![]() ![]() Being speechless in the face of courage needn’t rule out a little mockery of earnestness. ![]() This isn’t quite the impact Judy Chicago wanted to make with her monumental installation The Dinner Party, commemorating women ‘of history’. ![]() A few days later, they’re swimming in the warm water of an island off the Georgia coast, their relaxed chat implicitly referring back to the museum visit. In ‘Mothers’, for instance, the narrator watches her girlfriend Bad smoking weed: ‘Her body shuddered along an invisible curve, and the smoke crawled out of her mouth a limb at a time an animal.’ The narrator, who is perhaps called Good, accepts the pipe for the first time: ‘I felt my whole self loosening, my mind retreating to a place somewhere around my left ear.’ In their altered state the women take a tour of Bad’s old Brooklyn neighbourhood and visit the museum, where they see a table so long it never seems to end, laid with suggestive and flowering plates. I am speechless in the face of their courage.’ The stories in the book don’t really match this, their attitude being closer to a productive impertinence. I n the acknowledgments to Her Body & Other Parties Carmen Maria Machado strikes a note of respect for her predecessors that isn’t far from abasement: ‘Every woman artist who has come before me. ![]()
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