Bøger af Leslie Heywood

The Proving Grounds unfolds a narrative not of strict chronology, but rather the way each poem functions as a moment that gathers the thematic clusters of the struggle for identity in a consumer culture that has no sense of intrinsic value and that struggle's manifestation in the world of athletic performance and the way these general trends interact with individual experience. The poems trace the female body as a primal proving ground where the distance between history and experience form a paradox: the idea that the female body is limited and weak is particularly strange for a narrator who grew up in the generation post-Title IX, when girls were assumed to have the same competencies as men, and who has been called upon to physically shield her mother from her father from the time she was seven. Similarly strange but compelling is the paradox of the deep love for and identification with her father that arises from this first proving ground to shape the rest of her life.

Examining the sport and image of female body building as a metaphor for how women fare in the current political and cultural climate, this text draws on contemporary feminist and cultural theory. It reveals how female bodybuilders find themselves both trapped and empowered by their sport.

Abnormal Repetitive Behaviors explores how we respond to violence, grief, and loss, and the ways animals are emotionally akin to us in those responses.  Driven by the ways those primary emotions get tangled with memory, the ways the body informs the mind, we end up feeling and repeating behaviors linked to original struggles long after they have passed. Fighting against what threatened to cageus, the fight itself becomes the cage, affecting our lives and relationships in the most visceral ways.  Yet it is the simplest things that promote recovery and survival:  a calming animal touch.  Simple presence.

In this work, young feminists born between the years 1964 and 1973, discuss the things that they consider matter now - both in looking at the accomplishments and failures of the past, and in planning for the future.