Feminist Theory | Verso Reading Guide

Book strip #1

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  Glitch Feminism

  by Legacy Russell

  The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our...
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  The Xenofeminist Manifesto

  by Laboria Cuboniks

  The Xenofeminist Manifesto is an attempt to articulate a feminism fit for the twenty-first century. Unafraid of exploring the potentials of technology, exploring both oppressive and emancipatory po...
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  Females

  by Andrea Long Chu

  “Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.”So begins Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and ...
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  Full Surrogacy Now

  by Sophie Lewis

  "Rooted in historical, site-based, narrative, and political accounts, Full Surrogacy Now is the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for. This kind of gestation depends on...
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  The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

  by Friedrich Engels

  Foreword by Jennifer Doyle

  Introduction by Eleanor Burke Leacock

  In this provocative and now-classic work, Friedrich Engels explores the interrelated development of the family and the state from ancient society to the Victorian era. Drawing on new anthropologica...
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  The Anti-Social Family

  by Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh

  The stereotypical nuclear family is in the minority of households, yet remains a powerful ideology. This classic of socialist feminism charts how the family reinforces conditions of inequality, and...
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  Abolish the Family

  by Sophie Lewis

  What if we could do better than the family?We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonmen...
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  They Call It Love

  by Alva Gotby

  They Call It Love investigates the work that makes a haven in a heartless world, examining who performs this labour, how it is organised, and how it might change. Drawing on the thought of the femi...
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  The Arcana of Reproduction

  by Leopoldina Fortunati

  Translated by Arlen Austin and Sara Colantuono

  Emerging from the great social upheavals that contested the sexual and racial divisions of labor globally in the 1970s, Leopoldina Fortunati’s classic work expands and transforms how we analyze the...
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  Woman's Estate

  by Juliet Mitchell

  Scrutinizing the political background of the movement, its sources and its common ground with other radical movements of the sixties, Women's Estate describes the organization of women's liberation...
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  Abortion and Women's Choice

  by Rosalind Petchesky

  Foreword by Zillah Eisenstein

  This prize-winning study is the definitive work on the politics of abortion and fertility. Rosalind Pollack Petchesky provides overwhelming evidence against the anti-abortion forces and in the proc...
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  Cultures in Babylon

  by Hazel V. Carby

  Bringing together multi-award-winning author Hazel Carby’s most important and influential essays, Cultures in Babylon addresses the political dilemmas of representing Black women as sexual subjects...
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  Feminism or Death

  by Francoise d'Eaubonne

  Translated by Ruth Hottell

  Originally published in French in 1974, radical feminist Francoise d’Eaubonne surveyed women’s status around the globe and argued that the stakes of feminist struggle was not about equality but abo...
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  Feminist Antifascism

  by Ewa Majewska

  In this exciting, innovative work, Polish feminist philosopher Ewa Majewska maps the creation of feminist counterpublics around the world—spaces of protest and ideas, community and common struggle,...
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  Taking A Long Look

  by Vivian Gornick

  For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick’s essays, written with her characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and pe...
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  Fortunes of Feminism

  by Nancy Fraser

  Second Wave feminism emerged as a struggle for women’s liberation and took its place alongside other radical movements. But feminism’s subsequent immersion in identity politics coincided with a dec...

Book strip #2

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  The Dialectic of Sex

  by Shulamith Firestone

  An international best-seller, first published in 1970 when Shulamith Firestone was just twenty-five years old, The Dialectic of Sex broke new ground in presenting a theory of politics for the women...

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Book strip #11

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  Glitch Feminism

  by Legacy Russell

  The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our...

Book strip #12

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  Feminist City

  by Leslie Kern

  What should 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 wi...

Book strip #13

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  Revolutionary Feminisms

  by Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah

  Edited by Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah

  In a moment of rising authoritarianism, climate crisis, and ever more exploitative forms of neoliberal capitalism, there is a compelling and urgent need for radical paradigms of thought and action....

Book strip #14

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  The Future of Difference

  by Sabine Hark and Paula-Irene Villa

  Translated by Sophie Lewis

  The Future of Difference theorises contemporary regimes of power as engaged primarily in the violent production of difference. In this moment, the logic of ‘other and rule’ thoroughly permeates the...

Book strip #15

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  The Feminist and The Sex Offender

  by Judith Levine and Erica R. Meiners

  With analytical clarity and narrative force, The Feminist and the Sex Offender contends with two problems that are typically siloed in the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration: sexual and gender vi...

