Here are 100 books that Living a Feminist Life fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have been a feminist for as long as I can remember. I recall seeing a billboard featuring Sophie Dahl sprawling on a sofa, completely naked. I recognized that I had no control over the images that dominate the visual landscape I inhabit, and I wanted to change this. These books might seem varied, but they all critique aspects of contemporary culture and offer ways to change things. In my academic writing and artwork, I examine these issues through a queer, feminist, and anti-capitalist lens, and these books offer a glimpse into the struggles that I think are important and the methods for change that I think could work.
To be honest, I could’ve picked any book by David Harvey–he writes about capitalism and how it affects people and the places we inhabit in a really accessible way. This brief introduction is a great way to get into his writing (a gateway book!). It is also a useful guide to thinking about contemporary issues with hope rather than despair.
Like the book by Ahmed, this one offers ideas for a socially just society, giving the reader solutions and not just problems. I think it is important when critiquing society to come up with tangible ways that we can move away from unequal systems to more equitable ones. This book makes change feel possible.
Neoliberalism - the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action - has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Its spread has depended upon a reconstitution of state powers such that privatization, finance, and market processes are emphasized. State interventions in the economy are minimized, while the obligations of the state to provide for the welfare of its citizens are diminished. David Harvey, author of 'The New Imperialism' and 'The Condition of Postmodernity', here tells the political-economic story of…
I have been a feminist for as long as I can remember. I recall seeing a billboard featuring Sophie Dahl sprawling on a sofa, completely naked. I recognized that I had no control over the images that dominate the visual landscape I inhabit, and I wanted to change this. These books might seem varied, but they all critique aspects of contemporary culture and offer ways to change things. In my academic writing and artwork, I examine these issues through a queer, feminist, and anti-capitalist lens, and these books offer a glimpse into the struggles that I think are important and the methods for change that I think could work.
This book appeals to me as both an academic and an artist. In my art practice, I critique gender stereotypes in commercial and commodity culture, and this book provides a brief history of advertising and why it is bad for societies, followed by brilliant creative case studies of activist artists and artworks.
It contains lots of images of poster campaigns and graphic designs that uncover the ways that adverts play with our fears and desires–a subject that I talk about in relation to body and beauty ideals in my book. The artists in this book are very clever and hugely talented, so the book is a constant source of inspiration.
Advertising Shits in Your Head calls adverts what they are—a powerful means of control through manipulation—and highlights how people across the world are fighting back. It diagnoses the problem and offers practical tips for a DIY remedy. Faced with an ad-saturated world, activists are fighting back, equipped with stencils, printers, high-visibility vests, and utility tools. Their aim is to subvert the adverts that control us.
With case studies from both sides of the Atlantic, this book showcases the ways in which small groups of activists are taking on corporations and states at their own game: propaganda. This international edition includes…
I have been a feminist for as long as I can remember. I recall seeing a billboard featuring Sophie Dahl sprawling on a sofa, completely naked. I recognized that I had no control over the images that dominate the visual landscape I inhabit, and I wanted to change this. These books might seem varied, but they all critique aspects of contemporary culture and offer ways to change things. In my academic writing and artwork, I examine these issues through a queer, feminist, and anti-capitalist lens, and these books offer a glimpse into the struggles that I think are important and the methods for change that I think could work.
There are a lot of books about selfies out there (including mine), so it was difficult to choose one. Tiddenberg’s book is my favorite because it talks about why selfies are treated as unimportant or superficial things. However, it shows that being able to represent yourself as you wish is a powerful tool.
Tiddenberg argues that selfies are mocked and viewed as a demonstration of narcissism because they shift power away from visual culture gatekeepers, such as fashion photographers and magazine editors, towards marginalized people who have less power. By clearly showing why some people hate selfies, the book articulates why I love them.
This book brings a rich and nuanced analysis of selfie culture. It shows how selfies gain their meanings, illustrates different selfie practices, explores how selfies make us feel and why they have the power to make us feel anything, and unpacks how selfie practices and selfie related norms have changed or might change in the future.
As humans, we have a long history of being drawn to images, of communicating visually, and being enchanted with (our own) faces. Every day we share hundreds of millions of photos on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Selfies are continually and passionately talked about. People…
I have been a feminist for as long as I can remember. I recall seeing a billboard featuring Sophie Dahl sprawling on a sofa, completely naked. I recognized that I had no control over the images that dominate the visual landscape I inhabit, and I wanted to change this. These books might seem varied, but they all critique aspects of contemporary culture and offer ways to change things. In my academic writing and artwork, I examine these issues through a queer, feminist, and anti-capitalist lens, and these books offer a glimpse into the struggles that I think are important and the methods for change that I think could work.
