that she’s being observed by someone with a strong resemblance to the Men In Black familiar to every UFO enthusiast, she decides it’s time to make herself hard to find. Packing her research notes and her working clothes into her car, she hits the road, travelling from the location of one important UFO sighting to another, pausing along the way to earn money at strip clubs from Seattle to Montana, looking fir clues to support her theory. Meanwhile, her friend Dina is researching online, sending her articles about discoveries in the area of reproduction, sex and gender.

It’s an interesting, even provocative, juxtaposition, a narrative that chronicles the environment of a professional sex worker, someone whose livelihood is based in displaying the obvious biological distinctions between sexes, and at the same time looks at scientific evidence of the fragility and perhaps even the eventual disappearance of the chromosomal basis for sexual differentiation in mammals - including man. The protagonist’s often clinical, almost anthropological commentary on the details of a stripper’s life, the clubs, the culture, the men, and the broader attitudes toward strippers and sex workers as portrayed in the media, make a strong counterpoint to her thesis that the Y chromosome, the very basis of the sexually differentiated behaviour that shapes her working environment' is alien.

The novel is open-ended. We don’t know, not for sure, whether Jyn is right or not. But the possibilities are there, waiting for a continued conversation.

In Other Lands, by Sarah Rees Brennan, is a YA portal fantasy/wizard school adventure/coming-of-age story with a difference, and it’s a difference that is quite delightful.

Elliot at 13 is a lonely, cynical, grumpy, often-bullied outsider from a broken family - absent mother, alcoholic, defeated, emotionally unavailable father - who is suddenly invited to attend a school in the Borderlands on the other side of the Wall - a magical dividing line between worlds that few can see, let alone cross. The reader doesn’t get to know much more than Elliot himself at the outset - only that there are humans living in this Borderland, they are allied with the elves, that the humans traditionally guard the border, though at first it’s not too clear what they guard against. There are two courses of study in the Border school, the war course and the council course - one trains fighters, the other, diplomats and lawmakers.

Elliot chooses the less prestigious council course, and spends most of his time complaining about the lack of everything from plumbing to pens. The time not spent studying or complaining is devoted to admiration of Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle, the first elf to attend border school, talented and brilliant, who is trying to take both the war and council courses. She has, of course, over-estimated, not her ability, but the sheer demand of time involved, and in order to help her, Elliot forms an uneasy alliance with Luke Sunborn, a handsome and apparently self-assured all-round athlete and warrior in training, scion of one of the oldest human families in the borderlands, and an example of everything that Elliot has learned to fear and despise.

Elliot is a nerd, a whiny kid, a smart-ass, and has some lessons to learn, but I couldn’t help liking him, at least in part because he is such a cranky little beast.The other part is because he’s smart, curious, loyal, and has an actual moral compass that goes beyond ‘is it a bad thing? Let’s kill it’ - which is the level at which most heroes of these kinds of fantasies function. He is a pacifist in a land that is built around war.

As the four years of his schooling pass, Elliot learns a great deal about the Borderlands and the history of the various societies - human, elven, dwarven, mermaid, and others - and how they interact. He finds himself - or to be more accurate, plunges himself - into situations where war and conflict are the immediate choice of these around him, and struggles, often successfully, to find ways to promote communication and peace. Most people - of all kinds - think he’s strange and annoying. But he persists, preventing some major interspecies conflicts through persistence and sheer gall.

In addition to having a marvelously atypical protagonist, and being a delightful send-up of the subgenres it draws inspiration from, In Other Lands also offers some interesting takes on gender roles and performance. Elven society is led by women, who are considered stronger and more warlike, while men are fragile, emotional and subject to a double standard of morality. The human society of the borderlands is more like ‘normal’ human society, where women are not quite seen as the equal of men - except in some warrior families where women are trained in the same way as their male siblings, and men and women both fight and take responsibility for home and childcare.

And it deals quite frankly and openly with sex. Teen age sex. Teen age queer sex. Part of Elliot’s coming of age journey is discovering that he is bisexual, and in the course of the story, he has sexual relationships with other young people, boys and girls. And it’s dealt with just as a normal part of growing up, which is a good thing.

Brennan has pulled a lot of different ideas and influences together in In Other Lands, and made a deeply funny, warm, enjoyable, and rather subversive adventure that both kids and adults can enjoy.

