hi! sorry if this is a weird ask but do you have any feminist lit book recs? I feel like I'm lacking skills in the "being able to call out how capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy affects everyday life" department. idk a better way to put it. I just need to brush up on it all, really. again, sorry if this was weird, feel free to ignore!!!!!
anon of course! and I'm opening this ask up to any feminists who've done more reading than I have. My current Big Recommendation is Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins. Writing wise, it's super accessible (stay away from the voice that academics use when talking about theory). She talks extensively about Black women as a people, culture, and political force. Her second edition, the one I'm reading now, is inclusive of queer sexuality and gender as other axes in the matrix of domination that Black women must contend with. I haven't reached that section yet, though.
There's a free PDF available online if you just Google it. I'd say this is my first time really reading feminist theory--everything else I've read both online and off, in class and outside class, has touched on feminism in bits and pieces or just mentioned gender and sexuality relations without talking about feminism in particular. I'm using Black Feminist Thought as a jumping off point to read other feminist works by other (largely) Black women, since Collins cites so many.
Another good book is Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell. This one isn't feminist-based, but I do recall gender and gendered relations/expectations being part of the core text. If I'm also recalling correctly, there was an issue of class reductionism at the end, but the great thing about reading theory is that you don't have to accept everything the author says as the Gospel truth, especially when we have evidence to the contrary.
Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Y. Davis is one that looks at the prison system as a reform to previous systems of punishment, and then focuses on how women are affected by the current prison system and gendered expectations both within and outside that system.
A book that isn't explicitly feminist but definitely brings up issues for those feminists who care about the intersections of reproduction, medicine, and culture is Birth in Four Cultures: A Crosscultural Investigation of Childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden, and the United States by Brigitte Jordan, Robbie Davis-Floyd. I loved it.
Most of my education on feminism was in bits and pieces. I'd read through portions of feminists works here, or read through threads and debates on social media talking about different types of feminism. I have the very online upbringing in feminist thought, like many feminists. I also learned what I could in college, but I genuinely don't remember those readings and I don't know if i could find them now, sorry 😭. Part of my learning to critique capitalism was reading anti-capitalist works by men and training myself to see the gaps in their knowledge. Their statistics, their theories, their hypotheses, etc, frequently failed to include women. So I'd ask myself -- if women were included in this analysis of the division of labor, how would it change? Which women? Poor women, Black women, immigrant women? What are their lives and histories like now that would influence the outcome of this work?
Also don't be scared not to just take everything at face value. Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay was originally going to go on this list, but I don't recall much of it outside her scrabble chronicles, her acknowledgement that she still listens to music with misogynistic lyrics, and her disagreement that trigger warnings are that good of an idea. I take issue with the second and disagree with the third.
This is long enough lol, hope this helps! And again if anyone has any recommendations, feel free to add! I'm still hoping to get my hands on a copy of Whipping Girl by Julia Serano, so that's next up on the list.
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