I



     After my Grandfather died, he waited in line for one year. His ashes, inside a lacquered box, sat among the ashes of others in a cold concrete bunker nestled in the Chinese countryside. Each box bore a tiny black-and-white engraving of the deceased. The owner of the bunker kept track of burials by scrawling a name and date on the lids.

     A single light bulb hung from the ceiling. It was rigged to save electricity by shutting off when it sensed no movement. Whenever someone came in on funeral business, the bulb flickered on. Otherwise, the dead waited their turn in darkness.



PROPERTY RIGHTS



     There are seven million people living in Hong Kong, making it the fourth most densely populated city in the world. Its citizens are dying faster than ever, at numbers that have doubled since 1970. Forty thousand people now die each year from the standard gamut of reasons: drowning, old age, suicide, electrocution, severe allergies, traffic accidents, heartache, stress.

     A century ago, these 40,000 souls would have found eternal peace at the foot of some sacred, pine-forested mountain chosen for optimal feng shui. Such postmortem peace is now impossible, as most of this once-sacred land has been developed into condominiums or factories.

     The line between the yang world of the living and the yin world of spirits is vaguely drawn in Chinese theology (an amalgam of Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian beliefs). This line blurs more each year as millions of Chinese flock to live over the old bones of their ancestors, creating a literal juxtaposition of life and death.

     Property rights, for example, work for the dead in much the same way as for the living. In China, property exists in a state of perpetual leasehold. Whether a high rise or a hovel, residential property may be owned only for a period of 70 years. At the end of this period, the property is either re-leased or the hapless owners evicted.

     The dead, too, face the possibility of eviction. China’s most esteemed burying ground, Babaoshan (“??? Eight Treasure Mountain”) cemetery in Beijing, is not so much a holy mountain as a quiet gap in urban sprawl. Regardless, the upper echelon of Chinese society engages in bidding wars over its plots, which start at 70,000 yuan, or about 11,500 dollars for a 20-year lease. If a family’s fortune has turned by the end of those years, the formerly exalted government official or wealthy businessman is expelled from his resting place like a loaf of expired bread.



II



     Once Grandfather’s year in exile ended, our entire extended family packed into four Toyota cars and prepared to inter him in his (semi-)permanent resting place.

     It was raining that day. For a long while we drove into pine-covered hills, until an empty city emerged from between the trees. Tall black columns rose from stone steps which went up and up until they brushed the grey horizon. Blurry, colorless portraits stared at our small party from every direction.

     Cousin Jiang held up an umbrella to keep Grandfather dry. We climbed stone steps until we reached a small slab nestled between two columns. On it was Grandfather’s face, etched in ink. Elder Uncle Hu raised the slab with a tire jack, revealing an opening underneath.

     “Well—here it is,” Uncle said, hesitation in his voice.



SAFETY NETS



     Since Neolithic times, the Chinese have been obsessed with remembrance after death. To be forgotten by descendants is equivalent to hell. One’s ghost would enter the next world as a low-ranking personage, looked down upon by other spirits. To guard against this fate, the ancient Chinese buried their dead with plentiful provisions, including a large supply of the deceased’s favorite food and alcohol. In certain eras in ancient China, wealthy individuals would be buried with mementos, servants, or even wives.

     Today, wine is still poured into the grave-earth. Oranges, meat buns, and other delicacies are left on graves to fill the air with pungent smells of decomposition. Wax fruit, plastic jade bracelets, and paper Rolex watches are common offerings. A cigarette might be lit and left burning on the grave. Lung cancer is one of China’s leading causes of death.

     Despite strict rules governing food and alcohol provisions, religious requirements have long been lax. A wealthy family might have employed both a Taoist and a Buddhist priest to officiate the funeral, or invited an expert in the Confucian classics to preach filial piety as the dead were ushered away.

     Unlike their modern counterparts, the ancients enjoyed a short waiting period between death and spiritual peace. According to tradition, spirits remain on earth for seven days, after which they enter heaven, or hell, or are reincarnated. These seven days are fraught with danger for the family of the deceased. Traditions, some common, others unique to individual families, must be meticulously obeyed. Any small misstep—the presence of a mirror, the color red, the misuse of a title—might cause the spirit to transform into a vindictive ghost.



III



     “Turn around,” commanded Aunt Pearl.

     “What?”

     “Turn around. You can’t watch,” she repeated as she gripped my shoulders and steered me to another gravestone (marked “?? Zhang Xin”) a few feet away.

