A review by abbie_
Tomboyland: Essays by Melissa Faliveno

emotional reflective medium-paced

4.25

My thanks to the publisher for my free review copy!

What I loved

  • the discussion around bisexuality, biphobia, and bi erasure. Faliveno is bi and in a relationship with a man, and she talks about how she (and many of her other queer friends) often feels like she no longer belongs in the queer community, but also doesn’t belong among the cis-hets because of her gender ‘presentation’
  • The discussion around gender presentation. The author does disclose her preference for she/her pronouns, but also identifies as genderqueer. Loved her discussion on how the world reacts to her because we’re all so obsessed with putting things (and people) into clearly delineated boxes
  • Tomboy history - did you know the word tomboy has racist and heteronormative roots? I didn’t but I’m not surprised. Also people used to encourage girls to be tomboys so that they’d run around more and get healthy and fit and strong so they’d be more suited for child bearing later on?? Then when they hit 14 or 15 it was time to be a proper lady again
  • Made me think about tornadoes, those things are scary and America just experiences them all the time?? Wild
  • Everything she shares about found family and community, and the privilege she knows she has that she’s both close to her biological family and has such a great queer community surrounding her
  • All the discussion around children and deciding to be child-free. I don’t think I’ve seen someone take such a complex deep dive into their feelings around this, especially as she admits to feeling some type of grief around not having children, but that grief doesn’t mean she wants to change her mind or regret her decision. A lot of things are presented as black and white these days, so it was nice to see someone admit to holding a lot of conflicting feelings at once

What I didn’t like so much:

  • not much tbh! The last essay wasn’t as strong as the others so I feel like that could have been placed elsewhere in the collection 


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