Best of
Feminist-Studies

2019

Tonguebreaker


Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha - 2019
    Tonguebreaker is about surviving the unsurvivable: living through hate crimes, the suicides of queer kin, and the rise of fascism while falling in love and walking through your beloved’s Queens neighborhood. Building on her groundbreaking work in Bodymap, Tonguebreaker is an unmitigated force of disabled queer-of-color nature, narrating disabled femme-of-color moments on the pulloff of the 80 in West Oakland, the street, and the bed. Tonguebreaker dreams unafraid femme futures where we live—a ritual for our collective continued survival.

Choice Words - A Collection of Writing About Abortion


Louise Swinn - 2019
    At a time when abortion is a criminal act and prosecution is a real risk in parts of Australia, this book is needed more than ever. In 2018, the world watched aghast when a Tasmanian woman lost her job at a high-profile sporting agency for tweeting the truth: even in states where abortion is legal, access can be nearly impossible. This treasury of stories highlights the sheer, unspoken commonality of abortion. Women have been dealing with the risks and the fall-out for longer than there is record. It is poignant, wise, funny and true; a salute to those who have been working in the field, a celebration of how far we've come, an electrifying caterwaul at how far we still have to go, and a clarion call to action. Contributors include Jane Caro, Claudia Karvan, Laura Jean, Melissa Lucashenko, Emily Maguire, Tara June Winch, Michelle Law, Tony Birch, Melanie Cheng, Anne Summers, Gideon Haigh, Monica Dux, Bri Lee, Jenny Kee, and a Foreword by Tanya Plibersek. Proceeds from Choice Words will go to the charity Marie Stopes Australia, the only national, independently-accredited, not-for-profit safe abortion provider, that has helped more than 600,000 women in the past twenty years.

A Little Feminist History of Art


Charlotte Mullins - 2019
    Using the “female gaze” to articulate socially relevant issues after an era of aesthetic “formalism,” feminist artists, working in a variety of media, have brought attention to ideas surrounding gender, identity, and form. They have critiqued and altered our thinking about the cultural expectations and stereotyping of women, women’s struggle for equality, and the treatment of the female body as a commodity. Fifty outstanding works reflect women’s lives and experience, the changing position of women artists, and the impact of feminist ideals and politics on visual culture. This book is a celebration of one of the most ambitious, influential, and enduring artistic movements to emerge from the 20th century.

Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran


Nazanin Shahrokni - 2019
    Author Nazanin Shahrokni takes us onto gender-segregated buses, inside a women-only park, and outside the closed doors of stadiums where women are banned from attending men’s soccer matches. The Islamic character of the state, she demonstrates, has had to coexist, fuse, and compete with technocratic imperatives, pragmatic considerations regarding the viability of the state, international influences, and global trends. Through a retelling of the past four decades of state policy regulating gender boundaries, Women in Place challenges notions of the Iranian state as overly unitary, ideological, and isolated from social forces and pushes us to contemplate the changing place of women in a social order shaped by capitalism, state-sanctioned Islamism, and debates about women’s rights. Shahrokni throws into sharp relief the ways in which the state strives to constantly regulate and contain women’s bodies and movements within the boundaries of the “proper” but simultaneously invests in and claims credit for their expanded access to public spaces.