     “Why can’t I watch?” I protested, plucking at her lean fingers. “He’s my grandfather.”

     “Of course. And he was born in the year of the pig,” she said. For Aunt Pearl, no more explanation was needed. According to Chinese superstition, dogs and pigs have “?? mao dun,” instinctual conflict, and if I were to witness the interment, he would come back as a ghost and bring me bad luck.

     I glanced at my father, who stood near grandfather’s grave. He shook his head as if to say, Let it be.

     Sighing, I obeyed Aunt Pearl’s demand and spun around. She clicked her tongue with satisfaction and returned to tearing apart sheets of fake dollar bills. Each bill bore in clumsy English letters the logo “Hell Bank Notes” and the confident claim “guaranteed legal tender for spirits.” Later we would burn them on Grandfather’s grave to send him pocket money for trinkets and snacks in the other world.

     Uncle Hu grunted as he cleared debris from the grave. I scanned the other gravestones, which bore black-and-white portraits of mostly expressionless faces. I could tell the age of each person when he or she died. Most faces were old and lined. Every so often a young face peered out from the frame, with eyes black and cold.

     Aunt Pearl finished tearing the Hell Bank Notes. The pine trees rustled impatiently. Sounds slowed and faded, while the grey faces around me grew accusing and hostile. I felt a great desire to turn from them, to turn around, to look, to make sure my family was still behind me, to make sure they had not vanished into the other world and left me alone.

     A loud crack broke the quiet. I spun around in time to see the edge of a red lacquered box vanish under the stone slab, into darkness.

     We kowtowed in succession, three knocks each. When my turn came I could think only about the wet dark hole in which we had buried Grandfather. I kneeled dumbly on the cold pine-strewn ground until Aunt Pearl tugged at my arm.

     We set off firecrackers to frighten away evil spirits. They fizzled into the air and burst dully against the rain. Bangs echoed intrusively from column to column and suffocated among the pines.

     We squeezed into our four Toyotas before the echoes died. Uncle Hu drove the first car, his fingers pale against the steering wheel. We sped away and away from that empty stone city, none of us turning to look back.



HISTORIES



     Cremation was not always the norm in China. Although Buddhists regularly burned the bodies of their dead, other religious and ethnic groups considered cremation taboo. Tibetans, for example, believed only criminals should be burned. An auspicious Tibetan burial, known as Sky Burial, involved placing the body on a high mountain peak to be picked apart by vultures and the natural elements.

     In modern China, however, cremation has been law since 1956 when 151 communist party officials, including Chairman Mao Zedong, signed a Funeral Reformation proposal. Given the nearly half-billion Chinese deaths that occurred from the 1940s to 1960s, there was a simple logic to incineration.

     According to the China Funeral Association, modern China has a death count of over eight million people each year. Four million of these bodies are cremated, which brings the cremation rate to 52.7 percent. The Association would prefer 100 percent.

     At the Yishan Crematory, the workers are mostly middle-aged and balding. Ashes work their way under their fingernails, leaving the hands of handlers permanently black. The pollution that hangs as perpetual smog over China’s cities does not hold a candle to Yishan, a factory for processing the dead.

     Yishan is in Shanghai, a city of 14 million with a death rate of 100,000 people per year. Most of those 100,000 pass through the crematorium. Four hundred bodies a day are ferried by motorized lift to 24 incinerators. The incinerators belch toxic smoke into the air and into nearby neighborhoods, perpetuating some cosmic joke about the cycle of death.

     It is a most innovative facility. In previous years, blood drained from bodies was disposed through the sewer system. But the sheer volume of displaced blood eventually grew to become a health hazard. Yishan developed an embalming method that uses freezing instead of bloodletting to preserve bodies until they are ready for cremation.

     Many Yishan workers are kept busy digging graves or carving gravestones, but they never seem to keep up with demand. Some would-be customers resort to do-it-yourself mounds on the sides of railway tracks or on the hillsides of scenic preserves.

     Wealthy families have the option of circumventing the Yishan process altogether. Some send bodies abroad to be buried in the United States or Canada, taking advantage of various body shipping services that promise to deliver goods intact and in acceptable condition.

     With so many bodies going through the crematorium, mistakes do happen. Instead of servants or wives, some families burn a fire-resistant memento with the body. The object serves the dual purpose of comforting the soul of the dead and verifying the ashes’ former identity.

     According to the workers at Yishan, the funeral business is a business of life. They do whatever they can to smooth the post-death process for their customers.



