Books with category 🟣 Feminism
Displaying 11 books

Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People's Business

2024

by Roxane Gay

From beloved and bestselling author Roxane Gay, a strikingly fresh cultural critic (Washington Post), comes an exhilarating collection of her essays on culture, politics, and everything in between.

Since the publication of the groundbreaking Bad Feminist and Hunger, Roxane Gay has continued to tackle big issues embroiling society—state-sponsored violence and mass shootings, women’s rights post-Dobbs, online disinformation, and the limits of empathy—alongside more individual topics: Can I tell my co-worker her perfume makes me sneeze? Is it acceptable to schedule a daily 8 am meeting?

In her role as a New York Times opinion section contributor and the publication’s “Work Friend” columnist, Gay reaches millions of readers with her wise voice and sharp insights. Opinions is a collection of her best nonfiction pieces from the past ten years.

Covering a wide range of topics—politics, feminism, the culture wars, civil rights, and much more—with an all-new introduction in which she reflects on the past decade in America, this sharp, thought-provoking anthology will delight Roxane Gay’s devotees and draw new readers to this inimitable talent.

Rebel Girl: My Life As A Feminist Punk

2024

by Kathleen Hanna

An electric, searing memoir by the original rebel girl and legendary front woman of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre. Hey girlfriend I got a proposition, goes something like this: Dare ya to do what you want. Kathleen Hanna's rallying cry to feminists echoed far and wide through the punk scene of the 90s and beyond. Her band, Bikini Kill, embodies this iconic time, and today her personal yet feminist lyrics on anthems like "Rebel Girl" and "Double Dare Ya" are more powerful than ever.

But where did this transformative voice come from? In Rebel Girl, Hanna's raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumultuous childhood home to her formative college years in Olympia, Washington, and on to her first years on tour, fighting hard for gigs and for her band. As Hanna makes clear, being in a "girl band," especially a punk girl band, in those years was not a simple or safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a singer who was a lightning rod for controversy took limitless amounts of determination.

But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her—including with her bandmates, Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, and Johanna Fateman; her friendships with Kurt Cobain and Ian MacKaye; and her introduction to Joan Jett— were all a testament to how the punk world could nurture and care for its own. Hanna opens up about falling in love with Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and her debilitating battle with Lyme disease, and she brings us behind the scenes of her musical growth in her bands, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin.

She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its later exclusivity. In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the hardest times along with the most joyful—and how it continues to fuel her revolutionary art and music.

Counting Feminicide

Why grassroots data activists in Latin America count feminicide—and how this vital social justice work challenges mainstream data science. What isn’t counted doesn’t count. And mainstream institutions systematically fail to account for feminicide, the gender-related killing of women and girls, including cisgender and transgender women.

Against this failure, Counting Feminicide brings to the fore the work of data activists across the Americas who are documenting such murders—and challenging the reigning logic of data science by centering care, memory, and justice in their work. Drawing on Data Against Feminicide, a large-scale collaborative research project, Catherine D’Ignazio describes the creative, intellectual, and emotional labor of feminicide data activists who are at the forefront of a data ethics that rigorously and consistently takes power and people into account.

Individuals, researchers, and journalists—these data activists scour news sources to assemble spreadsheets and databases of women killed by gender-related violence, then circulate those data in a variety of creative and political forms. Their work reveals the potential of restorative/transformative data science—the use of systematic information to, first, heal communities from the violence and trauma produced by structural inequality and, second, envision and work toward the world in which such violence has been eliminated.

Specifically, D’Ignazio explores the possibilities and limitations of counting and quantification—reducing complex social phenomena to convenient, sortable, aggregable forms—when the goal is nothing short of the elimination of gender-related violence. Counting Feminicide showcases the incredible power of data feminism in practice, in which each murdered woman or girl counts, and, in being counted, joins a collective demand for the restoration of rights and a transformation of the gendered order of the world.

