What would you recommend as essential readings on feminism?
I’m going to make two subdivisions here, to demarcate stuff that I think is crucial to understanding the particular feminist tendency with which I associate (materialist feminism), and stuff that I think is crucial for the integration of materialist feminist thought with decolonization. *s next to stuff that’s particularly important.Materialist Feminism / Proletarian Feminism:Rosa Luxemburg - ‘Women’s Suffrage and the Class Struggle.’Alexandra Kollontai - ‘Communism and the Family’ and ‘The Woman Worker and Peasant in Soviet Russia’Chicago Women’s Liberation Union - “Socialist Feminism”Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex (I know, I know, but I have to include it as an essential reading imo)*Christine Delphy - ‘The Main Enemy’ (in French it’s published as Liberation des femmes: annee zero)*Monique Wittig - ‘The Category of Sex’ and ‘One is not born a woman’ (cf de Beauvoir, to whom this title is a nod)Silvia Fedirici - Caliban and the Witch (here in particular, her engagement with the concept of primitive accumulation in Marx becomes a useful rethinking of women’s oppression as an active contradiction)Catharine Mackinnon - Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (I have a lot of problems with Mackinnon, but I think that this work in particular is very crucial for matfem theory; link is only to ch. 8, but if you do a little digging it’s very easy to find full pdfs)Decolonial / Third World / Subaltern FeminismThird World Women’s Alliance - ‘Women in the Struggle’ and ‘Black Women’s Manifesto’*Maria Lugones - ‘On the coloniality of gender’ and ‘Heterosexualism and the Colonial/modern gender system’*Hortense Spillers - ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’ and ‘Interstices’Saidyia Hartman - Scenes of Subjection (no good pdf available that isn’t in a repository that i’d rather not link to on here) *Audre Lord - ‘Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,’ and ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’Chandra Mohanty - ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’Other Stuff That I Think Is ImportantIris Marion Young - ‘Throwing Like A Girl’ Everything from Sara Ahmed, literally everything that she has written.Judith Butler - ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’ (generally a better introduction to her framework - performativity - than her longer works), Gender Trouble (particularly for the critique of essentialism, esp. the critique of Irigaray)Hélène Cixous - ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’Idk, it’s like midnight for me so I’m pretty exhausted and this is hardly exhaustive (lol). Hope it’s at all helpful.
