But as Vorona Cote acknowledges her debts, it forces the reader to wonder what Too Much is attempting to add to that canon in 2020. Their writing paved new ground for what feminism could be outside of the academic sphere, and much of it remains deeply relevant and affecting-obviously, the problems of entrenched sexism have not been banished by their naming. Vorona Cote weaves into her work the classics of 2010s feminist writing on “muchness,” like Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, Jess Zimmerman’s essay “Hunger Makes Me,” and Anne Helen Petersen’s Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman, which Too Much deeply resembles. But in 2020, the book feels like an anachronism, and it offers few new insights into how misogyny circumscribes women’s presentation and emotional lives. Too Much, her response, is an impassioned defense of “too muchness” (her terminology) in women, blending literary analysis from the Victorian era with meditations on pop culture from the last century. By her own admission, Vorona Cote is one of them, and she is tired of being told she’s too much: too loud, too talkative, too crazy. “So too is a fat woman, a horny woman, a woman shrieking with laughter.” These women are “too much,” in the language of the book. “A weeping woman is a monster,” writes Takoma Park-based author Rachel Vorona Cote in the first line of her new book Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today. Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription.
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