Who has the recs?
@Owl - any recs? You always come to mind as a comrade with a good understanding of feminism.
reaper_cushions already recommended “Women, Race, and Class” by Angela Davis, which is the big one.
I would also recommend the ShitRedditSays recommended reading list, which is a nice collection of short and effective articles, by the people I learned feminism from. They have links to longer essays from the 101 links. The only caveat is that it says you should read the ShitRedditSays FAQ first, which you don’t, because they haven’t been relevant in nearly a decade.
Also it’s a mixed bag of whether you’ll get Marxist-feminism or not there. The short version is that class struggle fits inside intersectionality theory, and class is just another axis of oppression within the kyriarchy (although the biggest one by a lot). That’s a lot of jargon right now, but when you see these terms defined and wonder how they fit with class, just come back to that description. Nesting the theories this way works very well, and they’re very compatible when composed this way.
(Often I find that people are hostile to Marxist-feminism, because they see treating intersectionality as the more general one as somehow robbing the prestige of Marxism, and how can this squishy thing by girls be more important than the immortal science? And if you find that you’re one of those people, it’d be good to spend some time unpacking your assumptions.)
I would recommend Whipping Girl by Julia Serano. It’s queer trans feminist theory and an extremely good read about how patriarchy fuels misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia.
It was written in 2007, so some of the terminology around trans people is a little dated, but the core of the book remains relevant.
My literacy with feminist theory is low, but Sylvia Federici and Barbara Ehrenreich are both cool
Ehrenreich’s What Is Socialist Feminism is a blassic.
I think Federici’s seminal work is Caliban and the Witch but I haven’t read it.
I haven’t read Caliban and the Witch either, but have heard good things. It’s on my already too long reading list.
caliban and the witch is absolutely amazing and i would highly recommend it to everyone. its a fantastic work of steadfastly materialist history that centres the place of women and their labour (as both actors and subjects) in a robust examination of the class struggles between the aristocracy/bourgeoisie/peasantry-into-proletariat in the centuries of transition from feudalism to capitalism in europe, and its both academic and also quite easy to read
One thing I would strongly recommend is being wary of anything that is second wave feminism or earlier. The majority of 1st and 2nd wave western feminist movements were white and cishet centered. They were largely focused on getting access to the power structures of patriarchy and imperialism for white cishet women instead of true liberation.
There are also a lot of issues in second wave feminism around viewing masculinity and men as somehow inherently evil, which is total bullshit and leads to bizarre reactionary concepts like “political lesbianism” and TERFs.
I’m sure there is some interesting work in there if you can read it critically, but I view it as having minimal modern use in comparison to modern intersectional feminism.
Feminism for the 99% if you want I can let you borrow it next time I see you, totally random hexbear user whom I’ve definitely never met in real life.
:meow-hug: That’d be swell! Just started Jakarta Method today, so I’ll be working through that for a bit.
Have you been missing the Hexbear meetups? There’s posters all over Quantico advertising them, they’re hard to miss.
