Book picks similar to
A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000-2010 by Cherríe L. Moraga
non-fiction
feminism
essays
poetry
Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality
Anne Fausto-Sterling - 2000
In lively and impassioned prose, she breaks down three key dualisms - sex/gender, nature/nurture, and real/constructed - and asserts that individuals born as mixtures of male and female exist as one of five natural human variants and, as such, should not be forced to compromise their differences to fit a flawed societal definition of normality.
Defiant Daughters: 21 Women on Art, Activism, Animals, and The Sexual Politics of Meat
Wendy Lee - 2013
Adams was published more than twenty years ago, it caused an immediate stir among writers and thinkers, feminists and animal rights activists alike. Never before had the relationship between patriarchy and meat eating been drawn so clearly, the idea that there lies a strong connection between the consumption of women and animals so plainly asserted. But, as the 21 personal stories in this anthology show, the impact of this provocative text on women's lives continues to this day, and it is as diverse as it is revelatory. One writer attempts to reconcile her feminist-vegan beliefs with her Muslim upbringing; a second makes the connection between animal abuse and her own self-destructive tendencies. A new mother discusses the sexual politics of breastfeeding, while another pens a letter to her young son about all she wishes for him in the future. Many others recall how the book inspired them to start careers in the music business, animal advocacy, and food. No matter whether they first read it in college or later in life, whether they are in their late teens or early forties, these writers all credit The Sexual Politics of Meat in some way with the awakening of their identities as feminists, activists, and women. Even if you haven't read the original work, you're sure to be moved and inspired by these tales of growing up and, perhaps more important, waking up to the truths around us.
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex
Eric A. Stanley - 2011
The first collection of its kind, Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics to offer new ways for understanding how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determination, this collection argues that trans/queer liberation and prison abolition must be grown together. From rioting against police violence and critiquing hate crimes legislation to prisoners demanding access to HIV medications, and far beyond, Captive Genders is a challenge for us all to join the struggle."An exciting assemblage of writings—analyses, manifestos, stories, interviews—that traverse the complicated entanglements of surveillance, policing, imprisonment, and the production of gender normativity.... [T]he contributors to this volume create new frameworks and new vocabularies that surely will have a transformative impact on the theories and practices of twenty-first century abolition."—Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz"The purpose of prison abolition is to discover and promote the countless ways freedom and difference are mutually dependent. The contributors to Captive Genders brilliantly shatter the assumption that the antidote to danger is human sacrifice."—Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California"Captive Genders is at once a scathing and necessary analysis of the prison industrial complex and a history of queer resistance to state tyranny. By queering a prison abolition analysis, Captive Genders moves us to imagine the impossible dream of liberation."—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of So Many Ways to Sleep BadlyEric A. Stanley is a radical queer activist, outlaw academic, and experimental filmmaker.Nat Smith is a member of Trans/gender Variant in Prison Committee and is an organizer with Critical Resistance.
Citizen: An American Lyric
Claudia Rankine - 2014
Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.
GenderQueer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary
Joan NestleLucas Dzmura - 2002
The questions go beyond the nature of male/female to a yet-to-be-traversed region that lies somewhere between and beyond biologically determined gender. In this groundbreaking anthology, three experts in gender studies and politics navigate around rigid, societally imposed concepts of two genders to discover and illuminate the limitless possibilities of identity. Thirty first-person accounts of gender construction, exploration, and questioning provide a groundwork for cultural discussion, political action, and even greater possibilities of autonomous gender choices. Noted scholar Joan Nestle is joined by internationally prominent gender warrior Riki Anne Wilchins and historian Clare Howell to provide a societal, cultural, and political exploration of gender identity.Marketing Plans: National Advertising: The Advocate Academic mailing to gender studies and queer studies professors Media campaign hilighting authors Nestle and WilchinsJoan Nestle is the cofounder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York and the writer and editor of six books including the groundbreaking Women on Women series. Riki Anne Wilchins is the executive director of GenderPAC, the national gender advocacy group, and the cofounder of the Gender Identity Project of New York City's Lesbian and Gay Center. She is the author of Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender. Clare Howell is a senior librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library.