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, by law professor Dorothy Roberts, was first published in 1997, but the topic it addresses, the relationship between race and concepts of reproductive freedom, are no less fraught today than they were 20 years ago - in fact, these issues, in the era of Black Lives Matter, may be even more crucial now.

White feminism has long framed reproductive freedom as the freedom not to bear children, and advocated for access to birth control and abortion. What this fails to recognise is the ways in which reproduction for black women is a story that begins with forced rape and abduction of children during slavery, and continues through eugenicist narratives to coerced administration of birth control and forced sterilisation.

“...we need to reconsider the meaning of reproductive liberty to take into account its relationship to racial oppression. While Black women’s stories are sometimes inserted as an aside in deliberations about reproductive issues, I place them at the center of this reconstructive project. How does Black women’s experience change the current interpretation of reproductive freedom? The dominant notion of reproductive liberty is flawed in several ways. It is limited by the liberal ideals of individual autonomy and freedom from government interference; it is primarily concerned with the interests of white, middle-class women; and it is focused on the right to abortion. The full extent of many Americans’ conception of reproductive freedom is the Constitution’s protection against laws that ban abortion. I suggest an expanded and less individualistic conception of reproductive liberty that recognizes control of reproduction as a critical means of racial oppression and liberation in America. I do not deny the importance of autonomy over one’s own reproductive life, but I also recognize that reproductive policy affects the status of entire groups. Reproductive liberty must encompass more than the protection of an individual woman’s choice to end her pregnancy. It must encompass the full range of procreative activities, including the ability to bear a child, and it must acknowledge that we make reproductive decisions within a social context, including inequalities of wealth and power. Reproductive freedom is a matter of social justice, not individual choice.”

By tracing social responses to black women’s reproductive history, fertility and family choices, Roberts demonstrates the ways in which reproductive freedom has many different meanings for black women. Where white ablebodied women have in general been encouraged to have children, leading to a construction of reproductive freedom as the choice not to reproduce except on her own terms, the mass of historical and social meanings surrounding reproduction for black women leads to a far more complex formulation of what it means for them to have full autonomy over their reproduction.

Roberts begins where all narratives of black people in the Americas must begin, with the conditions of slavery. Black women were seen not only as labourers, but as the source of new slaves to add to the labour force. While systematic breeding of slaves was not common, most slaveowners were well aware of the economic benefits of black women’s fertility. Childbearing was encouraged, barrenness punished. Rape was common, both at the hands of white men, and black men chosen as mates for potentially fertile women. At the same time, black women had no rights to their children, who were legally the property of their owners. Their children might be taken from them, and sold away or rented out without any recourse. Even when their families remained intact, mothers often had little choice over the rearing of their children. As healthy slaves were required to work long hours, childrearing was often assigned to older or disabled slaves who could no longer work at hard labour.

Roberts goes on to discuss the shift in social pressures brought to bear on black women once slavery was abolished and their reproduction no longer benefits owners. The growing eugenics movement, based in a belief that a range of character traits from intelligence to moral behaviour were hereditary in nature, combined with racist constructions of black people as unintelligent, sexually promiscuous, morally lax, lazy, insubordinate, and otherwise undesirable, began to argue for limitations on reproduction among black people, as well as other “undesirable” groups. Sterilisation of both men and women in these groups, as well as limited access to prenatal and perinatal care for the poor were advocated as means of preventing the passing on of inferior genes.

“I turn to a discussion of eugenics because this way of thinking helped to shape our understanding of reproduction and permeates the promotion of contemporary policies that regulate Black women’s childbearing. Racist ideology, in turn, provided fertile soil for eugenic theories to take root and flourish. It bears remembering that in our parents’ lifetime states across the country forcibly sterilized thousands of citizens thought to be genetically inferior. America’s recent eugenic past should serve as a warning of the dangerous potential inherent in the notion that social problems are caused by reproduction and can be cured by population control.”

However, Roberts acknowledges the complexity of black attitudes toward birth control. Many black women used various forms of birth control, from abstinence to barrier methods to post-coital douching and abortion. Over the first half of the 20th century, the birth rate among black women fell to the same levels found among white women. The ambiguities result from the mixed messages for birth control. Many white birth control advocates - and some Black advocates as well - used the language of eugenics, while most black advocates talked in terms of spacing families, improving maternal health and decreasing infant mortality. At the same time, a significant number of black voices called for blacks to resist family planning as a firm of racial suicide, and indeed, to raise birth rates in order to outpace white population growth.

