I Am An Emotional Creature: The Secret Life Of Girls Around The World (2010) - Plot & Excerpts
Book blurb: Through rants, poetry, questions, and facts, we come to understand the universality of girls everywhere: their resiliency, their wildness, their pain, their fears, their secrets, and their triumphs. I Am an Emotional Creature is a call, a reckoning, an education, an act of empowerment for girls, and an illumination for parents and for us all.I am a huge fan of Eve Ensler's work, and but this one did not work as well for me as her previous works. This book is a collection of prose, poetry, and lists that captures the varied issues that girls and women face around the world. While I appreciated the attempt to catalog, educate, and shed light on many of these issues, there was something missing. It felt like there was a thick glass window I was looking through that created a sense of disconnection that was distracting given the subject matter. And while some of the pieces are wonderful, overall I did not love this collection. That said, this would still be an important read for older teens and the adults who love them. "but mainly we are refusers. / We don't accept your world / your rules your wars / We don't accept your cruelty and unkindness. / We don't believe some need to suffer for others to survive / or that there isn't enough to go around / or that corporations are the only and best economic / arrangement."I am a big fan of The Vagina Monologues, mainly because it publicized a topic that is usually taboo in most cultures. Therefore, I have been wanting to read this book to see what Ensler will present. Granted, the book is beautifully written. Part poetry, part prose, the book explores the perspectives of girls from various countries around the world. My problem with it is that similar to Vagina Monologues, it seems to present a Westernized viewpoint of "other" cultures without any factual evidence or specific reference to a primary source interview. It seemed to me that each girl from a country had only the one story - the American girl with the eating disorder, the African girl who gets her clit cut and is sold in exchange for cows, the Parisian girl who smokes to feel. It creates dichotomized narratives about prettiness/ugliness, intelligence/humor, helplessness/liberation, traditional/Western. I wanted an ethnography of experiences, not a mosaic of cultures sown together to prove the point that all girls want the same thing everywhere.
What do You think about I Am An Emotional Creature: The Secret Life Of Girls Around The World (2010)?
Inspirational 21st century feminista prose and poetry. I reread parts often.
—theo
This is a very interesting and insightful book! Every girl should read it.
—ssnnss
A student gave this to me to read. Powerful.
—ddgomez
