Recent Posts
Earlier this year, I spent hours binge-watching Button Poetry‘s spoken word poems on YouTube. One of my favorite poems was “Like Totally Whatever,” performed by a woman named Melissa Lozada-Olivia. In this piece, she talks about the judgment that comes with being a traditionally “feminine” woman, an I-like-to-get-my-nails-done-and-go-shopping kind of woman, a woman who uses the filler words: like, um, totally, whatever, you know.
Throughout the performance, Lozada-Olivia consistently defends herself by exaggerating her use of filler words and by exclaiming: “It’s, like, maybe I’m always speaking in questions because I’m so used to being cut off. It’s, like, maybe this is defense mechanism; like, this is protection…like, our likes are our kneepads, our um’s are the knives we tuck into our boots at night, our you know’s are the best friends we call when we’re walking down a dark alley … like, this is how we breathe easier.”
This poem spoke volumes to me not only because I, like, silently identify myself as this type of woman, but also because I had, um, taken a class with a professor who constantly, totally, berated his students by the number of “likes” we used to fill our sentences, to trace our thoughts, to find our voices. We were told that we needed to clean up our sentences in order to increase our chances of finding a job and “being respected” in the future.
Instead, what I heard was: Stop using “like” in order to obey institutions that teach me how to be successful woman by their definitions.
But why does it have to be that way? For years, women have been restricted in every aspect of their lives. And for years, culture has imposed this idea that women’s writing must reflect the idea that femininity is pure, delicate and nurturing.
In a response to these stereotypes, postmodern feminist authors have adopted fragmented writing styles in order to disrupt the rigid dichotomies that restrict women’s identities. Authors such as Kathy Acker in “Blood and Guts in High School,” Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in “Dicteé,” Robin Coste Lewis in “Voyage of the Sable Venus” and Cristy Road in “Spit and Passion” are demonstrating ways to repurpose language and art in order to find their voices within a culture that has tried to erase them.
These are good books to read because they subvert what it means to be only good and only bad, to be solely man and solely woman, to be right and wrong. Incorporating circular narratives, appropriated work, disjointed text, different languages or hand-drawn images, these inspirational stories are challenging what published books, traditional novels and standard poems are supposed to look like.
These authors channel Hélène Cixous, a famous poststructuralist feminist writer, poet, philosopher and literary critic. In her article “Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous claims that women must write “through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetoric, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse.”
Cixous gives women permission to write and feel their desires, passions and fears. Women are meant to write unapologetically with the emotions that have previously been silenced and shunned.
The beautiful part of this literature is that, in Cixous’ words, it “[forges] the antilogos weapon [and becomes] the taker and initiator.” In Cristy Road’s “Spit and Passion,” Roads finds “her people” through the band Green Day because of her inability to be both gay and Catholic, both gay and Cuban, both Cuban and American. Her grungy and corporeal comics help perverse the notion that she is not “good enough.”
This is her story of salvation through the eyes of someone who has been previously made an outsider because of the strict boundaries of what it means to be a gay, Catholic, Cuban and American woman. It’s a story of what it’s like to be a “freak” – to live outside of and to continue to blur restricting boundaries by embracing diversity.
These authors have found the middle-ground, the fluidity within language and narrative where meaning is not easily understood. By layering images, inclusive stories and other fragmented styles, these authors have created the stories that exist somewhere between comprehensibility and nonsense.
So dear “freak,” be like these women. Continue to explore the middle ground of language to make a home for yourself and others where there wasn’t one originally.
