Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement


Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha - 2020
    This is How We Survive focuses on concrete alternatives to policing and prisons. From practical tool-kits and personal essays, to supporting people in mental health crises, to community-based murder investigations, this text delves deeply into the “how to” of transformative justice. Along the way, this volume documents the history of this radical movement, creating space for long time organizers to reflect on victories, struggles, mistakes, and transformations.

From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers


Marina Warner - 1994
    Why are storytellers so often women, and how does that affect the status of fairy tales? Are they a source of wisdom or a misleading temptation to indulge in romancing?

Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape


Jaclyn Friedman - 2008
    Feminist, political, and activist writers alike will present their ideas for a paradigm shift from the “No Means No” model—an approach that while necessary for where we were in 1974, needs an overhaul today.Yes Means Yes will bring to the table a dazzling variety of perspectives and experiences focused on the theory that educating all people to value female sexuality and pleasure leads to viewing women differently, and ending rape. Yes Means Yes aims to have radical and far-reaching effects: from teaching men to treat women as collaborators and not conquests, encouraging men and women that women can enjoy sex instead of being shamed for it, and ultimately, that our children can inherit a world where rape is rare and swiftly punished. With commentary on public sex education, pornography, mass media, Yes Means Yes is a powerful and revolutionary anthology.

Transgender History


Susan Stryker - 2008
    Chapters cover the transsexual and transvestite communities in the years following World War II; trans radicalism and social change, which spanned from 1966 with the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon, and lasted through the early 1970s; the mid-'70s to 1990-the era of identity politics and the changes witnessed in trans circles through these years; and the gender issues witnessed through the '90s and '00s. Transgender History includes informative sidebars highlighting quotes from major texts and speeches in transgender history and brief biographies of key players, plus excerpts from transgender memoirs and discussion of treatments of transgenderism in popular culture.

How to Suppress Women's Writing


Joanna Russ - 1983
    She wrote it but she shouldn't have. She wrote it but look what she wrote about. She wrote it but she isn't really an artist, and it isn't really art. She wrote it but she had help. She wrote it but she's an anomaly. She wrote it BUT..." How to Suppress Women's Writing is a meticulously researched and humorously written "guidebook" to the many ways women and other "minorities" have been barred from producing written art. In chapters entitled "Prohibitions," "Bad Faith," "Denial of Agency," Pollution of Agency," "The Double Standard of Content," "False Categorization," "Isolation," "Anomalousness," "Lack of Models," Responses," and "Aesthetics" Joanna Russ names, defines, and illustrates those barriers to art-making we may have felt but which tend to remain unnamed and thus insolvable.

Slut!: Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation


Leora Tanenbaum - 1999
    Often the labels has nothing to do with sex -- the girls simply do not fit in.  An important account of the lives of these young women, Slut! weaves together powerful oral histories of girls and women who finally overcame their sexual labels with a cogent analysis of the underlying problem of sexual stereotyping.Author Leora Tanenbaum herself was labeled a slut in high school.  The confessional article she wrote for Seventeen about the experience caused a sensation and led her to write this book.

Margaret Mead: A Life


Jane Howard - 1984
    . . a fine biography that gets beyond the public icon to a portrait of the real woman."-- Chicago Sun-Times At the age of twenty-three, in the 1920s, Margaret Mead traveled alone to the South Sea and wrote of adolescent sexuality and guilt-free love in her now classic Coming of Age in Samoa. For the next half-century, Mead would act as a powerful participant and opinion maker in the largest issues of her time: culture and religion, education and child rearing, sex and freedom, world hunger, war, and the politics of peace.Outrageous and extravagant, Mead was, in every sense of the word, spirited. Friendships and families of many kinds were at the core of her personal life, and she was both loyal and demanding with people, always challenging them to move in new directions.An inveterate world traveler, a teacher at Columbia University, and curator of The Museum of Natural History, Mead wrote thirty-four books, made ten films, and was granted twenty-eight honorary degrees and numerous awards. This intimate and fascinating story is an astonishing record of the personal and scientific life of an extraordinary human being.Praise for Margaret Mead"Mead was, as Miss Howard's abundantly and unfailing lively account shows, a very American individual. . . . Miss Howard writes not as an anthropologist but as the superb reporter she is."-- The Wall Street Journal "A triumph of industry, imagination, and literary grace."--The Washington Post

Mockingjay: The Hunger Games - Book Three (A BookCaps Study Guide)


BookCaps - 2011
    The perfect companion to Suzanne Collins' "Mockingjay: The Hunger Games - Book One," this study guide contains a chapter by chapter analysis of the book, a summary of the plot, and a guide to major characters and themes.BookCap Study Guides do not contain text from the actual book, and are not meant to be purchased as alternatives to reading the book.

