On Wooster Collective I saw this. Vera’s Flickr photostream is here.

The Art of Vera (via Wooster Collective)

The Women Unbound reading challenge (which Litlove mentions here) is something I have been thinking about since I first came across it. For years, from the time I was quite a small girl, until I was through my second degree, I did a bunch of heavy lifting when it came to feminist reading.  I don’t want to revisit all those books, although I have incorporated what they offered me in my day-to-day thinking about what I can do and what I am.

I don’t choose books based on gender issues any longer. I have narrowed my focus to a rather small subset of what it means to be human that, seems to me anyway, to be prior to what it means for me to be a woman in the world. Not that my gender doesn’t effect how things are for me. It does. Invisibility, condescending assumptions and other such typical things are just a part of what it is to be in this time and place. Having said that I no longer read books based on gender, I most definitely count myself as a feminist. I think any woman who has her own bank account, drives and votes has to recognize herself as a feminist on pain of terrible hypocrisy.

I have noticed that if I am going to read something light, it almost always involves a female protagonist – Olive Kitteridge, for example. Notable exceptions are books by Indian (Native American) authors, Cormac McCarthy and Terry Pratchett (whose novels Night Watch and Monstrous Regiment still make me roll around with laughter. Though, come to think about it Monstrous Regiment is about women pretending to be men so they can fight in the on-going war, with predictably hilarious results – this is Pratchett after all).

So I don’t think I can really say I am going to start reading books to meet the challenge, but what I think I can do is look at what it means to be human and female through art.  That’s why Vera. But you never know, if I run across an interesting fictional woman in a novel or even one in a non-fiction setting, I’ll pop it up here.