How We Write Now
Black mothers are the public face and embodiment of loss. They constantly live on the edge, anticipating the sudden but not unexpected loss of their Black sons and men at the hands of the state’s legal system. Since the Black Lives Matter Movement, Black feminists have sharpened theorizing of loss as an intense Black aesthetic concerning predictable forms of anti-Black ...
Manufacturing Freedom
In Elena Shih’s pathbreaking book, she uncovers and offers a layered analysis of the moral economy of low-wage women’s work through a global ethnographic exploration of the rescue industry within the international movement of anti-trafficking. This wonderfully rich book contributes to anti-trafficking scholarship and activates diverse strategies for reading and understa...
Pregnant at Work
Given the fact that service industry work requires flexible and round-the-clock availability (not to mention periods when workers are expected to be “on call”), the reality that many employers in that sector offer limited or no time off for sick or parental leaves, and the necessity for pregnant women to schedule and attend frequent medical appointments—where there can ...
New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century
Are women funny? Sabrina Fuchs Abrams, professor of English at the State University of New York, Empire State, and author of New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century, asserts not only are women funny, but women humorists in the interwar period “used satire, irony, and wit as an indirect form of social protest” (p. 1). Examining the works of six female hum...
Who Would Believe a Prisoner?
Before readers even open its front cover, Who Would Believe a Prisoner? poses a powerful epistemological question about how institutions function through the repression of marginalized voices. The title quotes Harrie Banka, whose 1871 exposé of systematic corruption and sexual abuse at Indiana’s Jeffersonville State Prison accelerated Reconstruction Era calls t...
Fierce and Fearless
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink (Patsy Mink’s daughter) bring Mink’s life and career front and center, placing their work squarely within the historiography of women’s history, civil rights history, and environmental history while recounting Mink’s legislative achievements and goals, primarily using a feminist lens of analysis.
The Color Pynk
Through this work, Tinsley offers “a loving, lingering note on Black femmes’ poetics of survival in the Trump era and beyond.”
We Are Owed.
In her debut full-length poetry collection, We Are Owed., Ariana Brown steps into her own inheritance as a griot and medium as she weaves together vignettes of her experiences.
America, Goddam
Treva B. Lindsey’s America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice provides an in-depth examination of the lived experiences of Black women throughout the history of the United States.
Sasinda Futhi Siselapha (still Here): Black Feminist Approaches to Cultural Studies in South Africa’s Twenty Six Years Since 1994
Sasinda Futhi Siselapha (Still Here) is an edited volume of interdisciplinary scholars who work on ‘post-apartheid’ South Africa. The strength of the edited volume lies in the authors’ commitment to what feminist scholar Amina Mama calls the idea of activist scholarship.
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again
Katherine Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again proceeds from a provocative premise: that, perhaps, too much emphasis is placed on women’s speech in our contemporary discussions about sex.
The Divorce Colony
April White’s The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier tells the stories of four elite women who, when they moved to North Dakota in order to obtain divorces, found themselves at the center of controversy and gossip.
Honour-based Violence and Forced Marriages
Honour-based Violence and Forced Marriages: Community and Restorative Practices in Europe by Clara Rigoni explains issues that are truly relevant in our modern world. The book is mostly about such urgent matters as violation of human rights (especially those of women and children) in gender-based violence.
Dressed for Freedom
This fascinating and timely work will have you think twice about the clothes you put on every day. Einav Rabinovitch-Fox asks readers to take another look at twentieth-century fashion – this time, with a feminist lens.
Desert Chrome
Wilder’s Desert Chrome has a similar power that other memoirs have had in feminist theorizing, in that she uses the personal – writing as a witness – to build the threads that run through her narrative and guides her advocacy on the land.
Medicine Stories
Aurora Levins Morales’s book sets the reader up on a journey through her teachings and knowledges that she has gained over the years as a Puerto Rican Ashkenazi Jewish activist. This newly revised edition that expands on the original 1998 version, takes into consideration and subtly comments on the current political, social and activists’ climate.
Beyond the Periphery of the Skin
In Beyond the Periphery of the Skin, Federici looks at the ways in which the appropriation of women’s bodies is not merely supplementary to the regime of capitalism, but it is only by embedding women’s bodies within debates of reproduction, social organisation and workforce discipline, that capitalism can perform its hegemony.
Staging Black Fugitivity
McCormick presents a case for a deep investigation of how black theatre and performance discusses the remnants of slavery, questioning “the tensions of American citizenship and the limits of black freedom.”
Beauty Diplomacy
Oluwakemi M. Balogun’s Beauty Diplomacy: Embodying an Emerging Nation, however, examines beauty pageants in their full complexity by recognizing aspects of pageantry that some scholars deem troublesome while simultaneously honing-in on the industry’s role in diplomacy, nationalism, and international politics.
You’re Dead – So What?
This book provides an empirical study of media and law enforcement bias in reporting and investigating homicides of African American women compared with their white counterparts. The author discusses the symbiotic relationship between media coverage and the response from law enforcement to victims of color, particularly when these victims are reported missing and presumed to be in danger by their loved ones.
As We Have Always Done
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson locates Indigenous political resurgence as a practice rooted in uniquely Indigenous theorizing, writing, organizing, and thinking. She makes clear that the goal of Indigenous resistance can no longer be cultural resurgence as a mechanism for inclusion in a multicultural mosaic, calling for unapologetic, place-based Indigenous alternatives to the destructive logics of the settler colonial state.
Evidence of Being
Evidence of Being is an important book that should impact the contours of Black and Queer Studies. Bost’s recuperation of the history of black gay cultural expression opens new lines of inquiry for scholars concerned with black sexuality, loss, history, and memory. Readers will find Evidence of Being moving, theoretically rich, and original.
From Angel to Office Worker
Susie S. Porter’s newest monograph, From Angel to Office Worker, Middle-Class Identity and Female Consciousness in Mexico, 1890–1950, is an important piece of scholarship that unapologetically emphasizes that women’s history is labor history and that labor history is women’s history.
Sarah Waters: Gender and Sexual Politics
In her book, Claire O’Callaghan inserts herself into the debate between essentialist feminists and queer theorists, reading Waters’ historical fiction as a model for contemporary queer and feminist interdependence.