Your Editor Has Issues, Part 1
in which she tries on the "F" word and grapples with the "Gurlesque"
I've never been too good with introductions, and in considering how best to introduce Melusine, or Woman in the 21st Century to its readership, I realize I've somehow backed myself into the corner of defining its relationship to feminism. Not because it is a feminist journal (in fact, although I am personally a feminist, I do not view it as such, only because that would contradict deep convictions I hold about the role of art) but I do feel the need to break the ice by addressing the issue of Melusine in relation to feminism, only because the subtitle I chose (a nod to Margaret Fuller, an early advocate of public conversations between women) demands I do so.
So what do I mean by "Woman in the 21st Century?" All I can say is, yes, that's the question I'm asking. If I had answers, I guess there wouldn't be much point in a conversation. I don't know if anyone out there has answers, or better yet, more questions, but I'd love to find out. It's because I was in search of both answers and questions that I started this journal, to start conversations with other women and with men, to see what we could come up with, tentatively, and on an ongoing basis, with no end in sight. And so far, based on the quality of material I've been privileged to publish in this first issue, I think we're making a good start.
One topic that's been generating a lot of questions recently, with regard to writing by women, particularly poets, is the "Gurlesque," a term that refers to a surging trend either loosely correlated or latently descended from the Riot Grrrl movement of the 1990s and third-wave feminism.
Most of the writing in Melusine could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be described with this term. And one of the things I like most about this issue is how diverse in style the writing is, how diverse in age and background our contributors are. Since we're not a woman-only journal, I hope to see a few male contributors in later issues as well. Yet there's more than a trace here and there of work that brings to mind my conception of “Gurlesque.” And furthermore, the concept intrigues me.
When I first heard the term, I realized with surprise that I had been writing poems (although not, before the last year or two, publishing them) with elements that could be considered "Gurlesque," without realizing that other women around my age (Generation X and the one that follows) were doing the same thing, and that, while I had been doing so for many years, so had they.
Not everything I wrote had these elements – never much more than half at any given time – and I certainly wasn't doing it on purpose to conform with a trend, since I didn't know one existed, and, it seemed, neither did these other poets, because, until Arielle Greenberg coined the term early in the present decade, not much thought was probably given to the characteristics she describes being present together in a single poem.
Young women poets like myself (including ones who, unlike myself, were publishing books) were composing poems with these attributes not because we had shared notes with each other but because something was happening in the zeitgeist: another aspect of Generation X identity (long overshadowed by the Boomer identity forged in the '50s and '60s) was revealing itself. Young women raised in the '70s and '80s had ideas about being female, and they weren't necessarily calling it "feminism."
Because second-wave feminism existed, and had been to some extent successful, young women now had, as Greenberg put it in this 2003 article, the "luxury" of talking not as shining examples of our gender, but just as people, who happened to be female, with things on our minds – issues, complaints, flaws, conundrums, ambivalences. The same struggle to speak as individuals rather than spokespersons for a group is found in the experience of any minority or oppressed group once the early objectives of basic legal equality and surface acceptance are reached.
Like the early Civil Rights movement, second-wave feminism came to be very precisely defined, and there was something inherent in it that welcomed this close definition. Like first-wave feminism, it had a mission. It had measurable goals.
Third-wave feminism is a very different animal. It's what happened when second-wave feminism achieved some (though certainly not all) of its goals and yet some (though not all) girls still grew up with mixed messages, feeling second-best or confused, and in some cases still sexually victimized, even though (some of) their mothers may have gotten equal pay for equal work.
And to delve a bit deeper into the matter, it's what happened when the so-called “feminine" itself demanded respect within Anglo-American (versus French, for instance) feminism, when being equal on paper seemed not quite enough, if all things "girlish” were still seen as less-than, if not the grown-up equivalent of cooties-ridden in the "serious” male realm that young women entered in order to earn their degrees and get their equal pay for equal work – and in order to earn their creds (no “frills” allowed) as artists, musicians, or writers. Being female, lesbian or straight, in the public sphere of a man's world, while finally possible, was still a bit like living under a "don't ask, don't tell" policy with regard to any attribute identifiably female. Unless, of course, we were "just asking for it." It started with how we dressed and extended deeper into who we were and had been, going back to our native culture of girlhood.
