Warner (English/Rutgers Univ.) challenges the current stodginess of queer activism—focused as it is on the gay community’s hope to be considered “normal”—through his incisive critique of the banalities and dangers of such normalcy. Criticizing the way some identities are deemed normal while others are not (Ö la Foucault), Warner delineates with lapidary skill the problems of the cultural constructions of the normal, how heterosexual lives are thus validated at the expense of the queer. Using a smoothly textured argumentative style, Warner showcases the functioning of shame within a conservative ideological framework to reward some identities and punish others. His argument stands strongest when he concentrates on how the eradication of shame from sexuality would liberate queer communities from the monolith of marriage and how the rejection of normalcy would accord the gay community a liberated space within the spheres of the sexual culture. Ironically, the trouble with The Trouble with Normal is that it directs its arguments toward the queer community rather than the straight one. Telling gay people that, for various ethical reasons, they shouldn’t even want to marry, when they already can’t, does not change the fact that laws that enfranchise some while disenfranchising others are discriminatory. Warner’s rhetoric persuasively reveals the hierarchical parameters of marriage and the constraints of normalcy, but a more universal approach to his topic would delineate the limitations of marriage for all people—not just queer people. In the end, his polemic leaves standing discriminatory treatment of queers for the sake of a theoretical attack on normalcy. Warner’s ethical vision succeeds as a utopian revelation of sex freed from shame, but a sharper eye for the real-life ramifications of such an outlook might have revealed its limitations.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-86529-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
The writing in this terrifying tale is neither sophisticated nor nuanced, but the facts—presented bravely and unstintingly—are powerful. This is the closest thing imaginable to a modern-day slave narrative: the story of a woman basically imprisoned by a brutal repeat attacker and by an impotent and incompetent police force. Divorced and living alone with her young daughter, Skalias was first raped in 1977 by Lanny Gene Bevers Jr., a man she had known glancingly through his brother, who had done some yard work for her husband. Despite the rapist's threats that if she went to the police he would kill her and her daughter, Skalias identified him. She methodically recounts the steps leading up to the trial, including Bevers's extradition from Germany, where he was serving in the military, and her own lie detector test, taken in order to ``prove'' that she was raped; one officer offhandedly comments that this is the first rape he's ever heard of that didn't involve ejaculation. Finally, Bevers's fingerprints on the window he had broken to enter her house led to a 20-year prison sentence. Assured that the parole board would alert her before releasing Bevers, Skalias was shocked to awaken one night seven years later and find him standing in her bedroom with a stocking over his head. The second rape was even more brutal; Bevers severed her thumb and beat her beyond recognition. Despite her insistence that she recognized Bevers and his methods, the police almost forced her to implicate another suspect when she was heavily sedated. Meanwhile, Bevers began to make increasingly threatening phone calls to Skalias. The reproduction of transcripts of those calls is one example of the straight-on tactics used here in a constant emotional assault by Skalias and Davis, former Tarrant County district attorney's victim assistance coordinator. Skalias has since been relocated and given a new identity; her story is being made into an ABC TV movie. Frightening and enlightening. (16 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 20, 1994
ISBN: 1-56530-146-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
Lyrical tale of the survival and triumph of a small farm amid the suburban sprawl of southern California, with writing as rich and satisfying as the taste of a ripe melon. Fairview Gardens exists amid tract housing, malls, and endless miles of freeway. Ableman (founder of the Center for Urban Agriculture; From the Good Earth, not reviewed) tells of how the farm made peace with this suburban world and how this world came to first tolerate and then embrace this oasis of connection to the land. It hasn—t been easy. Homeowners do not rest quietly with manure spreaders hard at work near their backyards; Ableman resents, albeit with grace, the imprecations of the modern world onto the land he manages. Yet, over time, the farm has become accepted as an eccentric neighbor, at first as a convenient place to buy good, healthy food and then as a repository of the dying knowledge of what is to be learned from working the land. Ableman’s writing on these lessons—perseverance, patience, humility, a feeling of empowerment when one eats what one grows—forms the heart of this work. It is writing of inspiring joy, without the overblown “cosmic” rhetoric that often mars such paeans to nature. Along the way he offers some valuable tips to farmers, on mulching, watering, weeding, fighting city hall. Today Fairview Gardens is a public place, not a bucolic back-to-nature vacation spot for the few. It stands not apart from the community but within it, no small reason for its survival in the face of hungry developers. It remains a thriving farm, but also a place where people, especially children, come to experience the land. Among a sprawl of books incessantly issued and hyped, this small, wise volume quietly calls us to read and be renewed. (50 color photos)
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8118-1921-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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