Feminist theory
Foundational Marxist critiques of feminism in the age of neoliberalism, with contemporary books on the family, sex work, and gender identity.
As mainstream feminism is being effectively mobilized to support a capitalist, racist agenda, it is more important than ever to build a feminism that recognizes how different forms of oppression are bound together. From the grassroots history of the first wave, to human rights violations within women's prisons, demands for sex workerâs rights, and calls for a feminist politics to combat fascism, our feminist bookshelf includes all of your essential radical feminist reading.
What if family were not the only place you might hope to feel safe, loved, cared for and accepted?
Where pregnancy is concerned, let every pregnancy be for everyone. Let us overthrow, in short, the âfamilyâ.
The incendiary French feminist work that defined ecofeminismânow available for the first time in English.
In this exciting, innovative work, Polish feminist philosopher Ewa Majewska proposes a specifically feminist politics of antifascism.
Why do patriarchal systems survive? In this groundbreaking work of feminist theory, Nancy Folbre examines the contradictory effects of capitalist development.
In this brilliant and kaleidoscopic look at the emerging feminist international, VerĂłnica Gago uses the womenâs strike as both a concept and a collective experience. At once a gripping political analysis and a theoretically charged manifesto.
A provocative, elegantly written analysis of female desire, consent, and sexuality in the age of MeToo.
One of our most vital and incisive writers on literature, feminism, and knowing oneâs self.
The story of how enslaved women struggled for freedom in the West Indies.
An unprecedented collection of feminist voices from four millennia of global history.
A new manifesto for cyberfeminism.
In Feminist City, through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built into our cities, homes, and neighborhoods. Kern offers an alternative vision of the feminist city.
Interviews include Avtar Brah, Gail Lewis and Vron Ware on Diaspora, Migration and Empire. Himani Bannerji, Gary Kinsman, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Silvia Federici on Colonialism, Capitalism, and Resistance. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Avery F. Gordon and Angela Y. Davis on Abolition Feminism.
How can we learn to value difference when it is too often enlisted in the service of domination? Hark and Villa make a compelling case for the urgent necessity for a detoxification of feminism as a matter of urgency, and for an ethical mode of living-with the world.
In the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration, The Feminist and the Sex Offender makes a powerful feminist case for accountability without punishment and sexual safety and pleasure without injustice.
In this landmark collection spanning three centuries and four waves of feminist activism and writing, Burn It Down! is a testament to what is possible when women are driven to the edge. The manifestoâraging and wanting, quarreling and provokingâhas always played a central role in feminism, and itâs the angry, brash feminism we need now.
Second Wave feminism emerged as a struggle for womenâs liberation and took its place alongside other radical movements. But feminismâs subsequent immersion in identity politics coincided with a decline in its utopian energies and the rise of neoliberalism. Now, foreseeing a revival in the movement, Fraser argues for a reinvigorated feminist radicalism able to address the global economic crisis.
Females is Andrea Long Chuâs genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire.
In Revolting Prostitutes, sex workers Juno Mac and Molly Smith bring a fresh perspective to questions that have long been contentious. Speaking from a growing global sex worker rights movement, and situating their argument firmly within wider questions of migration, work, feminism, and resistance to white supremacy, they make clear that anyone committed to working towards justice and freedom should be in support of the sex worker rights movement.
Unaffordable housing, poverty wages, inadequate healthcare, border policing, climate changeâthese are not what you ordinarily hear feminists talking about. But arenât they the biggest issues for the vast majority of women around the globe?
Unafraid of exploring the potentials of technology, both its tyrannical and emancipatory possibilities, the manifesto seeks to uproot forces of repression that have come to seem inevitableâfrom the family, to the body, to the idea of gender itself
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In this collection of new and previously published writings, leading activists, feminists, scholars, and writers describe the shape of the problem, chart the forms refusal has taken, and outline possible solutions. Importantly, they also describe the longer histories of organizing against sexual violence that the #MeToo moment obscuresâamong working women, women of color, undocumented women, imprisoned women, poor women, among those who donât conform to traditional gender rolesâand discern from these practices a freedom that is more than notional, but embodied and uncompromising.
