Women Rage Against Patriarchy in Dystopian “Exile in Guyville” https://ift.tt/nQLeAZC
Amy Lee Lillard’s short story collection, Exile in Guyville, channels the bone-deep rage of existing as a female in a patriarchal world. In each of her six short stories, her female protagonists’ anger is reappropriated, validated, and given space to bloom. The collection borrows its title from Liz Phair’s 1993 debut album of the same name — Lillard’s homage to the Riot Grrrl underground feminist movement born as a response to the male-dominated punk scene of the early 90s.
In a 2021 article from Literary Hub, Lillard explains how her upbringing caused her to seek an outlet for this ever-building rage: “I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Des Moines, Iowa, in the 80s and 90s: a place where people got married out of high school, and had kids when they themselves were kids, and worked jobs they didn’t like, and that was life. Where women were told to be small, to live within limits.” Through the battle cries of female punk and indie musicians like Sleater-Kinny, Bikini Kill, and the Slits, among others, Lillard discovered both an outlet for her justified anger as well as a long-needed vessel of catharsis.
At a time when reproductive rights are constantly debated; the Harvey Weinsteins of the world are rarely, if ever, held fully accountable for their sexual violence toward women; and misogyny and sexism continue to run rampant in seemingly every sector of our daily lives, this short story collection allows this inherent rage to exist and act as a catalyst for action rather than be stifled and repressed in the name of upholding and maintaining the status quo. Eschewing societal expectations, Exile in Guyville instead centers this rage, alchemizing the anger felt on an individual level into a powerful collective energy of rebellion.
Drawing on writers like Margaret Atwood, “…whose speculative fiction showed me a path,” Lillard uses the expansiveness of the genre to explore dystopian futures rooted in the ongoing restrictions, violence towards women, and relentless policing of feminine identity.
In the opening story of the collection, also titled “Exile in Guyville,” and set in 2074, Lillard explores the topic of women as property and the catch-22 of survival versus sovereignty. We find ourselves in a museum of women from different time periods of the past. Our protagonist, a woman named Temple from the year 1870, discovers the true purpose of the museum and sees through the façade of what she’s told, namely that her future will be a life free of worry or want, if she surrenders to the purpose of the museum — a veiled promise that a better life awaits for just the small price of her autonomy. In an act of subversion, Temple discovers a workaround to her limited options, reclaiming her agency, but not without concessions.
In “Typical Girls” Lillard explores the Black-Mirror-esque idea of an internal operating system designed to improve communication, physical appearance, and make life overall easier for its owner. When a stressed hospitality worker decides to get the implant, its sinister nature comes to light, creating one of the most quietly horrifying and heartbreaking stories in the collection, exploring themes of blurred consent, impossible beauty standards, and the cost of relinquishing one’s identity in the service of the homogenous collective.
The third story of the collection, “Corporeal,” features intersecting timelines in which a woman named Wynn interacts with multiple versions of herself living in alternate realities. After realizing all these versions of herself have met untimely deaths, Wynn follows one of her doppelgangers who reveals a way to reclaim her agency over the situation and her own fragmented, questionably stable identity.
In “Blackbird” girls and women living in a post-apocalyptic world are confined to life in a shared compound, controlled by violent, sadistic groups of men. Routinely, the girls and women are hunted for sport, often mutilated, sexually assaulted, or killed. A pair of young girls hatch a daring plan to escape, with their plan and its consequences recalling the high stakes and tension of Suzanne Collins’s YA series The Hunger Games as well as Veronica Roth’s Divergent series.
“Wintersong” features the dissolution of a massage therapist’s marriage, alternatively remarking on her husband of 50 years and the Swedish man, also married, with whom she’s been having an affair. In sparse yet powerful writing, we see a woman decide against the path of least resistance, opting instead for a reclamation of what it means to be a soul in a body living for oneself rather than catering to another. The repressed experience of the protagonist in “Wintersong” contrasts starkly with the women in the final, and most powerful story of the collection titled “Things You Say,” a title borrowed from a Sleater-Kinney song. This story features a group of vigilante women seeking a reckoning against the men in their lives who have abused and violated them. Through the vessel of speculative fiction, Lillard weaves in the dark realities of male violence with the retribution of women able to enact their version of justice. A beautiful example of the power of catharsis and a feminine collective, “Things You Say” embodies the Riot Grrrl rebellion and reclamation of power Lillard so aptly infuses into each story in this collection.
The strength of these stories lies in Lillard’s ability to create wholly separate worlds contained in themselves, yet whose concepts and dystopian warnings sprawl far beyond the physical page. Each story stands alone as a microcosm of our current world and the imagined, seemingly imminent, future. Speared through the heart of these six short stories, a collective feminine rage centers reclamation and retribution for women railing against the patriarchy every day. This collection demands a reckoning, the undercurrent of rage fueling the fire, and the sparking prose standing atop the highest wall screaming from the page with its whole chest: GIRLS TO THE FRONT!
Exile in Guyville
By Amy Lee Lillard
BOA Editions
Published May 21, 2024
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