Wisewomen & boggy-boos Book

Note: this review is especially harsh because I have high expectations for this author.

This book mostly takes the myths around the Amazons and adds a simple story of how lesbians came to be liberated from the current society to form their own community subdivided into tribes, with a bunch of magical elements. It's interesting how a dictionary (more like an encyclopedia really) can be read: from A to V (it doesn't go further), or at random and then by looking up recurring words. You discover the fictive world, called "the age of glory", and its story, piecemeal, as if you had a real document from this world in hand.

The definitions could be classified as such:
- a few definitions give the core of the story, like "powder", "mother", "history", "witch"
- others, a bit more numerous, give you the core of the culture and social organization of the "lesbian peoples", like "love", "orgasm", "bag", "animals", "hallucination"
- similar ones give you peripheral elements of said culture and social organization; they repeat the same traits as what is in the core, like "mushrooms", "clitore", "mouth"
- others, rather numerous but that don't contribute much besides giving the reader some familiarity with names and places from the myths around the Amazons, give names and vague details about the Amazons and its famous people, reinterpreted in the context of this book's world-building
- the few definitions left are about people and things from when the book was written — I noticed the obvious "Gouines Rouges" and a reference to Joanna Russ, but there probably are a few more

The definitions about Amazons are highly repetitive; okay, there's a justification for that given in the book itself about repetitive tales told by those from the Phoenix islands, but even when it's not textually repetitive, the content still is. At best, it gives you some familiarity with the Amazons, but not much more. The definitions about the core of the story are a bit more interesting, but it's still not the meat of the book as they mostly give is a justification for how the "age of glory" came to be and how it's related to the past. Politically it's not relevant either, as the solution to create the authors' utopia here is magical realism.

So the most interesting part is the world-building, which is like a small ethnography of the "lesbian peoples". But what's in it, what are its core categories? As much as I enjoyed the way the book works and how it follows the logic of myths, despite the small issues I noted previously, the underlying categories of the world of the "age of glory" show major issues at odds with one of the authors' previous essays in The Straight Mind and Other Essays.

The authors describe peoples who live close to nature, don't need and even reject science, have mysterious supernatural powers, organize their social lives mostly around love and sex (especially sex, as love seems to be mostly expressed through sexuality), relate themselves strongly to animals (or can be half animals in some tribes), and are eternal adolescents (contrarily to the "mothers" in the cities who give birth). Associating women with nature, lack of rationality, sex, animals, and childhood is at the core of the symbolic order of patriarchy; even more so for lesbians who are cast as never truly women. Maybe the authors should have ready Wittig's essay "Homo Sum", because this essay tackles exactly that issue... Wait, Wittig is one of the co-authors!

So, what happened here? Reading articles written after Wittig died by people who knew her, it surfaced that a few years after having co-founded the MLF (movement for the liberation of women), she became sort of disillusioned with the reception of her ideas and how lesbians were seen in the movement. She wrote about that with acrimonious literary devices in the untranslated short stories Paris-la-politique. Seemingly at that time she became more interested in lesbian separatism due to her pessimism. She also made contrary declarations later about how it wasn't for her. This dictionary seems to be an attempt to create an imaginary world for that — it's a thought experiment maybe, or a way to "universalize the point of view of the dominated". But as I argued earlier, the core categories are very much in line with that of sexism! This seems like a failed subversion to me. Or maybe it's supposed to be taken humorously throughout, but that would imply if you "lesbianize" our culture, suddenly it can't be serious anymore? Whichever it is, there's something wrong here.

All in all, the world-building and its exposition is very well done, though there are some unneeded repetitions in my opinion. As for the underlying discourse on our culture and society, and as a fiction for a magical utopia, the attempt was interesting, but I think it's a dead end: the subversion has failed, no counter-model to the "straight mind" has emerged from it, whereas this should have been the book that could have done it.