Counting Feminicide

Why grassroots data activists in Latin America count feminicide—and how this vital social justice work challenges mainstream data science. What isn’t counted doesn’t count. And mainstream institutions systematically fail to account for feminicide, the gender-related killing of women and girls, including cisgender and transgender women. Against this failure, Counting Feminicide brings to the fore the work of data activists across the Americas who are documenting such murders—and challenging the reigning logic of data science by centering care, memory, and justice in their work.

Drawing on Data Against Feminicide, a large-scale collaborative research project, Catherine D’Ignazio describes the creative, intellectual, and emotional labor of feminicide data activists who are at the forefront of a data ethics that rigorously and consistently takes power and people into account. Individuals, researchers, and journalists—these data activists scour news sources to assemble spreadsheets and databases of women killed by gender-related violence, then circulate those data in a variety of creative and political forms. Their work reveals the potential of restorative/transformative data science—the use of systematic information to, first, heal communities from the violence and trauma produced by structural inequality and, second, envision and work toward the world in which such violence has been eliminated.

Specifically, D’Ignazio explores the possibilities and limitations of counting and quantification—reducing complex social phenomena to convenient, sortable, aggregable forms—when the goal is nothing short of the elimination of gender-related violence. Counting Feminicide showcases the incredible power of data feminism in practice, in which each murdered woman or girl counts, and, in being counted, joins a collective demand for the restoration of rights and a transformation of the gendered order of the world.

Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other

2024

by Danielle Dutton

From the author of Margaret the First and SPRAWL comes a prose collection like no other, where different styles of writing and different spaces of experience create a collage of the depths and strangeness of contemporary life. Danielle Dutton's endlessly inventive books have been praised as "strikingly smart and daringly feminist" (Jenny Offill), "brilliantly odd" (The Irish Independent), and "beguiling" (The Wall Street Journal).

In Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other, four distinct sections operate like Joseph Cornell boxes, each offering its own vibrant proposal for what contemporary writing might be. "Prairie" is a cycle of stories set in the Midwest, a surreal landscape of wildflowers, ominous rivers, violence, virtual reality, art, fear, and loss. The conceptual work in "Dresses" reconsiders the canon through the lens of its garb, like a wild literary closet. "Art" turns to essay, examining how works of visual art and fiction relate to one another, a theme central to the whole book. The final section, "Other," collects pieces in irregular ("other") forms, stories-as-essays or essays-as-stories that defy category and are hilarious or heartbreaking for reasons as inexplicable as the abiding beauty and strangeness of all of Dutton's work.

The Garden

2024

by Clare Beams

The Garden, a novel by Clare Beams, presents a psychologically thrilling tale that explores the deep yearnings of women to become mothers and the intricate ways in which the female body has been subjected to control and manipulation throughout history.

In the year 1948, Irene Willard, having endured five miscarriages in her pursuit to fulfill her husband's desire for a child and currently pregnant again, arrives at a secluded house in the Berkshires that doubles as a hospital. This establishment is run by a duo of doctors dedicated to pioneering a treatment for her condition. With caution, Irene commits to the Halls' methods aimed at 'rectifying the maternal environment', addressing both the physical and psychological aspects.

Amidst this, she stumbles upon an enigmatic walled garden on the property, a space infused with its own mystical forces. As the medical endeavors of the Halls begin to falter, Irene and the other patients are driven to tap into the garden's potential for their own ends. They are forced to confront the immense dangers that come with the promise of extraordinary benefits.

Evoking the atmospheric tension of works by Shirley Jackson and the unsettling themes of Rosemary's Baby, The Garden delves into the realms of motherhood, childbirth, the enigmas of the female anatomy, and the historical efforts to dominate it.

Like Love

2024

by Maggie Nelson

Like Love: Essays and Conversations is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson's brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes, and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson's passion for dialogue and dissent.

The range of subjects is wide—from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walker—but certain themes recur: intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression, and perversity; the roles of the critic and of language in relation to visual and performance arts; forces that feed or impede certain bodies and creators; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making.

Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking, and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson's own development, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.

Who's Afraid Of Gender?

2024

by Judith Butler

From a global icon, a bold, essential account of how a fear of gender is fueling reactionary politics around the world.

