feminist lit
Items in this hypelist
Black Feminism
A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance
Stella Abasa Dadzie · 2020
Killing the Black Body
Dorothy E. Roberts · 2017
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Race and American Culture)
Saidiya Hartman · 1997
To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe
Akwugo Emejulu, Francesca Sobande · 2019
Speak Out!: The Brixton Black Women's Group
Brixton Black Women's Group · 2023
Sister Outsider
Audre Lorde • 2012
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
bell hooks • 2014
When Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center was first published in 1984, it was welcomed and praised by feminist thinkers who wanted a new vision. Even so, individual readers frequently found the theory "unsettling" or "provocative." Today, the blueprint for feminist movement presented in the book remains as provocative and relevant as ever. Written in hooks's characteristic direct style, Feminist Theory embodies the hope that feminists can find a common language to spread the word and create a mass, global feminist movement.
Women, Race & Class
Angela Y. Davis · 1983
From one of our most important scholars and civil rights activist icon, a powerful study of the women’s liberation movement and the tangled knot of oppression facing Black women.<br/><br/>“Angela Davis is herself a woman of undeniable courage. She should be heard.”—The New York Times<br/><br/>Angela Davis provides a powerful history of the social and political influence of whiteness and elitism in feminism, from abolitionist days to the present, and demonstrates how the racist and classist biases of its leaders inevitably hampered any collective ambitions. While Black women were aided by some activists like Sarah and Angelina Grimke and the suffrage cause found unwavering support in Frederick Douglass, many women played on the fears of white supremacists for political gain rather than take an intersectional approach to liberation. Here, Davis not only contextualizes the legacy and pitfalls of civil and women’s rights activists, but also discusses Communist women, the murder of Emmitt Till, and Margaret Sanger’s racism. Davis shows readers how the inequalities between Black and white women influence the contemporary issues of rape, reproductive freedom, housework and child care in this bold and indispensable work.
Marxist Feminism, Social Reproduction & Anti-Capitalism
The Arcana of Reproduction
Leopoldina Fortunati · 2025
Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism
Laurie Penny · 2011
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
Silvia Federici · 2004
Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Outspoken by Pluto)
Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Outspoken by Pluto)
Feminism for the 99%
Cinzia Arruzza • 2019
<b>The organizers of the International Women’s Strike “cut through the corporate feminist ‘<i>Lean In</i>’ noise to offer a feminism rooted not just in intersectionality . . . but also in economic justice”—for readers of Roxane Gay and Rebecca Solnit (<i>Vogue</i>).</b><br> <b> </b><br> <b>Feminism shouldn’t start—or stop—with seeing women represented at the top of society. It should start with the 99%.</b><br><br> Unaffordable housing, poverty wages, inadequate healthcare, border policing, climate change—these are not what you ordinarily hear feminists talking about. But aren’t they the biggest issues for the vast majority of women around the globe?<br><br> Taking as its inspiration the new wave of feminist militancy that has erupted globally, this manifesto makes a simple but powerful case: feminism shouldn’t start—or stop—with the drive to have women represented at the top of their professions. It must focus on those at the bottom, and fight for the world they deserve. And that means targeting capitalism. Feminism must be anticapitalist, eco-socialist and antiracist.
