To Be Real (1995)

Tyee Elementary has one of those book-bin-on-a-stick jobs beside its playground and last week I found a dozen recently delivered books on feminism from the 1980s to mid-1990s. Familiar faces include Naomi Wolf and Camille Paglia (the latter gaining a re-appreciation in non-student circles of late, the former carrying on as she had started), and those new to me, like Rebecca Walker (b.1969), a "third wave" feminist whose anthology, To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (1995), contains writings that would have some of its contributors digitally tarred-and-feather by today's standards (Donna Minkowtiz's "Orgasm, Fear, and Femaleness" begins with her arousal on reading a description of a prison rape), while others, such as Gina Dent's "Missionary Position", takes on "missionary feminism" through a Black woman's perspective, an account that zeroes in on ...

the combined tendency in the world of public information [what we now call the interweb?] toward what I am loosely calling "confession," about its uses and abuses, and about how it contributes to the problem of doing feminism without saying it [which she attributes to historic Black feminism] and saying feminism without doing it [the theoretical feminism of the white world]. It seems to me that in order to answer the question of why young woman are not claiming feminism [Dent was born in 1966], we have to consider it from the other side -- what is it that feminists are doing that gets labelled Feminism? I think much of what they (we) are doing is making confessions. (63)

In her Introduction, Walker talks of the tightrope she walked as a child of enlightened parents (her mother is the author Alice Walker, her father a white civil rights lawyer), when household feminism had strict boundaries, and to transgress those boundaries brought sanctions, if not shame. For Rebecca Walker, the feminism of today (1995) contains allowances, what for some might amount to guilty pleasures, all part of being real ("being real" is the title of her Introduction). Curious to see how Rebecca Walker has faired over the years, I looked her up and found that she is not only estranged from her mother, but telling tales about her, an example of what Gina Dent calls "making confessions"?