OBSCENE GESTURES FOR WOMEN <i> by Janet Kauffman (Knopf: $16.95; 110 pp.) </i>

Janet Kauffman’s short stories pose overtly feminist questions in a thoroughly undogmatic way. Men are not the enemy. Her women live happily with gentle companions. But the women discover that they are strangers in the world, disenfranchised by the masculinity of the forms of expression--the gestures of the title. The opening story, a surrealistic fantasy, sets the scene: A man accidentally comes upon a flock of woman-birds in a field. They seem to be creatures he has never seen before, but he recognizes that they are women acting is a way no man has ever observed. The voices in the stories that follow could be the individuals in this exotic flock.

Marimba, the narrator in the title story, has perfect teeth. Her pleasure in their appearance collapses, however, when she discovers that the smoothness of their beveled edges comes from her habit of grinding her teeth in her sleep. For years she had prided herself on her firm jaw muscles: “In her ignorance, she thought when she looked in the mirror: this is how a woman’s face matures.” When she takes her newly-discovered troubles to a hypnotherapist--male, of course--he instructs her to “display hostility rather than self-inflict it. . . . You don’t know how many men go around, surreptitiously giving their bosses the finger.” Here Marimba rebels; she can’t “give the finger.” A new vocabulary of obscene gestures is needed for women, she argues: “Couldn’t he see that physiologically, women do not screw the world? I said, Give me an obscene gesture for women, and sure, I’d use it.”