Book strip #16

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  Burn It Down!

  by Breanne Fahs

  Burn It Down! is a testament to what is possible when women are driven to the edge. Collecting over seventy-five manifestos from around the world, Burn It Down! is a rallying cry and a call to acti...

Book strip #17

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  Fortunes of Feminism

  by Nancy Fraser

  Second Wave feminism emerged as a struggle for women’s liberation and took its place alongside other radical movements. But feminism’s subsequent immersion in identity politics coincided with a dec...

Book strip #18

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  Females

  by Andrea Long Chu

  “Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.”So begins Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and ...

Book strip #19

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  Revolting Prostitutes

  by Juno Mac and Molly Smith

  How the law harms sex workers - and what they want insteadDo you have to endorse prostitution in order to support sex worker rights? Should clients be criminalized, and can the police deliver justi...

Book strip #20

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  Feminism for the 99%

  by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser

  Unaffordable housing, poverty wages, healthcare, climate change, border policing; not the issues you ordinarily hear feminists talking about. But don’t these issues impact the vast majority of wome...

Book strip #21

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  The Xenofeminist Manifesto

  by Laboria Cuboniks

  The Xenofeminist Manifesto is an attempt to articulate a feminism fit for the twenty-first century. Unafraid of exploring the potentials of technology, exploring both oppressive and emancipatory po...

Book strip #22

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  Where Freedom Starts: Sex Power Violence #MeToo

  Edited by Verso Books US

  The powerful wave of rage fueling #MeToo has finally refocused public attention on sexual harassment and sexual violence and starkly posed questions of power, of feminism, and of politics. How do w...

Book strip #23

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  Playing the Whore

  by Melissa Gira Grant

  The sex industry is an endless source of prurient drama for the mainstream media. Recent years have seen a panic over "online red-light districts," which supposedly seduce vulnerable young women ...

Book strip #24

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  Promise of a Dream

  by Sheila Rowbotham

  At the beginning of the decade renowned historian Sheila Rowbotham was a rebellious sixteen-year-old at a Methodist boarding school in the north-east of England, reading Sartre and dreaming of Pari...

Book strip #25

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  Flora Tristan

  by Sandra Dijkstra

  Active in the 1830s and 1840s, Flora Tristan is best known for her book "Workers' Union", an account of the conditions of women and workers in Peru, London, Paris and the provinces of France. Regar...

Book strip #26

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  Betraying Big Brother

  by Leta Hong Fincher

  On the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, the Chinese government arrested five feminist activists and jailed them for 37 days. The Feminist Five became a global cause célèbre, with Hillary C...

Book strip #27

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  Heart Of The Race

  by Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe

  Introduction by Lola Okolosie

  Heart of the Race is a powerful corrective to a version of Britain’s history from which black women have long been excluded. It reclaims and records black women’s place in that history, documenting...

Book strip #28

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  Invisibility Blues

  by Michele Wallace

  First published in 1990, Michele Wallace’s Invisibility Blues is widely regarded as a landmark in the history of black feminism. Wallace’s considerations of the black experience in America include ...

Book strip #29

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  Constituting Feminist Subjects

  by Kathi Weeks

  Kathi Weeks suggests that one of the most important tasks for contemporary feminist theory is to develop theories of the subject that are adequate to feminist politics. Although the 1980s modernist...

Book strip #30

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  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

  by Mary Wollstonecraft

  Introduction by Sheila Rowbotham

  Composed in 1790, Mary Wollstonecraft’s seminal feminist tract A Vindication of the Rights of Woman broke new ground in its demand for women’s education. A Vindication remains one of history’s most...

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Book strip #32

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  Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman

  by Michele Wallace

  Foreword by Jamilah Lemieux

  Originally published in 1978, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman caused a storm of controversy. Michele Wallace blasted the masculine biases of the black politics that emerged from the si...

Book strip #33

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  I, Rigoberta Menchú

  by Rigoberta Menchú

  Introduction by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray

  Edited by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray

  Translated by Ann Wright

  Now a global bestseller, the remarkable life of Rigoberta Menchú, a Guatemalan peasant woman, reflects on the experiences common to many Indian communities in Latin America. Menchú suffered gross i...

Book strip #34

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  Beyond the Pale

  by Vron Ware

  Foreword by Mikki Kendall

  How have ideas about white women figured in the history of racism? Vron Ware argues that they have been central, and that feminism has largely developed as a political movement within racist societ...

Book strip #35

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  Inside This Place, Not of It

  by Voice of Witness

  Foreword by Michelle Alexander

  Inside This Place, Not of It reveals some of the most egregious human rights violations within women’s prisons in the United States. In their own words, the thirteen narrators in this book recount ...