Word: thelma
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...time--using some of my electives--I took half of my classes from female professors and teaching fellows, including one course in the Women's Studies department taught by two women in which we spent a lot of time talking about heroines and role models, especially in popular culture. Thelma and Louise were an option, but aside from the fact that they are fictional characters, I'm not sure I'm so fond of all the choices they made. Madonna is another possibility, but as much as I adore "Evita," I still can't get past envisioning...
...different narrators. The book centers around Caridad, a woman of Chinese, Spanish and Philippine ancestry, and her search for her true roots, obscured by family secrets for over forty years. Her voice begins and ends the novel, but in between, her story is told through those of her mother Thelma, her aunt Emma and her cousin Ligaya. "After all," says Caridad, "do we not all belong in each other's stories...
...Thelma, the strong matriarch, has had to deal with a severe mother-in-law, a cheating husband, sterility, medicine men and more. Each step in her growth is treated like a gigantic leap of mankind, then is pushed aside for yet another revelation. After a few years of childless marriage, for example, Thelma's mother-in-law becomes concerned and takes action, asking "the old man to come." After that summoning, there is a break in the text, as if an earth-shattering meeting, or story-changing event is about to take place. The next paragraph contains a description...
...given us the butch heroine--at once babe, district attorney and driving-men-crazy. She can be a victim, in, say, Thelma & Louise, an outlaw fantasy in which the women's suicide is seen as a magnificent screw-you gesture. Or she can be a victor, in Waiting to Exhale, where most of the guys are so lame and preening that there's little triumph in outsmarting them. The set piece in both films was blowing up an automobile: sexual revenge as car-nage. But that was not nearly so explosive as the smoulder of Sharon Stone's sexual menace...
...movie, and not nearly a perfect one. And its makers are, darn it, men. But it restores a little balance to phallocentric Hollywood. It says women can thrive in the good old '30s way: by being smart, sexy, human. Best of all, it doesn't stand alone, a defiant Thelma without her Louise; instead, it mingles with its sister films in a proud, growing community. If women can create, star in and see more movies like this one, that will be their sweetest revenge...