This book deals with a subject that I feel strongly about–fat discrimination. It includes diet culture and the damage caused by the medicalization of fat. Lupton’s book was the first I read on this subject, and it is a brilliant, concise introduction to the social and political meanings of fat today.
Importantly, it debunks things like the BMI (body mass index commonly used in medicine to determine a person’s health level) and introduced me to movements such as the Health at Every Size Movement. It describes ways that anti-fat biases are being fought against, and I try to practice them in my life and academic work.
In contemporary western societies, the fat body has become a focus of stigmatizing discourses and practices aimed at disciplining, regulating and containing it. Despite the fact that in many western countries fat bodies outnumber those that are thin, fat people are still socially marginalized, and treated with derision and even repulsion and disgust. Medical and public health experts continue to insist that an 'obesity epidemic' exists and that fatness is a pathological condition which should be prevented and controlled.
Fat is a book about why the fat body has become so reviled and reviewed as diseased, the target of such…
After bumping around newspaper journalism in my 20s, I wandered into a Ph.D. and then landed a great job at the University of Texas at Austin. Being a professor allowed me to explore any subject that seemed interesting, which resulted in books on environmental collapse, sexism and pornography, racism, foreign policy and militarism, religion, journalism and mass media, and critical thinking. Throughout this work, radical feminism has remained at the core of my philosophy. Andrea Dworkin captures this politics in a line from her novel Ice and Fire, “'I am a feminist, not the fun kind.” Such feminism may not always be fun, but it’s always important.
When I first read this book on feminist philosophy in the late 1980s, I was nervous about both feminism (because I wasn’t sure what it meant for me) and philosophy (because I wasn’t sure I was smart enough to understand it).
Marilyn Frye’s book helped me realize that I had been raised in a male-dominated and deeply sexist culture without knowing much about it, making feminism essential to my education. She also demonstrated that philosophy written in plain language was for everyone rather than an esoteric endeavor for specialists.
Frye was a scholar-in-residence at the university where I did graduate studies, and she sat in on our reading group. It was a real treat to sit across the room and hear her think out loud.
Politics of Reality includes essays that examine sexism, the exploitation of women, the gay rights movement and other topics from a feminist perspective.
“This is radical feminist theory at its best: clear, careful and critical.”—SIGNS
“For anyone first coming to feminism, these essays serve as a backdrop . . . for understanding the basic, early and continuing perspectives of feminists. And for all of us they provide a theoretical framework in which to read the present as well as the past.”—Women’s Review of Books
“The style is both scholarly and direct without being ponderous. Frye makes a concerted effort to…
Valerie M. Hudson is a University Distinguished Professor and holds the George H.W. Bush Chair in the Department of International Affairs at The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, where she directs the Program on Women, Peace, and Security. Hudson was named to the list of Foreign Policy magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers, and was recognized as Distinguished Scholar of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA/ISA) and awarded an inaugural Andrew Carnegie Fellowship as well as an inaugural Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Australian National University. She has been selected as the Distinguished Scholar Award recipient for 2022 by the Political Demography and Geography Section (PDG/ISA) of the International Studies Association.
If Enloe’s book set the stage, Tickner’s 1992 book was the first to openly challenge the then-conventional verities of IR Theory in a systematic way. In her book, Tickner takes on the two major subdivisions of IR thought—Security/Conflict Studies and International Political Economy, and mounts a devastating critique of the major approaches in each. She lambasts how gendered our understandings of, say, deterrence are, and how the state is viewed in IR theory as a “masculine” entity, and how this has warped our understandings and even the very questions we ask in IR. Tickner does the same with the clearly male-focused world of microeconomic theory with its womanless world of rational utility maximizers. This book set IR back on its collective heels.
My family moved around a lot when I was younger, which may explain why I’m fascinated by the experience of being an outsider. To me, it’s not a bad thing; being on the outside can sometimes help a person to see things more clearly, to think more critically and creatively. The year I spent living in a country where English wasn’t the main language was one of the most stimulating periods of my life, because I was so attuned to all the tiny details that other people took for granted. Plus, as teenagers, everyone feels like they’re on the outside looking in – which is probably why all of my books have contained some coming-of-age element.