IV



     In China, four (“? si”) is considered an unlucky number because it is phonetically similar to the word for “die.” The combination of four and eight (“?? si ba”) is even unluckier because it sounds like a curse - “?? die now.” Buildings often skip over the fourth floor and jump directly from three to five.

     Even in cemeteries, where the dead already reign, one rarely sees a fourth burial terrace or a tombstone numbered four.



FINAL DECISIONS



     The combination of Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian thought in China complicates end-of-life decisions.

     Taoism urges harmony with the Tao (“? the Way”). Death is a part of life, the flow of the universe. In dying, one returns to the primordial void.

     Buddhism urges freedom from suffering. To accept death is to accept the futility of suffering and to ease the suffering of caretakers. Life is transient and impermanent, and a single death has no effect on the scheme of the cosmos. Besides, there is always the chance one may be reborn as a being higher than human.

     Confucianism urges communal harmony, especially within a family. Followers of Confucian thought think constantly of their ancestors, their children, and their relations, however distantly related. If one person’s sickness creates discord and suffering for the family, it might be better to end the problem at the source. And if one’s relations make proper preparations, death and the journey that follows will pass like a dream.

     Despite the diversity of Chinese beliefs, the overarching message they impress on the Chinese psyche seems to be: Let go.



V



 



     “I can’t go,” declared Grandmother.

     “Mother,” said Aunt Pearl with impatience, “Not this again.”

     “I won’t go,” Grandmother repeated.

     “You must go,” said Aunt Pearl, “We buried the old father last May, and now we must go pay our respects. It’s the one-year burial anniversary. You’re his wife.”

     “I don’t care. I’m not going to that damned place.”

     “Dear mother, for heaven’s sakes, why not?”

     “Because you saw how he died,” hissed Grandmother, “Feeble, in his bed, with his bedpans. Such indignity. Smoking a cigarette until his last moments. Selfish. He was the type of man who kept his best thoughts for himself. When Hu was sent off to labor in the boonies, did he raise a finger? No! I was the one who walked miles for my son—your husband. But when Little Sister went to Beijing for college, who took a vacation in the big city to visit every year? Him, of course. The old fogey was selfish and self-absorbed. I was the one who kept this family together. How dare he leave me so suddenly, in that way, with such—such indignity. I will not go visit him. He should be the one to come visit me. He should be the one—he should be the one—”

     “Don’t say that,” exclaimed Aunt Pearl, aghast, “How would you feel if he really came back to haunt you? You’d have a heart attack, and we’d be burying you next!”

     “Oh, I would have some choice words for him,” said Grandmother.

     “Oh—dear!” Aunt Pearl quickly made a bow to Grandfather’s home shrine in the corner of the kitchen. The grey face in his portrait remained impassive. Uncle Hu, standing silent by the door, looked at his watch.

     With an air of finality, Grandmother sat down on a kitchen chair and repeated, “I’m not budging. I’m too old. I waited so many years, in bad weather, for him. He can stand to wait a few more years for me.”

     Aunt Pearl wavered between Grandmother and Uncle Hu like an indecisive bee. Finally she exclaimed, “Ai-ya! Have it your way, then. Don’t blame me if he comes back and haunts you for being a faithless wife,” and then, with genuine anxiety, “Mother, if you still insist on your blasphemy, make sure you hang a frond of palm and a clove of garlic over the door. You can buy palm fronds for cheap at the fourth street market. Oh, and the garlic must be extra pungent. That is the only way to ward away ghosts.”

     Aunt Pearl shepherded the entire family out the door. On the street waited four gleaming Toyotas, the same ones we used last year. As I climbed into a back seat, I looked back over my shoulder into Grandmother’s kitchen window.

     Grandmother stood in the middle of the room for a moment, arms folded, watching us go. Then, as the door of the last Toyota clicked shut, her entire body relaxed. Perhaps it was a trick of the tinted windows, but the lines of grief she had accumulated in the past few months seemed to melt from her face. Her lips formed a slow, secret smile.

     She sat down cross-legged, in the fashion of a small girl, in front of Grandfather’s shrine. With tenderness, she picked up his black-and-white portrait and placed upon it a single kiss.

