Cunt: A Declaration of Independence (Live Girls) [Paperback]

Inga Muscio (Author)

Book Description

Series: Live Girls | Publication Date: September 1998

The author reclaims the word, which has been a taboo word for many years, as a powerful and positive term than can unite all women. In it, she explores feminist issues such as birth control, sexuality, jealousy between women, and prostitution, with a fresh attitude for a new generation of women.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Somewhere between Valerie Solanas's bitter SCUM Manifesto and Eve Ensler's fanciful The Vagina Monologues lies this self-indulgent exercise in feminist reclamation. Striving to remove the negative connotations from a word usually used as a scathing insult, Muscio traces the history of the term "cunt" and asserts that it was once a term of respect before the patriarchy turned it into a profane, misogynistic epithet. This transformation, she insists, occurred as part of a conspiracy to make women feel a sense of self-loathing and uncleanness; only by reconnecting with love for their genitalia can women achieve personal and political power. Muscio muddles her work with rambling digressions, including those about utilizing sea sponges instead of tampons during menstruation, using herbal tea and visualization in order to miscarry an unwanted fetus and identifying with Imelda Marcos. What insights the book does provide must be discerned beneath Musico's jarring prose, which fluctuates between the academic and the colloquial, sometimes in the same paragraph. On responses to her manuscript, she writes, "Reactions to a book called Cunt always lead to an intense grilling. Ain't never encountered ambivalence." Although this work may constitute a move toward women's acceptance of themselves and their bodies, it is a very small step. Agent, Leigh Feldman.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 277 pages
• Publisher: Seal Press (WA); First Edition edition (September 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1580050158
• ISBN-13: 978-1580050159
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (116 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,049,337 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

159 of 177 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A clear voice, November 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Cunt: A Declaration of Independence (Live Girls) (Paperback)

I adore the Internet because, among other things, it allows us to be anonymous voices delivering messages without attached messengers. Thus, the messages must be evaluated without prejudice...

But Ms. Muscio's book is clearly written from a particular narrator in a particular class, and it feels impossible to write a review without declaring that, yes, I'm a white male and yes, many parts of _cunt_ made me feel personally uncomfortable.

Nonetheless, _cunt_ is very much worthwhile reading. Whether you agree fully, partially, or not at all with the the book, Ms. Muscio offers a clear and pointed commentary on women's roles in society, and offers many suggestions for combating sexism and nurturing women. Where she falls short is on offering ways on engaging and changing society at large. Sexism hurts all of us, not just women; its eradication requires cooperation from all of us.

Buy the book. Read it. Pass it around. Argue it with someone who sees it differently. Even if ultimately nobody's mind is changed, _cunt_ can can at least help to remove our absurd taboo on discussing our sexuality. Enlightenment does not spread through silence.

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars something else, December 24, 1999

By 

monster treasure (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cunt: A Declaration of Independence (Live Girls) (Paperback)

This book is from a kickass school: it's not preoccupied with men, it's not loose and theoretical. It's about coming to terms: with your own body, with language, with the culture at large. It's about subverting the tampon industry, hanging out with your mom, taking control of some of the more suspicious parts of your life, and riding skateboards down the street while wearing bunny-ear hats. I never did feel like part of the club before when reading feminist literature, but this book made me feel invited to the party.

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Flawed, but Phenomenal, May 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Cunt: A Declaration of Independence (Live Girls) (Paperback)

It would seem that to date, reviews of "cunt" fall into two camps: those who unreservedly love the book (and likely were strongly predisposed to doing so before they'd ever seen the dust jacket), and those who hate it with an all-too-unsurprising virulence (expressed in generalities suggesting these critics may not have cracked the spine at all, or done anything more than peruse the description on the book's rear cover). A less strongly pre-agenda'd, although by no means `objective', reading might prove more informative:

On the one hand, there is much in "cunt" that is problematic. The book is far too prone to telescoping gender into the genitals, literalizing the cunt as an abstractly idealized and ontologically primary font of identity. This points to a larger confusion, namely that the book is frequently unclear on the differences between the cunt as anatomical materiel and as metaphor. Additionally, and despite a clearly demonstrated lack of misandrony ("cunt" is in no way, shape or form a male-hating screed), Muscio frequently reduces the world to a dichotomy of dick/male=arrogated power vs. cunt/female=site of oppression and resistance. "cunt"'s approach thus precludes the book from addressing how patriarchy deeply and systematically exerts control over people with dicks as well, even (and especially) those who haven't thought to spend a single second recognizing how patriarchal relations twist both their conceptions and lived realities. Thus, "cunt" has little to say about how males and females are reciprocally culpable in the continuing, self-repressive reproduction of patriarchy itself and, in this silence, largely fails to grapple with how any effective and durable response necessitates that we all participate, regardless of whether the sperm-derby stuck us with a double-x or an xy.

These critiques aside, however, the book willfully veers between the hilarious (in a laugh-with, not laugh-at, way), the deeply touching, the instructive, and the joyously celebratory, all the while remaining well attuned to significant differences within the category of `female' itself. Muscio enthusiastically, relentlessly, and with unfailingly outrageous good humor points out the ludicrous double-standards yoking females from without and within, double-standards that've become so commonplace as to leave most folk immobilized beneath the assumption that it's "just the way things are." And, beyond this act of recognition, Muscio offers a treasure trove of prescriptions, many of them outright fun, for what to do about it. Thus, "cunt" is a powerful arsenal against the relegation of more than half the planet's population, generation after generation, into second-class-citizenship, and for this "cunt" is a must-read.