Highlights from this issue...

Photo by Fern Logan (American, b. 1945), Headwrap, 1997. From The Black Female Body.

Taking back the camera
The Black Female Body: A Photographic History by Deborah Willis and Carla Williams. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002, 228 pp., $60.00 hardcover.
Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture edited by Kimberley Wallace-Sanders. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002, 350 pp., $24.95 paper.

Reviewed by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw

THE BLACK BODY as a site of cultural and ideological construction has been of increasing interest to scholars over the last decade. Starting with the 1993 exhibition The Black Male organized by curator Thelma Golden for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the raced and gendered body has been a popular focus for cultural critics and historians of the African diaspora. Most recently, notices went out announcing an international conference on "The Black Body: Imagining, Writing and (Re)Reading" to be held at DePaul University, April 23-24, 2004, organized by their Center for Black Diaspora and the Center for the Study of Race and Bioethics. Such exhibitions and conferences about the black male body or the black body in general are now joined by a wealth of new book titles focusing exclusively on the black female body. Foremost among these recent publications are Deborah Willis' and Carla Williams' The Black Female Body and Skin Deep, Spirit Strong, edited by Kimberly Wallace-Sanders. Both texts are richly varied and wide-ranging, sharing a feminist take on the visual creation, exploitation, and celebration of the bodies of black women throughout the African diaspora.

While The Black Female Body takes photographic images as its sole media focus, rather than artistic representations as a whole, it spans the entire history of photographic reproduction. From an early ethnographic daguerreotype produced in 1845 of a Sofala woman from the Portuguese colony of Mozambique to contemporary self-portraits by the African-American artists Adrian Piper and Clarissa Sligh, the volume contains a myriad of image types accompanied by detailed and sensitively penned discussion. With its insightful analysis and potent content, it is more than just a coffee-table book. In fact, the visceral nature of some of the 185 photographs included between its beautifully designed covers may be disturbing for the casual or immature reader.

Both volumes tackle the difficult question of what constitutes black female subjectivity. Where does agency lie when the body in question has been defined and manipulated by Eurocentric, masculine, and hegemonic cultures? Willis and Williams begin to answer this dilemma by examining images born of the colonial conquest of Africa during the mid-19th century. They investigate various modes of visual colonization, including examples of a style of photography that has come to be known popularly as the "National Geographic aesthetic," in which black women are unceremoniously shown as bare-breasted, exotic types. These photographs construct black women's bodies as mysterious and accessible at the same time, simultaneously objectified and sexualized. The subjects become objects who are little more than female creatures and curiosities, denied womanhood and rendered distinctly Other. Willis and Williams show us that such images encompass a diverse range of types, from South African "tribeswomen" to New Orleans madames, often revealing the fetishistic interests of their makers. With a number of lurid depictions of black prostitutes and an in-depth section on the exhibition of Africans at late 19th-century expositions in France and elsewhere, this chapter holds perhaps the most disturbing images in the book. The viewer is confronted by the dehumanizing impulses that this sort of photography both sanctioned and encouraged. The authors explain that this debasing form of looking does not end with the colonizing gaze but bleeds through into other realms of photography, including the work of Edward S. Curtis, Thomas Eakins, and Walker Evans--all renowned artists whose photographs have long been considered more art than ethnographic documentation.

The two sections that follow the discussion of the colonized body focus on the "cultural body" and the "body beautiful," respectively. The photographs of the acculturation of the black female body include familiar faces of black women who had fascinating careers in which image-making functioned as a constructive element in the establishment of their public identities. One of the earliest instances of the application of the photograph as cultural currency is found in the example of the abolitionist Sojourner Truth, who used the funds from the sale of souvenir carte-de-visite portraits at her many lectures to support herself. In a similar demonstration of the internalization of the importance of the photograph in the promotion of a public identity, the New Negro writer Zora Neale Hurston allowed Carl Van Vechten to make a series of portraits of her. Upon receiving them she wrote him, confessing famously, "I love myself when I am laughing. And then again when I am looking mean and impressive." Here Willis and Williams note how the comments of Hurston and the experiences of Truth are rare in our knowledge about how early black female photographic subjects actually felt about the process of image making or the potential for its economic exploitation.

Photo by Elise Fitte-Duval (Martinican, b. 1967), Untitled [Nude]. From The Black Female Body.

At the heart of their investigation into the photographic representation of the black female body is a challenge to the conception of the medium as veristic and unbiased. In so doing they reveal the ways that photographs have been used to create and reinforce symbolic power through the construction of specific controlling types. The inclusion of images of mammies, exotic dancers like the Jazz Age expatriate Josephine Baker, and various named and anonymous artists' models elucidates the many roles that the black female body has occupied within the European and American imagination. Black women have been depicted as sexual and sexless, natural and preternatural, industrious and impertinent. By following the second part of the book with a final section devoted to reclamative images of the "body beautiful," many made by contemporary women artists from throughout the African diaspora, the authors stress the role of artifice and the fragility of traditional power relations when the one who was once the object of the gaze now holds the camera. In providing what are at times conflicting viewpoints about the images, and by including numerous quotations from both the sitters and the photographers, the authors achieve a balance that stresses the malleability of the black female body, its power, and its promise.

WITH A SIMILAR AMBITION, Skin Deep, Spirit Strong presents analyses of some of the key issues of identity and representation that surround the African-American female body. The essays in this volume are arranged in a loosely chronological progression beginning with the 16th-century slave trade and ending in the present day. They approach the subject from a variety of disciplines including history of science, literature, and queer studies. Significantly, all of the authors are women, each writing within the distinctive language of her academic field.

