+++There is freedom in announcing that we are human, messy, and that we’re bound to fuck it up. Then they get knocked off when they fuck it up. “People who are placed on pedestals are expected to pose, perfectly. “I am a bad feminist because I never want to be placed on a Feminist Pedestal,” Gay writes. It is unlike “nasty woman” in that it is a label for women, by a woman, and in this way it is more like, say, “bad feminist,” coined by Roxane Gay in her book of the same name. It accepts and owns and transforms a negative label into a powerful identity.
It is like “nasty woman,” Trump’s mocking epithet for Hillary Clinton, which was appropriated by women all over the world as an identity and rallying cry. +++Once I read the phrase in Offill’s book, I started seeing it everywhere. But while my protagonist struggles with her decision, and suffers because of it, Offill’s character is bitter, ironic, flippant. I was struck by the idea of the art monster, because at the time I was working on my novel Self-Portrait with Boy, which is about a woman artist who arguably chooses art over love. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things.” “I was going to be an art monster instead. “My plan was to never get married,” her female narrator says. Nonfiction by Rachel Lyon Like many readers I encountered the phrase “art monster” when I read Jenny Offill’s novel Department of Speculation.
