Who has the recs?
Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex”. It has the sentence that started the trans movement.
“One is not born, but is rather made, a woman.”
She certainly didn’t intend it this way, but it is wonderful waving this in the faces of TERFs when they tell you a woman is an adult human female. And the beautiful part is that they can’t refute the statement without kicking the legs out from under their entire feminist movement. The Second Sex was huge for feminism.
Just looking at my bookshelf:
Women, Race and Class and Whipping Girl have both been mentioned but I’ll reiterate those.
All of Alexandra Kollontai’s writings are really good, if a bit outdated in terms of sex work and women’s roles as mothers.
Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale by Maria Mies is a good intro to Marxist feminism
Ain’t I a Woman by Bell Hooks is a good black feminist perspective, as is Sister Outsider by Audre Lord
Leslie Feinberg’s works are all great, and while they’re focused on trans issues they intersect a lot with feminism.
I’m not sure it’s really qualified as theory, but if you’re a cishet man reading this thread, a parent especially, I’d highly recommend “How to raise a feminist son” by Sonora Jha.
As someone with a redpilled ex living in the imperial core I’ve been struggling with how to work through that and that book helped me a lot. She talks a lot about how she engaged with media over the course of raising her son and how she repurposed even stories that reinforce patriarchy as a way to introduce critical thinking. It has a specific anecdote that I resonated with quite strongly where she went to see a film with her son he had seen prior and she caught him watching to see her reaction to see if she saw what he did. Sort of a common practice in my own family to be honest.
I’ve been liking Will to Change so far