    Last September, the McNally Jackson bookstore in SoHo, New York, hosted an event to celebrate the publication of the critical edition of Chris Kraus’s *Aliens and Anorexia*. The event was called “Alien Insurrection: An Evening with Chris Kraus, Emily Gould, Ariana Reines, Kate Zambreno, and Others,” and Kraus and seven other women were to give readings of the book and discuss “new feminism,” which I had never heard of. The venue was packed, the whole bottom ­floor of the bookstore over­flowing with women: women wearing all black, women with notebooks, women with their hair heaped on top of their heads in the turn-of-the-century Gibson Girl style popular in the lit world. It was clearly an event that both the audience and the panel of readers had dressed up for, and everyone was eyeing each other up and down, unused, I think, to seeing so many other literary women in a room, uninterrupted by the presence of men.



    Yet the event that everyone had dressed up for never materialized. Chris Kraus and the other panelists did read from *Aliens and Anorexia*, but it was almost impossible to understand any of them. Each spoke with her own theatrical affect; some in a quiet, sexy husk, others with an overly-dramatic swell of gravitas. The result was that no one in the audience—which I imagine was mostly made up of fans of Kraus’ more famous book *I Love Dick*—gained any sense of what *Aliens and Anorexia* was about.    



    Inclined to leave, I made myself stay because I wanted to hear the panel about “new feminism.” This, unfortunately, did not occur. After over an hour of reading, ten or fifteen minutes were spent on audience questions, all of which were, like the reading, answered obscurely with varying degrees of performative ­flourish. Then the event ended. There was no panel, and “new feminism” was never mentioned. My suspicion is that this is because new feminism does not exist.



    One of the readers at the Alien Insurrection talk, Kate Zambreno, wrote a book called Heroines that was edited by Kraus and published in 2012 by what Zambreno calls the “dumb cunt” imprint of Semiotext(e), an MIT-based publisher founded by Kraus’ husband, the French literary and cultural critic Sylvère Lotringer. Heroines is memoir-criticism, a hybrid text that blends Zambreno’s investigation into the crimes against the “mad” wives of modernism with an account of her own life. “Mad” is in quotation marks because part of Zambreno’s project is to challenge the pathologization of these women as insane. Perhaps “wives” of “modernism” should be in quotations too; after all, not all the women Zambreno writes about were wives (Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein), some were more famous than their husbands (Virginia Woolf), and several were not from the modernist period at all (Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Sylvia Plath).



    Zambreno’s initial premise is to accuse the modernist husbands— along with other male conspirators—of their wives’ spiritual, creative, and even literal murder. (Zelda Fitzgerald, as most people know, burned to death in Highland Hospital, the asylum in which Scott had originally placed her. She was confined within a locked room, most likely tied to a bed.) In fact, she claims, few or none of these women were mad in the first place, but were rather driven insane by the impossibility of life alongside men who beat, raped, and neglected them, stole and suppressed their work, forbade them from writing, committed them to asylums, and abandoned them. There are probably few within the cautious world of the academy who would have attempted such radical revisionism for this large and messy collection of cultural figures, and Zambreno’s work is persuasive and important. Yet *Heroines* works best when Zambreno’s touch is light or nonexistent, when she lets the modernist women speak for themselves. Take, for example, this announcement Vivien(ne) Eliot, wife of T.S., unsuccessfully attempted to have placed in the* Times*: “Will T.S. Eliot please return to his home, 68 Clarence Gate Gardens, which he abandoned Sept. 17th, 1932.” Zambreno is a skilled curator of this kind of astonishing, heartbreaking primary material. Perhaps her greatest asset is knowing when to let the modernist women speak for themselves, and allowing their broken, desperate words ring out.



    Zambreno told an interviewer in *The Paris Review*: “I’m not sure I think much about academia.” This is evident in *Heroines*, a text entirely out of touch with contemporary academic feminism. While this out-of-touchness is certainly not a bad thing in itself (it could, under different circumstances, have been a great thing), even the most casual reader of “third wave” academic feminism will cringe at much of Zambreno’s book, and for good reason. As much as she rails against the second wavers, Zambreno still succumbs to many of their most embarrassing missteps: erasing queerness and people of color, embracing gender essentialism, and treating the issue of domestic labor with haughty disdain.



    Lesbianism is mentioned twice in* Heroines*: once, when Zambreno erases it (“I mean, Gertrude Stein was basically a patriarch, right?”) and again when, discussing Djuna Barnes, she irritatingly refers to it as “girl-on-girl.” This absence is certainly a strange choice for a book that includes fairly extensive analysis of Barnes’ *Nightwood* as well as exploration of the biographies of Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Simone de Beauvoir, Anaïs Nin, June Miller, and Barnes’ lovers Thelma Wood and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, all of whom were unquestionably on the spectrum of what we now think of as queer.



