Click: Becoming Feminists

Rebecca Murdock is a solicitor with the British Columbia Labour
Relations Board.

As Crosbie notes in her introduction, “click” is Gloria Steinem’s
catchphrase for the moment of feminist awareness. The word works
effectively as a device for bringing together diverse first-person
narratives of women recounting their introduction to feminism. Intimate
and engaging, the offerings in this text display the astute perceptions
of some first-rate alternative minds.

In the opening pages, sex siren/movie star Mamie Van Doren asserts that
“[t]he movie scene in the late 1950’s was to feminism what a CLEAVER
is to MEAT.” Pat Califa, self-styled “leather dyke author,”
recounts vignettes from her childhood that foreshadowed the unwavering
confidence that would later lead her to write banned books and found a
politically aware S/M community.

Particularly enjoyable are the offbeat rantings of femme-fatale
Sook-Lin Lee, pigtailed DJ with Toronto’s MuchMusic and the outlaw
child of a functioning but mentally ill mother who immigrated to
Vancouver when her family fled China’s Cultural Revolution. Slavenka
Drakulic is a distinct voice from the wilderness of war-ravaged Croatia;
her essay, “lipstick and other feminist lessons,” offers insight
into the unique experience of Eastern feminists over the last decade.

Other authors are less confined to traditional prose. Multimedia artist
Persimmon Blackbridge and Susan Stewart offer a postfeminist narrative
in the pastiche style of a late–1990s girl zine; their reminiscences
of childhood are interspersed with amusing bra photos and liberal
references to “girls” and “chick.” Comic Pioneer Aline
Kominisky-Crub’s brand of feminism is a cartoon graveyard of wasted
women entitled “Deep Thoughts.”

This collection is a breath of fresh air for women grown weary of the
earnestness of an 1980s feminism. Crosbie has done her homework in
pulling together contributors with cutting-edge perspectives from a
range of professions, cultures, and age groups. It is the young women
who steal the show through their sly innovations of inherited wisdom; in
this regard, Click, is also a study in the contrasts of the different
waves of feminism.