Decolonial, Intersectional & Transnational
Borderlands/La Frontera
Gloria Anzaldúa · 2012
Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine
Nada Elia · 2023
A Muzzle for Witches
Dubravka Ugresic · 2024
Feminist Antifascism
Ewa Majewska · 2021
Separate and Dominate: Feminism and Racism after the War on Terror
Christine Delphy · 2015
Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology
Robin Morgan · 2016
Against White Feminism
Rafia Zakaria · 2021
<p><b><br> An essential, comprehensive account of what white feminism is, and an empowering manifesto for revolution<br></b><br> For readers of Reni Eddo-Lodge's <i><b>Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race</b></i><i>,</i> Caroline Criado Perez's <i><b>Invisible Women</b></i> and Florence Given's <b><i>Women Don't Owe You Pretty</i></b><br> <b><br> 'M</b><b>ake room beside Audre Lorde and Angela Davis on your shelves</b><b>'</b> <i><b>Chicago Review of Books</b></i><b><br> <br> 'A book to make you stop and think' Mishal Husain, national broadcaster</b><br> <b><br> 'Necessary, warm-hearted and sharp-eyed...</b> <b>This book is going to light fires everywhere, so if you are prone to combust, get right the hell out of the way' Lit Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2021</b><br> <br> Feminism is supposed to be the fight for the freedom and equality of women. And in the past 200 years it has made incredible gains: paving the way for women to advance economically, handing them back control of their own bodies, and advocating for their needs and their experiences.<br> <br> <b>But not for all women.</b><br> <br> Since its very beginning, mainstream feminism has catered to a particular group of women: middle class, cis-gendered, Western, and above all, white. And the exclusion of everyone outside this narrow category is not merely an oversight, a coincidence, a slip. It is baked into the way feminism works.<br> <br> <b>This must change.</b> <b>White supremacy is killing feminism.</b> <b>Until all of us are free and equal in society, none of us are.<br> <br> The power to transform it lies with each one of us. It starts with understanding how we got here in the first place.</b><br> <br> Eye-opening, timely and impossible to ignore, <i>Against White Feminism</i> traces the connections between feminism and white supremacy from the earliest stirrings of the women's suffrage movement to the 'fourth wave' we see today, demonstrating how an idea based on equality has been corrupted by prejudice and exploitation from the start. Rafia Zakaria issues a powerful call to arms to every reader to build a new kind of feminism which will light the path to true emancipation for all.</p>
Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity
Chandra Talpade Mohanty · 2003
A Decolonial Feminism
Françoise Vergès · 2021
Women, Culture & Politics
Angela Y. Davis · 1990
A collection of speeches and writings by political activist Angela Davis which address the political and social changes of the past decade as they are concerned with the struggle for racial, sexual, and economic equality.
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa · 1983
Literature & Memoir
Motherhood: A Novel
Sheila Heti · 2018
Arturo’s Island
Elsa Morante
Breasts and Eggs
Mieko Kawakami · 2020
Living My Life
Emma Goldman · 2020
My Work
Olga Ravn · 2023
The Empusium
Olga Tokarczuk · 2024
Zami
Audre Lorde · 2018
The Golden Notebook: A Novel
Doris Lessing · 2008
The Vegetarian
Han Kang · 2016
<b>FROM HAN KANG, WINNER OF THE 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE</b><br><br><b>“[Han Kang’s] intense poetic prose . . . exposes the fragility of human life.”—The Nobel Committee for Literature, in the citation for the Nobel Prize</b><br><br><b><i>A NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER</b><br><b>WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE </b><br><b>ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY<br>A <i>KIRKUS REVIEWS </i>BEST FICTION BOOK OF THE CENTURY</b><br><br><b>“Ferocious.”—<i>The New York Times Book Review</i> (Ten Best Books of the Year)</b><br><b>“Both terrifying and terrific.”—Lauren Groff</b><br><b>“Provocative [and] shocking.”—<i>The Washington Post</i></b><br><br>Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her. Soon their attempts turn desperate, subjecting first her mind, and then her body, to ever more intrusive and perverse violations, sending Yeong-hye spiraling into a dangerous, bizarre estrangement, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself. <br><br>Celebrated by critics around the world, <i>The Vegetarian</i> is a darkly allegorical, Kafka-esque tale of power, obsession, and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her.<br><b><br>A Best Book of the Year: <i>BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Wall Street Journal, Time, Elle, The Economist, HuffPost, Slate, Bustle, The St. Louis Dispatch, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly</i></b>
A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing
Eimear McBride · 2014
Queerness, Transness & Lesbianism
Democracy in the Political Present: A Queer-Feminist Theory
Isabell Lorey · 2022
Gender Trouble
Judith Butler · 2016
Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary
The Argonauts
Maggie Nelson • 2016
Abolition Feminism & The Carceral State
Become Ungovernable An Abolition Feminist Ethic for Democratic Living
H.L.T. Quan · 2024
Free Them All: A Feminist Call to Abolish the Prison System
Gwenola Ricordeau · 2023
A Feminist Theory of Violence: A Decolonial Perspective
Françoise Vergès · 2022
Self Defense: A Philosophy of Violence
Elsa Dorlin · 2022
A brilliant study of violent self-defense in the struggle for liberation by an award-winning philosopher<br/><br/>Is violent self-defense ethical? In the history of colonialism, racism, sexism, capitalism, there has long been a dividing line between bodies "worthy of defending" and those who have been disarmed and rendered defenseless. In 1685, for example, France's infamous "Code Noir" forbade slaves from carrying weapons, under penalty of the whip. In nineteenth-century Algeria, the colonial state outlawed the use of arms by Algerians, but granted French settlers the right to bear arms.<br/><br/>Today, some lives are seen to be worth so little that Black teenagers can be shot in the back for appearing "threatening" while their killers are understood, by the state, to be justified. That those subject to the most violence have been forcibly made defenseless raises, for any movement of liberation, the question of using violence in the interest of self-defense.<br/><br/>Here, philosopher Elsa Dorlin looks across the global history of the left - from slave revolts to the knitting women of the French Revolution and British suffragists' training in ju-jitsu, from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to the Black Panther Party, from queer neighborhood patrols to Black Lives Matter, to trace the politics, philosophy, and ethics of self defense.<br/><br/>In this history she finds a "martial ethics of the self": a practice in which violent self defense is the only means for the oppressed to ensure survival and to build a liveable future. In this sparkling and provocative book, drawing on theorists from Thomas Hobbes to Fred Hampton, Frantz Fanon to Judith Butler, Michel Foucault to June Jordan, Dorlin has reworked the very idea of modern governance and political subjectivity.<br/><br/>Translated from the French by Kieran Aarons.