How I Resist: Activism and Hope for a New Generation
Maureen JohnsonSabaa Tahir - 2018
They're ready to stand up and be heard - but with much to shout about, where they do they begin? What can I do? How can I help? How I Resist is the response, and a way to start the conversation. To show readers that they are not helpless, and that anyone can be the change. A collection of essays, songs, illustrations, and interviews about activism and hope, How I Resist features an all-star group of contributors, including John Paul Brammer, Libba Bray, Lauren Duca, Modern Family's Jesse Tyler Ferguson and his husband Justin Mikita, Alex Gino, Hebh Jamal, Malinda Lo, Dylan Marron, Hamilton star Javier Muñoz, Rosie O'Donnell, Junauda Petrus, Jodi Picoult, Jason Reynolds, Karuna Riazi, Maya Rupert, Dana Schwartz, Dan Sinker, Ali Stroker, Jonny Sun (aka @jonnysun), Sabaa Tahir, Shaina Taub, Daniel Watts, Jennifer Weiner, Jacqueline Woodson, and more, all edited and compiled by New York Times bestselling author Maureen Johnson. In How I Resist, readers will find hope and support through voices that are at turns personal, funny, irreverent, and instructive. Not just for a young adult audience, this incredibly impactful collection will appeal to readers of all ages who are feeling adrift and looking for guidance. How I Resist is the kind of book people will be discussing for years to come and a staple on bookshelves for generations.
Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today
Rachel Vorona Cote - 2020
So too is a fat woman, a horny woman, a woman shrieking with laughter. Women who are one or more of these things have heard, or perhaps simply intuited, that we are repugnantly excessive, that we have taken illicit liberties to feel or fuck or eat with abandon. After bellowing like a barn animal in orgasm, hoovering a plate of mashed potatoes, or spraying out spit in the heat of expostulation, we've flinched-ugh, that was so gross. I am so gross. On rare occasions, we might revel in our excess--belting out anthems with our friends over karaoke, perhaps--but in the company of less sympathetic souls, our uncertainty always returns. A woman who is Too Much is a woman who reacts to the world with ardent intensity is a woman familiar to lashes of shame and disapproval, from within as well as without. Written in the tradition of Shrill, Dead Girls, Sex Object and other frank books about the female gaze, TOO MUCH encourages women to reconsider the beauty of their excesses-emotional, physical, and spiritual. Rachel Vorona Cote braids cultural criticism, theory, and storytelling together in her exploration of how culture grinds away our bodies, souls, and sexualities, forcing us into smaller lives than we desire. An erstwhile Victorian scholar, she sees many parallels between that era's fixation on women's "hysterical" behavior and our modern policing of the same; in the space of her writing, you're as likely to encounter Jane Eyre and Lizzie Bennet as you are Britney Spears and Lana Del Rey. This book will tell the story of how women, from then and now, have learned to draw power from their reservoirs of feeling, all that makes us "Too Much."
Socialist Realism
Trisha Low - 2019
Instead, she faces the end of her relationships, a family whose values she has difficulty sharing, and America's casual racism, sexism, and homophobia. In this book-length essay, the problem of how to account for one's life comes to the fore--sliding unpredictably between memory, speculation, self-criticism, and art criticism, Low seeks answers that she knows she won't find. Attempting to reconcile her desires with her radical politics, she asks: do our quests to fulfill our deepest wishes propel us forward, or keep us trapped in the rubble of our deteriorating world?
My Own Words
Ruth Bader Ginsburg - 2016
Throughout her life Justice Ginsburg has been (and continues to be) a prolific writer and public speaker. This book’s sampling is selected by Justice Ginsburg and her authorized biographers Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams. Justice Ginsburg has written an introduction to the book, and Hartnett and Williams introduce each chapter, giving biographical context and quotes gleaned from hundreds of interviews they have conducted. This is a fascinating glimpse into the life of one of America’s most influential women.
We Don't Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists
Melody BergerShelby Knox - 2006
Today’s young feminists are wary of being labeled. They are media-savvy, hyper-aware of being categorized and marginalized, and are here to tell the world that feminists are feminists — diverse in age and experience — and that it’s time to drop the labels in favor of proactive agendas and united goals.Topics that matter to young feminists range from lighter issues, such as DIY culture and craftivism, to heavy-hitting issues that feminists have struggled with for generations, including abuse, rape, shame, and self-hatred. The young writers in this collection band together under the banner of feminism to share the message that the F-word is a good thing, and that feminists are breaking new ground while still valuing the traditions and achievements of their sisters and foremothers.We Don’t Need Another Wave brings a message of unity and a message to get beyond subcategorizing a movement that needs cohesiveness and strives on strength in numbers.
nîtisânak
Jas M. Morgan - 2018
Morgan’s nîtisânak is woven around grief over the loss of their mother. It also explores despair and healing through community and family, and being torn apart by the same. Using cyclical narrative techniques and drawing on Morgan’s Cree, Saulteaux, and Métis ancestral teachings, this work offers a compelling perspective on the connections that must be broken and the ones that heal.