    Throughout* Heroines* Zambreno returns to the idea of a wife: what it means to be a wife and to act as a wife—“to wife” as a verb. In discussing her relationship with her own husband, John, Zambreno goes back and forth between enthusiastically placing herself within the lineage of the abused modernist wives, and claiming that John—who cooks and cares for her, ­financially supports her, and facilitates her career as a writer—is really the one doing the “wifing.” In any case, Zambreno’s point is clear: To wife is to lose. In her words, the wife is the “pawn,” powerless and used. The author Mary Gaitskill, whom Zambreno lists in her book as one of her contemporary heroines, argued in an interview with The Believer that while she and her husband take turns playing the “wife,” what they could really use is a third party to “wife” both of them so they could get on with the important aspects of their lives. As our post-second wave, post-Equal Pay Act society shows us, the idea of wife-as-loser inevitably leads to the desire for a “third party wife.” Indeed, almost all powerful white women—women who, according to popular culture, are the ones advancing the cause of feminism, the shards of a broken glass ceiling glittering at their feet—are “wifed” by poor brown women who they employ to be the loser so they don’t have to, so they can be on equal footing with their powerful white husbands. What Zambreno and Gaitskill don’t acknowledge is that someone is always going to have to perform the domestic labor and personal sacrifices associated with the role of the wife, and that therefore characterizing the wife as loser preserves the hierarchy of some people over others, even if the actors end up being switched. If Zambreno’s argument were more expansive, if it acknowledged queerness not only within the lives of its historical subjects but also as something that exists now, she would probably have found an escape route out of this wife-as-loser trap, born out of a narrow, white, “lavender menace” era of feminism.



    The front cover of* Heroines* is a collage of pictures of women featured in the book. They are all white except Nina Simone, and I was intrigued to see how Simone would be incorporated into a book about the wives of modernist writers. Well, this is how: There is a single sentence about Nina Simone in the entire book, and the sentence is *about her irrelevance*. It is during a scene in which Kate the narrator and John are on a tour of Highland Hospital, the asylum where Zelda Fitzgerald burned to death. Kate feels that the tour guide is paying insufficient attention to Zelda, and illustrates this by writing: “For a moment maybe these tourists are silent, attuned to Zelda’s story: a screwball comedy become tragedy. Or perhaps the guide is now narrating that Nina Simone took singing lessons with Dr. Carroll’s [the hospital director’s] wife as a young girl.” This is how Nina Simone ended up on the cover of *Heroines*. It’s almost comical, like a private school brochure trying to disguise a racially homogenous student population with a picture of a black girl. This lie—this appropriation of one of the most important black artists of the 20th century—is a crime in itself. Yet it also reveals a key flaw in Zambreno’s work: its limited perspective, its ­fixation with the visible. To say that there were no modernist writers of color is exactly the kind of lie, the kind of erasure, that *Heroines* is supposed to be reversing; yet with her whitewashed cast of characters, Zambreno becomes a perpetrator.



    One of the most pervasive ideas about feminism is that it is in constant need of reinvention—a damsel forever in need of saving. From this perspective, “new feminism” is an appealing title, though a completely non-speci­fic one; those outside of academic and activist feminist movements are keen to see every phase of feminism as a revolutionary, back-to-the-drawing board moment, as opposed to something that has grown organically out of centuries of heterogeneous thinking and fighting. The blurb on the back cover of *Heroines* claims that Kate Zambreno “reinvents feminism for her generation.” Is this the “new feminism” that was promised at McNally Jackson? If so, this would suggest a movement encompassing Zambreno and Kraus and the other speakers, along with people like Kathy Acker, and Eileen Myles, and Sheila Heti, and even the horrendous performances of Marie Calloway, whom Zambreno defended in an essay on Thought Catalog called “All the Sad Young Pretty Girls.” Note the word “pretty.” In one of the few negative reviews of *Heroines*, Emily Keeler wrote in the *Los Angeles Review of Book*s, “A feminist friend emails me about *Heroines*… ‘I inherently distrust the kind of woman who is obsessed with glamour, to me a bit of an empty suit.’” It’s true: Zambreno is obsessed with glamour to the point of shallowness, often to the point of absurdity. She fixates on the outfits of the modernist women, describing how she buys ­flapper-style dresses so she can look like them. In perhaps the most ridiculous moment in an often ridiculous book, she writes about buying a nail polish from the “Swiss collection” of the expensive brand O.P.I. as an “homage” to the period of Zelda Fitzgerald’s life she spent locked up in a Swiss asylum. I would assume this was a joke, were this not a book filled with details about Zambreno’s outfits and many trips to Sephora, and which argues that to dismiss these details as insulting to Fitzgerald, frivolous, or vain, would automatically be an anti-feminist move.    



