The Difficulties of Celebrity

Tara Brabazon, Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002.

Reviewed by Kelly McWilliam.

Tara Brabazon needs to speak to her publisher. In her recent book, Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women, Brabazon makes a series of energetic, flippant and sometimes frustrating statements in her introductory paragraph, that includes: 'And whoever invented hipster trousers has never seen a woman's body. I'm sorry, but I curve there' (vii). This might seem an odd sentence to quote (though valid enough in context), until you remember the young woman on the cover of Ladies Who Lunge in what look suspiciously like … hipster pants. Perhaps not the initial statement Brabazon might have hoped for.

Ladies Who Lunge is an interesting, sometimes uneasy combination of social commentary, cultural critique and glib, gimmicky witticisms. Brabazon produces a pop feminist examination of a series of 'difficult women' - slightly random but all with a certain kind of 'celebrity'- ranging from Anita Roddick (of The Body Shop), Miss Moneypenny (of the James Bond films), Bette Davis, Julie Burchill, Captain Janeway of the Starship Voyager and WWF wrestler Joanie 'Chyna' Laurer. In doing this, Brabazon delves into different, sometimes disparate areas including fashion, capitalism and colonialism, science-fiction television, politics, pedagogy, wrestling and cinema. Throughout the book, Brabazon retains a writing style that has more in common with Helen Razer than the academy.

While pop feminism is, of course, as valid and important an arena of feminist writing as any other, Brabazon's choice and execution of language has a number of unfortunate implications. Brabazon is, for example, frequently dismissive of other women - who are either not 'difficult' enough in her assessment, or perhaps simply too difficult for her. Consider, for example, Brabazon's description of a hostile audience member who asks a question in response to a paper Brabazon has just presented with three graduate students:
One questioner had her arms crossed, voice raised and defences up. She accused me of creating 'clones' of myself and over-emphasising the continual patriarchal ideologies within the supervisory structure. After all, she had a male supervisor 'and he was a darling'. Thanks for sharing. Unfortunately, the vixen was only winding up, rather than down. Experience can be a brutal weapon when viciously wielded by the wounded. (79)
Brabazon's personal attack on the unnamed female questioner is equivalent to wider sexism in the workplace, where women are devalued through a system that disregards their opinion, sexualises them, and characterises any criticisms they may have as a product of their 'unstable emotions.' Brabazon's very similar approach - with her dismissive 'thanks for sharing', 'vixen' tag and assumption that the woman is responding as someone who is 'vicious' consequent upon being 'wounded' - seems quite antithetical to her initial call to celebrate 'difficult women'; that we 'all have a responsibility to value and validate women's choices' (x). Instead, Brabazon is not only uninterested in the woman's opinion, she is disrespectful and actively trivialises both the woman and her comments.

Brabazon is often also reductive about the experience of other women under the guise of humour. Ladies Who Lunge, for example, begins with Brabazon stating: 'Frequently, I hate myself for being a heterosexual woman. It is like cherishing a scratched vinyl record in the era of compact discs' (vii). I'm sure queer women around Australia - whose lives are typically fraught with very real and sometimes physically dangerous bias - would be buoyed to note that Brabazon considers them a product of a harmless, quirky fashion-trend, equivalent to opting for café latté over Nescafe Instant.

What is perhaps most frustrating about Ladies Who Lunge however, are its strengths: Brabazon is a charismatic, perceptive critic who makes a number of valid, often convincing arguments about the collection of 'difficult women' she has assembled. Her discussions are, overall, both astute and cogent, and any book that calls for its readers to listen to and support women, regardless of fractious potential, is always a valuable contribution to contemporary thought. It is the fact that Brabazon doesn't always take her own advice - her sheer determination to be offhand about the experiences and opinions of others (and others who are not necessarily in the same position as Brabazon, a heterosexual moderately senior academic) - that undermines the ethic of Ladies Who Lunge.

Kelly McWilliam is a doctoral candidate in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland. Her research investigates 'female queer' independent cinema, and the industry practices that enable and disable these films. She is the General Editor of M/C Reviews.