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A review by jarrahpenguin
Commute: An Illustrated Memoir of Female Shame by Erin Williams
3.0
Commute is a complicated graphic memoir to review. It's an extremely honest look at Williams' experiences with sex, sexual harassment, and sexual assault; and how all those experiences connected to her history of alcoholism. The art is crisp, minimalist and effective, with colour used sparingly to make particular images pop and force the reader to take everything in with a bit more awareness. Some pages feel more like drawing exercises and are less refined but it does all come together. Williams' observations on objectification and shame are pretty powerful and no doubt would resonate for many heterosexual women readers.
That said, Williams has some blind spots that really show through when she tries to universalize her experiences as applicable to all women. Others have noted that her musings on her weight are fatphobic or at least demonstrate internalized fatphobia. I'm inclined to give the benefit of the doubt that Williams was trying to portray her thoughts about her weight as toxic and implicitly sanction women who take up space in many ways (physical space, making noise, etc.), but I think she stopped short of actually trying to put herself in the shoes of a fat person or really questioning the idea that fat = undesirable.
A recurring theme in the book is feeling caught in a trap where you're either hyper-visible/desired or invisible to/undesired by men. Williams does want to be visible and desired by men and doesn't spend time considering women who don't, because they're ace or queer or just don't care. Men who aren't heterosexual aren't part of her picture.
What bothered me most was how Williams can't seem to imagine that there could be other ways for women to experience being seen/unseen by men. For many fat women, visibly poor women, BIPOC women, queer women, trans women, women with disabilities, and other women who deviate from the skinny-average cis white norm, you can be hyper-visible but not desired. Instead of the threat of sexual assault there is the threat of ridicule, judgement and other kinds of physical violence. It's a critical dimension to so many women's experiences that it kind of hurts to see it overlooked like it is in this book.
On one page of Commute, Williams shows herself standing in a crowd of women, including women of different colours and creeds, with the caption: "And we women, we remember you." She's talking about women remembering men that raped them. While there is power in drawing attention to how gender-based violence occurs across cultures, the page feels like diversity window-dressing because Williams doesn't ever actually acknowledge intersecting systems of oppression or how she might be privileged relative to other women.
That said, Williams has some blind spots that really show through when she tries to universalize her experiences as applicable to all women. Others have noted that her musings on her weight are fatphobic or at least demonstrate internalized fatphobia. I'm inclined to give the benefit of the doubt that Williams was trying to portray her thoughts about her weight as toxic and implicitly sanction women who take up space in many ways (physical space, making noise, etc.), but I think she stopped short of actually trying to put herself in the shoes of a fat person or really questioning the idea that fat = undesirable.
A recurring theme in the book is feeling caught in a trap where you're either hyper-visible/desired or invisible to/undesired by men. Williams does want to be visible and desired by men and doesn't spend time considering women who don't, because they're ace or queer or just don't care. Men who aren't heterosexual aren't part of her picture.
What bothered me most was how Williams can't seem to imagine that there could be other ways for women to experience being seen/unseen by men. For many fat women, visibly poor women, BIPOC women, queer women, trans women, women with disabilities, and other women who deviate from the skinny-average cis white norm, you can be hyper-visible but not desired. Instead of the threat of sexual assault there is the threat of ridicule, judgement and other kinds of physical violence. It's a critical dimension to so many women's experiences that it kind of hurts to see it overlooked like it is in this book.
On one page of Commute, Williams shows herself standing in a crowd of women, including women of different colours and creeds, with the caption: "And we women, we remember you." She's talking about women remembering men that raped them. While there is power in drawing attention to how gender-based violence occurs across cultures, the page feels like diversity window-dressing because Williams doesn't ever actually acknowledge intersecting systems of oppression or how she might be privileged relative to other women.