Scabs in the Cloth. "Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women", by Tara Brabazon. [review]

Abstract

Tara Brabazon’s "Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women" is a collection of essays on feminism and popular culture. Addressing a range of subjects — including aerobics, wrestling, Miss Moneypenny, Anita Roddick and the pedagogy of Sylvia Ashton Warner — Brabazon’s material on the whole does justice to her general contention that feminist readings of popular culture need to be fearless and bold. Arguing that feminism requires a (metaphoric) equivalent of the movie "Fight Club", Brabazon suggests that feminist critique is at its sharpest when it reads against the grain of mainstream thinking. For the most part, these essays do just that.