I’ve been slowly but surely tweaking and expanding the site here. Most of the visual stuff isn’t particularly obvious, but it makes me feel better and brings me several steps closer to full XHTML compliance. The content stuff, however, is here for you to look at—I’ve finally put up the Reviews section. Most of these were written for the newsletter of Sisterspirit Bookstore during the 4 years I volunteered there; the others were written for OutNOW!, a Bay Area gay newspaper, or for the Reclaiming Quarterly. I’m hoping to keep in writing practice by expanding the section as I read, rent DVDs, etc. One navigational note: if the review has a cover graphic, clicking it will take you to Amazon, where you can purchase your very own copy. Just a little service from me to you (and maybe someday back to me).
Patricia Foster, Editor
Anchor Books
1994
We have many roles in our lives as women; we are mothers and writers, workers and intellectuals, athletes and artists. And yet it is striking, in spite of all these different ways we have of defining and creating ourselves, that so much of our self-image and identity becomes focused on the physical: our bodies. A host of current “women’s” issues center around our bodies, our control over those bodies, and what our culture limits us to because of them. In Minding the Body, Patricia Foster and the contributing writers address that wide range of issues and ideas related to the female body with a great deal of insight.
Foster begins the book with a personal and political memoir about the vision of womanhood that came down through her family, one which placed motherhood as the natural (and mandatory) order of things. She also discusses the warping of self-image that led to her own anorexia as a young woman, that “abyss of illusory self-control” which can lead a healthy woman to starve herself to death. The theme of weight is echoed in many of the selections here, in both its personal and social implications. Sallie Tisdale contributes a moving piece about coming to terms with her body, about what it took for her to step out of the self-loathing that feeds so much of the diet industry.
Other contributors discuss more external political issues. In “Department of the Interior,” Linda Hogan traces the lineage of western culture’s fear of the female body to a related fear of wilderness—of wildness—specifically relating it to the treatement of Native Americans by arriving Europeans. They saw the land and the native people as wild things needing to be tamed, as women’s bodies are often seen now. Western culture “is a culture that fears and destroys what it perceives as wild….” In “Beauty Tips for the Dead,” Judith Hooper shares a poignant and insightful memoir of her battle with breast cancer and how it has caused her to re-evaluate her own body.
This collection, though it contains many grim truths about western culture’s (and women’s own) views of the female body, is not without its mellower and lighter moments. Margaret Atwood contributes “The Female Body,” written in response to a request by another anthology on a similar topic. She begins:
I agree, it’s a hot topic. But only one? Look around, there’s a wide range. Take my own, for instance.
I get up in the morning. My topic feels like hell. I sprinkle it with water, brush parts of it…I dump in the fuel and away goes my topic, my topical topic, my controversial topic…in its oversized coat and worn winter boots,…hunting for what’s out there…hungry as ever.
Patricia Foster has done us a service. By providing one book with such a diverse set of ways we can look at the female body—our bodies—she has opened up new ways of seeing all the different ways it can be objectified and used to suit others’ purposes and needs. And the contributors, through the strength of their personal testaments, give courage to those who want to find peace in the body.
