Written by Furqan Mohamed
Reading can be an escape, a challenge, and a chance to see ourselves reflected back to us. When it comes to feminist reading, our experience can be a mix of all three. There is valuable information to gain from feminist texts of all kinds; fictional, non-fictional, and experimental hybrids.
Feminism has historically been misrepresented in media and literature, notably leaving out women of colour, Black and Indigenous women, queer and transgender people, and poor and working-class women worldwide. The current social and political moment, especially, clarifies that any feminism focused on a single story is not sufficient. Over the last year, we have learned who is essential, who is cared for, and who exactly does the caring. We have also witnessed a cultural shift in understanding how prisons and police exist in our society and the possible future of abolition. While the subjects of the conversations we are having today sometimes feel new, many feminist writers have been meditating them for quite a while.
The politics of class is often left out of the mainstream feminist discourse, and the writing of Cinzia Arruzza, Nancy Fraser, and Tithi Bhattachary highlights substantial inequalities and is an excellent read for anyone interested in the relationship between the modern-day feminist movement and neoliberalism. Mikki Kendall’s writing makes clear the ways some white feminists can perpetuate white supremacy within the movement. She and other writers on this list challenge the traditional idea of “a shared woman-experience” that has marked feminism since the 1990s. Gender and gender performance are complicated examples of this, as is sex and rape culture. Reading Julia Serano can be challenging, and the collection of essays edited by Roxane Gay can feel downright uncomfortable and even triggering.
This list also includes writers you may know, such as Toni Morrison, a titan who wrote about Black women with intention and refused to appeal to the white gaze. Also included is Fariha Róisín, a newer name whose poetic memoir reckons with the ghosts of intergenerational trauma and Islamophobia. This list also consists of two texts of fiction, highlighting the accounts of several women and people of colour. Where someone like Alicia Elliott may deal with the effects of white supremacy in a literal sense, Bernardine Evaristo and Souvankham Thammavongsa deal with these issues through their inventions. You might become discouraged reading Teen Vogue’s “No Planet B,” like other texts on climate change, but it is necessary. I promise you can then pick up Mariame Kaba’s book if you’re looking to feel more confident about the prospects of social justice movements at large. Reading does not make-up for all the work that needs to be done, but books can help us better understand and attain intersectional feminism that considers class, geography and race. Kaba often says, “hope is a discipline”, so I hope that this list provides you with knowledge that remind you of the long arc of the feminist movement and optimism for the future. While we still have much work to do, we will do it standing on the shoulders and scholarship of some incredible thinkers.
“No woman has to be respectable to be valuable.” ― Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot
“So you decide, for the first time in your life, that you aren’t going to be one of the good girls anymore. You decide that “good” is not an adjective that ought to be applied to a person, as it only rendered you inanimate and inhuman, like a piece of cheese or a watercolour painting. The good girl is nothing more than a myth. We long for her for the same reason we long for utopia: Neither exists.” ― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture
“Until feminists work to empower femininity and pry it away from the insipid, inferior meanings that plague it — weakness, helplessness, fragility, passivity, frivolity, and artificiality — those meanings will continue to haunt every person who is female and/or feminine.” ― Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
“A feminism that is truly anti-racist and anti-imperialist must also be anti-capitalist.” ― Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%
“Feminism is as old as sexual repression. In this country, women’s liberation flowered best in the soil prepared by black liberation the mid-19th century abolitionist movement yielded suffragettes. The mid-20th century civil rights movement yielded women’s liberation. Both movements were loudly championed by black men no white men so distinguished themselves. But both abandoned Black Civil Rights and regarded the shift away from the race problem as an inevitable and necessary development. An opportunity to concentrate on exclusively sexist issues. Each time that shift took place, it marked the first stage of divisiveness and heralded a future of splinter groups and self-sabotage.” ― Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
“Racism, for many people, seems to occupy space in very much the same way as dark matter: it forms the skeleton of our world, yet remains ultimately invisible, undetectable. This is convenient. If nothing is racist, then nothing needs to be done to address it.” ― Alicia Elliott, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
“We are volcanoes. We declare ourselves. We are the solstice, the new moon. We are not silent, brown girl. I hear you, but I don’t weep.” ― Fariha Roisin, How to Cure a Ghost
“What matters most to me, is that I know how I feel, and the rest of the world might catch up one day, even if it’ll be a quiet revolution over longer than my lifetime, if it happens at all.” ― Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other
“The only love Red knew was that simple, uncomplicated, lonely love one feels for oneself in the quiet moments of the day. It was there, steady and solid in the laughter and talk of the television and with her in the grocery aisles on the weekends. It was there every night, in the dark, spectacular and sprawling in the quiet. And it all belonged to her.” — How to Pronounce Knife, Souvankham Thammavongsa
There are doorways everywhere, ones without locks, doors that swing open. There isn’t only now and here. There is elsewhere and somewhere too. Speak against the coloniality of the world, against the route of despair it causes, in an always-loudening chant. Please keep loving.”― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body
“Nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone.” ― We Do This ’til We Free Us, Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba
“Three key aspects of the climate justice movement — reporting, activism, and intersectionality — form the guideposts for this collection just as they have guided and continue to guide our coverage day in and day out. Accuracy, advocacy, and equity are foundational pillars to any movement seeking justice, and the climate justice movement of these last several years has embodied them all.” ― No Planet B, essays edited by Lucy Diavolo
Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall
Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture by Roxane Gay
Whipping Girl by Julia Serano
Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto by Cinzia Arruzza, Nancy Fraser, and Tithi Bhattachary
The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations by Toni Morrison
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott
How to Cure a Ghost by Fariha Róisín
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa
A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt
We Do This ’til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba
No Planet B: A Teen Vogue Guide to Climate Justice by Lucy Diavolo