Not surprisingly, Skin Deep, Spirit Strong begins with the colonized black female body and Anne Fausto-Sterling's detailed analysis of the case of Saartje Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, whose body was exhibited throughout Europe as a sexual curiosity at the beginning of the 19th century and then after her death dissected by the naturalist Georges Cuvier and put on display in the Museum of Man in Paris. To underscore the horror of this act, Fausto-Sterling illustrates her essay with a murky black-and-white photograph of Baartman's preserved genitalia, which were only recently (in 2002) returned home to South Africa for burial. After learning the history of the scientific culture that sanctioned and even encouraged the horrifying practices that rendered Baartman less than human and therefore open for display, alongside the related essays on early contact between Europeans and black women's bodies by Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Jennifer L. Morgan, it is easy to agree with Guy-Sheftall's assertion that "being black and female is characterized by the private being made public."

The negative portrayal of the unclothed black female body in the public sphere that began with the exhibition of women like Baartman has long affected the artistic production of African-American painters and sculptors. In the next section Wallace-Sanders brings together essays that address creative responses to this dilemma. Art historian Lisa Gail Collins, whose groundbreaking book The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past recently set the bar higher for the emerging field of contemporary African-American art history, provides a condensed overview of the history of such representation in the fine arts. Her discussion of the work of diverse artists such as Edmonia Lewis and Alison Saar is followed by Lisa E. Farrington's focused analysis of the quilter/painter Faith Ringgold's Slave Rape Series, which Farrington effectively argues is a project that returns the ownership of ancestral bodies to their cultural descendants, and an essay by Carla Williams that radically condenses some of the key arguments found in the text of The Black Female Body.

The three chapters in the volume that address the representation of the black female body in the written word all take works by African-American women as their topics. Rachel Adams offers a provocative reading of the carnivalesque in Toni Morrison's Beloved, while Siobhan B. Somerville discusses cross-dressing and racial passing in the somewhat obscure 19th-century novella Winona, by Pauline Hopkins. Elizabeth Alexander examines the poetry of the late Audre Lorde, whose radical lesbian perspective informed her evocation of various issues of inequality in her writing.

The final section of the book returns the reader to the realm of the history of science and the horrific deeds performed upon the bodies of black women under the auspices of progress and the perfection of technique. Here Doris Witt discusses the cultures of food and fat that have grown up around black women's bodies through the transformation and exploitation of iconic figures that range from the mythical Aunt Jemima to the omni-present Oprah Winfrey. Terri Kapsalis recounts the story of the experimental gynecological surgeries performed without anesthesia or pity by James Marion Sims on the bodies of numerous black female slaves. She places this history within a broader discussion of the black female pelvis as a victim of external mastery. The abomination of acts such as Sims' is irrefutable, and yet the continued marginalization of the study of African-American women's sexuality is explained in part by Evelynn Hammonds' essay, which asserts that the dearth of contemporary research on black female sexuality, lesbianism in particular, by black women academics demonstrates the impact of a pervasive culture of racialized institutional sexism. The book ends with the story of Bridgett Davis' effort to create a film that defines the black female body both as a subject and as the agent of her own destiny.

Overall, Skin Deep, Spirit Strong and The Black Female Body are powerful and revealing looks at the many visual, textual, and archival legacies that influence us all as we move through contemporary society. Whether we are the ones looking at black women's bodies, or whether as black women we find ourselves the objects of the gaze, we cannot ignore the way that our inculcation into a raced and gendered culture of display determines our perceptions of other's differences or the difference of our own otherness.

Photo by Stephen Marc (American, b. 1954), England, 1989. From The Black Female Body.

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Feminism's opposite
Nothing Sacred: Women Respond to Religious Fundamentalism and Terror edited by Betsy Reed. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002, 433 pp., $17.95 paper.

Reviewed by Harriet Malinowitz

NEITHER FUNDAMENTALISM NOR TERRORISM sprang into being on September 11, 2001; nor did that date inaugurate consciousness of these phenomena on the part of intellectuals, activists, feminists, patriots, or the millions whose lives were bound up with them. Yet that was when the question "Why?" became a mass American utterance (whose ingenuousness was noted with bemusement by many of the planet's other inhabitants). As ours is not a culture prone to great acts of reflection, it's a pity that the sincere query was curtailed so peremptorily, and so effectively, by the president's spurious explanation: Muslim religious fanatics were jealous of our freedom and democracy. A "war on terrorism" of "infinite" proportions drew the support of a panicked, blinkered populace.

It was never possible to know just how much of this populace did indeed believe what it was told, as the media polls described a nation "united" in a purpose most people I knew personally didn't subscribe to. Clearly, many remained curious: Hastily-designed courses in Islam, Asian cultures, and global politics drew robust enrollments on campuses; special issues of mass newsmagazines asking "Why Do They Hate Us?" inundated newsstands; and bookstores in suburban malls did a brisk business in "instant" books that purported to make recent events comprehensible. The questions were potent enough to command their own backlash: The presidential press secretary's admonition to "watch what you say"; the de rigueur prefaces to dissenting commentary ("Of course in no way is this meant to condone or justify terrorism...."); and the widely-publicized report by a conservative think tank in November 2001, "How Our Universities are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It"--which indicted faculty, students, and administrators at teach-ins and other public forums for "demurring" from the national project of "calling evil by its rightful name," and was promoted by former National Endowment for the Humanities head Lynne Cheney. All these sent the message that critical analysis was anathema to the public good.