No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
Ursula K. Le Guin - 2017
Le Guin, and with an introduction by Karen Joy Fowler, a collection of thoughts—always adroit, often acerbic—on aging, belief, the state of literature, and the state of the nation.Ursula K. Le Guin has taken readers to imaginary worlds for decades. Now she’s in the last great frontier of life, old age, and exploring new literary territory: the blog, a forum where her voice—sharp, witty, as compassionate as it is critical—shines. No Time to Spare collects the best of Ursula’s blog, presenting perfectly crystallized dispatches on what matters to her now, her concerns with this world, and her wonder at it. On the absurdity of denying your age, she says, If I’m ninety and believe I’m forty-five, I’m headed for a very bad time trying to get out of the bathtub. On cultural perceptions of fantasy: The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is ‘escapism’ an accusation of? On her new cat: He still won’t sit on a lap…I don’t know if he ever will. He just doesn’t accept the lap hypothesis. On breakfast: Eating an egg from the shell takes not only practice, but resolution, even courage, possibly willingness to commit crime. And on all that is unknown, all that we discover as we muddle through life: How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.
To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: An Informal Autobiography
Lorraine Hansberry - 1969
Now, Hansberry tells her own life story in an autobiography that rings with the voice of its creator.
Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicana and Chicano Literature
Cristina GarcíaDagoberto Gilb - 2006
In Bordering Fires, the first anthology to combine writing from both sides of the Mexican-U.S. border, Cristina Garc’a presents a richly diverse cross-cultural conversation. Beginning with Mexican masters such as Alfonso Reyes and Juan Rulfo, Garc’a highlights historic voices such as “the godfather of Chicano literature” Rudolfo Anaya, and Gloria Anzaldœa, who made a powerful case for language that reflects bicultural experience. From the fierce evocations of Chicano reality in Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Poem IX to the breathtaking images of identity in Coral Bracho’s poem “Fish of Fleeting Skin,” from the work of Carlos Fuentes to Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo to Octavio Paz, this landmark collection of fiction, essays, and poetry offers an exhilarating new vantage point on our continent–and on the best of contemporary literature.ContentsPrelude: Excerpt from The use of thought / Samuel Ramos Early influences:Major Aranda's hand / Alfonso Reyes My cousin Agueda, and In the wet shadows / Ramón López Velarde Excerpt from Pedro Páramo / Juan Rulfo L.A. nocturne : the angels / Xavier Villaurrutia Chicano/a voices I: How to tame a wild tongue / Gloria AnzaldúaIndia / Richard RodriguezMeditations on the South Valley: Poem IX / Jimmy Santiago Baca B. Traven is alive and well in Cuernavaca / Rudolfo Anaya Contemporary Mexican voices:Excerpt from The death of Artemio Cruz / Carlos Fuentes Introduction from Here's to you, Jesusa! / Elena Poniatowska The day of the dead, and I speak of the city / Octavio Paz Excerpt from The book of lamentations / Rosario Castellanos Chicano/a voices 2: Daddy with Chesterfields in a rolled up sleeve / Ana Castillo Never marry a Mexican / Sandra Cisneros Maria de Covina / Dagoberto Gilb Excerpt from Crossing over : a Mexican family on the migrant trail / Rubén Martínez New departures:Hagiography of the apostate / Ignacio PadillaAunt Leonor, and Aunt Natalia / Ángeles MastrettaIdentity hour or, What photos would you take of the endless city / Carlos Monsiváis Fish of fleeting skin / Coral Bracho
The Toni Morrison Book Club
Juda Bennett - 2020
Tackling everything from first love and Soul Train to police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, the authors take up what it means to read challenging literature collaboratively and to learn in public as an act of individual reckoning and social resistance. Framing their book club around collective secrets, the group bears witness to how Morrison’s works and words can propel us forward while we sit with uncomfortable questions about race, gender, and identity. How do we make space for black vulnerability in the face of white supremacy and internalized self-loathing? How do historical novels speak to us now about the delicate seams that hold black minds and bodies together? This slim and brilliant confessional offers a radical vision for book clubs as sites of self-discovery and communal healing. The Toni Morrison Book Club insists that we find ourselves in fiction and think of Morrison as a spiritual guide to our most difficult thoughts and ideas about American literature and life.