Tama Janowitz Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Elizabeth Young

Critical Essay by Elizabeth Young

SOURCE: “Library of the Ultravixens: The Lost Phallus—Where did I Put It?—in the works of Tama Janowitz, Mary Gaitskill, and Catherine Texier,” in Shopping in Space, edited by Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney, Atlantic Monthly Press and Serpent's Tail, 1992, pp. 142-93.

In the following essay, Young discusses Janowitz's oeuvre within the framework of postmodern feminist theory.

“Slipping through the stitch of virtue, Into crime”

(Djuna Barnes, The Book of Repulsive Women)*

I. Bohemians and Bad Girls

It is the 1950s and our heroine is sitting in the kitchen. Outside, a bomb-shelter broods in the backyard. She is watching her mother who, in a flowered pinny and turban is doing a hundred things at once: mixing the Bisto gravy, worming the cat, sudsing the smalls, dashing away with a smoothing iron, all because she's W.O.M.A.N. Her daughter's never going to grow up like that … In a trice she's become a pouting, blonde dolly-bird in...
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