The Defiant Middle

How Women Claim Life's In-Betweens to Remake the World

Kaya Oakes

• Publisher: Broadleaf Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506467689
• eBook ISBN: 9781506467696
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

For every woman, from the young to those in midlife and beyond, who has ever been told, "You can't" and thought, "Oh, I definitely will!"--this book is for you.

Women are expected to be many things. They should be young enough, but not too young; old enough, but not too old; creative, but not crazy; passionate, but not angry. They should be fertile and feminine and self-reliant, not barren or butch or solitary. Women, in other words, are caught between social expectations and a much more complicated reality.

Women who don't fit in, whether during life transitions or because of changes in their body, mind, or gender identity, are carving out new ways of being in and remaking the world. But this is nothing new: they have been doing so for thousands of years, often at the margins of the same religious traditions and cultures that created these limited ways of being for women in the first place.

In The Defiant Middle, Kaya Oakes draws on the wisdom of women mystics and explores how transitional eras or living in marginalized female identities can be both spiritually challenging and wonderfully freeing, ultimately resulting in a reinvented way of seeing the world and changing it. "Change, after all, " Oakes writes, "always comes from the margins."

Notes

Prelude

1 Gabriele Uhlein, ed., Meditations with Hildegard of Bingen (Rochester, VT: Bear, 1983).

2 Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Mineola, NY: Ixia, 2019).

One

1 Kyle McKinnon, “Will Malala’s Influence Stretch to Europe?,” DW News, January 18, 2013, http://www.dw.de/will-malalas-influence-stretch-to-europe/a-16532149.

2 Staff, Transcript: “Greta Thunberg’s Speech at the U.N. Climate Action Summit,” NPR, September 23, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/09/23/763452863/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-the-u-n-climate-action-summit.

3 Anatole France, Life of Joan of Arc (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1926).

4 Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2009), 13.

5 Diane Felmlee, Paulina Inara Rodis, and Amy Zhang, “Sexist Slurs: Reinforcing Feminine Stereotypes Online,” Sex Roles 83 (2020): 16–28, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-019-01095-z.

6 “Child Pornography and Abuse Statistics,” Thorn, accessed April 9, 2021, https://www.thorn.org/child-pornography-and-abuse-statistics/.

7 Sandi Villarreal, “Their Generation Was Shamed by Purity Culture. Here’s What They’re Building in Its Place,” Sojourners, accessed April 9, 2021, https://sojo.net/interactive/their-generation-was-shamed-purity-culture-heres-what-theyre-building-its-place.

Two

1 Aretaeus, De causis et signis acutorum morborum, quoted in A Treatise on Hysteria, Robert Lee. J and A Churchill, London, 1871.

2 Laura Mallonee, “An Artist Takes an Unflinching Look at Her Own Hysterectomy,” Wired, October 13, 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/elinor-carucci-midlife/.

3 Muhammad ibn Adam, “Do Women Have to Wear Hijab after Menopause—What about When They Are Elderly?,” Seekers Guidance, November 3, 2016, https://seekersguidance.org/answers/hanafi-fiqh/women-wear-hijab-menopause-elderly/.

Three

1 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge, 2004), 83.

2 Weil, 70.

3 Kim Jensen, “Fanny Howe” (interview), Bomb, January 1, 2013, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/fanny-howe/.

4 Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

5 Haley Byrd, “Ted Yoho Apologizes after Reportedly Verbally Accosting Ocasio-Cortez over Stance on Unemployment, Crime in New York,” CNN, July 22, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/21/politics/aoc-ted-yoho-confrontation/index.html.

6 Democritus Junior, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Project Gutenberg, 2004; updated 2021), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10800/10800-h/10800-h.htm.

7 Paul R. Albert, “Why Is Depression More Prevalent in Women?,” Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience 40, no. 4 (July 2015): 219–21, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4478054/.

8 Debbie Nathan, “What Happened to Sandra Bland?,” The Nation, April 21, 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/what-happened-to-sandra-bland/.

9 Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus,” in Collected Poems, Harper Perennial Modern Classics reprint ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), 244–47.

Four

1 Rebecca Solnit, “The Mother of All Questions,” Harper’s, October 2015, https://harpers.org/archive/2015/10/the-mother-of-all-questions/.

2 Cynthia R. Chapman, “Barrenness,” Bible Odyssey, https://www.bibleodyssey.org/en/people/related-articles/barrenness.

3 Letty Cottin Pogrebin, “Miriam’s Cup,” The Shalom Center, accessed March 25, 2021, https://theshalomcenter.org/purim-to-pesach/miriams-cup.

Five

1 Darcey Steinke, Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natura...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prelude: The Middle, the Medieval, and the In-Between
• One: Young
• Two: Old
• Three: Crazy
• Four: Barren
• Five: Butch/Femme/Other
• Six: Angry
• Seven: Alone
• Postlude: The Defiant Middle: A Manifesto
• Acknowledgments
• Notes