Are Prisons Obsolete?
Angela Y. Davis
Abolition. Feminism. Now.
Angela Y. Davis · 2022
A powerful work from four activist scholars on the need for our thinking on abolitionism and feminism to intersect. As a politics and as a practice, abolitionism has increasingly shaped our political moment. Abolitionism and feminism stand shoulder-to-shoulder in fighting a common cause- the end of the carceral state, with its key role in perpetuating violence, both public and private, in prisons, in police forces, and in people's homes. Abolitionist theories and practices are at their most compelling when they are feminist; and a feminism that is also abolitionist is the most inclusive and persuasive version of feminism for these times.
Surrogacy, Abortion & Reproductive Justice
Abortion Beyond the Law: Building a Global Feminist Movement for Self-Managed Abortion
Naomi Braine · 2023
Reproductive Justice: An Introduction (Reproductive Justice: A New Vision for the 21st Century Book 1)
Loretta Ross, Rickie Solinger · 2017
The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism (Theory in Forms)
Françoise Vergès · 2020
Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family
Sophie Lewis · 2019
Eve: The Disobedient Future of Birth
Claire Horn · 2023
Housework, Home & Mothering
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
Adrienne Rich · 2021
Mother State
Helen Charman · 2024
Woman’s Estate
Juliet Mitchell
Three Guineas
Virginia Woolf · 2006
Afterwork: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time
Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek
Abolish the Family
Sophie Lewis · 2022
Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle
Silvia Federici · 2020
Written between 1974 and 2016, Revolution at Point Zero collects four decades of research and theorizing on the nature of housework, social reproduction, and women’s struggles on this terrain—to escape it, to better its conditions, to reconstruct it in ways that provide an alternative to capitalist relations.<br/>Indeed, as Federici reveals, behind the capitalist organization of work and the contradictions inherent in “alienated labor” is an explosive ground zero for revolutionary practice upon which are decided the daily realities of our collective reproduction.<br/>Beginning with Federici’s organizational work in the Wages for Housework movement, the essays collected here unravel the power and politics of wide but related issues including the international restructuring of reproductive work and its effects on the sexual division of labor, the globalization of care work and sex work, the crisis of elder care, the development of affective labor, and the politics of the commons.<br/>This revised and expanded edition includes three additional essays and a new preface by the author.
The Body, Beauty & Disgust
The Beauty Myth
Wolf, Naomi
Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women
Silvia Federici · 2018
Something Out of Place: Women & Disgust
Eimear McBride · 2021
Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism (Kairos)
Silvia Federici · 2020
Dead Weight: On Hunger, Harm and Disordered Eating
Emmeline Clein · 2024
Rape Culture
Sexual Revolution
Laurie Penny · 2023
The Case Against the Sexual Revolution
Louise Perry · 2022
<p>Ditching the stuffy hang-ups and benighted sexual traditionalism of the past is an unambiguously positive thing. The sexual revolution has liberated us to enjoy a heady mixture of erotic freedom and personal autonomy. Right?</p> <p>Wrong, argues Louise Perry in her provocative new book. Although it would be neither possible nor desirable to turn the clock back to a world of pre-60s sexual mores, she argues that the amoral libertinism and callous disenchantment of liberal feminism and our contemporary hypersexualised culture represent more loss than gain. The main winners from a world of rough sex, hook-up culture and ubiquitous porn - where anything goes and only consent matters - are a tiny minority of high-status men, not the women forced to accommodate the excesses of male lust. While dispensing sage advice to the generations paying the price for these excesses, she makes a passionate case for a new sexual culture built around dignity, virtue and restraint.</p> <p>This counter-cultural polemic from one of the most exciting young voices in contemporary feminism should be read by all men and women uneasy about the mindless orthodoxies of our ultra-liberal era.</p>
Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny
Kate Manne · 2019
On Violence and On Violence Against Women
Jacqueline Rose · 2022
Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo
Mithu M. Sanyal · 2019
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent
Katherine Angel · 2022
Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
Lundy Bancroft · 2003
Rape and Resistance
Linda Martín Alcoff · 2018
Men Who Hate Women: From incels to pickup artists, the truth about extreme misogyny and how it affects us all
Laura Bates • 2021
The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
Amia Srinivasan · 2021
Ecofeminism
Feminism or Death: How the Women's Movement Can Save the Planet
