Book picks similar to
Critical Race Feminism: A Reader by Adrien Katherine Wing
feminism
race
law
anthologies
Faking It: The Lies Women Tell about Sex--And the Truths They Reveal
Lux Alptraum - 2018
Women lie about orgasms. Women lie about being virgins. Women lie about who got them pregnant, about whether they were raped, about how many people they've had sex with and what sort of experiences they've had - the list goes on and on. Over and over we're reminded that, on dates, in relationships, and especially in the bedroom, women just aren't telling the truth. But where does this assumption come from? Are women actually lying about sex, or does society just think we are? In Faking It, Lux Alptraum tackles the topic of seemingly dishonest women; investigating whether women actually lie, and what social situations might encourage deceptions both great and small. Using her experience as a sex educator and former CEO of Fleshbot (the foremost blog on sexuality), first-hand interviews with sexuality experts and everyday women, Alptraum raises important questions: are lying women all that common - or is the idea of the dishonest woman a symptom of male paranoia? Are women trying to please men, or just avoid their anger? And what affect does all this dishonesty - whether real or imagined - have on women's self-images, social status, and safety? Through it all, Alptraum posits that even if women are lying, we're doing it for very good reason -- to protect ourselves ("My boyfriend will be here any minute," to a creep who won't go away, for one), and in situations where society has given us no other choice.
Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman
Michele Wallace - 1978
She described how women remained marginalized by the patriarchal culture of Black Power and the ways in which a genuine female subjectivity was blocked by the traditional myths of black womanhood. In 1990 the author added a new introduction examining the debate the book had sparked between intellectuals and political leaders; an extensive bibliography of contemporary black feminist studies was also added. Black Macho raised issues and arguments that framed the terms of current feminist and black theory and continues to be relevant today.
Feminism FOR REAL: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism
Krysta WilliamsAshling Ligate - 2011
actually being anti-racist). Confronting the sometimes uncomfortable questions feminism has made us ask about what’s going on FOR REAL paved the many paths that brought the contributors of this book together to share their sometimes uncomfortable truths, not just about feminism, but about who they are and where they are coming from.Against a backdrop exposing a 500+ year legacy of colonization and oppression, Feminism FOR REAL explores what has led us to the existence of “feminism”, who gets to decide what it is, and why. With stories that make the walls of academia come tumbling down, it deals head-on with the conflicts of what feminism means in theory as opposed to real life, the frustrations of trying to relate to definitions of feminism that never fit no matter how much you try to change yourself to fit them, and the anger of changing a system while being in the system yourself.
Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva - 2003
Bonilla-Silva documented how beneath the rhetorical maze of contemporary racial discourse lies a full-blown arsenal of arguments, phrases, and stories that whites use to account for and ultimately justify racial inequities.In the new edition Bonilla-Silva has added a chapter dealing with the future of racial stratification in America that goes beyond the white / black dichotomy. He argues that the U.S. is developing a more complex and apparently "plural" racial order that will mimic Latin American patterns of racial stratification. Another new chapter addresses a variety of questions from readers of the first edition. And he has updated the book throughout with new information, data, and references where appropriate. The book ends with a new Postscript, "What is to be Done (For Real?)". As in the highly acclaimed first edition, Bonilla-Silva continues to challenge color-blind thinking.
The Racial Contract
Charles W. Mills - 1997
Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged "contract" has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence "whites" and "non-whites," full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence.The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state. Holding up a mirror to mainstream philosophy, this provocative book explains the evolving outline of the racial contract from the time of the New World conquest and subsequent colonialism to the written slavery contract, to the "separate but equal" system of segregation in the United States. According to Mills, the contract has provided the theoretical architecture justifying an entire history of European atrocity against non-whites, from David Hume's and Immanuel Kant's claims that blacks had inferior cognitive power, to the Holocaust, to the kind of imperialism in Asia that was demonstrated by the Vietnam War. Mills suggests that the ghettoization of philosophical work on race is no accident. This work challenges the assumption that mainstream theory is itself raceless. Just as feminist theory has revealed orthodox political philosophy's invisible white male bias, Mills's explication of the racial contract exposes its racial underpinnings.