Nonetheless, critical analysis flourished in the "alternative" and foreign Internet media, onto which many Americans began to click for the first time. Left and feminist counter-pundits disputing the US government- and media-manufactured mass consensus drew a growing audience at a host of sites--from Alternet, Common Dreams, and ZNet to Britain's Guardian, the English-language international Arab weekly Al-Ahram, and the irrepressible Al Jazeerah.

Such culturally vital post-September 11 commentary occupies a good deal of space in the important anthology Nothing Sacred: Women Respond to Religious Fundamentalism and Terror--though a number of the essays, including some of the most riveting ones, were written prior to September 11. The book is particularly powerful in its ability simultaneously to draw on the new public interest in fundamentalism and terrorism and yet to avoid making that tragedy its defining critical moment. What subject, then, serves as the organizing center of this collection? Actually, that's up for debate.

Its subtitle is broad enough to subsume the loose threads in the collection, whose pieces comprise a farrago of observations related to the two stated themes. A more specific paradigm is proposed in a couple of lead pieces--Betsy Reed's "Editor's Note" and Katha Pollitt's introduction. "The opposite of fundamentalism is feminism," writes Pollitt. In the scheme she and Reed posit, the book is dedicated to scrutinizing this idea in cross-cultural context by examining its Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu manifestations. That noble aim is mitigated by the volume's insubstantial treatment of Jewish fundamentalism and by its stuffing of contemporary Indian Hindu fascism into a fundamentalist paradigm it doesn't exactly belong in. Still, one could flag the numerous pieces that support the editorial vision--which include some priceless entries on feminism in relation to Islamic and Christian fundamentalism--and come away satisfied.

For me, the great (and apparently unintended) revelation of the book is that the connection between fundamentalism and terrorism is a hazy one at best. When George W. Bush posited that connection, feminists and leftists sought to explain it and to decenter it--that is, from its singularly Islamic association, and from the fantasy that the terrorism of "rogue states" and rogue organizations was different from the terrorism of "respectable" states and internationally recognized organizations--but not to challenge the assumption that "fundamentalism and terrorism" were a unified subject. When Nothing Sacred featured on its cover an inventory of my most cherished feminist public intellectuals--from Arundhati Roy to Laura Flanders, Fatima Mernissa and Amira Hass to Barbara Ehrenreich and Ellen Willis--I felt secure in my faith that the link would be clearly established.

It never was. No one in the book even tried to argue that the two megathemes did or didn't cohere. Something must have happened along the road from project conceptualization to final production, because terrorism appears here as a side order. What is fabulously delivered instead is a portrait of fundamentalism as a phenomenon with its own logic. Rather than embodying a reclamation of medievalism and genuine "tradition," fundamentalism, according to many of these writers, is distinctly a product of modernity--a response to colonialism, globalization, and the tumultuous cultural changes they prompt. These changes include, in the words of Karen Armstrong (a scholar of multiple religions and author of the highly useful primer, Islam: A Short History), "a coercive secularism." Fundamentalism, she asserts (while pointing out that the huge majority of its proponents enact it in nonviolent, lawful ways), "can...be seen as the shadow side of modernity," a "'postmodern' movement" that "could have appeared at no time other than our own." It first appeared in the United States; Islamic fundamentalism developed in the 1960s and 1970s, well after Christian and Jewish fundamentalisms had established themselves.

AS INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi explains, a set of "boundary problems" has produced "the crisis that is tearing the Muslim world apart." Fundamentalism affords a set of "anxiety-reducing mechanisms" in a culturally imploding world, and satisfies a "psychological need to maintain a minimal sense of identity." Foreign powers' intrusive role in Muslim societies (not the least of which is their bolstering of local plutocratic, authoritarian regimes), the economic control transnational corporations and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) wield over Muslim economies, the double-edged sword of absorbing Western science and technology, and the "invasion of children's desires by Coca-Cola and special brands of walking shoes" are all signs of outside forces "trespassing" onto Muslim identity. They have blown out of orbit the familiar "authority thresholds" that once organized reality.

Law professor Karima Bennoune's interview with her father Mahfoud Bennoune, a retired anthropologist and veteran of the 1954-62 Algerian war of independence from French colonial rule (he spent four years as a prisoner of war), supports this thesis. The rollback of progressive reforms and social programs in Algeria during the 1980s, along with massive privatization in the country and the concomitant burgeoning of multinational companies, led, he says, "to disenchantment with socialism, but also to disenchantment with capitalism. And, therefore, it sort of became inevitable that the only way out seemed to be what they call 'the Islamic solution.'"

Iranian women's studies scholar Minoo Moallem points out that the specter of "the Islamic revival" is also necessary to the West. It provides a useful rationale for its "expansionist logic," its "quest for oil and political control of strategically located 'Middle Eastern' countries," the "preservation or establishment of friendly local regimes" and the resulting "steady deterioration of culture and social values of people in this area." Mahfoud Bennoune casts fundamentalism in the Muslim world as a co-star in the colonial tragedy. It is "an attempted cure" for globalization and the despair it breeds, he says, but it is in fact "a disease masquerading as a cure," tangled in a symbiotic, mirroring relationship with the hostile, repressive, exclusionary West it purports to repudiate.

