Girlhood's Collective Trauma: On Rochelle Hurt's "The J Girls: A Reality Show"

Rochelle Hurt | The J Girls: A Reality Show | Indiana University Press | 2022 | 92 Pages

Part poetry, part (screen)play, Rochelle Hurt’s The J Girls: A Reality Show, winner of the 2021 Blue Light Book Prize, interrogates the collective trauma of women coming of age. Set in a fictional Gaudeville (Godville! Gaudyville!), Ohio in the late 90s to early 2000s, Hurt’s cinematic hybrid collection introduces us, via three VHS tapes from a church rummage sale, to five working-class teen girls: Jocelyn, Jodie, Jennifer, Jacqui, and Joelle. It’s no coincidence that, though the cast list spells out their distinguishing features, the J girls are also indistinguishable—simultaneously very real young women and archetypes. 

Through a series of monologues, talk shows, commercial breaks, and mock interviews, the J girls navigate the hardships of girlhood through the safety of creating television—in constructing these performances, they’ve made a space where they are, for once, in control, reclaiming the autonomy that has, often by men, been snatched from them. Hurt’s utilization of these forms paired with her ability to, quite literally, set the stage (several, really) only enhances the poignancy of the lyricism and the narratives the poems contain. Doused in nineties’ nostalgia, the landscapes Hurt constructs for us are tactile and gritty—the salty, fatty air hanging over the mall food court; the greasy stink of skate rentals at the roller rink; the Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers we overapplied to make our mouths shine; the cucumber melon Bath & Body Works body spray we were certain was sexy. 

The places we witness the J girls—and the things they do there—not only appeal to our own nineties nostalgia but also illustrate the intersection of sexuality and class. In “Viral,” one of Jodie’s monologues, she begins: “Danger is as danger and I once did.” Here we have Jodie in her Taco Bell uniform, leaning out the drive-thru window, pumping a sour cream gun into the air. We’ve got a shocked mother she’s flashed. And we get a glimpse into how others perceive her—as a delinquent: “I saw all the PTA ma’ams / clutching their jumbo pearls, as if / I’d filch them from their chests”—and as an addict and a slut: “Who knows what drugs she’s on, how many / men.” Not only is Jodie acutely aware that she is the subject of the kind of gossip working class women bear as a social consequence of being poor, the poem ends with her not giving a fuck: “No need for DNA revenge— / hot trash that I am, my name passed tit to lip / through every throat in town by week’s end.” 

I bring with me—to this book, to all texts, to all things—my queerness. Like the J girls, I too am a millennial who came of age in a Catholic school in Ohio, but I experienced a different kind of girlhood, and this book made me think about how my visible queerness (e.g., “masculinity”) as a child and teen both endangered and protected me. It was not safe to come out to anyone in my family or community, and I believe I was spared the common experience of sexual assault and generally violent, or at least nonconsensual, sexual experiences because I was not the type of girl men found “desirable,” and thus did not have to spend the kind of time fending off unwanted attention and aggression from men like my peers did. Of course, there is also a danger in not being “desirable” to men, and I recognize, too, my fortune in having only been called faggot or dyke out truck windows as opposed to being physically assaulted. This is all to say that one of my favorite poems in the collection is one of queer desire, one that occupies a gentler space than many of the other poems in the collection. In “Thigh High,” one of Joelle’s monologues, she and Jocelyn sit cross-legged in the grass at sunset:

…Sometimes desire

says break it, so I lay a hand on you
with a laugh, with a girl, I know.

Your tiny hairs catch like breaths
on my finger grooves. Razor burn

blooms like specks of fire and spreads
through goosebumps, little triggers.

I want to test you. You let me
press your ink and citrus bruises,

and it’s nearly enough.

Hurt is an expert in uncovering the intimate nuances in relationships between women, and this poem is just one example of the performative space of television being a safe space because it serves as a catalyst for tenderness that may have been unsafe in a more “public” way. Still, I think in many poems with women at the center, there is an element of vulnerability that feels a little unsafe—I can relate to the ingenuine gestures we sometimes have to force into our language for the sake of “no homo”—here, saying “girl,” as a means to revoke some of the intimacy and, therefore, confirm a platonic relationship—deep-seated homophobia impressed by patriarchy is forever in the air. Still, what I like about the poem, is that tenderness prevails in a moment of desire:

…The sky bowed 

behind you all afternoon, waiting
for permission. Girl, you

are a hall of mirrors falling on me—
you are the end of looking.

One of things that I love most about this book is the way it holds space for both collective tenderness and collective rage. In “Cunts in the Girls’ Room,” another one of Joelle’s monologues, Hurt builds vulnerability via the privacy of a bathroom stall (sexual intimacy, though it has to be hidden) and the violence that demands seeking that privacy (eating disorder-inducing societal pressures for women to be thin):

Excess is catechism in the room that drinks 

the runoff of girls made from too much—
cunts who push our luck with wobbly locks
we trust to keep our splitting bodies hidden 

while we kiss and puke and cry and scratch
our names into the flaking paint.

The poem is a commentary on girls being both too much and unable to be contained. The word “cunt” stands out, as it does in many contexts, and it’s not the reclaimed kind, but rather the kind used to put down other women, the vulgar slang for vaginas, rooted, of course, in misogyny. 

In addition to misogyny and rage between women, Hurt illustrates, too, rage among women in a collective sense, often by way of individual accounts of mistreatment that are familiar to all women. Girlhood cannot be discussed without a parallel and specific discussion around consent and the physical and psychological dangers men impose. “The Birth of Anger at the Roller-Skating Rink,” where Joelle (she’s my favorite, okay?) stands at the center of the rink in her socks, disco ball spinning slowly, its effect negated by the shining overhead lights, plainly describes common sexual experiences of young women:

I let him inside me last night
and then said stop, my mind scratching like a record 
as I lay in his bed and watched him finish in me
from some far horizon in my head, so he told his friends:
too big anyway, too loose—a whisper that echoes 
girl to girl in this rink where I am, most nights, 
       too small to be seen.

This poem portrays sexual violence against women and what is often the psychological aftermath not only of being physically violated but also of men pitting women against each other and the isolation that can accompany it. The poem ends with Joelle becoming “her own solar system” on the rink:

…I burn a girl-sized hole in the hissing air 
and rise, a mascaraed god-eye, taking in pain unflinching. 
Huge, I spin imperceptibly, turning little by little 
toward an orange rage that will, I can see, eclipse everything.

One single example fuels the rage of many. The word “assault” is never used in this book. And the word “rape,” only once: “Sometimes girls on girl means swapping rape stories.” What has been unspeakable for many of us for entire lifetimes is spoken in this poem.

Startling and familiar, sometimes vulgar, often hilarious, and very sure of itself, The J Girls is, without a doubt, one of the best books I’ll read this year.