Aggregated Discontent

By: Harron Walker

An unflinchingly honest and often comedic appraisal of the highs and lows of twenty-first-century womanhood

After a brief fling with corporate stability, Harron Walker becomes a terminally single freelancer and part-time shopgirl. In the throes of her second adolescence, she wants it all: basic human rights, a stable job with healthcare, bodily autonomy, the possibility of contentment. When she starts to acquire those things—well, as The Monkey's Paw famously asked, "What could go wrong?"

In sixteen wholly original essays that blend memoir, cultural criticism, investigative journalism, and a dash of fanfiction, Walker places her own experiences within the larger context of contemporary American womanhood. She eviscerates a corporation's attempt to pinkwash their way into bath bomb sales while simultaneously confronting her “pick me” impulse to do so. She interrogates her relationship to labor, from the irony of working in a transphobic workplace in order to cover gender-affirming surgery, to the cruel specter of the girlboss that none of us ever think we'll become. She explores the allure and violence of assimilating into white womanhood, exposes the ways in which the truth of trans women's reproductive healthcare is erased in favor of reactionary narratives, and considers how our agency is stripped from us—by governments, employers, partners, and ourselves—purely on account of our bodies.

With razor-sharp, biting prose that’s as uncompromising as it is playful, Walker grapples with questions of love, sex, fertility, labor, embodiment, community, autonomy, and bodily fluids from her particular vantagepoint: often at the margins, conditionally at the center.