Emerging Critics 2019

We might, for the sake of simplicity, call a human body a result of the things it has eaten and the things it has excreted; the things it has said and done and had said and done to it. The things it has read and pretended to read. The things which I have recently read, such as these books by Ellena Savage and Emma Marie Jones.

Invented Lives is structured around a series of upheavals. The characters’ worlds change and they must decide whether to take a risk or keep their lives as close as they can to before.

It is like an inverted and far more complicated version of Sedgwick’s erotic triangle (in which two men bond over their rivalry for a female’s affection). What I keep seeing is variations on this: two young women, both of them queer or queer-adjacent, intensely connected and wavering between the platonic and the erotic; and then the added complication of an older straight man, with whom one of the women sleeps.

Women are sometimes portrayed in traditional domestic settings in Leunig’s drawings, but they are never confined to simple human giver roles, or if they are, they chafe against these power dynamics, consciously or unconsciously.

This image of a woman observed in public, her distraction a sign that she is somewhere else, too, is one that arises again and again in texts that have women contemplate the minds of other women.

The questions Bishop and Robinson ask are linked: could these disasters have been prevented? But more importantly, how do we keep going?

Kofman focuses on the materiality of scars: how they come to be on the body, how they index pain and trauma, and how they define a person, whether they like it or not.

Laveau-Harvie has packed a lifetime of hurt, confusion and disorientation into this slim volume.

Both George-Allen and Lee are describing their experiences of realisation, of revelation, of feminist wonderment: that the way our culture has been built relies on the systemic mistrust of women.