Gothic Feminism: A Reading List
The madwomen are coming out of the attic and the witches are among us—we ignore them at our peril. Happy Halloween reading from Verso!
Gothic writing is about the return of the repressed, the emergence of the uncanny, the haunting of those who have been wronged. The horror of the gothic novel is not from the monsters themselves—the witches and madwomen, the ghostly specters and raging Furies—but from the reckoning of injustice being, finally, at hand.
It is no surprise that this has long been a feminist genre, for women have been closeted and repressed, silenced and forced into attics both real and metaphorical. The explosion of women’s rage in the eighteenth century was given voice by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Women; tellingly, her daughter become one of the most famous gothic novelists of all: Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.
With today’s cresting wave of feminist rage and feminist desire, the gothic banshee is back, and she is writing. The madwomen are coming out of the attic and the witches are among us—we ignore them at our peril. Happy Halloween reading from Verso!
[book-strip index="1" style="buy"]A cat and mouse game of surveillance and psychological torment develops between a middle aged artist and her aging mother.
[book-strip index="2" style="buy"]A jarringly sensual book about the peculiarities of our bodies and the impossibilities of our families, and a young woman trying to find a way forward with both.
[book-strip index="3" style="buy"]In these darkly playful and punky stories, the fantastical elements are always grounded in the universal pettiness of strife between the sexes, and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs, whatever planet that ladder might be on.
[book-strip index="4" style="buy"]“The internet is all about girls—and is an impossible place to be one. Girl Online writes its way through that dilemma with critical insight and creative moxie. It’s a really good book for anyone who has ever tried to have a gender—especially on the internet.” – McKenzie Wark, author of Capital is Dead
[book-strip index="5" style="buy"]The incendiary French feminist work that defined ecofeminism—now available for the first time in English. As d’Eaubonne prophesied, “The planet placed in the feminine will flourish for all.”
[book-strip index="6" style="buy"]A manifesto for cyberfeminism: finding liberation in the glitch between body, gender, and technology.
[book-strip index="7" style="buy"]Burn It Down! is a testament to what is possible when women are driven to the edge — including The Manifesto of Apocalyptic Witchcraft by Peter Grey.
[book-strip index="8" style="buy"]Debut novel from critically acclaimed artist and musician Jenny Hval presents a heady and hyper-sensual portrayal of sexual awakening and queer desire.
[book-strip index="9" style="buy"]A provocative and lyrical exploration of trauma and memory, from one of Norway’s most famed and provocative novelists. Longlisted for the National Book Award!
[book-strip index="10" style="buy"]“Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.” Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire.
[book-strip index="11" style="buy"]Brilliant, insane, violent, prescient—Valerie Solanas’s 1968 manifesto announcing the formation of the Society for Cutting Up Men.
[book-strip index="12" style="buy"]Mary Wollstonecraft’s foundational text from 1790, an elegant and impassioned argument for women’s education.
[book-strip index="13" style="buy"]Silvia Federici wrote: “Revolting Prostitutes is a book I have been waiting for.” What more could you possibly need to know?!
[book-strip index="14" style="buy"]A pocket colour manifesto for a new futuristic feminism.
[book-strip index="15" style="buy"]Reviewing the large, disparate, and often contradictory western discourse on gender and sexuality of the Other.
[book-strip index="16" style="buy"]*NOT AVAILABLE IN NORTH AMERICA
An international bestseller, originally published in 1970, when Shulamith Firestone was just twenty-five years old, The Dialectic of Sex was the first book of the women’s liberation movement to put forth a feminist theory of politics.
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Non-Verso:
Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, by Avery F. Gordon
This book cracked our editor’s mind wide open, in terms of its subject—haunting and history—and its example of how evocative and experimental a work of scholarship can be.
White is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi
A haunted house, a mysterious set of twins, a meditation on race and belonging in contemporary Britain, and an elegant lyrical tale.
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, by Angela Carter
Dark and sensual, haunting and violent fairy tales from this master of the supernatural – and icon of the 1960s women’s liberation movement.
K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, by Mark Fisher
Stop whatever you’re doing and go read the essays on goth couture, golgothic materialism, and horror stories immediately.
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
Meet Bertha Mason, the original madwoman in the attic and symbol of all the trauma of British colonialism; meet Jane Eyre, the most clear-eyed and fierce narrator ever penned.
Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English
A pamphlet written in a blaze of anger during the women’s liberation movement in 1973, this was the first book to argue that women healers had been demonized and that the witch-hunt was a regime of terror launched against women challenging patriarchal institutions, economies, and laws.
Fledgling, by Octavia Butler
A vampire tale, an allegory of race and otherness, and a novel about survival from the late, brave, and brilliant Octavia Butler.