Roberts devotes considerable space to a discussion of the use of Norplant as a birth control method aimed at - and in some cases forced upon - poor and minority women, with particular emphasis on preventing pregnancy among unmarried teens and women on welfare. Issues ranging from unethical testing on Third World women to lack of long-term testing, to side effects, health risks and problems with implant removal, point to a ‘solution’ adopted without much thought fir the real concerns of women, as a measure to control the reproduction of the poor, and particularly women of colour. Part of the hidden coerciveness of Norplant comes from the fact that, unlike other forms of contraception, which a woman can simply decide not to use, Norplant can only be discontinued with the intervention of a medical practitioner.

“Being able to get Norplant removed quickly and easily is critical to a user’s control over reproductive decisionmaking. Yet poor and low-income women often find themselves in a predicament when they seek to have the capsules extracted. Their experience with Norplant is a telling example of how a woman’s social circumstances affect her reproductive “choices.” A woman whose insertion procedure was covered by Medicaid or private insurance may be uninsured at the time she decides to have the tubes removed. A woman who had the money to pay for implantation may be too broke to afford extraction. Some women have complained that they learned of the cost of removal—from $150 to $500—only after returning to a physician to have the implants taken out.”

Other key examples of the policing of Black women’s bodies and reproduction focused on in Roberts’ examination of race and reproductive freedom include the prosecution and incarceration of poor, and primarily black, pregnant and post-natal drug users on charges of child abuse, child neglect, and similar crimes. She shows clearly that, despite rhetoric to the contrary, the goals here are not to protect black fetuses or to fight drug abuse, rather, that the factor driving such prosecutions is the desire to control black reproduction. She also dissects the American welfare system, showing how it is designed to penalise poor black women with children. A discussion of new reproductive technologies such as IVF observes the ways in which the costs if these technologies, and the fact that they are not covered by Medicaid or many insurance plans, make them inaccessible to Black women and families who are infertile or otherwise having difficulty in having a child.

Roberts concludes her examination of race and reproduction by examining the ways in which the liberal understanding of liberty as a defense of individual choice fails to provide true social justice and equality. Modern American law and society has focused on liberty as a protection from government intervention, and ignored the potential for equality that can come from government action. To ensure equality in the area of reproduction, as in many other areas, requires a balance between liberty and equality as guiding principles. This formulation of a positive, progressive idea of liberty:

“... includes not only the negative proscription against government coercion, but also the affirmative duty of government to protect the individual’s personhood from degradation and to facilitate the processes of choice and self-determination. This approach shifts the focus of liberty theory from state nonintervention to an affirmative guarantee of personhood and autonomy. Under this postliberal doctrine, the government is not only prohibited from penalizing welfare mothers or crack-dependent women for choosing to bear children; it is also required to provide subsistence benefits, drug treatment, and medical care. Ultimately, the state should facilitate, not block, citizens’ efforts to install more just and egalitarian economic, social, and political systems.”

Kate Harding has been writing for feminist and current affairs blogs and websites, magazines and newspapers, for some time now, and has turned her public voice to an analysis of what is more and more often being recognised as “rape culture.” Her book, Asking for It - The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do About It, looks at the elements that make up rape culture in North America, and discusses ways to initiate change.

It’s written in an easy, almost conversational style, and is highly accessible in terms of explaining, and demonstrating, exactly what is meant by the term ‘rape culture.’ It’s also startlingly real. I found myself flooded with a sense of recognition, the feeling that the author had distilled my own experiences, into just about every paragraph. This is a book that will have most women who have done any thinking about the dynamics of sexual assault saying ‘yes, yes, that’s it, exactly’ all the way through.

Harding begins with a brief summation of rape culture from the perspective of by far the most typical victims, women:

“In the preamble to their 1993 anthology Transforming a Rape Culture, feminist scholars Emilie Buchwald, Pamela R. Fletcher, and Martha Roth write, ‘In a rape culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself. A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women and presents it as the norm.’ “

Continuing her discussion of rape culture, Harding presents and explodes a number of myths about rape, building again on earlier feminist thought:

“Like ‘rape culture,’ the concept of an identifiable set of ‘rape myths’first arose among feminists in the seventies, and has been refined and studied by social scientists ever since. In a 2012 paper published in Aggression and Violent Behavior, researchers Amy Grubb and Emily Turner explain, ‘Rape myths vary among societies and cultures. However, they consistently follow a pattern whereby, they blame the victim for their rape, express a disbelief in claims of rape, exonerate the perpetrator, and allude that only certain types of women are raped.’ “

