Rebellion: Essays, 1980-1991

Pratt's ( Crimes Against Nature ) 11 polished, articulate essays offer a striking example of everyday philosophy at work: a feminist assessing her experiences and learning from them, whether remembering her mother as a social worker in the South or noting the false cheer in exchanges between herself--a white woman--and her black janitor, divided by a social and historical chasm. In ``Rebellion,'' Pratt looks back on the small Alabama town where she was raised, which honored the memory of the Confederacy but gave short shrift to contemporarycorrect? ok rebels against a social order based on inequality. In ``Identity: Skin Blood Heartno commas ,'' the author describes breaking through the ``protective'' barriers that circumscribed her youth as she tries to ``learn a way of looking at the world that is more accurate, complex, multilayered.'' ``I Plead Guilty to Being a Lesbian'' explores her act of civil disobedience to protest the Supreme Court's refusal to invalidate state sodomy laws. In ``My Mother's Question'' Pratt considers what it means to have money or privilege, probing the provenance of what one of her students called ``my money'' and wondering who has lost by her gain. (Dec.)