Christian fundamentalism is also, many of the book's authors make clear, a reaction to modernity, analogous to Islamic fundamentalism in many respects. "There has been a lot of loose talk, since September 11, about a 'clash of civilizations' between musty, backward-looking, repressive old Islam and the freedom-loving West," begins Barbara Ehrenreich in a little gem of an essay called "Christian Wahhabists." This rings a bell for her; she notes that, in her high school history books' account of the Reformation in Europe, "Protestants were supposed to be the up-and-coming, progressive force vis-ŕ-vis the musty old Catholics." She gaily excavates an obscure passage from Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations comparing Wahhabism and Protestantism: "Both are reactions to the stagnation and corruption of existing institutions; advocate a return to a purer and more demanding form of their religion; preach work, order, and discipline." Given that Calvinism (or "Puritanism") glorified the very work ethic and pleasure-denial that, Ehrenreich tells us, Max Weber "credited with laying the psychological foundation for capitalism," Ehrenreich wonders why we're not supposed to be cheering for the Wahhabists now. After all, the present-day United States is rapt with

its demented war on drugs, its tortured ambivalence about pornography and sex, its refusal to accord homosexuals equal protection under the law. [The Calvinist legacy] persists in organized form as the Christian right, which continues to nurture the dream of a theocratic state. Recall the statement by one of our leading warriors against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism--John Ashcroft--that "we have no king but Jesus." (p. 257)

Divine rule is also, of course, pursued internationally by the Vatican. Laura Flanders documents the role played in the United Nations by the Holy See--"the only religious body to enjoy 'nonmember state permanent observer' status"--and the efforts of See Change, an international coalition, to downgrade its status. While ordinary nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and UN agencies (including even such luminaries as the World Health Organization) must silently observe debate at the UN from a gallery, the Holy See's "observer," while unable to vote, gets "to speak, to lobby, and to negotiate on virtually equal footing with any nation," giving it enormous power. Like Wahhabists and other fundamentalist groups, the Roman Catholic Church maintains social services in poor countries and communities; those who depend on its "more than three hundred thousand health facilities worldwide" will be the losers if the Church closes them down rather than provide abortion, contraceptive, and condom-related HIV prevention services. "This creates a hostage situation," asserts Flanders--an especially unassailable one given US collaboration with both the Vatican and some Islamic nations to block progressive reproductive rights and women's health care policy at the UN.

Though it may be hard to recall at the moment, until the mid-1970s in the United States, religious condemnation of abortion was a concern primarily of the Catholic Church; Protestant evangelical groups had yet to muster much interest in the subject and raised few objections to Roe v. Wade in 1973. (Some, in fact, actively supported it.) According to Margaret Lamberts Bendroth in her capsule history of Protestant American fundamentalism, that movement actually defined itself in opposition to conventional ideas about of the family until fairly recently. Protestant American fundamentalism emerged in its "apocalyptic and premillennial," Bible-as-inerrantly-stable form in the 19th century, when the rise of universities and the values of the Gilded Age threatened to supplant durable, "old-time religion" with skepticism, materialism, corruption, secular middle-class values, and spiritual indeterminacy. Fundamentalists especially loathed sentimental, feminine notions of Victorian domestic piety and promoted in their stead a Christian model that embodied obedience, hierarchy, and a stoic masculine defiance of temptation.

Bendroth emphasizes the fundamentalists' long-term antipathy to the ideal of the "relational" family, which for more than a century has been that embraced by mainstream, middle-class Christians: the family as an interconnected, empathetic haven from a harsh world. By the postwar era, with this notion made virtually canonical by "experts" such as Dr. Spock and the popular dramas of radio and television, fundamentalists accepted the fact that the "relational family ethos" was clearly unbeatable and decided to join it. Televangelism took its place beside Donna Reed in the medium most suited to spreading the pro-family message.

Specifically, the message was that the family was in danger. According to Bendroth, "the rhetoric of family decline has served to focus a range of objections to modernity." "Pro-life" sentiment came to symbolize a conglomerate of issues, including objections to homosexuality, birth control, sexual freedom, pornography, and equal rights for women. All these were held to be evidence of a "liberal values" offensive mounted by the secular state. The religious domain, rather than the secular world of psychology and child-rearing professionals, became the place in which the family--now synonymous with "the Christian family"--could find refuge from modern ills. In this way political conservatives succeeded in making the defense of the family along religious lines a cornerstone of their fundraising and electoral success.

BENDROTH'S PIECE IS INTRIGUING, yet frustrating on two accounts. First, as she uses the phrase "the Christian family," it appears to be synonymous with "the white Christian family," leaving a mystifying gap regarding how these social phenomena were played out in the black church. As with mystifying gaps generally, this troubles the clarity of the whole canvas. Secondly, though informed about what happened, one often remains confused about why. What, ideologically, were political conservatives getting out of the utilitarian harnessing of family values to their election campaigns if those values were in reality repugnant to them? Was a socially conservative platform decked out in "pro-family" language simply the bitter pill that economic conservatives thought it expedient to swallow? Or were they actually converted by their own rhetoric? And what thread connects the appeal, for evangelicals, of born-again Democrat Jimmy Carter and fiscally neoliberal Republican Ronald Reagan?

In the larger scheme of things, if we accept the thesis that the crisis of modernity is the root cause of fundamentalist reaction (and the case is made very persuasively by a number of the writers), what about Judaism, Hinduism, and other varieties of fundamentalism not treated in this volume? Of the two articles in Nothing Sacred concerning Jewish fundamentalism, one discusses the effects of Shas and other ultra-orthodox Israeli political parties on Jewish Israeli women and Jewish Israeli culture. You'd never know that Jewish fundamentalism affected anyone else--like, for instance, the Palestinians. In contrast to Christian and Muslim fundamentalism, political Jewish ultra-orthodoxy appears here as a holdover of quaintly old-fashioned religious excess, devoid of violent impulses toward Others. "Jewish religious zealots have nowhere engaged in the kind of murderous attacks that have been perpetrated between Hindus and Muslims in India," asserts Alice Shalvi. This, of course, is patently absurd, though I'm sure some will protest that Israel is essentially a secular state, and that religious zealotry is not operative here. However, in the immortal words of the theme from the movie Exodus, "God gave this land to me." Secular Zionists have made a strategic choice not to look that gift horse in the mouth.

