Best of
Feminist-Theory

2019

Hippie Woman Wild: A Memoir of Life & Love on an Oregon Commune


Carol Schlanger - 2019
    Her parents spoiled her and she expected the universe to follow. It didn’t. After being expelled from Yale, losing a coveted Broadway lead, and seeing a suicide splatter at her feet, she left NYC for the Great Northwest, to live in nature with a man “who made everything beautiful with his hands.” At that time she chose love and nature, over art and career ... until she didn’t. Carol Schlanger put “hidden” cash down on an abandoned homestead—160 acres. The commune followed—all 13 jammed tight into a broken-down cabin with no phone, no electricity, and no running water. They were dependent on each other for every human need and survival. But then freeloading and free love threatened the hard-won utopia. After struggling through infidelity, rape, and childbirth, all except the father of her child left when Carol refused to share land ownership. When, as a lone wilderness “wife,” she accidentally set their house on fire, she realized she couldn’t survive in isolation. Strapping her toddler into a battered old Chevy, she headed to Los Angeles to reclaim her life as a mother, her power as an artist, and her responsibility as an adult. This time her Texan followed her. This is both their love story, and a love story for an explosive, mind-altering era.

All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence


Emily L. Thuma - 2019
    Emily L. Thuma traces the making of this anticarceral feminism at the intersections of struggles for racial and economic justice, prisoners’ and psychiatric patients’ rights, and gender and sexual liberation.  All Our Trials explores the organizing, ideas, and influence of those who placed criminalized and marginalized women at the heart of their antiviolence mobilizations. This activism confronted a "tough on crime" political agenda and clashed with the mainstream women’s movement’s strategy of resorting to the criminal legal system as a solution to sexual and domestic violence. Drawing on extensive archival research and first-person narratives, Thuma weaves together the stories of mass defense campaigns, prisoner uprisings, broad-based local coalitions, national gatherings, and radical print cultures that cut through prison walls. In the process, she illuminates a crucial chapter in an unfinished struggle––one that continues in today’s movements against mass incarceration and in support of transformative justice.

The Anatomy of Silence


Cyra Perry Dougherty - 2019
    About how we are all complicit in creating that silence. It offers an unflinching account of how a culture of shame perpetuates a culture of violence against our bodies—and reflects on what it would take to create a world in which that silence — once broken — stays broken.

Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement


Katherine M. Marino - 2019
    The founding mothers of this movement were not based primarily in the United States, however, or in Europe. Instead, Katherine M. Marino introduces readers to a cast of remarkable Latin American and Caribbean women whose deep friendships and intense rivalries forged global feminism out of an era of imperialism, racism, and fascism. Six dynamic activists form the heart of this story: from Brazil, Bertha Lutz; from Cuba, Ofelia Domingez Navarro; from Uruguay, Paulina Luisi; from Panama, Clara Gonzalez; from Chile, Marta Vergara; and from the United States, Doris Stevens. This Pan-American network drove a transnational movement that advocated women's suffrage, equal pay for equal work, maternity rights, and broader self-determination. Their painstaking efforts led to the enshrinement of women's rights in the United Nations Charter and the development of a framework for international human rights. But their work also revealed deep divides, with Latin American activists overcoming U.S. presumptions to feminist superiority. As Marino shows, these early fractures continue to influence divisions among today's activists along class, racial, and national lines. Marino's multinational and multilingual research yields a new narrative for the creation of global feminism. The leading women introduced here were forerunners in understanding the power relations at the heart of international affairs. Their drive to enshrine fundamental rights for women, children, and all people of the world stands as a testament to what can be accomplished when global thinking meets local action.

