Australian Women's Book Review Volume 14.1 - School of English ...

The Difficulties of Celebrity
Tara Brabazon, Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002.
Reviewed by Kelly McWilliam.
Tara Brabazon needs to speak to her publisher. In her recent book, Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating
Difficult Women, Brabazon makes a series of energetic, flippant and sometimes frustrating statements
in her introductory paragraph, that includes: 'And whoever invented hipster trousers has never seen a
woman's body. I'm sorry, but I curve there' (vii). This might seem an odd sentence to quote (though
valid enough in context), until you remember the young woman on the cover of Ladies Who Lunge in
what look suspiciously like … hipster pants. Perhaps not the initial statement Brabazon might have
hoped for.
Ladies Who Lunge is an interesting, sometimes uneasy combination of social commentary, cultural
critique and glib, gimmicky witticisms. Brabazon produces a pop feminist examination of a series of
'difficult women' - slightly random but all with a certain kind of 'celebrity'- ranging from Anita Roddick
(of The Body Shop), Miss Moneypenny (of the James Bond films), Bette Davis, Julie Burchill, Captain
Janeway of the Starship Voyager and WWF wrestler Joanie 'Chyna' Laurer. In doing this, Brabazon
delves into different, sometimes disparate areas including fashion, capitalism and colonialism, sciencefiction
television, politics, pedagogy, wrestling and cinema. Throughout the book, Brabazon retains a
writing style that has more in common with Helen Razer than the academy.
While pop feminism is, of course, as valid and important an arena of
feminist writing as any other, Brabazon's choice and execution of language
has a number of unfortunate implications. Brabazon is, for example,
frequently dismissive of other women - who are either not 'difficult' enough
in her assessment, or perhaps simply too difficult for her. Consider, for
example, Brabazon's description of a hostile audience member who asks a
question in response to a paper Brabazon has just presented with three
graduate students:
One questioner had her arms crossed, voice raised and defences up. She
accused me of creating 'clones' of myself and over-emphasising the
continual patriarchal ideologies within the supervisory structure. After all,
she had a male supervisor 'and he was a darling'. Thanks for sharing.
Unfortunately, the vixen was only winding up, rather than down.
Experience can be a brutal weapon when viciously wielded by the
wounded. (79)
Brabazon's personal attack on the unnamed female questioner is equivalent to wider sexism in the
workplace, where women are devalued through a system that disregards their opinion, sexualises them,
and characterises any criticisms they may have as a product of their 'unstable emotions.' Brabazon's
very similar approach - with her dismissive 'thanks for sharing', 'vixen' tag and assumption that the
woman is responding as someone who is 'vicious' consequent upon being 'wounded' - seems quite
antithetical to her initial call to celebrate 'difficult women'; that we 'all have a responsibility to value
and validate women's choices' (x). Instead, Brabazon is not only uninterested in the woman's opinion,
she is disrespectful and actively trivialises both the woman and her comments.
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