Granta 115

Feminism is not an easy term to pin down, and is too often bandied about with both positive and negative connotations attached. More significant, though, is the growing disinterest in and distrust of the term, neatly summed up in Granta's title The F Word. What exactly, this collection asks, is the relevance of feminism nowadays?

This question might immediately set alarm bells ringing, but we are thankfully spared an academic discourse. Instead, Granta presents an impressive array of stories, poems, memories, photographs and essays that all, in some way, touch upon the central issue of gender, be it the experience of Hijra in India, the ordeal of a group of French women in a concentration camp, or the introspection of a recent divorcee. The collection is so wide-ranging that it is impossible to reduce the F Word to a battle between men and women, though some individual stories might strive to; instead, we are shown women and their children, their mothers, their fathers, other women, women over the class divide, and women from a man's perspective, to name but a few. One of the most effective of all the stories is 'Night Thoughts' by Helen Simpson, which cleverly inverts the expected stereotype to present a man lying awake at night in a state of worry over his relationship, his looks, his wife's porn habit... ending with the world-affirming 'This was the way things were. This was the natural order.'

The F Word does not seek to dictate to the reader what he or she must think about feminism, nor does it try to tell us what being a woman means. The range of this sensitive and thought-provoking collection serves only to cast light - sometimes bright, sometimes dim - on the huge variety of experience and meaning that feminism can offer.