The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne Valente

The Refrigerator Monologues was a birthday present from my wonderful husband, along with a Funko figure of Louise from Bob's Burgers. I have an affinity for small angry ids in character form. I don't let anger out very often in my real life, so roleplaying games and identification with angry women/girls is pretty much where it makes its place in my life. So, in as far as that is concerned, this was a particularly good pairing, because The Refrigerator Monologues is both angry and heartbreaking.

It comes from that particular pain of being a female comic book fan. I'm one myself, so there was so much I responded to here, about a medium I enjoy, but which frequently makes me uncomfortable. Particularly when you read a story and realize it sounds a lot like another story, and in both, women are treated in less-than-optimal ways. Suddenly, it's not just a single story anymore. It's a theme. And what you wanted to enjoy ends up in a place where women are punished/killed off/sidelined because of their gender, and it may be unconscious, but it's sure as hell not accidental.

So here we have Catherynne Valente's reaction to yet another girlfriend in a superhero movie dying to motivate a hero, which comes out as a visit to the land of the dead, where all these women congregate, dance, and tell their stories - at least until a reboot, when they get pulled back out to fill their roles again. All the characters are her own, but there are obvious parallels to the stories of Gwen Stacy, Jean Grey, Harley Quinn, Mera, Karen Page, and Alexandra DeWitt. And seen all together like that, around the table in a cafe or nightclub in Deadtown, it's overwhelming and infuriating.

We get these women centered in their own stories, aware of the way they've been subsumed in the stories of the men around them, decentered and sidekicked, murdered and committed to insane asylums, with their power unrecognized or terrifying. Goddammit, we need to do better, and some do. Thankfully. (There's a lovely nod to Gail Simone and a few other comic book creators.)

And because this is Catherynne Valente, it's all written so very beautifully. Not lushly this time, but with words that are sometimes like a punch, and sometimes a scalpel, cutting through the excuses around this topic and laying bare the underlying assumptions about women and their roles in stories. Particularly heroic stories.

Some of the stories I didn't know, and had to search out their our-world equivalent - Bayou, first of all. I never read much DC, and certainly knew very little about Aquaman, but reading even just the wikipedia article on Mera made me see red in the same way the story did. There's so little that Valente is adding to most of these stories, so many of them are the bare bones just as they were in the comics, but treated without sentiment and more thought, so what was thrown in without thinking is exposed like a nerve.

I want more. I want women at the centre of stories with superpowers, I want them to be less props, more people, whose stories are not just there to highlight the more important male stories beside them. Thankfully, some of those comics are being written these days, and maybe someday this book will not resonate with female comic book fans and aware male ones quite so much as it does at the moment. But until then, pull up a chair and prepare to get angry.