Like many people, I was really impressed by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk on the problem of a single story. So when I saw that she’d written a short chapbook of feminist advice for a friend who’d recently become a mother to a baby girl, I had to get my hands on a copy. My own daughter was still a preschooler when it came out, so I figured I had just enough time to make good on the fifteen pieces of advice she offers. Witty, wise, and supremely accessible, this is a book for mothers and daughters equally – as well as anyone with an interest in building a more just and equitable world for all.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The award-winning author of We Should All Be Feminists and Americanah gives us this powerful statement about feminism today—written as a letter to a friend.
A few years ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a childhood friend, a new mother who wanted to know how to raise her baby girl to be a feminist. Dear Ijeawele is Adichie’s letter of response: fifteen invaluable suggestions—direct, wryly funny, and perceptive—for how to empower a daughter to become a strong, independent woman. Filled with compassionate guidance and advice, it gets right to the heart of sexual politics in…
I write about contemporary art, and much of the work I’ve been drawn to was made by women and by artists in other sidelined communities. Early on, I also focused on marginalized disciplines: artists’ books, performance, and art that responded directly to the vacant sites that abounded in New York City when I started out in the late 1970s. It was an enormously exciting time, but also a tough one. Violence was very hard to avoid. I didn’t focus on that at the time, but ultimately, I realized I needed to look more directly at trouble, and how artists respond to it.
I didn’t read Last Days ofHot Slit in time to include it in my own book about sexual violence. In truth, I could have (barely; it was published just before I finished). But I felt comfortable with my aversion to Dworkin, a crusader against assault who had found common cause with conservative activists. And Dworkin was a self-defeating font of vituperation, wasn’t she? Well, no. She was in fact altogether brilliant. Fateman’s wonderfully lucid, deeply researched introduction and the careful selection she and Scholder made of Dworkin’s surprisingly wide-ranging work, demonstrate the force and courage not just of this radical feminist’s writing, but also of her character.She was dauntless.
Selections from the work of radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin, famous for her antipornography stance and role in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s.
Radical feminist author Andrea Dworkin was a caricature of misandrist extremism in the popular imagination and a polarizing figure within the women's movement, infamous for her antipornography stance and her role in the feminist sex wars of the 1980s. She still looms large in feminist demands for sexual freedom, evoked as a censorial demagogue, more than a decade after her death. Among the very first writers to use her own experiences of rape and battery…
I’ve always been interested in food, even as young as 3 years old I remember wanting to taste everything, and I found the process of cooking fascinating. But I really got interested in food as a topic for research during my time studying Greek culture for my PhD thesis. People on the island of Kalymnos, where I’ve conducted research for 30 years, made a strong connection between food and memory, but it was a connection that few scholars have written about until recently. So I’ve been excited to participate in a new field reflected by all of these books, and hope you will be as well.
This is the first book of its kind to combine a focus on women’s food knowledge from growing and harvesting to cooking.
The author draws from a wide array of sources to provide a rare cross-cultural and historical perspective on women’s food practices and their significance to “sexual politics.” Written in accessible and lively prose that is both informative and a pleasure to read.
Women have always been inextricably linked to food, especially in its production and preparation. This link, which applies cross-culturally, has seldom been fully acknowledged or celebrated. The role of women in this is usually taken for granted and therefore often rendered unimportant or invisible. This book presents a wide-ranging, interdiscplinary and comprehensive feminist analysis of women's central role in many aspects of the world's food systems and cultures. This central role is examined through a range of lenses, namely cross-cultural, intergenerational, and socially diverse.
I'm a London-based critic, author, and host whose love affair with film began after seeing The Lion King in the cinema as a kid. I trained as a journalist because I wanted to talk about the world. Since then I’ve been covering film and culture for the likes of Empire Magazine, Time Out, and IGN. I co-host MTV Movies and the weekly film reviews podcast Fade to Black; co-founder of The First Film Club event series and podcast, and am a member of London's Critics' Circle. I'm a voice for gender equality, diversity, and inclusion in the entertainment industry and an advocate for MENA representation as a writer of Tunisian heritage.
One of the most influential thinkers and writers on feminist film theory, Mulvey’s groundbreaking essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is one of many that tackle the representation of women in art and culture and how these mediums might impede or aid the women’s movement.
Mulvey was a great resource for my own book in analysing the overt sexualisation of female characters on screen to cater to the so-called Male Gaze and misogynistic pleasures.
A new edition of Laura Mulvey's groundbreaking collection of essays, originally published in 1989. In an extensive introduction to this second edition, Mulvey looks back at the historical and personal contexts for her famous article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema , and reassesses her theories in the light of new technologies.
