Status
Publication
Description
"Who is "the girl"? Look to movies, TV shows, magazines, and ads and the message is both clear and not: she is a sexed-up sidekick, a princess waiting to be saved, a morally infallible angel with no opinions of her own. She's whatever the hero needs her to be in order to become himself. She's an abstraction, an ideal, a standard, a mercurial phantom. In You Play the Girl, Chocano blends formative personal stories with insightful and emotionally powerful analysis. Moving from Bugs Bunny to Playboy Bunnies, Flashdance to Frozen, the progressive '70s through the backlash '80s, the glib '90s, and the pornified aughts--and at stops in between--she explains how growing up in the shadow of "the girl" taught her to think about herself and the world and what it means to raise a daughter in the face of these contorted reflections. In the tradition of Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, and Susan Sontag, Chocano brilliantly shows that our identities are more fluid than we think, and certainly more complex than anything we see on any kind of screen."--Page 4 of cover.… (more)
User reviews
One example I can give is how the movie Flashdance affected her, I can’t relate to what she described because I never saw that movie and never wanted to, but the description of her experiences felt valid from what I remember of the 80’s. It was this way throughout most of the book. And I actually feel this made this book even more relevant and valuable to me, I feel it is very important to recognize that no one experiences culture in the same was as anyone else and yet we are all shaped by it for both good or ill.
Overall this was a very quick read, very accessible and engaging and it made me think and reevaluate the culture and times I grew up in be seeing someone else’s experiences.