When Cris Mazza’s second collection of short fiction, Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?, was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, she received a call from a radio station wanting to interview her. Once someone at the station finally read the book, however, they canceled the interview. They were looking for actual victims of sexual harassment, and Mazza’s characters were too complicated to be neatly categorized as victims anyway.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“A woman character who’s a victim is a more commercial property than a woman character who is feeling and honest and makes her own mistakes,” says Mazza. A writing instructor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Mazza hopes to buck this trend in two anthologies of new women’s fiction, Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction and Chick-Lit 2 (No Chick Vics), which she’s put together with coeditors Jeffrey DeShell and Elisabeth Sheffield for FC2, a Normal-based publisher of alternative fiction. “By using the term postfeminist we’re not saying that feminist causes are unnecessary or that women are never victims,” Mazza explains. “We’re saying that, please, there’s more to us than just being victims of a patriarchal society. We’re saying that we have individual personalities and we’re not only what society has made us.”
Mazza says that editing Chick-Lit affected her own writing. Her novel Your Name Here:_________, published last year by Coffee House Press, follows a news anchorwoman who must deal with being raped and the way she has always viewed herself in relation to men. “I realized that the character in that book might look like a victim to some people. But she was not only a victim of these men. She was, in a more subtle sense, a victim of her own priorities. I was able to strengthen that aspect of the book because I became more aware of it. Her situation was too complicated to merely be the story of a victim.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Jim Alexander Newberry.
