Book picks similar to
The Womanist Idea by Layli Phillips Maparyan


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On Intersectionality: The Essential Writings of Kimberlé Crenshaw


Kimberlé Crenshaw - 2019
    Crenshaw explores how a holistic analysis of discrimination gives rise to a more nuanced understanding of salient social forces. This long-awaited volume examines the Central Park jogger case, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, LGBT activism, Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas, and other significant matters of public interest. In each case, her analysis challenges and exposes the intricate social dynamics among individuals and groups whose identities are increasingly layered.This new account covers the evolution of the meaning of intersectionality over the course of two decades and how this concept has radically changed the face of social justice activism. On Intersectionality is compulsory reading from one of the most brilliant critical race theorists of our time.

A Question of Choice


Sarah Weddington - 1992
    Wade decision, here is the engrossing story of the case by the attorney who successfully argued it in the Supreme Court--now with a new chapter on the current situation. B/W photos.

This Is One Way to Dance: Essays


Sejal Shah - 2020
    Throughout the collection, Shah reflects on what it means to make oneself visible and legible through writing in a country that struggles with race and maps her identity as an American, South Asian American, writer of color, and feminist.This Is One Way to Dance draws on Shah's ongoing interests in ethnicity and place: the geographic and cultural distances between people, both real and imagined. Her memoir in essays emerges as Shah wrestles with her experiences growing up and living in western New York, an area of stark racial and economic segregation, as the daughter of Gujarati immigrants from India and Kenya. These essays also trace her movement over twenty years from student to teacher and meditate on her travels and life in New England, New York City, and the Midwest, as she considers what it means to be of a place or from a place, to be foreign or familiar.Shah invites us to consider writing as a somatic practice, a composition of digressions, repetitions--movement as transformation, incantation. Her essays--some narrative, others lyrical and poetic--explore how we are all marked by culture, gender, and race; by the limits of our bodies, by our losses and regrets, by who and what we love, by our ambivalences, and by trauma and silence. Language fractures in its attempt to be spoken. Shah asks and attempts to answer the question: How do you move in such a way that loss does not limit you? This Is One Way to Dance introduces a vital new voice to the conversation about race and belonging in America.

The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader


Ida B. Wells-Barnett - 2014
    Wells off a train for refusing to give up her seat. The experience shaped Wells’s career, and—when hate crimes touched her life personally—she mounted what was to become her life’s work: an anti-lynching crusade that captured international attention.This volume covers the entire scope of Wells’s remarkable career, collecting her early writings, articles exposing the horrors of lynching, essays from her travels abroad, and her later journalism. The Light of Truth is both an invaluable resource for study and a testament to Wells’s long career as a civil rights activist.

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture


Ariel Levy - 2005
    In her groundbreaking book, New York magazine writer Ariel Levy argues that, if male chauvinist pigs of years past thought of women as pieces of meat, Female Chauvinist Pigs of today are doing them one better, making sex objects of other women – and of themselves. Irresistibly witty and wickedly intelligent, Female Chauvinist Pigs makes the case that the rise of raunch does not represent how far women have come; it only proves how far they have left to go.

Himalaya: Adventures, Meditations, Life


Ruskin Bond - 2016
    Others find refuge and tranquility in the mountains, a place where they can seek their selves, perhaps even God. And over millennia, the mountains have cradled civilization itself and nurtured teeming, irrepressible life.With over fifty essays, this comprehensive volume brings together a dazzling range of voices—among others, Fa-Hsien, Pundit Nain Singh, Heinrich Harrer, Fanny Parkes, Dharamvir Bharati, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Rahul Sankrityayan, Amitav Ghosh, Jawaharlal Nehru, Frank Smythe, Paul Brunton, Edmund Hillary, Mark Twain, Sarat Chandra Das, Dom Moraes, Manjushree Thapa—and the two editors themselves—in an unparalleled panorama.Here you will find stories of great ascents and descents; The madness of war on the ‘world’s highest battlefield’; Tales of exploratory derring-do in Tibet and elsewhere; A drunken jaunt in Kumaon and even the probable sighting of an 'Abominable Snowman in the Valley of Flowers'. A seeker has an intense spiritual experience on Mount Kailas, another among shamans on a mountaintop in Nepal and looking for the snow leopard in Ladakh, an author finds himself. A resident of a Sherpa village writes a heartfelt account of the aftermath of an avalanche which killed porters and climbers on Everest and residents of Langtang record an oral history of the earthquake which wiped out their village. A matriarch describes her life and family in Almora of a bygone time; A prisoner in Dehra Dun jail draws solace from visits by birds and small animals and the fragrance of lime makes a traveler's night in a remote Garhwal village memorable for all time.Edited by Ruskin Bond, India’s most-loved writer and acclaimed novelist Namita Gokhale, this anthology spans the entire range, from the foothills to the highest peaks and from its easternmost to its westernmost ends. Himalaya will keep you riveted.

