Read Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions for Free Online

"Sleeping Beauty, Revised." Crash Diet . Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1992.
Sage, Lorna. Women in the House of Fiction: Post-War Women Novelists . New York: Routledge, 1992.

 

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Sexton, Anne. Transformations . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.
Weldon, Fay. Down Among the Women . 1972. Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1984.
. Female Friends . New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974.
. The Life and Loves of a She-Devil . 1983. New York: Ballantine Books, 1985.
. Moon Over Minneapolis . 1991. New York: Penguin, 1992.
. The Rules of Life . New York: Harper & Row, 1987.
. Words of Advice . 1977. New York: Ballantine Books, 1978.
Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales . Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979.

 

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Slam Dancing with Fay Weldon
Siân Mile
I am ... fairly marketable, I don't kick people's ankles or spit into the camera. Fay Weldon, The Guardian
"You can all stop staring now," [Johnny] Rotten spits after the opening song deteriorates. "We're ugly and we know it ..." Noel E. Monk and Jimmy Guterman, Twelve Days on the Road: The Sex Pistols and America
Fay and Johnny. An odd couple? Perhaps not.
I
The Odd Coupling
What could Fay Weldon and her feminist texts possibly have to do with punk, a subculture not exactly known for its inclusion of women, let alone feminists? Punk is the mid-1970s phenomenon which, after all, seems sexed as male (only men have "sex pistols"), sexualized as heterosexual (Johnny Rotten is pictured pawing bare-breasted women), and gendered as masculine (the standard punk leather jackets "prove," says Legs McNeil, "we aren't wimps"). Given this, how could punk be of any use to the critic examining a feminism which seems concerned, in Weldon's case, with unfixing, not bolstering, the identity categories of sex, sexuality, and gender?
How indeed? My contention is that just as punk can be, and was, used to explore the "status and meaning of revolution" (Hebdige, p. 2), it can be used to explore the status and meaning of another revolution of sorts, feminism, and particularly the feminism of Fay Weldon. What becomes apparent in such an exploration is the existence of "feminist-punk"; Weldon calls feminist-punk into being as she advances the substance of fem-

 

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inism in the style of punk. Both her persona and her writing style draw, perhaps surprisingly, on the well of punk, even if Weldon herself may "pretend" that they do not.
II
Safety Pinning Down
Feminist
For the purposes of this essay, feminism will become strategically fixed in the constellation of identity politics. The identity of "feminist" may become temporarily less problematic, while remaining, ideally, "permanently unclear" (Butler, p. 14). What I am identifying as "feminist" in Weldon's fictions is her ability to reveal that culturally constructed identity categories (sex, sexuality, gender, and even feminism itself) are, as Judith Butler puts it, "in no way stable." Weldon reveals them as identities "tenuously constituted in time,'' and "instituted through a stylized repetition of acts" (Butler, p. 270). Weldon is in the business of deinstitutionalization, with one eye, radically enough, on social transformation. This is a feminism of strategic flux, as is my definition of it.
Punk
Punk of the 1970s is primarily a style which articulates on its surface, says Dick Hebdige, both a "breakdown in consensus" (p. 17) and an interruption of the normalized taken-for-grantedness of "anonymous ideology " (p. 9). It is an "intervention" in urban culture. Punk is, particularly, a moment and movement of negationa negation that calls any and all social facts into question as obnoxiously and optimistically as possible (Marcus, p. 7). Fashioned after the Situationist International of the 1950s and '60s, punk desires, through the creation of a persona and a textual style, to move the audience, the "spectator," from passive to active. The situationist and the punk use "situations" to disrupt a