9. "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" by Jeanette Winterson

Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges are Not the Only Fruit. New York: Grove Press, 1985.
Reviewed by J. d’Artagnan Love

The color orange is supposed to represent energy and warmth but it is a far cry from what the protagonist experiences in Winterson’s first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit. Raised in a Pentecostal church, Jeanette experiences extreme ridicule and humiliation after she is discovered to be in a romantic partnership with another woman. She is publicly humiliated in church causing her great emotional strife.

This is a difficult review to write after only reading the book once. There are many, many layers in this text that I certainly did not discover after just one pass through. One section of the text is a mythical fairy tale which emphasizes the importance of story-telling in the text. It wasn’t apparent to me at first, but the more I read the more I picked up on the numerous strands of stories that were being woven together.

Winterson writes, “Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time” (93). This is a good way to interpret this work. It explains everything while leaving everything unexplained. Certainly worth reading a couple of times.

3.5 darts out of 5

8. "Queer Theory and Social Change" by Max H. Kirsch

Kirsch, Max H. Queer Theory and Social Change. London: Routledge, 2000.
Reviewed by J. d’Artagnan Love

Queer Theory and Social Change was one of those life-changing books for me. I tend to be a pragmatic and practical person. I get more satisfaction from actively doing things and I enjoy being productive. This book gave me a new outlet for my work—a way to both think and do.

Kirsch is highly critical of queer theory but makes a clear distinction between queer theory and queer politics. He defines queer politics as a positive social movement. Queer politics allows for recognition of queer identity and the use of queer as a sort of umbrella under which LGBTI individuals can unite and form solidarity. Queer politics are active and productive. Kirsch defines queer theory as a theory of non-identity. He makes a parallel between queer theory and capitalism because of queer theory’s individualistic and apathetic nature. He claims that queer theory only reaffirms capitalist goals rather than dismantling capitalism like it claims to. Capitalism is reaffirmed because of the way queer theory doesn’t allow for community.

Kirsch is highly critical of Judith Butler and I must say he makes a few excellent points. He breaks down her work even to the particulars of her writing style. He argues that queer theory, Butler’s work in particular, needs to find a way to reconcile the individual vs. the community otherwise it is doing more damage to the queer movement than good. He writes about queer theory being the new “novelty” in academia when really, capitalism has already told the same stories.

This book is written in an easy-to-read prose. He uses solid evidence and whenever he presents a dense quote, he unpacks it so that readers are sure to understand. This is part of why I love this book. Hopefully, when I further my career in academia and am writing about densely theoretical work, I can do as a good a job as Kirsch does in making my work clear and easily understood. His logic is sound and he not only picks apart some of the problems of queer theory but offers some solutions as well. This book is certainly worth the read for anyone frustrated with queer theory but still wishing to embrace queer politics.

5 darts out of 5

7. "Zami: A New Spelling of My Name" by Audre Lorde

Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Freedom: The Crossing Press, 1982.

Reviewed by J. d’Artagnan Love

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name is described as a “biomythography.” It traces the pain and also the joy that Audre Lorde experienced growing up in New York, working in Connecticut and studying in Mexico. It also traces the joys and sorrows accompanied with coming out and living as an “out” lesbian in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. This book closely resembles work of other queer writers such as Leslie Feinberg. The struggles the women went through are similar and are documented in a similar way. Lorde is an advocate for community building, especially building communities of lesbians and other identified queer women. By structuring her book in the way she has, Lorde has joined the current community of queer literature and writers meeting her goal of community building in a very tangible way. In the course of the novel as well, she pays tribute to the many and varied women who have shaped her life.

“Being women together was not enough. We were different. Being gay-girls together was not enough. We were different. Being Black together was not enough. We were different. Being Black dykes together was not enough. We were different” (Lorde 226). Here Lorde ruminates on the different oppressions she, as a Black lesbian was faced with throughout her life. The book clearly and elegantly articulates the intricacies of this particular kind of oppression during the time of her youth.

Zami is a must for anyone interested in queer or multicultural literature. Lorde mixes her prose with her poetry and even uses meta-commentary at times. She takes a few lines to write about one character’s reaction when they learn that Audre is writing Zami. This creates a profound sense of awareness. Readers understand that Audre Lorde doesn’t mince words; each has its place just as, “The important message seemed to be that you had to have a place. Whether or not it did justice to whatever you felt you were about, there had to be some place to refuel and check your flaps” (Lorde 225). For Lorde, the place to refuel was found in the love she shared with the women in her life.

4.5 darts out of 5

6. "The Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch

Pausch, Randy and Jeffrey Zaslow. The last Lecture. New York: Hyperion, 2008.
Reviewed by J. d’Artagnan Love

This is a quick little book with pragmatic advice. Written by the late Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture reads fast but is, and I hate to say this, unoriginal. This book was written because the author, Randy Pausch was dying of pancreatic cancer and wanted to document his life for his children. He tells stories of how he met his wife, what his childhood was like, and how he was so successful at work. He offers advice but never gets too deep. It feels insensitive of me to say that I didn’t like this book but it honestly didn’t impress me. The story is written in boring prose and the advice isn’t anything I haven’t heard before.

This is a great thing for Pausch to pass on to his children, but not worth marketing to a larger audience. To me, it seemed like a way to make a lot of money fast. Now don’t get me wrong, Pausch seems like a decent fella and I’m sorry he had to suffer through cancer but, in the realm of literature, this book is a flop.