Fat Is a Feminist Issue


Susie Orbach - 1978
    Reflecting on our increasingly diet and body-obsessed society, Susie Orbach's new introduction explains how generations of women and girls are growing up absorbing the eating anxieties around them. In an age where women want to be sexy, nurturing, domestic goddesses, confident at work, and feminine too, the twenty-first-century woman is poorly armed for survival. Never before has the Fat Is A Feminist Issue revolution been more in need of revival.Exploring our love/hate relationship with food, Susie Orbach describes how fat is about so much more than food. It is a response to our social situation; the way we are seen by others and ourselves. Too often food is a source of anguish, as are our bodies. But Fat Is A Feminist Issue discusses how we can turn food into a friend and find ways to accept ourselves for who and how we are. Following the step-by-step guide, and you too can put an end to food anxieties and dieting.

Looking for Miss America: A Pageant’s 100-Year Quest to Define Womanhood


Margot Mifflin - 2020
    From its start in 1921 as an Atlantic City tourist draw to its current incarnation as a scholarship competition, the pageant has indexed women’s status during periods of social change―the post-suffrage 1920s, the Eisenhower 1950s, the #MeToo era. This ever-changing institution has been shaped by war, evangelism, the rise of television and reality TV, and, significantly, by contestants who confounded expectations.Spotlighting individuals, from Yolande Betbeze, whose refusal to pose in swimsuits led an angry sponsor to launch the rival Miss USA contest, to the first black winner, Vanessa Williams, who received death threats and was protected by sharpshooters in her hometown parade, Margot Mifflin shows how women made hard bargains even as they used the pageant for economic advancement. The pageant’s history includes, crucially, those it excluded; the notorious Rule Seven, which required contestants to be “of the white race,” was retired in the 1950s, but no women of color were crowned until the 1980s.In rigorously researched, vibrant chapters that unpack each decade of the pageant, Looking for Miss America examines the heady blend of capitalism, patriotism, class anxiety, and cultural mythology that has fueled this American ritual.

Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets


Feminista Jones - 2019
    As Jones reveals, some of the best-loved devices of our shared social media language are a result of Black women's innovations, from well-known movement-building hashtags (#BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #BlackGirlMagic) to the now ubiquitous use of threaded tweets as a marketing and storytelling tool. For some, these online dialogues provide an introduction to the work of Black feminist icons like Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, bell hooks, and the women of the Combahee River Collective. For others, this discourse provides a platform for continuing their feminist activism and scholarship in a new, interactive way.Complex conversations around race, class, and gender that have been happening behind the closed doors of academia for decades are now becoming part of the wider cultural vernacular--one pithy tweet at a time. With these important online conversations, not only are Black women influencing popular culture and creating sociopolitical movements; they are also galvanizing a new generation to learn and engage in Black feminist thought and theory, and inspiring change in communities around them.Hard-hitting, intelligent, incisive, yet bursting with humor and pop-culture savvy, Reclaiming Our Space is a survey of Black feminism's past, present, and future, and it explains why intersectional movement building will save us all.

What We Talk About When We Talk about Rape


Sohaila Abdulali - 2018
    Indignant at the silence on the issue in India, she wrote an article for an Indian women’s magazine questioning how we perceive rape and rape victims. Thirty years later her story went viral in the wake of the 2012 fatal gang rape in Delhi and the global outcry that followed. In 2013, Abdulali published an op-ed in the New York Times called “After Being Raped, I Was Wounded; My Honor Wasn’t” that was widely circulated. Now, as the #metoo and #timesup movements blow open the topic of sexual assault and rape, What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape is a brilliant and entirely original contribution to our understanding.Drawing on her own experience, her research, her work with hundreds of survivors as the head of a rape crisis center in Boston, and three decades of grappling with the issue as a feminist intellectual and writer, Abdulali examines the contemporary discourse about rape and rape culture, questioning our assumptions and asking how we want to raise the next generation. She interviews survivors whose moving personal stories of hard-won strength, humor, and wisdom collectively tell the larger story of how societies may begin to heal.Abdulali also explores what we don’t say. Is rape always a life-defining event? Does rape always symbolize something? Is rape worse than death? Is rape related to desire? Who gets raped? Is rape inevitable? Is one rape worse than another? How does one recover a sense of safety and joy? How do we raise sons? Is a world without rape possible? Both deeply personal and meticulously researched, What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape is a rallying cry and required reading for us all.