First venturing into the supposedly “murky” area of consent, she points to research indicating that the common excuse that women fail to express lack of consent clearly enough is, essentially, a steaming pile of bullshit. In any other area of human interaction, men (like all other human beings) are perfectly capable of decoding polite demurrals as ‘noes’ - it’s only in the area of sexual advances that even plain statements become somehow insufficient. She also challenges the frequently expressed idea that having the obtain clear consent for each intensification of sexual activity “spoils the mood.”

Harding reminds the reader of all the things we know about rape - that it is about power, not sex; that it is a violation of a person’s autonomy and not a trivial act that means little to a sexually experience woman; that it is intentional, not accidental; that it is not something any one secretly wants; that men who rape do so because they like it and know they can get away with it; that all the advice about dressing and acting appropriately does nothing to forestall it. She talks about the ubiquity of victim-blaming and the perverse focus on how being charged and convicted of rape will affect the lives of rapists while dismissing the trauma experienced by those who are raped. She takes aim at the cultural assumption that when looking at strategies for rape prevention, it is somehow the responsibility of women to avoid rape, rather than the responsibility of men not to rape.

Harding also takes a close look at how the police and the legal and justice systems function - or far too often, don’t function - in a rape culture. She explores the myth, all too frequently held by police, that women often make false accusations of rape, and looks at how the refusal to accept and investigate sexual assault allegations as legitimate complaints allows rapists to continue committing crimes, endangering more women. As Harding notes, “The greatest challenge, though, is changing the culture. Both a law enforcement culture in which one former Philadelphia detective—­echoing Milledgeville’s Sergeant Blash—reportedly called Special Victims the “Lying Bitches Unit” and the larger society we all live in.”

She also explores the role of media - from popular music to film and television to video games - in creating snd perpetuating rape culture through the way women, sex and violence are portrayed. Including online social media in her discussion, she looks at the issue of online sexual harassment and the meanings of rape in gamer and ‘manosphere’ culture.

In her closing chapter, Harding talks about beginning to see changes in the general acceptance of rape culture, in the way more women were beginning to come forward, and the increase in conversations around the concept of enthusiastic consent, the idea that only yes means yes. The book was published in 2015, before the seachange that is #MeToo and #Time’sUp swept through the media. Each year, perhaps we put a few more cracks in the rape culture.

Kristen Roupenian, "Cat Person"; The New Yorker, December 11, 2017
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person

An all-too-familiar story about a woman meeting and becoming involved with a man, despite all the tiny warning signals that suggest she should be mire cautious. The scary thing is that it ended in a better way than I'd feared, although 'better' is perhaps not the right word.


Carmen Maria Machado, "The Husband Stitch"; Granta, October 28, 2014
https://granta.com/the-husband-stitch/

One reviewer of this short story has said "It’s a horror story in which the monster is heterosexual relationship", which seems to me as accurate as anything else I could say. It's a powerful story about being a woman in a world made by men, about how we fit ourselves into the spaces in their lives and try to hold onto some small thing that is our own. Until they want that too, and we give it freely because we love them, and we have nothing left.


Maureen McHugh, "Sidewalks"; Omni, November 28, 2017
http://omnimagazine.com/sidewalks/

Ros Gupta is a speech pathologist called in to examine a "Jane Doe" of indeterminate racial identity who speaks only 'gibberish' and is currently being held in an institution because the police feared she might be a danger to self or others. She manages to communicate with the woman, whose name is Malni, and what she discovers changes her entire way of relating to the world she lives in. There are some profound messages here, about the fragility of the things we know and love, about connectedness and change, about actions and consequences, and about living as a woman in the world.


Charlie Jane Anders, "Don't Press Charges and I Won't Sue"; Boston Review, October 30, 2017
http://bostonreview.net/fiction/charlie-jane-anders-dont-press-charges-and-i-wont-sue

A brutal story about a woman struggling to hold on to her identity in a world determined to eliminate it. The real horror is that this world is only a few existential tweaks away from our own, and there are people who would not read this as a terrifying and cautionary dystopic narrative. Powerful, painful.