In Playing the Whore, journalist Melissa Gira Grant turns these pieties on their head, arguing for an overhaul in the way we think about sex work. Based on ten years of writing and reporting on the sex trade, and grounded in her experience as an organizer, advocate, and former sex worker, Playing the Whore dismantles pervasive myths about sex work, criticizes both conditions within the sex industry and its criminalization, and argues that separating sex work from the "legitimate" economy only harms those who perform sexual labor.
Promise of a Dream is a moving, witty and poignant recollection of a time when young women were breaking all the rules. Sheila Rowbotham was, and remains, one of their most effective and endearing voices.
Flora Tristan was one of the first women radicals to draw clear connections between the plight of disaffected workers and powerless women. Active in the 1830s and 1840s, and regarded as something of a pariah, she is best known for her book Workersâ Union, an account of the conditions of women in Peru, London, Paris and the provinces of France.
Through interviews with the Feminist Five and other leading Chinese activists, Hong Fincher illuminates both the difficulties they face and their âjoy of betraying Big Brother,â as one of the Feminist Five wrote of the defiance she felt during her detention. Tracing the rise of a new feminist consciousness now finding expression through the #MeToo movement, and describing how the Communist regime has suppressed the history of its own feminist struggles, Betraying Big Brother is a story of how the movement against patriarchy could reconfigure China and the world.
This new edition includes a foreword by Lola Okolosie and an interview with the authors, chaired by Heidi Safia Mirza, focusing on the impact of their book since publication and its continuing relevance today
First published in 1990, Michele Wallaceâs Invisibility Blues is widely regarded as a landmark in the history of black feminism. Wallaceâs considerations of the black experience in America include recollections of her early life in Harlem; a look at the continued underrepresentation of black voices in politics, media, and culture; and the legacy of such figures as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison,and Alice Walker.
One of the most important tasks for contemporary feminist theory is to develop a concept of the subject able to meet the challenges facing feminist politics. Although theorists in the 1980s raised the problem of feminist subjectivity, Kathi Weeks contends that the limited nature of that discussion now blocks the further development of feminist theory.
A renowned historian introduces Mary Wollestonecraftâs seminal feminist tract.
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An international bestseller, originally published in 1970, when Shulamith Firestone was just twenty-five years old, The Dialectic of Sex was the first book of the womenâs liberation movement to put forth a feminist theory of politics.
She presents feminism as the key radical ideology, the missing link between Marx and Freud, uniting their visions of the political and the personal. The Dialectic of Sex remains remarkably relevant todayâa testament to Firestoneâs startlingly prescient vision. The author died in 2012, but her ideas live on through this extraordinary book.
Originally published in 1978, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman caused a storm of controversy. Michele Wallace blasted the masculine biases of the black politics that emerged from the sixties. She described how women remained marginalized by the patriarchal culture of Black Power, demonstrating the ways in which a genuine female subjectivity was blocked by the traditional myths of black womanhood.
Now a global bestseller, the remarkable life of Rigoberta MenchĂș, a Guatemalan peasant woman, reflects on the experiences common to many Indian communities in Latin America. MenchĂș vividly conveys the traditional beliefs of her community and her personal response to feminist and socialist ideas. Above all, these pages are illuminated by the enduring courage and passionate sense of justice of an extraordinary woman.
Beyond the Pale is a major contribution to anti-racist work, confronting the historical meanings of whiteness as a way of overcoming the moralism that so often infuses anti-racist movements.
Inside This Place, Not of It reveals some of the most egregious human rights violations within womenâs prisons in the United States. Here, in their own words, thirteen narrators recount their lives leading up to incarceration and their harrowing struggle for survival once inside.