Understanding women's literature is a lot like understanding the woman, herself. As we were shown in various texts we've read throughout the course, especially illustrated in works such as The Vagina Monologues, The Shawl, and Krik? Krak!, women fit no specific stereotype placed upon them. They are wild; they are tame, they are emotional; they are stoic, they are simple; they are mysteriously complex. I've drawn on my experiences growing up to a single mother and being raised in her hair salon to help me connect to each text; each different aspect embodied in femininity. In some cases, the material was easily understood. The trials of women displayed in Ensler's "What I want my Words to do to You" and The Vagina Monologues, and in other cases, I couldn't have had a harder time connecting. The alienation and self-depersonalization in Push and Two or Three Things I Know For Sure. Here and now, at the end of the course, I find myself more enlightened, empathatic to, and sensitive towards femininity and womanhood, but really the same "boat" as before: "Woman" is just too general of a label to slap on any person of the gender. Under that title, they are fighters, mothers, lovers, lonely, bored, starving, outspoken, silenced, healing, broken, content, pissed off, sophisticated, raunchy, and everything in between. No two women, through life or our novels have proved to be the same.
My favorite novel(s) were a tie between The Vagina Monologues and Krik? Krak! Eve Ensler quickly became a favorite author of mine, due to her raw, "no-holds-barred" styling. She wound up and punched the reader in the face with everything she had to celebrate women with. This novel made me uncomfortable, sad, guilty, turned on, interested, repulsed, and other feelings I thought a book had no power in coercing me to feel. I learned the most through Ensler, as she exposed me to the mind of a lesbian's vagina, an "old" vagina, and a brand new vagina. All in all, she had me thinking as close as I ever could like a girl. Being a bit of a close-minded reader, dabbling only in old works written by dead men, this was a new alien territory that I actually found myself to like.
Krik? Krak! was one of the standout novels that I thoroughly enjoyed for reasons I've yet to figure out. I enjoyed the little, novella like stories that all seemed to tie together, yet contradict themselves at the same time, as that seemed to be foreshadowing or even allegorical of the course as a whole.
The course seemed best wrapped up by our final piece analyzed, the documentary-esque film, "What I Want my Words To Do To You." As I wrote in our final in class assignment, the film takes women of different backgrounds with different stories, that can all stand alone as piece of educating material on feminism, and juxtaposes each together to present a bigger, picture of feminism : a plethora of cultures, ideologies, pasts, futures, and stories that all come together in a celebratory jubilation that even Ms. Ensler herself couldn't express in words.
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