[The Feminist Press; 2024]
I know it’s a golden age fallacy, but I feel like I missed the best years of the internet—back when it was an uncharted landscape of niche forums, new technologies, and self-organizing groups that sought to connect a fan base, a subculture, or a set of like-minded individuals. The portion of the lost internet I pine for the most? Feminist blogs: Bitch Media. Feministing. Man Repeller. XO Jane. And Weird Sister, an online journal at the intersection of feminism and literature. These sites have all folded, and the mass closure of such websites serves as “a testament to the difficulty of sustaining an independent feminist project without sufficient funding,” according to Marisa Crawford, the website’s founder and the editor of a new anthology, The Weird Sister Collection, released this year by the Feminist Press. Weird Sister, which launched in 2014 and was actively updated through 2022, now lives again in a new-old form: the print anthology. The Weird Sister Collection pulls together essays from throughout the website’s eight-year run and organizes them into sections like “Our Bookshelves, Our Selves” (a clever riff on the 1970s populist sex-education text Our Bodies, Ourselves), “Double Double Pop Culture Trouble,” and “Performance, Identity, and Public Space.”
As Marisa Crawford references in the introduction, feminism has only recently garnered a close-to-positive connotation in general parlance. “‘Feminist’ was a word I barely heard growing up,” she recalls. “If I did, it was mentioned with suspicion at best and disdain at worst.” I can relate: in my predominantly white, conservative Christian upbringing, we regarded feminists with the same quiet mistrust we held for Democrats. For Crawford, women’s studies courses in college were what punctured her ideological bubble. My undergraduate years, at a private Christian college on the northeastern tip of the United States, didn’t include any gender studies or sociology classes. I thought I didn’t need feminism because I had Jesus—but I had no real understanding of what feminism was or why anyone might need it.
After college, I traded the tranquil forests of New England for the asphalt streets and verdant drainage ditches of central Houston. There, in the historically Black neighborhood of Third Ward, I encountered the same concepts Crawford learned about in her college courses: “intersectionality, agency, privilege.” I was introduced to womanism, in the tradition of Alice Walker, and to the legacy of the Combahee River Collective. I learned about the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (bell hooks’ iconic phrase) from Black women abolitionists, artists, curators, and community organizers. These women taught me to scrutinize the world around me for systems of oppression and for indicators of my own complicity: a radical practice also reflected in The Weird Sister Collection. Even though I wasn’t aware of the blog during those years (the same years when it was regularly updated), Weird Sister and its anthology share their spirit with the conversations that shifted my perspective so dramatically in my early twenties. Reading The Weird Sister Collection felt like being immersed back into that place of openness and discovery, back when everything about the world was ripe for criticism and I was just discovering what Michelle Tea in her foreword to the collection calls “the joy of thinking.”
Like Crawford, I’d long known that I wanted to be a writer, but that dream felt tethered to my previous life, bricked up within the ivory tower. Crawford “couldn’t figure out how these two spaces [the literary world and the feminist world] could coexist, let alone collide, and how on earth to go about building [her] own life within that collision”—so she created Weird Sister. As an archive, the collection offers a robust portrait of feminist literary thought at a certain point in history. However, the book’s greatest value lies not in content but in praxis. Each essay in the book reprises the site’s founding intention: to create the very space one desires and to invite others into dialogue while doing so. The essays stretch to fill this space and to push its boundaries even further. In Caolan Madden’s essay, “Fifty Shades of Grey: Why I Keep Defending Women’s Trash” (originally published in 2015), Madden demands a proliferation of creative avenues by which we can explore our fantasies and renegotiate our relationships to the world as it is. She hypothesizes that Fifty Shades of Grey itself might be one of these frameworks, however imperfectly executed. “What if,” Madden asks, “rather than an inaccurate representation of BDSM, the Fifty Shades novels are trying to do the same work as BDSM: provide a space where people (in this case, specifically women) can safely, guiltlessly, ethically, pleasurably work through their complicated relationship to patriarchal power?” Madden celebrates messy, flawed artwork that makes visible women’s efforts to understand and situate ourselves within culture. The Weird Sister Collection as a whole does the same. In Naomi Extra’s 2015 essay, “Revisiting Raven: Thoughts on Zora, Nina, and Take-Down Culture,” Extra states, “I’m not so much interested in Raven [Symoné, and her racial self-identification] as I am in the ways in which we interact with each other when we disagree, the silence we engender, and the complexity that we glide away from.” What Extra seeks, and activates in her essay, is a space for generous consideration of conflicting perspectives.
