What do you think?
Rate this book
Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought
A unique book, tracing 40 years of anti-racist feminist thought
Black, anti-colonial, anti-racist feminist thought is often sidelined in mainstream discourses that transform feminism into simplistic calculations of how many women are in positions of power. This unique book sets the record straight.
Through interviews with key scholars, including Angela Y. Davis and Silvia Federici, Bhandar and Ziadah present a serious and thorough discussion of race, class, gender, and sexuality not merely as intersections to be noted or additives to be mixed in, but as co-constitutive factors that must be reckoned with if we are to build effective coalitions.
Collectively, these interviews trace the ways in which Black feminists, Third World and post-colonial feminists, and indigenous women have created new ways of seeing, new theoretical frameworks for analysing political problems, and new ways of relating to one another.
Black, anti-colonial, anti-racist feminist thought is often sidelined in mainstream discourses that transform feminism into simplistic calculations of how many women are in positions of power. This unique book sets the record straight.
Through interviews with key scholars, including Angela Y. Davis and Silvia Federici, Bhandar and Ziadah present a serious and thorough discussion of race, class, gender, and sexuality not merely as intersections to be noted or additives to be mixed in, but as co-constitutive factors that must be reckoned with if we are to build effective coalitions.
Collectively, these interviews trace the ways in which Black feminists, Third World and post-colonial feminists, and indigenous women have created new ways of seeing, new theoretical frameworks for analysing political problems, and new ways of relating to one another.
288 pages, Paperback
First published August 18, 2020
29 people are currently reading
965 people want to read
About the author
Brenna Bhandar
6 books6 followersBrenna Bhandar is Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and coeditor of Plastic Materialities.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 2, 2021
This book was great. Each interviewee had a unique perspective, but they all spoke about their work with hope for the future, making this a surprisingly uplifting read.
They also engaged critically with Marxist thought, describing its shortcomings and filling in the gaps that class-focused Marxists have tended to ignore. This was, at times, a little more academic than I could handle, so I really appreciated the more conversational tone of Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore in their interviews.
Some of my personal highlights included: Gary Kinsmen's critique of the Canadian Liberal government co-opting intersectionality for neoliberal administration; Ruth Wilson Gilmore and the "anti-state state" (or "people who achieve or retain political power by condemning all aspects of the state while building it"); and Angela Davis pointing out that in Europe and the Americas, fascist tendencies have arisen from liberal democracy.
I could write extensively on Leanne Betasamosake Simpon's interview, especially her thoughts on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Colton Bushie, and First Nations being internationalist in outlook (despite the commonly held view that their knowledge is locally generated). She talks about "speaking in a coded, therefore protected, way to different audiences" in her writing, the pressure to conform to standards of "white legibility," and "making new worlds, rather than just talking about them." I'm looking forward to reading her work.
Silvia Federici's interview was my only disappointment. Her comments on "gender reassignment at a young age" equated internalized misogyny with gender dysphoria (did she just forget that AMAB trans women exist?), and given the opportunity to denounce trans exclusionary feminism, she instead criticized people who attribute the destabilization of gender to the trans movement. Her feminist work is extremely valuable, but her comments on the experiences of trans people...not so much.
Overall, I came away with a ton of exciting book recommendations, and a very optimistic outlook on the state of revolutionary discourse going into 2021.
They also engaged critically with Marxist thought, describing its shortcomings and filling in the gaps that class-focused Marxists have tended to ignore. This was, at times, a little more academic than I could handle, so I really appreciated the more conversational tone of Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore in their interviews.
Some of my personal highlights included: Gary Kinsmen's critique of the Canadian Liberal government co-opting intersectionality for neoliberal administration; Ruth Wilson Gilmore and the "anti-state state" (or "people who achieve or retain political power by condemning all aspects of the state while building it"); and Angela Davis pointing out that in Europe and the Americas, fascist tendencies have arisen from liberal democracy.
I could write extensively on Leanne Betasamosake Simpon's interview, especially her thoughts on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Colton Bushie, and First Nations being internationalist in outlook (despite the commonly held view that their knowledge is locally generated). She talks about "speaking in a coded, therefore protected, way to different audiences" in her writing, the pressure to conform to standards of "white legibility," and "making new worlds, rather than just talking about them." I'm looking forward to reading her work.
Silvia Federici's interview was my only disappointment. Her comments on "gender reassignment at a young age" equated internalized misogyny with gender dysphoria (did she just forget that AMAB trans women exist?), and given the opportunity to denounce trans exclusionary feminism, she instead criticized people who attribute the destabilization of gender to the trans movement. Her feminist work is extremely valuable, but her comments on the experiences of trans people...not so much.
