Women's Bodies Remain Battlegrounds in the Culture Wars

By Sarah Seltzer, RH Reality Check. Posted June 15, 2009.

Front Lines: "Words of Choice" (The New Press)

Writer and RH Reality Check blogger Cindy Cooper's "Words of Choice" weaves together humor, pathos, and politics to paint a picture of reproductive rights in America. She juxtaposes excerpts from a variety of different sources, personal and political, public and private, that all illustrate the state of reproductive freedom in our country. Some of the most notable moments come right from the Roe vs. Wade decision, congressional testimony about so-called partial birth abortion, an Onion parody, the word of a nurse injured in a clinic bombing, poetry, songs and more. The tapestry woven by these disparate excerpts is surprisingly complete, and may leave the reader or viewer with a good deal of righteous anger towards anyone who would use blanket laws to restrict something so personal and intense as reproduction. In this way, it's reminiscent of the 2007 anthology Choice, except Cooper's intentions are more defiantly (and refreshingly) political. "Words of Choice" as worthwhile a play to read as it must be to watch.  

"Words of Choice"  appears in the anthology Front Lines edited by Alexis Greene, and Shirley Lauro--all of which is worth reading. Front Lines is a group of political plays by American women, many of which got considerable media attention when they were first staged ("The Exonerated" about wrongful imprisonment and "No Child,' which tackles education in particular). It's exciting to see so many of these plays together because they do make a powerful point about creative women taking on a whole range of issues, from domestic violence to war to legal injustice. Any lingering stereotypes that political writing is a masculine realm are rendered ridiculous.

Read Cindy Cooper's RH Reality Check blog.  

Supergirls Speak Out (Simon and Schuster)

Fighting back against the cult of overachievement is an uphill endeavor. Books like Courtney E. Martin's Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, which targeted the toll of perfectionism on young women's bodies, and Alexandra Robbins's The Overachievers, which followed high school students through the college application process, were the vanguard of questioning whether all this impressive output on the part of the millenials was healthy.  

Liz Funk's Supergirls Speak Out adds to this conversation, pointing out the anxiety, body-image issues, and low self-esteem that can accompany that drive towards surface perfection in teen girls.  Funk, herself only a senior in college, followed several younger girls closely and details some quietly disturbing behavior in her teen subjects - like obsessively rewriting paper drafts for endless teacher approval when an A was already inevitable, or laying out coordinated outfits and makeup palettes each night. Funk's interest in pop culture--and knowledge of the tv shows and music that make up her subjects' frame of references--is a key part of the book. She analyzes the conflicting messages celebrity culture sends and how that can lead to a spiral of confusion. Like My Little Red Book, Supergirls works particularly well when targeted towards the girls it describes, as a way of preparing young women for the issues they face or making them feel less alone.

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Sarah Seltzer is an RH Reality Check staff writer and resident pop culture expert. Sarah is a freelance writer based in New York City. Her work has been published in Bitch, Venus Zine, Womens eNews, and Publishers Weekly among other places. She formerly taught English in a Bronx public school.

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