I’ve been meaning to talk about Luna’s zine Reclaim Yr Girlhood ever since I got it in the mail, but I have so many thoughts so I kept putting it off. I guess this is going to be less zine review and more gushy rambling about what it made me think about.
Luna talks a lot about her childhood relationship to femininity and her parents’ influence on it. Her parents shunned all conventional hallmarks of girlhood in favor of legos and train sets, which I really identify with. Like, legos and train sets are rad, but when you’re obviously just replacing typical girl things with typical boy things, that’s misogyny. My mother extended this to grooming as well— she didn’t teach me about makeup or shaving or periods or bras or anything. That was a feminist action for her, but in the end it just made me feel awkward and left out. It would have been so much better if instead of silently shunning, she had opened a dialogue about body image and how grooming can be oppressive and maybe even how it can be reclaimed.
This also reminds me of how when I was little I was a tomboy, and I remember aspiring to a certain persona: a boy crossing a stream with his pants rolled up or something, just being very competent and adventurous. I wanted to be that so badly, I loved that aesthetic, but I felt like I couldn’t be it fully because I was really a girl.
Similar thinking colored my experience with puberty. I think people often assume that extreme curviness is the unrealistic beauty ideal girls aspire to, when the opposite ideal exists as well. Luna writes, “I wanted to be lithe and androgynous, and have a razor sharp jaw.” In my family, all signs of puberty and womanliness were shamed. I had a rather boyish figure and didn’t get my period until I was fourteen, but my older sister, as a very serious athlete, was even more boyish and didn’t get hers until she was nineteen, so I always felt super awkward about my development. I’m so happy that Luna added this narrative to the discussion of misogyny surrounding puberty, because it’s important to realize that not all narratives consist of “I had small boobs and was made fun of!” There’s shame in both directions, all directions. (Looking back on all of this, the relationship my sister and I had with puberty strikes me as deeply fucked up, and I’m sure such relationships aren’t rare.)
I’m really interested in what gets categorized as conventionally feminine and reclaiming those things. In terms of literature and writing, I’ve noticed that certain narrative styles, like the confessional and the diaristic, are derided as indulgent or narcissistic. I really like those narrative styles, both as a writer and a reader! Self-obsession is really important to me. Also, I cry a lot, and I’m often embarrassed by it because it’s seen as indulgent. I’m beginning to recognize that embarrassment as internalized misogyny. Crying is shamed because it’s emotional, hysterical. So, I’m done with that! I wanna reclaim all those qualities that are derided as indulgently feminine: emotional, irrational, hysterical, narcissistic. Of course ideally we’d live in a world where people of all genders can take on conventionally feminine and masculine traits in whatever combinations they choose, but I think reclaiming diaristic novels and crying fits will really confuse dudes, and that’s kinda my favorite activity.
So, thanks for making me think about all of that, Luna! (Get your own copy of Reclaim Yr Girlhood here.)
![Embarking on a project wherein I post one entry daily from old notebooks because I need embarrassment, apparently. This one is the oldest and I’m really interested in the fact that I seemed to write a lot about how I was bored, like how people use the internet now. Also, I spelled marijuana “mariwona.”
~March 2004 (age ten)
“We are in a really cool museum. I am looking at pictures of people sleeping in the photograter’s bed. [Sophie Calle?] Sometimes they are nakd or smiling, or suprised or sleeping. I like this exhibit a lot.”](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4ri6iYj9g1qmsw3eo1_1280.jpg)