A Savage Set My Soul On Fire


Nola Jewels - 2019
    The abuse she’s experienced from her mother and step dad has left her sheltered and guarded. Her only motivation is to one day escape the darkness that surrounds her. Her vision is clear: work hard, get an education and walk away from the house of horrors for good. When the opportunity to get more money comes her way she jumps at the chance. Money is now her goal and the path she’s taking to get it will lead her down the road to an unexpected future. 
The Hampton brothers Za’Shon ‘Fire’, Jaivon, and Tyree are running things in Atlanta. Of the trio, Fire’s the most arrogant and the only one willing to do anything to take his family to the next level. His focus was on one thing building his empire and making more money. That is until he meets Lacye. He falls fast for her. 
Lacye has never met someone like Fire. His arrogance and bluntness takes her by surprise. But it’s also the thing she falls in love with. He believes he’s found the perfect woman who’s beautiful, smart, and innocent. Their romance goes fast but the secrets she’s been holding comes out. His lifestyle and her secrets crash together making the perfect storm. It leaves a path of destruction and hurt. They both find themselves losing everything they’ve worked so hard for. Za’Shon won’t allow his world to come crashing down and he won’t lose Lacye. The savage in him won’t let her go but the cost of loving her threatens to bring down him and his brothers. His recklessness creates havoc and starts a war that threatens to take everything and everyone away from him. But that’s what happens when you set Fire to Lacye.

The Judith Butler Reader


Judith Butler - 2003
    Judith Butler, author of influential books such as Gender Trouble, has built her international reputation as a theorist of power, gender, sexuality and identity. Organized in active collaboration between Judith Butler and Sara Salih, The Judith Butler Reader collects together writings that span Butler's impressive career as a critical philosopher, including selections from both well-known and lesser-known works. Includes an introduction and editorial material to assist students in their readings of theories that stand at the forefront of contemporary theoretical and political debates.

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity


José Esteban Muñoz - 2009
    It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist.Cruising Utopia seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future. He considers the work of seminal artists and writers such as Andy Warhol, LeRoi Jones, Frank O'Hara, Ray Johnson, Fred Herko, Samuel Delany, and Elizabeth Bishop, alongside contemporary performance and visual artists like Dynasty Handbag, My Barbarian, Luke Dowd, Tony Just, and Kevin McCarty in order to decipher the anticipatory illumination of art and its uncanny ability to open windows to the future.In a startling repudiation of what the LGBT movement has held dear, Muñoz contends that queerness is instead a futurity bound phenomenon, a "not yet here" that critically engages pragmatic presentism. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Cruising Utopia argues that the here and now are not enough and issues an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.