    Zambreno, having saved the modernist women from the pathologizing, belittling narrative bestowed on them by academic literary criticism, having emphasized that their writing is important and worthy of study, bizarrely appropriates them in order to make an argument for—to adopt a series of the adjectives she uses—“damaged girl internet diary writing.” This genre unfortunately extends beyond Zambreno and the blog that provided the basis for *Heroines*, Frances Farmer Is My Sister. It encompasses Calloway and others—in fact, according to Zambreno, encompasses all of the girls and women blogging on Tumblr (“So many of these Tumblr spaces are gorgeously written.” Are they?). It takes us beyond the premise that there is value in women’s writing to the weirdly essentialist idea that there is inherent value in all writing by women. “A disgust for Anaïs Nin is perhaps a disgust for the girls with their online diaries.” Perhaps. But even if this is true, the reverse is not; just because one woman’s diaries are worth reading, doesn’t mean all women’s diaries are.



     The kind of internet writing Zambreno is fighting for is more regurgitative than deliberate (she actually uses the word “bulimic,” in the true Tumblr tradition of glamorizing eating disorders and thinness). In the online diaries of Zambreno’s “fucked up girls,” suffering—particularly gendered suffering, eating disorders, self-harm, and degrading sexual encounters—is aestheticized. This raises suspicions about much of the critical content of Heroines, fixated as it is on the mental illness, abuse, and suicide of the modernist women it seeks to save. Woody Allen in *Annie Hall*: “Sylvia Plath—interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.” Why else is Sylvia Plath even in Heroines? She’s not a modernist and wasn’t married to one, but she is very popular on Tumblr.



    Zambreno’s “new” feminism is decidedly anti-aspirational. (Stylish) suffering is presented as an integral part of femininity or “girliness” (the words Zambreno uses are “fucked-up,” “toxic,” “damaged,” “messy,” “goopy” (?), “gooshy” (??), and, hundreds of times, “girl”/“girly,” as if it were an intentional fuck-you to feminism that tells people not to use “girls,” but “women”). Zambreno’s feminism is for women whose mothers were feminists in the ’70s and ’80s and who therefore resent the shoulder-padded, you-can-have-it-all, you’re-a-woman-not-a-girl kind of feminism. It is unsurprising that Kraus, Zambreno, et al. are popular with college-educated, white, heterosexual literary women, women who are smart and accomplished and who were told they were inheriting the earth, yet who find themselves still surrounded by Great White Literary Men who would rather fuck them than read their work. New feminism is for women who sleep with men in an era of unpaid internships and ubiquitous internet porn. There’s a moment in Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s zeitgeisty* Frances Ha* when Frances’s best friend Sophie, who has a successful career in the lit world, describes the guy she’s seeing: “It’s like with me and Patch…the way he always likes to come on my face.” She adds, “He’s a nice guy,” and later in the movie they get engaged. New feminism is for the women engaged to Patch.



   The problem is that, like the talk at McNally Jackson, like most of the internet girl writing Zambreno defends, there is no substance to new feminism. At its worst, new feminism is a way around feminism, a way of accepting anti-feminist practices under the banner of feminism. Zambreno writes that, earlier in her life, she was “convinced that I was going to be a writer, even though I hadn’t yet written anything.” She later says of the Tumblr bloggers, “Many of these girls identify intensely as writers, as artists,” never drawing a distinction between identifying as something and producing the work (be it art or feminist theory/practice) that qualifies you to adopt such an identity. The same problem exists for new feminism, so often a title with nothing beneath it. New feminism was born into a climate of unchecked sex positivity, of a desire for feminism that was appealing to the general public, and of extreme sensitivity to what Zambreno calls “girl-on-girl crime”—misogyny committed by women, women labeling other women as “bad feminists.” New feminists thus cannot be called bad feminists even when they are; even when they erase women of color, ventriloquize dead female writers, or glamorize mental illness. It is within this lack of borders, of boundaries, that new feminism supposedly resides. But there do need to be boundaries of quality. There need to be standards for what counts as valuable writing, just as there need to be standards for what counts as valuable feminism.



 



    Without these boundaries, everything bleeds out and in, and in place of so-called new feminism we are left with nothing. 

"All the Difference" is the 2024 winner of the Louis Begley Prize judged by R. F. Kuang.