Kelly Barnhill, "Probably Still the Chosen One"; Lightspeed, February 2017
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/probably-still-chosen-one/

A rather different take on the portal fantasy and the whole 'chosen child hero' trope. Eleven-year-old Corrina finds a portal to a land at war and is identified as the Chosen One by the Priesthood. Her destiny - to lead the people of Nibiru to victory against the evil Zonners. But it doesn't turn out quite the way Corrina dreams it will, or the Priests expect it too. Fun.


C. S. E. Cooney, "Though She Be But Little"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/though-she-be-but-little/

Something strange has happened - the Argentum, the sky turning silver - and strange things have happened - people turning into mythical pirates, floating alligators and parrots that can act like cellphones - and things have arrived from somewhere else, many of them monstrous. Emily Anne was a widow in her sixties before the Argentum; now she's an eight-year-old child and a nightmare creature, The Loping Man, is coming to kill her. Where the story focuses on Emily Anne's resourcefulness, courage, and ability to adapt to this new world, it was enjoyable, but I felt as though I'd been dropped into something complex with no explanation and that aspect was not as pleasing. I'd have enjoyed it more if it were presented as straight absurdist fantasy, but presenting it as something that's happened to a real world not unlike our own makes me want at least some clues toward answers to 'how' and 'why.'


Fran Wilde, "Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/clearly-lettered-mostly-steady-hand/

This one cut me deeply. It's a horror story about the way society and the medical profession deal with "freaks" - those of us who are visibly different - and how those freaks feel and think. The story is told as a monologue by a tour guide through a freak show, but the tone drips with rage at the 'normal' person, the voyeur come to see the horrifying strangeness of the 'different.' Intense.


N. K. Jemisin, "Henosis"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/henosis/

A short story about fame, fans, and legacy. An aging author nominated for a prize that it quite literally intended as the culmination of a stellar career is kidnapped by a fan. Interesting and somewhat savage commentary on what it's like to become famous and to be seen as possessing an artistic legacy.

In Feminist Erasures: Challenging Backlash Culture, editors Kumarini Silva and Kaitlynn Mendes have collected essays from a range of feminist scholars aimed at addressing - and countering - the growing belief in North America and the United Kingdom that we are living in a 'post-feminist' society, where the goals of feminism have been achieved and the movement is no longer needed. It is true that I - and many other feminists - would agree that feminism needs to change, to become a movement that recognises intersectionality and decentres the specific experiences of white women, in order to become a meaningful movement that addresses the needs of all women. Nonetheless, it has become painfully obvious in the past year, under the presidency of Trump, that sexism, like racism, is alive, well, and making a serious comeback in the public discourse arena - and that neither has ever been absent in the lives of people of colour and white women.

In their Introduction, Silva and Mendes talk about feminist erasure and an apathetic approach to feminism that threaten the gains made to date, and the potential of future gains.

"For us, what is at stake is the erasure of feminism as a completed project before its work is done. That the current circulation of postfeminist discourses, in both popular and political culture, creates a sense of ‘after’ that we, among other feminist scholars ..., feel is inaccurate. The apathetic approach to understanding the importance of feminism and its genea- logical history makes us immune to the systemic backlash against women that has become part of everyday culture. Here, let us take a moment to explain what we mean by an apathetic approach to feminism: for us, it’s a condition where the progress made by feminists and women’s rights movements, on a global level, are presented as a fait accompli and any ongoing activism or commitment to feminism is seen as outmoded and unnecessary. It is the simple belief that ‘women have arrived’ in spite of significant evidence to the contrary. This contrary evidence can be seen in the continued use of sexualized imagery and violence against women to sell products, in the legislative practices that are routinely enacted which negatively affect women’s health benefits, the continued double- burden that is placed on women who work both within and outside the home, the continued debates around welfare mothers and the general judgment placed on single mothers, just to name a few. In spite of these realities, women are continuously and relentlessly encouraged to believe that there is nothing more to be done. That women’s liberation has arrived and triumphed. But, as the chapters in this anthology suggest, such a declaration is not only inaccurate, it can also have significant drawbacks for continued activism and engagement with issues of gender, class, race, and sexuality that are much needed in contemporary culture."

The collected essays address a broad range of issues. Beginning from their personal contexts as scholars and feminists, the editors open the volume with a selection of essays addressing feminist issues in academe, from becoming a feminist scholar and in turn teaching feminism to conducting research within the modern academy and developing feminist methodologies. Subsequent sections look at the implications of postfeminist assumptions and the erasure of feminist history and analysis in discourse on popular culture, the relationship of femininity, motherhood and the workplace, and activism.

