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68
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
70/100Critics
44/100Scholars
89/100Author:
Lauren Elkin
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date:
November 14, 2023
What kind of art does a monster make? And what if monster is a verb? Noun or a verb, the idea is a dare: to overwhelm limits, to invent our own definitions of beauty. In this reassessment of women's stories, bodies, and art, Lauren Elkin explores the ways in which feminist artists have taken up the challenge of their work and how they not only react against the patriarchy but redefine their own aesthetic aims. How do we tell the truth about our experiences as bodies? What is the language, what are the materials, that we need to transcribe them? And what are the unique questions facing those engaged with female bodies, queer bodies, sick bodies, racialized bodies?
What The Reviewers Say
Elkin is most interested in the art these women made — as she should be; their art is fascinating — but the book also argues that this art is often a response to the social structures that threatened to inhibit them.
Hybrid cultural criticism and memoir.
...she offers the original, bracing definition of her subject only to abandon it.
Erudite, provocative, and relentlessly eclectic.