In fact, Jewish contributions to terrorism have been supplied by such 20th-century groups as the Irgun, the Stern Gang, Haganah, the Jewish Defense League, Kach, Kahane Chai (Kach's offshoot) and, it could easily be argued, the current Israeli Defense Force itself. These groups have spawned massacres ranging from the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem (1946), to Deir Yasein (1948), to fanatic Baruch Goldberg's machine-gunning of 29 Arabs in a Hebron mosque (1994), to the destruction of Jenin (2002). Most shocking to many was the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by right-wing Jewish Israeli Yigal Amir (1995)--though earlier organizations also targeted Jews who didn't toe their hard line.

There is, it is true, a shadow-appearance of this history in a piece by the venerable Israeli journalist Amira Hass. Hass has been an articulate Jewish critic of the Zionist occupation of Palestinian territories in venues ranging from the Israeli daily Ha'aretz to left and Arab periodicals. "Missing in Action," comprised of excerpts from her interviews with women in Gaza before the second Palestinian intifada, affords an extremely engaging glimpse into Palestinian women's struggles with gender roles. Yet though these struggles are of course contextualized by the occupation, Jewish "fundamentalism" and "terrorism" are not the focus of Hass's discussion in this particular chapter (which was extracted from a book of hers published in June 2002). Thus it seems that Jewish manifestations of the book's topic have been inexplicably excused from the unpleasant but necessary interrogation to which three of the world's other major religions are subjected.

With Kach and Kahane Chai on even the Israeli Cabinet's and US State Department's list of terrorist groups ("Stated goal is to restore the biblical state of Israel," asserts their official US government profile), one wonders why the usually unflinching Nation Books chose to elide this thorny bit of reality. Their choice is especially regrettable because it was the trauma of the Holocaust--indisputably one of the greatest crises of modernity--that gave the creation of the Jewish state such widespread credibility. This could have been productively examined in light of the book's overarching theoretical premises.

Hinduism, too, falls outside the theoretical purview here, despite a section of essays devoted to Hindu "communalism"--a phenomenon more accurately compared to nationalism than to religious fundamentalism in that it is far more political than theological and quite liberal regarding most women's issues. Arundhati Roy's "Fascism's Firm Footprint in India" and Ruth Baldwin's "Gujarat's Gendered Violence" describe the horrors of anti-Muslim pogroms (Roy's apt word) under the aegis of the Sangh Parivar--India's extreme right-wing coalition of Hindu communalist organizations. Most notorious of these pogroms was that of February 2002, when an attack by unknown perpetrators on a train in the state of Gujarat, which resulted in the deaths of 58 Hindus, set off a massive wave of Hindu nationalist mob violence. The toll, according to human rights organizations' estimates, was 2,000 Muslims killed and another 100,000 turned into refugees.

"While the parallels between contemporary India and prewar Germany are chilling, they're not surprising," writes Roy. The Sangh Parivar "can say several contradictory things simultaneously"; its "utter genius lies in its apparent ability to be all things to all people at all times"; it is adept at "whipping up communal hatred" and "indoctrinating thousands of children and young people, stunting their minds with religious hatred and falsified history." In states like Gujarat, "the police, the administration, and the political cadres at every level have been systematically penetrated. It has huge popular appeal," and the "kind of power... [that] can only be achieved with state backing."

"Fascism is about the slow, steady infiltration of all the instruments of state power. It's about the slow erosion of civil liberties, about unspectacular day-to-day injustices," writes Roy in a passage where the "chilling parallels" seem to be also to the present-day United States.

ONE PARTICULARLY DISTURBING DIMENSION of what is happening in India is that the activism of Hindu women is pivotal to the fascist project. (This, too, has its analogues in Hitler's Germany and the contemporary American radical right.) In an essay that is provocative on several levels, political scientist Amrita Basu makes--somewhat confusingly--the contrary points that Hindu women's activism is enlisted in reaction to the encroachments of global capitalist culture (along with fundamentalist movements in other parts of the world); and that Hindu women's activism, in contrast to these other movements, does not couch itself in anti-Western ideology. She argues that, in fact, Hindu communalism is shaped by an identification with "forward-looking" modernism. Its enemies are portrayed as sinister, archaic forces within the culture, not infiltrators from the outside.

Pursuing the latter theme, Basu deftly demonstrates how Hindu women's empowerment is exploited to promote a militant hatred of Muslims. The Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP)--the leading Hindu communalist party and head of the ruling federal coalition--depicts Muslim women as submissive, backward Others with whom "modern" Hindu women might well shudder to identify. The idea is that Muslim women's subordinate position in relation to their oversexed, libidinously uncontainable men, existing as it does in such terrifying proximity to Hindu society, could easily waft over and infect Hindu women's own existence should there be a lapse of vigilance.

And so we have, in the case of Hindu communalism, a scenario that doesn't really fit into the grand unified theory of fundamentalism suggested by some of the most hard-hitting analytic essays in the book. Correspondingly, due to the logistical traps of theory-building, three of the most outstanding essays in the book have fallen through the cracks of this review's discussion--and must be noted, even if there's no clear place for them. Leila Ahmed's "Gender and Literacy in Islam," Susan Friend Harding's "The Pro-Life Gospel," and Madhavi Sunder's "A Culture of One's Own: Learning from Women Living Under Muslim Laws" are nuggets of stunning rhetorical acuity, and home in on the ways that realities are constructed and "sold" by language.

