‘Here WeAre’ an uplifting feminist anthology for young readers
Kelly Jensen couldn’t have chosen a more fitting leadoff piece for “Here We Are,” her new anthology of contemporary writing about feminism for teenage readers, than novelist Malinda Lo’s “Forever Feminist.”
Like many of the writers in this book, Lo traces who she is today back to who she was as a child, “an awkward, outspoken girl in glasses with a stereotypical Asian bob haircut, pretending to fit in though I’m desperate to leave my small town behind.” She finds a hero and role model in her grandmother, a white woman who defied convention by marry- ing a Chinese man. The young Lo finds women to admire in the books she loves — not only Jo March in “Little Women” but also Amy March from the same novel, “determined, prickly, and unapologetic.”
Lo’s essay signals this anthology’s foregrounding of intersectional feminism — the understanding that women also face difficulties because of their race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and physical differences. Kaye Mirza describes the criticism she has experienced as a faithful Muslim woman and feminist. Ashley Hope Pérez testifies about growing up as a “nice girl” in the Bible Belt. “Feminism is perfectly compatible with genuine warmth, optimism, and courtesy,” Pérez writes, but she doesn’t feel the need to fake a smile for anyone.
“Here We Are” takes on difficult and painful subjects, including rape, in interviews with Laurie Halse Anderson (“Speak”) and Courtney Summers (“All the Rage”). Yet as a whole the book has an uplifting, hopeful tone.
“Here We Are” offers several sparkling pop-culture pieces, including Brenna Clarke Gray’s guide to getting started in fandom and Allison Peyton Steger and Rebecca Sexton’s illustrated “A Guide to Being a Teenage Superheroine.” But even the lightest essays in the book remind readers that feminism means equality. In “Teenage Superheroine,” Steger and Sexton tell budding crimefighters to remember that “no one is the sidekick in their own life.”
In “Reading Worthy Women,” Nova Ren Suma remembers the shock she felt when a high school teacher told her there were no female writers, composers or artists on the class syllabus because he deemed none worthy. That stirred Suma to five years of reading only female writers, and through engaging their words the discovery of her own voice.
“Here We Are” also reprints “Bad Feminist: Take Two” from Roxane Gay’s collection “Bad Feminist.” In this remarkable essay, Gay grapples with her personal “mess of contradictions” about how she wants to live, or thinks she should live, as a feminist, and how she actually lives, disowning neither feminism nor her own desires.
“I am as committed to fighting fiercely for equality as I am committed to disrupting the notion that there is an essential feminism,” Gay writes, using the word essential to challenge the notion of feminism as a narrow, impossibly restrictive party line.
Jim Higgins wrote this review for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.