The various contributors appear on the page with their own prose styles, affiliations, and preoccupations, and they invite the reader into the phenomenal breadth of feminist literary inquiry. Each essay in the collection rises from a specific occasion, whether a pre-existing text or artwork, as with Cathy De La Cruz’s performance art commentary, “How to Not Tell a Rape Joke—Adrienne Truscott’s Asking For It: A One-Lady Rape about Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else!”; a literary forebear, such as Kristin Sanders’s essay “The Honesty of Jean Rhys”; or an event, in Hossannah Asuncion’s “We Were There: Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter at the New Museum.” The essays relate to each other primarily via values and concerns. Sex has a strong presence in the collection, from Camille Wanliss’s homage, “Best Literary Sex: If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin,” originally published in 2017, to Terese Svoboda’s 2016 academic deep-dive in “Sex Permeates Everything: The Poetry of Lola Ridge.” Several essays displace the dominant (and often domineering) perspective of the white male critic. In Vanessa Willoughby’s review from 2016, “Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever: A Coming-of-Age Tale and Hip-Hop Opera,” Willoughby points out that the marketing around “‘Street Literature’ . . . implies that the genre lacks a certain finesse and elegance, even literary merit, in comparison to that which is regarded as Fiction.” In Neelanjana Banerjee’s 2018 essay, “My Guns N’ Roses Death Wish,” she recalls what it was like to be “a thirteen-year-old Brown girl . . . deeply and blindly influenced almost entirely by white male artists.” The panoply of voices and perspectives calls the reader into greater consciousness of the many possibilities and permutations of feminism.
In her foreword, Michelle Tea describes the anthology’s contents as “cross-hatchings of identities and cultures, the high and the low, the aspirational undertakings and the guilty pleasures.” I find a kinship in this anthology, as so many of the writers are in the active process of rejecting old, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal scripts about their lives. Jenif(f)er Tamayo, while listing the lessons learned from her protest of the overriding whiteness of the NYC poetry scene, names “this heartbreak you are feeling now, this unlearning that feels like death.” Sam Cohen, in her essay “I AM JENNY SCHECTER, PLEASE LOVE ME” (2020), leans into “the possibility that a writer is a person in flux, a person who can’t accept the way of being that’s been handed to her, even if she doesn’t have another one yet.” Rejecting the dominant culture’s way of being comes with grief—a grief that the contributors to Weird Sister know well. Resistance to dominant culture has to be nurtured like a timid houseplant. The Weird Sister Collection is one such way of tending to the anti-patriarchal imagination.
Most of the essays included in this collection aren’t arguing for a specific point or interpretation as much as they are pushing for their own self-realization, arguing for the vitality of the same spaces they’re staking out. While this might have felt self-gratifying when the blog was still running, in the print anthology, this emphasis serves to highlight the necessity of this kind of writing. “A feminist lit blog was never enough,” Crawford admits in the introduction, “to eradicate the world’s injustices, but being one small piece of the puzzle trying to change things for the better was all we could ever really hope to be.” I came to my feminist education late, but I’m still grateful for the virtual consciousness-raising group of The Weird Sister Collection, and for the possibilities and practices that it illuminates.
McKenzie Watson-Fore is a writer, artist, and critic based in her hometown of Boulder, Colorado. She holds an MFA from Pacific University and participated in the inaugural Emerging Critics program with Anaphora Literary Arts. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Write or Die magazine, Psaltery & Lyre, the Offing, and elsewhere. She can be found at MWatsonFore.com or drinking tea on her back porch.
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