With that in mind, it's easy to imagine how talking about "girly" stuff could become oddly empowering for grown or almost-grown women. In Riot Grrrl, the DIY punk movement of the early '90s that coincided with, or as some believe, sparked third-wave feminism, girlyness, with a hearty grrrowl and sharp edge of irony, was part of a vernacular in which demands for power and respect were vocalized.
The girl-stage of life has been plausibly associated with power because it predates the social compromises of individuality made, both willingly and unwillingly, by girls at the onset of pubescence and the development of womanly sexuality (and in the case of girls who were abused in childhood, those compromises were made both non-consensually and far sooner, and Riot Grrrl offered a forum for young women to honestly explore this sort of societally taboo subject in music and art with other young women who had similar experiences.)
Of course, Riot Grrrl was a punk movement and, in the fine tradition of American counterculture, eschewed consumerism, so the girls weren't wearing rhinestone-encrusted torn fishnets in those days, just plain old torn fishnets. The rhinestone-studding of the aesthetic came later and probably had more to do with celebrity heiresses than music or feminism, but somehow they made it into the mix, applied, of course, with tongue in cheek.
So, these days, for poets, (some of us in our thirties, who had our unnpierced noses stuck in books while Bikini Kill was playing downtown, late arrivals to the whole shebang) who are creating work that's being described as "Gurlesque," there's not only the question of girl power versus woman power and the implicit equation of the former with regressive sexuality, but also questions that take us back to the schoolyards and locker rooms and malls where we were all girls together, or alone.
What about women who, as girls, had "failed" at the archetype of girlyness, at the picture-perfect cuteness and the accessorized cliquishness it often entailed, yet faced the same barriers entering adulthood because they had been girls instead of boys?
What about women who, for reasons of class, race, or upbringing within an isolated subculture, were excluded from the prevailing cult of girlyness that is most commonly associated with a white, middle-class childhood?
All of these questions invite an examination of the internal politics of the idealized '70s/'80s girlhood, while simultaneously acknowledging how, as a construct, the “girly-girl” label is used by men and some women to undercut women or girls who seem to exhibit what are considered “girlish” traits (“What is girlish?” being a loaded enough question for another day) forcing us to contend with “girlyness” even as we may disapprove or feel alienated from it.
No wonder some of this work seems to contain such baffling (and, I think, often wonderful) ambiguity in its themes of violence and horror juxtaposed with joy and playfulness; no wonder there's both subversion and complacency, revolution and nostalgia, sisterhood and envy, tied up in the pretty, shiny, vaguely menacing and more than a bit ironic package of the “Gurlesque.”
To wrap up, although I've enjoyed this attempt to trace its lineage, I don't personally believe that "Gurlesque" is the poetic face of a new political movement, and I don't think those behind the term believe that either.
Speaking only for myself, I think it's a category very particular to poetry and perhaps other art forms, and very limited to aesthetics, and that it's actually no more than a language that is used, as the poem in question demands, to either pose questions, rhetorical or earnest, or to make statements – of description or observation, of personal, subjective truth, told both straight and "slant," with a wink or tongue in cheek – a language more in the sense of jargon or dialect than a paradigm with its attendant rules and theories.
And it's a language any poet can employ within a particular poem to suit the needs of that poem, without it becoming the defining characteristic of their work as a whole.
Defining poets who do not deliberately or exclusively write poetry with "Gurlesque" attributes as "Gurlesque" poets, when the essential nature of the term is still in the process of being defined, seems risky and premature. The language of "Gurlesque" seems like one that any poet, male or female, could adopt in any given poem, even if that poem is anomalous from the rest of their work.
As Greenberg and Lara Glenum, who are coediting an anthology on the “Gurlesque” due out next year, have emphasized, it's a descriptive term, not a foundation for a school or a movement. Something tells me they and others who participate in the various dialogues developing around this term will have to keep making that point many times before it sinks in.
That said, I think it's a provocative term (in the best sense) and that the dialogue it's generating is fascinating and worthwhile, and so I'm looking forward to following with interest all its meandering digressions. And I hope Melusine will grow into a welcoming place for just those sorts of digressions.
So thanks for reading, and welcome.
JEK