Francoise d'Eaubonne · 2022
Bodies of Water
Astrida Neimanis · 2017
Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science
Donna J. Haraway · 1990
Reactionary Movements
Pink-pilled
Lois Shearing · 2025
A daring investigation into how women are recruited by the far right online. As the far right has gained popularity and acceptance around the world, its ranks have swelled with an unlikely category of members: women. Women play significant roles in far-right movements, acting as propagandists, prizes to be won and mother-warriors of the nation. But up to now their activities have been largely overlooked. In Pink-pilled, journalist Lois Shearing interviews leading experts and infiltrates communities of tradwives and femtrolls to provide a cutting-edge account of how the far right uses the internet to recruit women. Shining a light on women’s experiences within these movements, Shearing reveals horrifying examples of misogyny and violence. Understanding how and why women join movements that explicitly aim to restrict their autonomy is essential if we want to fight back. Pink-pilled offers key insights for countering women’s radicalisation and building communities resistant to far-right thought.
Right-Wing Women
Andrea Dworkin · 2025
With a new foreword by Moira Donegan, this long-awaited reissue of Dworkin’s iconic study of women in American conservatism is paired with a bold, modern package to match Dworkin’s visionary perspective and style.<br/><br/>Andrea Dworkin wrote Right-Wing Women in 1983―a crucial and deeply illuminating analysis of the right’s position on abortion, homosexuality, antisemitism, female poverty, and antifeminism. Forty years later, the book feels more vibrant, clear-eyed, and visionary than ever, especially as these issues get relitigated in both legal and public forums. In addition to her revelatory and nuanced portraits of figures like Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly, and an examination of the roots of a distinctly woman-led brand of American conservatism, Right-Wing Women will give readers the thrill of rediscovering the force and elegance of Dworkin’s arguments and her skill as one of our most adept and prophetic feminist thinkers.
Sex Work & Pornography
Pornography
Dworkin Andrea
Being and Being Bought
Kajsa Ekis Ekman · 2025
Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex
Sophia Giovannitti · 2023
Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights
Molly Smith, Juno Mac · 2018
Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work
Melissa Gira Grant · 2014
Feminism and Pornography (Oxford Readings in Feminism)
Drucilla Cornell · 2000
King Kong Theory
Virginie Despentes · 2010
'I'm writing as an ugly chick and for the ugly chicks, the frigid, the unfucked and the unfuckables, for all those girls who who are excluded from the marketplace of hot girls, and for all those guys who don't want to be protectors, for those who would like to be but don't know how, for those who are not ambitious, competitive, or well-endowed. Because this ideal of the seductive white woman that gets waved about in front us - well, I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist.'<br/>Powerful, provocative and personal, King Kong Theory is a candid account of how the author of Baise-Moi came to be Virginie Despentes. Drawing from personal experience, Despentes shatters received ideas about and prostitution, and explodes common attitudes about sex and gender. King Kong Theory is a manifesto for a new punk feminism, reissued here in a brilliant new translation by Frank Wynne.
Women & the City
Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World
Leslie Kern · 2021
Feminist City is an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly in an urban world.<br/><br/>We live in the city of men. Our public spaces are not designed for female bodies. There is little consideration for women as mothers, workers or carers. The urban streets often are a place of threats rather than community. Gentrification has made the everyday lives of women even more difficult. What would a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment.<br/><br/>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. Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out an intersectional feminist approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and women-friendly cities together.
Making Space: Women and the Manmade Environment
Matrix · 2022
Feminist Aesthetics
The Newly Born Woman (Tauris Transformations)
Helene Cixous, Catherine Clement · 1997
Red Velvet Seat: Women's Writings on the First Fifty Years of Cinema
Antonia Lant · 2006
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
Saidiya Hartman · 2020
The Other Side
Jennifer Higgie · 2023
Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics
Christine Battersby · 1990
Taking A Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature and Feminism in Our Time
Vivian Gornick · 2021
Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism (Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts)
Ewa Płonowska Ziarek · 2012
A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf · 1989