1.5 darts out of 5

5. "Epistemology of the Closet" by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. 1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

Reviewed by J. d’Artagnan Love

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is one of the most notable writers in her field. In my first try at reviewing a piece of literary criticism I’ve found myself staring at a blank computer screen for a long while now. Sedgwick’s writing is a dizzying maze of nominalizations. It took me several tries to unpack this sentence: “Instead, I am trying to make the strongest possible introductory case for a hypothesis about the centrality of this nominally marginal, conceptually intractable set of definitional issues to the important knowledges and understandings of twentieth-century Western culture as a whole” (Sedgwick 2). Eventually, I became accustomed to her prose and, with a decently thick dictionary by my side, I was able to enter Epistemology of the Closet and come out alive.

Sedgwick focuses on the idea of the “closet” and the function that the “closet” performs in literature. The “closet,” if I have translated Sedgwick’s work accurately, is a sort of axis of power in homosexual identification and rhetoric. You can be “in the closet;” what Sedgwick describes as “the viewpoint of the closet,” or you can be aware of someone who is “closeted;” the “spectacle of the closet”. The “closet” functions as an open-secret of sorts.

The primary texts that Sedgwick works to explicate are themselves, dense and theory-heavy. She covers writers such as Oscar Wilde, Proust, Nietzsche and Melville. Her analysis of each text is interesting and thought-provoking, although, at points, overwhelming. This work would be much better appreciated if one has already read work by Wilde, Proust, Nietzsche and Melville. I’ve got three of the four writers under my belt and found that fourth section more challenging than the rest simply due to my own lack of knowledge of that specific writer. Sedgwick has assumed that her audience is already familiar with these writers so if you plan on digging into this text, come to the table prepared.

Epistemology of the Closet is a very challenging read and it is one of those texts that, no matter how many times one reads it, one can pull out something new from it or understand a part more clearly. That is part of the beauty of this book. It gets better each time you read it. (Trust me, I’ve had to read it on more than one occasion). Her work, I must admit, is daunting and not exactly the most accessible piece of writing I’ve come across. She writes in an obviously academic style which isn’t inherently a bad thing but could certainly be discouraging (and annoying) for those looking for a quick read.

3 darts out of 5.

4. "Middlesex" by Jeffrey Eugenides

Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
Reviewed by J. d’Artagnan Love

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then, again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petosky, Michigan, in August of 1974” (Eugenides 3). This is the first sentence of Jeffrey Eugenides second novel, Middlesex. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003 and certainly earned that title.

Eugenides weaves a beautiful and intricate story much like the silk worms he writes about. Middlesex is more than a story; it is a genealogy. Starting with Lefty and Desdemona, the plot unravels and knots and then untangles again in an enthralling circular narrative told by Cal, formerly Calliope. Cal was born Calliope and unbeknownst to him, is an intersexed individual; something he inherited from his Greek ancestry and long line of incestuous familial ties.

The plot starts with Lefty and Desdemona, Cal’s grandparents. They travel to America after their home in Bithynios is destroyed. The rest of the plot traces the genealogy of the Stephanides family and the defective gene that is passed down the family line.

Reading this book was like looking through a family scrapbook. Each character becomes so real and so dynamic one cringes with Cal/Calliope as s/he undergoes inspection by various doctors and researchers and one celebrates with Lefty and Desdemona when they survive the fires in Smyrna.

Eugenides has done his research as each chapter is full, not only of gut-wrenching character sketches and anecdotes, but rich histories. Three generations of the Stephanides family saw great changes in the world and Eugenides documents these changes and events in believable and lyrical ways. From violence between Greece and Turkey in the 1920’s, to Black Nationalism in Detroit, and the Gay Rights movement in San Francisco, Eugenides’s plot unwinds like a ball of yarn to create a something beautiful, mythical, believable and real.

4.5 darts out of 5.

3. "Full Frontal Feminism" by Jessica Valenti

Valenti, Jessica. Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters. Berkeley: Seal Press, 2007.

Reviewed by J. d’Artagnan Love

In Full Frontal Feminism, Jessica Valenti wants us to believe that feminism is one of the greatest things to ever happen, and I believe her. Valenti outlines how women of the twenty first century are faced with many obstacles and the important role that feminism will play in overcoming these obstacles. In chapters like “If These Uterine Walls Could Talk” and “You’re a Hardcore Feminist, I Swear” Valenti exposes the dangers of misogynist attitudes and encourages women to find their own form of feminism. Valenti writes, “Besides, at the end of the day, feminism is really something you define for yourself” (14).

The title suggests that the book is for “young” women but Valenti fails to define exactly who these “young women” are. It seems, based on some deductions I’ve made on the amount of time she spends writing towards a particular type of woman, that the young woman she is writing to is attractive, white (ahem, the cover of the book is a skinny, naked white woman), heterosexual, and between the age of 18 and 25 years old. This choice limits the scope of the book putting Valenti in danger of contradicting herself.

Valenti has, nonetheless done decent research and the writing, although gritty and full of f-bombs, keeps a steady pace. The book, despite its faults, is a good starting point for newbies to feminist theory. It is loaded with awesome resources and great bibliographic info. The language is accessible and the message is clear and well-supported: feminism effing rocks.

3 darts out of 5