So Here I Am: Speeches by Great Women to Empower and Inspire


Anna Russell - 2019
    With evocative and powerful illustrations from Brazilian artist, Camila Pinheiro, this anthology of great women -  whose own achievements speak for themselves - is timely and important. This shot of inspiration serves as a reminder that despite all adversity, nevertheless, she persisted.  Speakers include: Sojourner TruthMarie CurieEmmeline PankhurstHelen KellerSylvia RiveraJ.K. RowlingManal Al SharfiMalala YousafzaiMichelle ObamaAlicia Garza

Feminist International: How to Change Everything


Verónica Gago - 2019
    As women filled the streets of Argentina and Madrid, of Italy and Poland, they’ve transformed the meaning of radical politics and the grammar of various struggles.In this brilliant and kaleidoscopic look at the emerging feminist international, Verónica Gago uses the women’s strike as both a concept and a collective experience. At once a gripping political analysis and a theoretically charged manifesto, Feminist International draws on the author’s rich experience with radical movements to enter into ongoing debates in feminist and Marxist theory: from social reproduction and domestic work to the intertwining of financial and gender violence, as well as controversies surrounding the neo-extractivist model of development, the possibilities and limits of left populism, and the ever-vexed nexus of gender-race-class.Gago’s feminism is a powerful call to abandon the rhetoric of victimisation, and to instead mount a frontal challenge to both neo-liberal rule and the conservative counteroffensive. Feminist International asks what another theory of power might look like, one premised on our desire to change everything.

Fifth-Wave Feminism


Mohammed Hijab - 2019
    Second-wave feminism primarily defined women as being a subject of systemic exploitation through ‘the patriarchy’. Third/fourth wave approaches are more complicated. Many ideas have become noticeable in the literature which make this the case. The idea of intersectionality is of particular importance as it redefines what a ‘woman’ is in the first place. Post-structuralism further confuses the picture as it makes feminist ‘prescription’ more difficult. This book outlines some of the philosophical consequences of taking third/fourth wave ideas to their logical end point. In particular the book argues that a true intersectional approach would result in the philosophical self-implosion of feminism.

Inappropriate Bodies: Art, Design, and Maternity


Rachel Epp Buller - 2019
    Over the past two decades, the maternal body has gained currency in popular culture and the contemporary art world, with many books and exhibitions foregrounding artists' experiences and art historical explorations of maternity that previously were marginalized or dismissed. In too many instances, however, the maternal potential of female bodies-whether realized or not-still causes them to be stigmatized, censored, or otherwise treated as inappropriate: cultural expectations of maternity create one set of prejudices against women whose bodies or experiences do align with those same expectations, and another set of prejudices against those who do not. Support for mothers in the paid workforce remains woefully inadequate, yet in many cultural contexts, social norms continue to ask what is 'wrong'; with women who do not have children. In these essays and conversations, artists and writers discuss how maternal expectations shape creative work and designed environments, and highlight alternative ways of existing in relation to those expectations.

Feminism in Minutes


Shannon Weber - 2019
    But what really is feminism--in all its forms? Who were the key feminists, and what are their beliefs? What do feminists think about abortion, sex, religion, pornography, and beauty? And have women achieved equality--or is there still much to do?Feminism in Minutes is the quickest, easiest way to understand the big ideas and history of feminism, from its ancient roots to the #MeToo movement today.Contents include: Basic Concepts; Schools of Feminism; Marriage and Motherhood; Sex, Power, and Sexuality; Activism and Justice; Gender, Religion, War; Women's Achievements in Science and Medicine; Feminism in the Arts; as well as the ideas of essential feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Emmeline Pankhurst, Sojourner Truth, Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Pussy Riot, and Malala Yousafzai, among many others.

Them Goon Rules: Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism


Marquis Bey - 2019
    A series of essays that reads like a critical memoir, this work queries the function and implications of politicized Blackness, Black feminism, and queerness. Bey binds together his personal experiences with social justice work at the New York–based Audre Lorde Project, growing up in Philly, and rigorous explorations of the iconoclasm of theorists of Black studies and Black feminism. Bey’s voice recalibrates itself playfully on a dime, creating a collection that tarries in both academic and nonacademic realms. Fashioning fugitive Blackness and feminism around a line from Lil’ Wayne’s “A Millie,” Them Goon Rules is a work of “auto-theory” that insists on radical modes of thought and being as a refrain and a hook that is unapologetic, rigorously thoughtful, and uncompromising.