Fattily Ever After: A Black Fat Girl's Guide to Living Life Unapologetically


Stephanie Yeboah - 2020
    White female bodies being safe is paramount to maintaining white supremacy."– Stephanie Yeboah, 2017Twenty-nine year-old plus-size blogger Stephanie Yeboah has experienced racism and fat-phobia throughout her life. From being bullied at school to being objectified and humiliated in her dating life, Stephanie's response to discrimination has always been to change the narrative around body-image and what we see as beautiful. In her debut book, Fattily Ever After, Stephanie Yeboah speaks openly and courageously about her own experience on navigating life as a black, plus-sized woman – telling it how it really is – and how she has managed to find self-acceptance in a world where judgement and discrimination are rife.Featuring stories of every day misogynoir and being fetishized, to navigating the cesspit of online dating and experiencing loneliness, Stephanie shares her thoughts on the treatment of black women throughout history, the marginalisation of black, plus-sized women in the media (even within the body-positivity movement) whilst drawing on wisdom from other black fat liberation champions along the way. Peppered with insightful tips and honest advice and boldly illustrated throughout, this inspiring and powerful book is essential reading for a generation of black, plus-sized women, helping them to live their life openly, unapologetically and with confidence.

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color


Cherríe L. Moraga - 1981
    Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, “the complex confluence of identities—race, class, gender, and sexuality—systemic to women of color oppression and liberation.”

A Different Kind of Intimacy: The Collected Writings


Karen Finley - 2000
    The writings include text from the infamous performances that brought her to the Supreme Court in Finley vs. NEA, a battle that became a mainstay of the culture wars and which has made Finley an icon in the struggle for freedom of speech. Included in this volume will be the never before published, Obie Award-winning The American Chestnut for which she received a Guggenheim; such works as We Keep Our Victims Ready, A Certain Level of Denial, The Return of the Chocolate Smeared Woman, and an excerpt from her forthcoming film Shut Up and Love Me. Also appearing will be previously unpublished short stories, photos, artwork, and an essay on censorship. In 1998 Finley was named Woman of the Year by MS. magazine; she posed for Playboy the following year. She has appeared in numerous films including Philadelphia, and will soon be directing her own first feature film, Shut Up and Love Me, produced by Forensic Films. She has recorded albums including a collaboration with Sinead O'Connor. Finley is a regular on Politically Incorrect and can be seen giving her opinions on Exhale, a new show hosted by Candace Bergen on Oxygen. She will be hosting The Naked Players, a "nude Candid Camera" as well as Shock Video, both on HBO. Finley has written four books: Shock Treatment, Enough Is Enough, Living It Up, and Pooh Unplugged. "We need Finley: she doesn't duck the bullets, she keeps her eyes peeled on the artillery aimed at women, and she continues to push against her own boundaries as an artist" -- MS. Magazine

Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle


Katherine McKittrick - 2006
    In Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, black women inhabit diasporic locations marked by the legacy of violence and slavery. Analyzing diverse literatures and material geographies, McKittrick reveals how human geographies are a result of racialized connections, and how spaces that are fraught with limitation are underacknowledged but meaningful sites of political opposition. Demonic Grounds moves between past and present, archives and fiction, theory and everyday, to focus on places negotiated by black women during and after the transatlantic slave trade. Specifically, the author addresses the geographic implications of slave auction blocks, Harriet Jacobs’s attic, black Canada and New France, as well as the conceptual spaces of feminism and Sylvia Wynter’s philosophies. Central to McKittrick’s argument are the ways in which black women are not passive recipients of their surroundings and how a sense of place relates to the struggle against domination. Ultimately, McKittrick argues, these complex black geographies are alterable and may provide the opportunity for social and cultural change. Katherine McKittrick is assistant professor of women’s studies at Queen’s University.

Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free


Wednesday Martin - 2018
    Blending personal stories from Martin's own history with accessible social science, cultural theory, and interviews with sex researchers, psychologists, primatologists, anthropologists, and real women from all walks of life, she reveals startling insights about female sexuality.