100 books like Beauvoir in Time

This is the Granddaddy of earthshattering, perspective-changing books: philosopher Michel Foucault’s nimble dissection of the rise and the role of sexuality in the Western world. Written, and surely meant to be read, more like a Homeric epic poem than an academic treatise, every single sentence in this book quivers with energy and perception. From pithy aphorisms like “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species”, to heady pronouncements such as ‘”Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective”, this book is a gift that perpetually keeps on giving. Guaranteed to blow your mind.

Sigmund Freud tends to be lampooned these days as a cartoonish patriarch, but psychoanalysis is one of the few genuinely insightful theories that tries to understand why people frequently do things they can’t explain, don’t understand, or don’t even want to do. Social psychologist Michael Billig’s book starts out by noting that Freud considered his greatest discovery to be not the unconscious (as most people think), but repression – the series of activities that produce the unconscious. The book is a clearly-written, practical exploration of how repression is accomplished in day-to-day life. An example: “Each time adults tell a child how to speak politely, they are indicating how to speak rudely”. Think about that.

This slim volume by Toni Morrison is a spare, elegant meditation on how what is absent – from view, from awareness, from narrative (in this case, what she calls the “Africanist presence” in the literary imagination) – exerts a structuring influence on what is present. The prose is characteristically beautiful, but what keeps me coming back to this book is the luminous tenor of Morrison’s engagement with literature that many people find objectionable and even racist. Rather than dismiss, condemn, and cancel, Morrison wants to understand, engage, and gain insight. “My project arises from delight, not disappointment”, she says, and that truly shows.

As befitting the cheeky title, this book – about what it means to be, and to become, a gay man – is incisive, erudite, and a lot of fun to read. A pioneer of queer theory (and with this intervention, I suspect, a renegade from it), David Halperin is an unapologetic camp. He challenges received wisdom about how gay sensibility supposedly is misogynist, passé, irrelevant or dead, and his reflections on everything from Joan Crawford’s pizazz, to the current state of gay marriage, vacillate between being capacious and withering. “Sometimes I think homosexuality is wasted on gay people” he sniffs at one point, dispensing a delightful, and typically barbed, aperçu.

The Second Sex, published in 1949, is a forerunner of numerous books about the female psyche and experience; de Beauvoir inspired the next generation of feminist authors.

As a young woman it made me sit up and learn about historical, cultural, psychological, and political attitudes toward girls and women, and how those had always moulded females to fit stereotypes, and meet the expectations of their emotional, social, and familial connections.

It is presented in a very understandable way, that manoeuvers diverse parts into a comprehensible whole.  It changed my personal construct of myself as a woman and guided me to interact differently with my immediate world.

People have not always agreed with some of what is written, but de Beauvoir ignites in-depth debate.

I love this memoir because Leslie Morgan is a wise, funny, articulate, sex-positive, feminist BFF, who shares her emotional and sexual journey in the year after divorce and before turning 50 with pride rather than shame as she renounces the drab ex-wife role, dresses alluringly, and dates wildly.

Writing about sex and dating can be a cliché-ridden minefield, but Morgan enlivens the highs, lows, and middles with metaphors that resonate and invite you into the scene. And it’s not just about sex – it’s about the emotional truths that she learns along the way as she demonstrates an enjoyable way for older women to reclaim their sexual mojo and feel valued as an older woman. 

Yuknavitch’s memoir is a gloves-off gut-punch of stories about her life as a competitive swimmer, a daughter of a tyrannical father, and an artist-in-the-making. Best of all: The sex scenes are like nothing I’ve ever read. DO NOT MISS THIS ONE.

This excellent collection of essays brings some of the key readings of Sophocles’ Antigone in an ethical and feminist key. It includes, among others, interpretations by Tina Chanter, Luce Irigaray, and Bracha L. Ettinger. In the fascinating lineup of chapters, the book guides us through political, psychoanalytical, and sexual genealogies and classical interpretations of this Greek myth, thus providing the authoritative scholarship on a female figure of Antigone.  

Levenstein’s subtitle says it all: we generally don’t think there was a ‘90s feminism. Her book pairs especially well with the others on this list, because it demonstrates how women of color took the lead in an intersectional feminism that focused on a huge range of issues at the end of the 20th century. It’s also a great read about the role of the early internet in 1990s feminist organizing. If you think social media was the first time computer technology shaped grassroots activism, her chapter on technology alone will blow your mind.

The Bridge is a terrific and terrifying novella about womanhood, the patriarchate, technology, identity, and, ultimately, freedom. Its theme appeals to me as I have always been an ally of the women’s cause and JS Breukelaar does a great job describing a disturbing future if we are not more careful and respectful. What’s more, it is a great story, which embarks the reader in a dark and fascinating labyrinth. Both nightmarish and poetic, with references to ancient mythologies, The Bridge offers a unique reading experience. Although it’s very different stylistically from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, I nonetheless consider it to be a top-class feminist speculative fiction classic.