The Ways of White Folks
Langston Hughes - 1934
In it, he shares acrid and poignant stories of blacks colliding--sometimes humorously, but often tragically--with whites throughout the 1920s and 1930s.The book consists of fourteen moving stories:"Cora Unashamed""Slave on the Block""Home""Passing""A Good Job Gone""Rejuvenation Through Joy""The Blues I'm Playing""Red-Headed Baby""Poor Little Black Fellow""Little Dog""Berry""Mother and Child""One Christmas Eve""Father and Son"
Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme
Ivan E. CoyoteAnne Fleming - 2011
The result is Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. The stories in these pages resist simple definitions. The people in these stories defy reductive stereotypes and inflexible categories. The pages in this book describe the lives of an incredible diversity of people whose hearts also pounded for some reason the first time they read or heard the words "butch" or "femme."Contributors such as Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories), Thea Hillman (Intersex), S. Bear Bergman (Butch is a Noun), Chandra Mayor (All the Pretty Girls), Amber Dawn (Sub Rosa), Anna Camilleri (Brazen Femme), Debra Anderson (Code White), Anne Fleming (Anomaly), Michael V. Smith (Cumberland), and Zoe Whittall (Bottle Rocket Hearts) explore the parameters, history, and power of a multitude of butch and femme realities. It's a raucous, insightful, sexy, and sometimes dangerous look at what the words butch and femme can mean in today’s ever-shifting gender landscape, with one eye on the past and the other on what is to come.Includes a foreword by Joan Nestle, renowned femme author and editor of The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, a landmark anthology originally published in 1992.Ivan E. Coyote is the author of seven books (including the novel Bow Grip, an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book) and a long-time muser on the trappings of the two-party gender system.Zena Sharman is the assistant director of Canada's national Institute of Gender and Health.
Bitches, Bimbos, and Ballbreakers: The Guerrilla Girls' Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes
Guerrilla Girls - 2003
The Guerrilla Girls, notorious for their outrageous take on women's issues, now tackle the maze of stereotypes that follow women from cradle to grave. With subversive use of information—and great visuals—they explore the history and significance of stereotypes like Old Maid, Trophy Wife, and Prostitute with a Heart of Gold. They tag the Top Types, examine sexual slurs, explain the evolution of butches and femmes, and delve into the lives of real and fictional women who have become stereotypes, from Aunt Jemima to Tokyo Rose to June Cleaver. The Guerrilla Girls' latest assault on injustice towards women will make people laugh, make them mad, and maybe even make them change their minds.
Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film
Harry M. Benshoff - 1997
Drawing on a wide variety of films and primary source materials including censorship files, critical reviews, promotional materials, fanzines, men's magazines, and popular news weeklies, the book examines the historical figure of the movie monster in relation to various medical, psychological, religious and social models of homosexuality. While recent work within gay and lesbian studies has explored how the genetic tropes of the horror film intersect with popular culture's understanding of queerness, this is the first book to examine how the concept of the monster queer has evolved from era to era. From the gay and lesbian sensibilities encoded into the form and content of the classical Hollywood horror film, to recent films which play upon AIDS-related fears. Monster in the Closet examines how the horror film started and continues, to demonize (or quite literally "monsterize") queer sexuality, and what the pleasures and "costs" of such representations might be both for individual spectators and culture at large.
Occupied America: A History of Chicanos
Rodolfo F. Acuña - 1981
This comprehensive overview of Chicano history is passionately written and extensively researched.With a concise and engaged narrative, and timelines that give students a context for pivotal events in Chicano history, Occupied America illuminates the struggles and decisions that frame Chicano identity today.