Where does this unruly aggregation of thoughts about fundamentalism, terror, and feminism leave us? For one thing, it leaves us remembering, as we've learned in earlier periods of urgent collective inquiry, that the need to identify useful patterns or generalizations can collide with the inevitability of reaching scattershot conclusions. This is simply what happens when we try to make sense of huge, dispersed, highly disturbing phenomena that are sweeping through the world. Ambitious and badly needed, Nothing Sacred can better be appreciated for its many truly stellar parts than as the sum of them. Many of its essays ought to become staples of women's studies curricula. If the beginning of the second wave of the women's movement brought us "burning" questions, and postmodernism eased us into merely "vexed" ones, Nothing Sacred delivers us once again into an era when we are truly desperate, not merely curious, to figure out what's going on.

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Suzan-Lori Parks Photo by Stephanie Diani

Stage vs. page
Getting Mother's Body by Suzan-Lori Parks. New York: Random House, 211 pp., $23.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by E. J. Graff

THERE'S A SPECIAL FORM OF SUFFERING reserved for those of us who don't live in New York City (and don't have a friend there with a spare bed): reading the reviews in the New York Times and the New Yorker. You find yourself dying to see that one-of-a-kind arts event, but unable to know in advance whether it will really be worth several hundred dollars in hotel, food, and train, plane, or automobile. Last year, for me, this special form of suffering was occasioned by reading reviews of Suzan-Lori Parks' Topdog/Underdog, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for drama, along with wide praise for an intriguing exploration of identity, sibling rivalry, race, poverty, morality--you name it, this play apparently had it. And Parks' stellar resume includes 14 plays, a 2001 MacArthur "Genius" award, a script for Spike Lee, and, 20 years ago, an undergrad stint as James Baldwin's protégé at Mt. Holyoke College.

So I was thrilled to learn that Parks was publishing a novel, that most portable of arts. Getting Mother's Body is an excavation (yes, literally) of family secrets, lies, affections, and finances in a small African-American town called Lincoln, Texas. (Parks has a Lincoln thing that is surely being explored in lit-crit dissertations; her two characters in Topdog/Underdog are brothers named Lincoln and Booth.) It's 1963, a cusp year for civil rights, but Parks hasn't any special interest in how her characters relate to white people, except to move the plot; she's more interested in internal African-American community dramas of destruction, self-destruction, and redemption. Her key political lens here is feminist: The book explores how very different women defy or suffer under the era's sexual politics and options. Without doing it in a formulaic way, Parks gives us such characters as a woman whose father hands her over in marriage without so much as introducing her to her future husband; a wild woman who twists lovers around her finger but is undone by a botched self-abortion; a woman who swats away her irresponsible husband's petitionary lovers; a widow whose very proper marriage has nevertheless left her nearly penniless; and a passing woman so butch that today she'd surely be transgendered.

In Faulknerian fashion (As I Lay Dying is the model), the book's scores of chapters are narrated by these and other members of this community. Billy Beede is the firecracker main character, a smart-mouth teenager with her eye out for herself. Her supporting cast includes Teddy Roosevelt Beede, her uncle, and June Flowers Beede, her uncle's wife, who've been housing Billy since her mother died; Willa Mae Beede, her hustler mother, making oracular comments from beyond the grave; Dill Smiles, Willa Mae's butch lover, whom Billy at one point believed to be her (female) father; and Laz Jackson, the local undertaker's simple son.

Everyone in this book wants something, and on the surface, those desires hinge on money. Billy Beede wants an abortion. Her uncle, who manages a gas station for the local feudal lord, wants his lost church back. Her aunt wants a prosthetic leg. Her stepfather/stepmother Dill Smiles wants her pig-raising operation to stop sinking into debt. Laz Jackson wants to lose his virginity and to marry Billy. Dead Willa Mae apparently has the answer to all these problems; she insisted on being buried with the jewels given her by one of her innumerable male lovers. Those jewels serve as what Alfred Hitchcock called the MacGuffin: the item that everyone is chasing, tipping the plot into motion. A letter arrives, saying that Willa Mae's grave is about to be paved over to make way for a supermarket. Vehicles are stolen or borrowed, and there's a very slow chase to the Arizona grave. Along the way, all the characters discover what they really desire and come back to Lincoln to live happily ever after.

DOES THAT MAKE IT SOUND a little--goofy? Well, disappointingly, it is. Getting Mother's Body never quite gels into a continuous story, but rather bumps along from one disconnected episode and monologue to another. The emotionally meaty action is compressed into flashbacks like this one, in which Dill Smiles remembers her first glimpse of Willa Mae walking down the street as two boys followed, pushing her car:

White woman, looked like. Wearing a red dress that showed off her shape. She was walking but she weren't walking like she was walking down an almost-dirt road that runs through a town that ain't on most maps, no, this woman was walking, more like what they call sashaying…. The way she was moving was something to see but what was following behind her was something else.

It wasn't just a car. It was a brand new 1946 Bel Air. A bone-white with red, two-tone convertible, just crawling behind her…. All I had to my name was thirty-eight cents, but I was gonna get me that gal and her car both. (p.72)

Alas, those small flashbacks are some of the book's best moments. The present-tense road-trip hijinks and elaborate secrets and personal musings are tossed in one after another, without either suspense or discovery. This is particularly disappointing, since Parks' deeper material is excellent. She is particularly good at exposing each character's personal sense of morality. For instance, here's the abortion doctor after Billy hands him a deposit:

I write her out a receipt for fifteen dollars and tell her she has to be back by the end of next week or else she'll be too far gone for me to help her. I do the best I can for people, but I'm not a baby-killer. (p. 63)

And here's Billy, realizing that she can con--well, maybe not con, but persuade--people into helping her get what she wants. While still believing that her lover will marry her, Billy has the local bridal shop owner help her try on a wedding dress that Billy can't afford:

I see something in her… Something my mother might call The Hole… Mother said she could see The Hole in people and then she'd know how to take them. She could see Holes all the time but I ain't never seen one. Until now. Words shape theirselves in my mouth and I start talking without thinking of what I need to say…

"When you got married, what'd yr dress look like?" I ask Mrs. Jackson.

