Cunt: A Declaration of Independence Expanded and Updated Second Edition
Posted by Admin on December 12th, 2009 at 04:09pm
From Publishers Weekly
Somewhere between Valerie Solanas’s bitter SCUM Manifesto and Eve Ensler’s fanciful The Vagina Monologues lies this self-indulgent exercise in feminist reclamation. Striving to remove the negative connotations from a word usually used as a scathing insult, Muscio traces the history of the term “cunt” and asserts that it was once a term of respect before the patriarchy turned it into a profane, misogynistic epithet. This transformation, she insists, occurred…
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2 Comments for Cunt: A Declaration of Independence Expanded and Updated Second Edition
1. Winfield | December 12th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
Sick of academic feminism, I really thought this book was going to be a slipshod piece of etymological scholarship. I picked it up to laugh at it. Imagine my shock when it turned out to be a smart, feisty, personable, positive, constructive, angry, liberating book – oh yeah, and fun. The sheer pleasure Musico finds in life and words is exhilarating. Reading her book is like talking to your best friend – she’s stubborn, kind of crazy, and I still don’t agree with all her politics, but it’s damned hard not to like her or to respect where she’s coming from. Also, she has some sound, specific, and clearly stated advice on how to keep from being raped/mugged – that alone is probably enough to make the book worth reading.
I do think the majority of college-educated, pro-choice American women will get a kick out of this, if they can get past the embarassing cover (buying this book felt very much like buying a box of tampons – this is fallout from the author’s relentlessly sex-positive attitudes). However, extreme feminists will probably find it overly personal, insufficiently rigorous, and too focused on the lives of women of the demographic I mentioned above.
2. Audrina | December 12th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
This book is from a kickass school: it’s not preoccupied with men, it’s not loose and theoretical. It’s about coming to terms: with your own body, with language, with the culture at large. It’s about subverting the tampon industry, hanging out with your mom, taking control of some of the more suspicious parts of your life, and riding skateboards down the street while wearing bunny-ear hats. I never did feel like part of the club before when reading feminist literature, but this book made me feel invited to the party.
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