20 June 2022; Margaret Atwood, Author on the Centre stage, during the opening night of Collision 2022 at Enercare Centre in Toronto, Canada. Photo by Stephen McCarthy/Collision via Sportsfile.

Margaret Atwood's "Miss July Grows Older" certainly takes on a different tone than the other work I've covered in this project, and takes on more contemporary issues through quippy, witty language, but still does work to subvert gendered perspectives in literature. It is particularly clever for her to write the speaker as an aging, former beauty queen; she would have intimately known the isolation of desirability, and could clearly pinpoint the ways she could use her power to manipulate gazing eyes back, and speaker remembers being seen as an object, not a person. The fact that the speaker is reflecting on this from a distance gives her power back--"You no longer get what you see." Objectification of women is a form of oppression, and in this poem, she creates a personal and witty perspective, that is perhaps, surprising, unexpected, and even empowering. 

Greenblatt, Stephen. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth and Twenty First Centuries. 11th ed., vol. F, W.W. Norton and Company, 2024.