The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life's In-Betweens to Remake the World
For every woman, from the young to those in midlife and beyond, who has ever been told, "You can't" and thought, "Oh, I definitely will!"--this book is for you.
Women are expected to be many things. They should be young enough, but not too young; old enough, but not too old; creative, but not crazy; passionate, but not angry. They should be fertile and feminine and self-reliant, not barren or butch or solitary. Women, in other words, are caught between social expectations and a much more complicated reality.
Women who don't fit in, whether during life transitions or because of changes in their body, mind, or gender identity, are carving out new ways of being in and remaking the world. But this is nothing new: they have been doing so for thousands of years, often at the margins of the same religious traditions and cultures that created these limited ways of being for women in the first place.
In The Defiant Middle, Kaya Oakes draws on the wisdom of women mystics and explores how transitional eras or living in marginalized female identities can be both spiritually challenging and wonderfully freeing, ultimately resulting in a reinvented way of seeing the world and changing it. "Change, after all," Oakes writes, "always comes from the margins."
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Kaya Oakes is the cofounder of Kitchen Sink Magazine, which received the Utne Independent Press Award for Best New Magazine in 2003. Currently a writing instructor at the University of California, Berkeley, she has written music journalism, film and book reviews, and wrote a column on comics for Viz Comics' Manga Vizion. Her collection of poetry, Telegraph, received the Transcontinental Poetry Prize from Pavement Saw Press, and her poems have appeared in more than thirty journals and magazines. She has received writing awards from the Academy of American Poets and teaching fellowships from the Bay Area Writing Project and the Mellon Faculty Institute.