The hard line of her mouth lets go a little. (pp. 20-21)

Or here's the upright Dill, well-known as too hard-working to con or steal, on burying Willa Mae:

I put her in the ground cause she asked me too. And she asked me to bury her with her favorite things. Her ring and necklace. But I didn't. I took them and I weren't wrong to take them…. Willa owes me the right to sell the necklace pearl by pearl and she owes me the right to keep the ring in my pocket until I need to cash it in. The bitch ran around on me and disrespected me in the street. The way I see it, me taking the fast-running, no-count, trifling bitch's goods is only fair. Still. I miss her. (p. 97)

These are brilliant enough snapshots that I wished I felt more compelled to keep turning the page, but they don't connect. Without the chapter titles, you wouldn't know who was speaking: The voices run into each other. Parks relies on the kind of incantatory repetition that we know by now from Samuel Beckett, David Mamet, or The West Wing; it can work brilliantly when used by an actor who changes the repeating phrase's emotional pitch, but it disappears as merely redundant when scanned on the page.

I came away with the strong feeling that Parks hasn't yet mastered the difference between writing for the stage and the page. Playwriting involves a miraculous subtraction: The writer must outline fully imagined characters and then leave them for someone else to bring alive. In a novel, no such collaborative magic is possible: The author's pencil sketches must do it all. I believe these eccentric characters were vivid and particular in the author's mind, and she takes their desires quite seriously, but they stayed static on the page, antic but not alive. Maybe the book really wants to be a movie; maybe Parks is happy to have produced a beach novel; or maybe she'll come back with a novel that's more richly narrated. Meanwhile, I'm still dying to see her plays.

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Sex after 40
A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance by Jane Juska. New York: Villard, 2003. 273 pp., $23.95 hardcover.
Sexual Healing by Jill Nelson. Chicago: Agate Publishing, 2003, 320 pp., $23.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Emily Toth

As Jane Juska and Jill Nelson show in their new books, midlife women don't necessarily lose the urge to merge. More often, we lose our inhibitions, and we don't need any pretense of romance. Mature women can be as horny as teenaged boys--and a lot funnier.

Jane Juska Photo by Kelly Corrigan

Juska, in her memoir, and Nelson, in her novel, both describe women who wake up one day wanting the sex without strings that men have always (supposedly) craved. (In fact, nowadays men are more often the ones who push for marriage and family--but that's another story.) Thirty years ago, Erica Jong in Fear of Flying claimed that (straight) women wanted the uncomplicated sexual experience she called "the zipless fuck." Now some of us really do.

Juska, a recently retired high school English teacher, hadn't had sex with anyone but herself since her divorce 30 years earlier, and she hadn't had a date for 42 years. Five years of psychoanalysis taught her that "pleasure was not bad"; and volunteer teaching at San Quentin prison, singing, and exercising a lot weren't enough. She wanted to be the center of her own drama. And so she staked $136.50 on a personal ad in the New York Review of Books: "Before I turn 67--next March--I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me."

Twelve men responded immediately, and eventually 63 did. She sorted them, developing criteria as she went along: no kinky sex, no married men, no Republicans--and she broke all of those rules. Also--because I know you, the reader, can't wait to know--she did have sex with at least half a dozen men, ranging in age from thirtyish to eightyish. And she lived to tell the tale, with humor, poignancy, compassion, and charm. Hers is a book you have to love.

One of Juska's most lovable qualities is her oscillation between seriousness--she had a repressed childhood in a small northern Ohio town--and flat-out I-don't-give-a-shitness: The hymn "He Walks With Me," she writes, is "a soppily sexual love song to Jesus." It's clear that her mother, an "ironing fool" and a thorough Victorian, nevertheless loved sports and hated "girldom"--the world of frills and weakness.

Juska escaped these mixed messages when she was thirtyish and pregnant, ran from hubby a few years later, and wound up in Berkeley. One day, while watching a sophisticated French movie, she thought up her ad. She worried about the money and then decided to splurge ($36.50) to include the mention of Trollope. It was a pun she enjoyed, and not lost on her swains, one of whom wouldn't meet her in person but directed her to the New York Public Library to see Anthony Trollope's manuscripts.

Juska was enthralled, and much of the book is a love letter to New York City, where she met many of her men and fell in love--with the city. Her book is a bit of a tease--as is this review--in that she alternates chapters on her past with ones on her current sexual adventures. She also writes about how her teaching skills, honed on children, were challenged by the San Quentin inmates who immediately decided that Emily Dickinson is a sexy writer ("That Emily, she something," said one lifer.)

Yet it all fits together, because A Round-Heeled Woman is about the lifelong education of a Midwestern girl, a portrait of the artist as a woman still growing at an age when many give up. "Why is it that aging is so often accompanied by a loss of curiosity?" she wonders at one point. (One online reviewer says he doesn't want his parents to read Juska's book, lest they get ideas.)

But what about the sex? And by the way, I read the book in linear order. I did not skip ahead to the good parts.