Slavery's Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons
Sylviane A. Diouf - 2013
They hid in the mountains of Virginia and the low swamps of South Carolina; they stayed in the neighborhood or paddled their way to secluded places; they buried themselves underground or built comfortable settlements. Known as maroons, they lived on their own or set up communities in swamps or other areas where they were not likely to be discovered. Although well-known, feared, celebrated or demonized at the time, the maroons whose stories are the subject of this book have been forgotten, overlooked by academic research that has focused on the Caribbean and Latin America. Who the American maroons were, what led them to choose this way of life over alternatives, what forms of marronage they created, what their individual and collective lives were like, how they organized themselves to survive, and how their particular story fits into the larger narrative of slave resistance are questions that this book seeks to answer. To survive, the American maroons reinvented themselves, defied slave society, enforced their own definition of freedom and dared create their own alternative to what the country had delineated as being black men and women's proper place. Audacious, self-confident, autonomous, sometimes self-sufficient, always self-governing; their very existence was a repudiation of the basic tenets of slavery. Sylviane A. Diouf is an award-winning historian specializing in the history of the African Diaspora, African Muslims, the slave trade and slavery. She is the author of Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (NYU Press, 2013) and Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America, and the editor of Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies."Diouf persuasively captures the quiet heroism of North American maroons. Less dramatic and long-lived than many of the maroon communities in Suriname, Jamaica, or Brazil, those in the southern United States were nonetheless ever present. Diouf demonstrates how much freedom mattered to the enslaved and how, within the limited possibilities open to them, those that set off into the inhospitable swamps and forests managed to forge a new life beyond the authority of whitefolks."-Richard Price, author of Maroon Societies
Selected Poems
Gwendolyn Brooks - 1963
This compelling collection showcases Brooks's technical mastery, her warm humanity, and her compassionate and illuminating response to a complex world. This edition also includes a special PS section with insights, interviews, and more—including a short piece by Nikki Giovanni entitled "Remembering Gwen."By 1963 the civil rights movement was in full swing across the United States, and more and more African American writers were increasingly outspoken in attacking American racism and insisting on full political, economic, and social equality for all. In that memorable year of the March on Washington, Harper & Row released Brooks’s Selected Poems, which incorporated poems from her first three collections, as well as a selection of new poems.This edition of Selected Poems includes A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks's first published volume of poetry for which she became nationally known and which led to successive Guggenheim fellowships; Annie Allen, published one year before she became the first African American author to win the Pulitzer Prize in any category; and The Bean Eaters, her fifth publication which expanded her focus from studies of the lives of mainly poor urban black Americans to the heroism of early civil rights workers and events of particular outrage—including the 1955 Emmett Till lynching and the 1957 school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
Alison Phipps - 2020
In a right-moving world, women's anger about sexual violence has been celebrated as a progressive force. However, mainstream feminist politics is unable to tackle the converging systems of gender, race and class which produce sexual violence. Phipps argues that the mainstream movement against sexual violence expresses a political whiteness which both reflects its demographics and limits its revolutionary potential. Privileged white women use their traumatic experiences to create media outrage, and rely on state power and bureaucracy to purge 'bad men' from elite institutions with little concern for where they might appear next. Even more dangerously, the more reactionary branches of this feminist movement are complicit with the far-right, in their attacks on sex workers and trans people. This text is essential reading for anyone interested in the politics of sexual violence, and the feminist movement more generally.
Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle
Silvia Federici - 2012
Originally inspired by Federici's organizational work in the Wages for Housework movement, the topics discussed include the international restructuring of reproductive work and its effects on the sexual division of labor, the globalization of care work and sex work, the crisis of elder care, and the development of affective labor. Both a brief history of the international feminist movement and a contemporary critique of capitalism, these writings continue the investigation of the economic roots of violence against women.
BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine
Lisa Jervis - 2006
Magazine, Bitch was launched in the mid-nineties as a Xerox-and-staple zine covering the landscape of popular culture from a feminist perspective. Both unabashed in its love for the guilty pleasures of consumer culture and deeply thoughtful about the way the pop landscape reflects and impacts women's lives, Bitch grew to be a popular, full-scale magazine with a readership that stretched worldwide. Today it stands as a touchstone of hip, young feminist thought, looking with both wit and irreverence at the way pop culture informs feminism--and vice versa--and encouraging readers to think critically about the messages lurking behind our favorite television shows, movies, music, books, blogs, and the like. BITCHFest offers an assortment of the most provocative essays, reporting, rants, and raves from the magazine's first ten years, along with new pieces written especially for the collection. Smart, nuanced, cranky, outrageous, and clear-eyed, the anthology covers everything from a 1996 celebration of pre-scandal Martha Stewart to a more recent critical look at the "gayby boom"; from a time line of black women on sitcoms to an analysis of fat suits as the new blackface; from an attempt to fashion a feminist vulgarity to a reclamation of female virginity. It's a recent history of feminist pop-culture critique and an arrow toward feminism's future.