Outrageous: The Victoria Woodhull Saga, Volume One: Rise to Riches


Neal Katz - 2015
    What compels a woman and her youngest sister to overcome abject poverty and violent abuse to grow up to defy convention and obliterate every barrier to become the first women to own and operate a Wall Street brokerage firm and publish their own newspaper? How did Victoria Claflin Woodhull (1838 - 1927) become the first woman invited to speak to the United State Congress, and then the first female to run for president. What made Tennessee Celeste Claflin (1845 - 1923) so beguiling that the richest man in America, Cornelius Vanderbilt, fell completely in love with her? What caused the sisters to live out their long lives as royalty and peerage in Europe. Victoria living as landed gentry outside of London, and Tennessee in a huge castle like a queen? Why aren't these empowered and independent women iconic in our culture? Volume One of The Victoria Woodhull Saga tells the poignant, lascivious, and compelling inside story of how the sisters worked closely with Cornelius Vanderbilt, who at age 74 fell in love with the beguiling 24-year old Tennessee. Victoria provided the titan of industry "Inside Her Information" gathered through the soiled sisterhood, the ladies of the evening working at the top seven brothels servicing the rich and famous of New York City. This relationship resulted in the great lion of industry having his last public roar as together they manipulated the financial markets and created the impending collapse of the U.S. economy in the gold scandal of 1869. To avert the crash, President Ulysses S. Grant provides the richest man in America insider information on the gold market and telegrams Vanderbilt that his railroad company is "Too Big To Fail!" Vanderbilt was proclaimed "The Savior of the American Economy" for intervening in a crisis he helped create. View Victorian America through the eyes and thoughts of one of its leading heroines., Victoria Woodhull. Watch as the infighting and elitism of the earliest suffrage women denigrating, castigating, and denouncing other passionate suffrage rights women delayed woman suffrage and equal legal standing for five decades. Learn wonderful anecdotes of the origins of products and phrases used today. Learn the story of Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, the most popular man in America, who transformed Christianity from his father's "fire and brimstone" theology to one of a compassionate and loving Jesus, who will redeem all who turn to salvation with complete confession of their sins. The reverend's personal life did not imitate his lofty and popular theology of his weekly sermons at Plymouth Church. He was a notorious womanizer, often bedding, and sometimes impregnating the wives, sisters, and daughters of his most ardent trackers and deacons of the church. Written in the first person from Victoria's viewpoint, N. H. Katz weaves a compelling page-turning story that cleverly unfolds history while providing a wonderfully entertaining ride. Katz has pledged one half of book sale proceeds to charities dedicating to the empowerment and sustainable economic improvement of women, especially single mothers.

Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill


Robert Whitaker - 2002
    With a muckraker's passion, Whitaker argues that modern treatments for the severely mentally ill are just old medicine in new bottles, and that we as a society are deeply deluded about their efficacy. Tracing over three centuries of "cures" for madness, Whitaker shows how medical therapies have been used to silence patients and dull their minds. He tells of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practices of "spinning" the insane, extracting their teeth, ovaries, and intestines, and submerging patients in freezing water. The "cures" in the 1920s and 1930s were no less barbaric as eugenic attitudes toward the mentally ill led to brain-damaging lobotomies and electroshock therapy. Perhaps Whitaker's most damning revelation, however, is his report of how drug companies in the 1980s and 1990s skewed their studies in an effort to prove the effectiveness of their products. Based on exhaustive research culled from old patient medical records, historical accounts, numerous interviews, and hundreds of government documents, Mad in America raises important questions about our obligations to the mad, what it means to be "insane," and what we value most about the human mind.

Six by Ten: Stories from Solitary


Taylor Pendergrass - 2018
    Solitary confinement, often in cells no bigger than six by ten feet, means twenty-four hours per day with little or no meaningful human contact. Six by Ten explores the mental, physical, and spiritual impacts of America’s widespread embrace of solitary confinement, as told through the first-person narratives of individuals subjected to solitary confinement, family members on the outside, and corrections officers.Each chapter presents a different individual’s story and probes how Americans from all over the country and all walks of life find themselves held in solitary for years or even decades at a time. In addition to evocative first-hand accounts, the book also includes essays and analysis on how solitary became such a prominent feature of the US prison system today.Solitary confinement is the little-known dead end of the US criminal justice system. To understand that system, people need to understand and wrestle with what is happening in America’s isolation cells.Mateo Hoke is writer, journalist, and co-editor of Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation.Taylor Pendergrass is a lawyer and activist focused on criminal justice reform. He currently works for the American Civil Liberties Union.About the AuthorMateo Hoke is writer, journalist, and coeditor of Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life under Occupation. He studied journalism at the University of Colorado and the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Taylor Pendergrass is an advocate and activist around ending mass incarceration and racial injustice in the criminal legal system. He currently works for the ACLU and lives in Denver, Colorado. He graduated from Duke University and the University of Colorado School of Law.

They Stole My Innocence


Madeleine Vibert - 2015
    My throat tightens in fear…’At the tender age of five, Madeleine was living a daily nightmare. In a dark, grey building on Jersey, she was just another orphan, defenceless and alone. She was also an easy target. Unbeknownst to the outside world, the care home manager was abusing her, using her like she was his toy. “Say nothing, no one will believe a nasty little kid like you,” he’d whisper. Terrified, Madeleine would keep quiet. And, worse still, the home was selling the children to men who would inflict on them the worst possible abuse. No one cared.This is Madeleine’s heart-breaking story and her fight to survive.