Well, the men aren't perfect lovers, and some are bunglers. "Jonah," who won't admit to being in his 80s, has trouble keeping it up, and blames Juska (some things never change). He also absconds with her pajamas. "Robert," an elegant e-mail writer and retired professor, has another lady friend to whom he whispers sweet nothings on the phone in his closet.

Juska eventually hides in the same closet when she calls "Sidney" for a consoling date. They meet at the J. P. Morgan Library and feel each other up.

The sex is titillating, melodramatic, comical, and biographical: We learn about Juska's history with blow jobs. Her son, now over 30, told her not to worry about discretion: "Go get 'em, Mom. It's your turn." She may have held back some graphic details because she's still seeing three different men from her project--though not "Jonah the Thief" or "Robert the Liar" or "Sidney the Peculiar." Thirtyish, cuddly, wildly effervescent "Graham the Younger" sounds like he's a keeper.

Does Jane Juska worry about what people think? Well, her women friends love what she's done (as does every woman who's heard about it from me, including my 20-something students). One of Jane's friends yells at her about condoms in the middle of Berkeley traffic, delighting all eavesdroppers. Another Berkeley friend buys her a couple of nights at a fancy hotel to do the deed, and a Michigan friend mails her "the most gorgeous nightgown I had ever seen."

Does Juska regret being a "round-heeled woman" (the archaic term for "easy lay")? Not at all. Her book is a treat and a gift for intrepid women who want to Do It--not just sex, but all those scary and wonderful things we may not have gotten around to doing yet. Juska tells us it's not too late.

 

Jill Nelson Photo by Coreen Simpson

ACEY, ONE OF THE TWO FRIENDS in Jill Nelson's wonderful Sexual Healing, thinks it may be too late for her. She's fortyish, African American, the daughter of a preacher, and she still grieves for Earl, the beloved husband who went sailing some 12 years earlier and never returned. She's dated some, but Acey is still tied to the past.

Not so her lifelong best friend Lydia, an irrepressible loud-mouth who's finally dumped a useless, parasitic husband (who later steals her money to get a sex change--but it's kinda funny, it really is). Lydia doesn't want to have a relationship with another needy or greedy man. Lydia wants pretty much the same thing Jane Juska advertised for: "fabulous, regular, safe sex with a man who doesn't hurt my eyes."

One sunny afternoon in Oakland--what is it about the Bay area?--Lydia and Acey realize that most of the sisters they know hate "all the work dating requires for the usually low returns." Why go through all that only to wind up with mediocre sex anyway? they wonder. But Lydia and Acey aren't just horny. They're also middle-class go-getters, skilled in entrepreneurship and public relations. And so they hatch a business plan for "A Sister's Spa," a full-service spa with facials, pedicures, manicures--and great sex from willing, well-trained men whose job it is to give pleasure. (One new hire who demands fellatio is immediately fired.)

Their brothel for women has to be in Nevada, of course, and a lot of the novel (this is definitely fiction) is about how they pull it off. Odell, a UPS delivery man and great lover, pleases both women so much that they hire him to train others. LaShaWanda, a disaffected former Wall Street broker now working as a secretary, turns out to have the financial acumen they need. Lydia's mother, a librarian, checks out the history of Nevada brothels on the Net and says the world needs one for women. Earl, in moments of magical realism, turns up in Acey's pantry to reassure his widow, who's been wondering "if there's a conflict in simultaneously loving the dead Earl, being a good Christian, and wanting, really wanting, to get well fucked."

The major funding for the spa comes from one Dick Dixmoor and his wife Muffin, a white do-gooder who immediately bonds with the black women. Dick Dixmoor is a white supremacist who's pledged millions to get "black superpredators" off the streets--and if 30-some black men are in Nevada copulating all day and all night, he thinks his money's well-spent.

Sexual Healing--yes, of course, the title's from Marvin Gaye's song--is an exuberant story, almost a fairy tale, in which everything falls into place: long-lost children, secrets, good people who win, and bad ones who lose. There are characters who are a lot like Florynce Kennedy and Al Sharpton. Parts are laugh-out-loud funny, such as the multiple-choice questionnaire for male job applicants. Question 9, for instance:

I go down on a woman because:
* I like it
* She likes it
* Because most women's orgasms are clitorally, not vaginally, stimulated
* Because I understand a man's gotta eat that pie
* Other.

Sexual Healing has lots of great chummy, non-clinical sex scenes that are inventive and hilarious. With Odell, Lydia reports: "My legs wrap around his head like a nutcracker attacking a Christmas walnut."

As a white reader, I particularly enjoy the ways Lydia and Acey talk to each other. They use uninhibited, funky expressions I've never heard--but I know exactly what they mean, and they make me laugh.

Nelson also pokes fun at those endless quizzes in Cosmo, such as "Are You Pleasuring your Man?" Acey scores high as a "giver" and Lydia scores low as "a sexually selfish bitch," but neither one does well in relationships-"more proof that test scores don't tell much about how you'll function in the real world."

Jane Juska and Jill Nelson are both writing about how they'd like women to function in the real world. They're praising more than great sex, though: They also cherish women's friendships, gossip, and laughter. These books are celebrations. They would be perfect gifts to any friend in her perimenopausal doldrums, and I could easily imagine reading them aloud at midlife pajama parties. (Does anyone have such things? Well, we should.)

Except for some ménages in Sexual Healing, all the sex in both books is heterosexual. Would lesbian or bisexual writers tell different stories of midlife desires and adventure? The success of these two books should goose authors and publishers to, um, put out more on the subject. I hope they lay it all out on the table, and soon.

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