Judith Butler, the groundbreaking thinker whose iconic book Gender Trouble redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on “gender” that have become central to right-wing movements today.

The aim of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is not to offer a new theory of gender but to examine how “gender” has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and transexclusionary feminists. In their vital, courageous new book, Butler illuminates the concrete ways that this phantasm of “gender” collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of “critical race theory” and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation.

An essential intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a bold call to refuse the alliance with authoritarian movements and to make a broad coalition with all those whose struggle for equality is linked with fighting injustice. Imagining new possibilities for both freedom and solidarity, Butler offers us a hopeful work of social and political analysis that is both timely and timeless.

Headshot

2024

by Rita Bullwinkel

An electrifying debut novel from an “unusually gifted writer” (Lorrie Moore) about the radical intimacy of physical competition.

An unexpected tragedy at a community pool. A family’s unrelenting expectation of victory. The desire to gain or lose control; to make time speed up or stop; to be frighteningly, undeniably good at something. Each of the eight teenage girl boxers in this blistering debut novel has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country.

Through a series of face-offs that are raw, ecstatic, and punctuated by flashes of humor and tenderness, prizewinning writer Rita Bullwinkel animates the competitors’ pasts and futures as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win.

Frenetic, surprising, and strikingly original, Headshot is a portrait of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness, and sheer physical pleasure that motivates young women to fight—even, and perhaps especially, when no one else is watching.

The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule

2024

by Angela Saini

A groundbreaking exploration of gendered oppression—its origins, its histories, our attempts to understand it, and our efforts to combat it

For centuries, societies have treated male domination as natural to the human species. But how would our understanding of gender inequality—our imagined past and contested present—look if we didn’t assume that men have always ruled over women, if we saw inequality as something more fragile that has had to be constantly remade and reasserted?

In The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality, award-winning science journalist Angela Saini explores the roots of what we call patriarchy, uncovering a complex history of how it first became embedded in societies and spread across the globe from prehistory into the present. She travels to the world’s earliest known human settlements, analyzes the latest research findings in science and archaeology, and traces cultural and political histories from the Americas to Asia.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, philosophers, historians, anthropologists, and feminists began to actively question what patriarchy meant as part of the attempt to understand the origins of inequality. In our own time, despite the pushback against sexism, abuse, and discrimination, even revolutionary efforts to bring about equality have often ended in failure and backlash. But The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality is a hopeful book—one that reveals a multiplicity to human arrangements that undercuts the old grand narratives and exposes male supremacy as no more, and no less, than an ever-shifting element in systems of control.

Normal Women

The #1 New York Times bestselling historical novelist delivers her magnum opus—a landmark work of feminist nonfiction that radically redefines our understanding of the extraordinary roles ordinary women played throughout British history.

Most histories have been written by men, about men, relegating women—with the exception of a few queens—to the shadows of time. Now, bestselling author Philippa Gregory reveals the importance of ordinary women, providing a more balanced and truer chronicle that expands and adds rich detail to the story of Great Britain.

In Normal Women, Gregory draws on an enormous archive of primary and secondary sources to rewrite British history, focusing on the agency, persistence, and effectiveness of everyday women throughout periods of social and cultural transition. She sweeps from the making of the Bayeux tapestry in the eleventh century to the Black Death in 1348—after which women were briefly paid the same wages as men, the last time for seven centuries—to the 1992 ordination of women by the Church of England, when the church accepted, for the first time, that a woman could perform the miracle of the mass.

Through the stories of the female soldiers of the civil war, the guild widows who founded the prosperity of the City of London, highwaywomen and pirates, miners, ship owners, international traders, the women who ran London theaters and commissioned plays from Shakespeare, and the "female husbands" who married each other legally in church and lived as husband and wife, Gregory redefines "normal" female behavior to include heroism, rebellion, crime, treason, money-making, and sainthood. As she makes clear, normal women make history.

Normal Women will include black-and-white illustrations throughout and a full-color insert.

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