Identifying the overall impact of these very disparate essays and topics takes some contemplation, but my takeaway is that postfeminism creates certain dangers. It erases not only the recognition that there remains much work to be done, but also the history if what has been done and how that connects to present issues facing women. Without feminism, there is no fabric to connect isolated concerns, no awareness of systemic conditions which produce multiple points where resistance and change are needed - and thus no basis for co-ordinating resistance and creating alliances. Postfeminism is here revealed as a trap, a way of undoing the solidarity and structural understanding that supports collective and revolutionary action.

As gentle reader surely knows by now, there are certain things that generally delight me when I encounter them in books. Among these things are takes which draw on the Arthurian mythos, tales of female heroes, stories of women who love women, and novels that challenge or subvert traditional female roles. So one would expect that a novel set in a more-or-less historical Camelot, where the eternal triangle is between King Arthur, his competent and intelligent Queen Guinevere, and his best knight Lancelot - a passing woman - would be perfect for me. And indeed, I expected it to be so.

But...

I really wanted to love this book. For the wonderful idea of a female Lancelot, the best knight in the world as a passing woman, and the doomed love between Lancelot and Guinevere as a passion between two women. And I pushed through it, waiting patiently for it to 'click' for me. But it never quite did - though it came close at times.

I enjoyed Lancelot's voice, her innocence about the ways of the world turning to confusion, sorrow and pain as she sees at every turn the treatment of women and the brutality of war in Arthur's Britain. The telling of her descent into what can only be described as post-traumatic stress during the long sequence of battles against the Saxons.

Douglas clearly intends this book to be a critique that covers a range of feminist issues - from sexual abuse and domestic violence to paternalistic attitudes that limit women's opportunities and options. These issues are, in fact, present in the experience of virtually every female character who is even mentioned in the book. Unfortunately, the author falls into the trap of dismissing women's work, both physical and emotional, and women's concerns about relationships with men, family and children, as being something to be escaped, rather than accepted as a part of life that needs to be valued and embraced by society and all its members.

Instead of a story that validates all the possible choices women can make about their lives, what we get is a story in which women like Lancelot and Guinevere are able to transcend cultural limitations because they are different, and don't like "girl's things." Douglas also falls into the habit of giving most of the other women in the novel traditional roles - spurned lover, manipulative bitch, subservient wife, wise old crone, victim of violence or the dead woman in the fridge.

There are other problems. I found it overly slow and meandering, especially at the beginning. The author has incorporated elements of all the Arthurian stories she can possibly fit in, all together into one text, and it often seems that they are there just to add yet another instance of male indifference or brutality to women and their concerns, as many do not add significantly to the story of Guinevere and Lancelot. Even Malory, whose classic work is more a compendium of tales than a unified story, was selective about his choices, and kept one thread, that of the king whose greatness carries the seeds of his downfall, at the core of his narrative.

Moreover, there is something overly simplistic about the way key decisions that will literally change the course of lives are made. The choices that lead to Lancelot being raised as a boy in the first place, Gawaine's choice to follow Arthur, Morgan's decision to betray him, Guinevere's sudden acceptance of her lesbianism.... These things all happen almost without thought, like the flipping of a switch. The motivations are hollow, we barely see inside the characters enough to understand how or why such drastic choices are made and justified. We are told, but we do not see.

As well, the style of writing is rather pedestrian. At times it reads like a YA novel - and one for the younger end of that audience - but the themes of sexuality and violence rather run counter to that.

The story also relies upon one of my own pet peeves - failure to communicate. I was rather annoyed with the long keeping of secrets that prevented Guinevere and Lancelot from realising that their love was mutual. Particularly when there were so many times that Guinevere could have made it clear that she had seen through Lancelot's masculine facade. And it didn't stop with that. Certainly, a passing woman in such a time would need to keep her sex a secret, but there were so many other secrets kept by so many people.

On the other hand, it was quite satisfying to see some of the less-frequently adapted Arthurian tales brought into play, and to have so much of the story told from female perspectives, so I can't say there was no pleasure here for me. It's just that there could have been so much more. For those who want to explore the idea of a female Lancelot, in my opinion the gold standard remains Jo Walton's duology, The King's Name and The King's Peace.