PositiveLiberThe sparseness of the collection is not really the fault of its editor, her son David Rieff ... Having decided to rescue Sontag’s reputation as a feminist thinker, he had few essays from which to choose ... “The Third World of Women” stands out in the new collection for how clearly it defines a feminist utopia.
Frans de Waal
PanLIBERThere are readers who will walk away from this text more sympathetic to homosexuality and gender fluidity in humans and more open to the idea that women can be powerful and men can be nurturing. Amid the hypermisogynistic conclusions of most pop-evolution pundits, this is not nothing; I could imagine Different as a useful if mild prophylactic against, say, Jordan Peterson. But to be seduced by essentialism, and especially zoological essentialism, would be a mistake for feminists ... Surely, the right to live free from gender prescriptions does not depend on the existence of Donna the butch chimpanzee but instead on a basic human right to seek happiness where it does not imperil the pursuit of happiness in others. We do not need to search for a nonhuman precedent to permit ourselves gender fluidity any more than we did before forming democracies or writing lyric poetry. We, too, are animals; our behavior, too, is natural. I sometimes wanted to pull de Waal aside and say, The world that you labor to prove may someday exist already does ... in his frequent use of essentialist fallacies, de Waal seems simply in over his head ... It is a bad habit of essentialists to describe overlapping probability curves as mutually exclusive gendered traits, especially when the trait is suggestible and so the exaggeration self-fulfilling.
Elif Batuman
MixedLIBER... also a miscalculation, but its project is more ambitious and so its errors more interesting. By the fourth page, there are hints that Batuman is up to something new ... The widening gap between Selin and Batuman makes for a more provocative tension between narrator and author—Selin is no longer just ridiculous; now, possibly, she is wrong. The debate at hand is still broadly that of politics and the novel, but the concerns have coalesced more vividly ... A possible advantage of combining the two projects, to put it in MFA terms that Batuman would despise, is that it allows her to show-not-tell. Batuman does not explain that heteronormativity in the
canon is bad. Instead, we watch as Selin compares her own novel-life to the novel-lives of Kierkegaard’s young girl, Breton’s Nadja, Freud’s Dora, and James’s Isabel Archer, among many others. In doing so, Selin absorbs the norms of concision and of heterosexuality that Batuman will go on to reject in writing and life ... one gets the sense of a writer capable of throwing great distances who nevertheless, out of a sense of duty or novelty, ties her own hands ... These blights on the page are all the more painful because they are not gaffes but deliberate, ill-judged choices. Batuman is capable of much better.