Overall, I came away with a ton of exciting book recommendations, and a very optimistic outlook on the state of revolutionary discourse going into 2021.
September 23, 2020
„It’s also very important not to think you’re inventing thoseconversations for the first time; those conversations have been going back andforth forever. So why not start from recognition that those have been going on,and appreciate those voices, rather than just think you’re the first one to comealong and write about it?“ (Vron Ware)
I feel that often discussions and analysis (not rarely quite a superficial one’s) are frames as being „a first“ – the way publishing works for sure being one factor. There is a disconnect from earlier movements, theories, and discussions, and as Bhadar and Ziadah write a „wilful amnesia around issues of race and anti-racist struggle“. This book is a great resource counteracting this tendency.
In Revolutionary Feminisms Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah interviewten feminists who have shaped in different ways movements and theorisations ofour world. Roughly separated in the themes of Diaspora/ Migration/ Empire (AvtarBrah, Gail Lewis, and Vron Ware), Colonialism/ Capitalism/ Resistance (HimaniBannerji, Gary Kinsman, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Silvia Federici), and AbolitionFeminism (Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Avery F. Gordon, and Angela Y. Davis) Bhandarand Ziadah ask the interviewees about their political becoming, their experiences within different movements, theories they have related to/ critiqued/ worked on and much more.
But while I think it’s important to see different opinions and not always agree on all the details, a few aspects I’d like to point out: Federici– in an otherwise very interesting interview – suddenly goes into an unprompted rant about „children now transitioning at six years old“ and while Bhandar and Ziadahfollow up with a question on transphobia and feminism, Federici does more or less continue in that vein though she remains vague but it is never really challenged. I also found it quite glaring how in all these discussions which include a lot of different experiences, oppressive systems and practices etc, a discussion of antisemitism was very, very absent.
I feel that often discussions and analysis (not rarely quite a superficial one’s) are frames as being „a first“ – the way publishing works for sure being one factor. There is a disconnect from earlier movements, theories, and discussions, and as Bhadar and Ziadah write a „wilful amnesia around issues of race and anti-racist struggle“. This book is a great resource counteracting this tendency.
In Revolutionary Feminisms Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah interviewten feminists who have shaped in different ways movements and theorisations ofour world. Roughly separated in the themes of Diaspora/ Migration/ Empire (AvtarBrah, Gail Lewis, and Vron Ware), Colonialism/ Capitalism/ Resistance (HimaniBannerji, Gary Kinsman, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Silvia Federici), and AbolitionFeminism (Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Avery F. Gordon, and Angela Y. Davis) Bhandarand Ziadah ask the interviewees about their political becoming, their experiences within different movements, theories they have related to/ critiqued/ worked on and much more.
But while I think it’s important to see different opinions and not always agree on all the details, a few aspects I’d like to point out: Federici– in an otherwise very interesting interview – suddenly goes into an unprompted rant about „children now transitioning at six years old“ and while Bhandar and Ziadahfollow up with a question on transphobia and feminism, Federici does more or less continue in that vein though she remains vague but it is never really challenged. I also found it quite glaring how in all these discussions which include a lot of different experiences, oppressive systems and practices etc, a discussion of antisemitism was very, very absent.
December 24, 2022
It was a good group of different feminists, and I'm now introduced to activists whose work I want to know more about. And there are a lot of great thoughts in here, I ended up underlining a lot.
But this book is not great if you are not already very familiar with a lot of academic feminist theory. Which is a shame, because a few teaks such as including little definition blurbs or footnotes with little summaries of certain theories, people, or events being referenced would have gone really far. Since this is conversation style (which I did otherwise appreciate), it follows the natural ebbs and flows of a conversation between two people in the know, but they do nothing to compensate for gaps in conversation.
My biggest qualm, however, is with the editors of the book. It feels like a lot of the questions they asked the feminists were outright pandering to the interviewee or extremely leading. The introduction itself was also clear that the editors had "an agenda" as the kids would call it. Which only irks me because it makes these interviews feel like a much less genuine inquiry. Also speaking of the introduction, the authors used the most pretentious words and phrasing I've ever read.
But this book is not great if you are not already very familiar with a lot of academic feminist theory. Which is a shame, because a few teaks such as including little definition blurbs or footnotes with little summaries of certain theories, people, or events being referenced would have gone really far. Since this is conversation style (which I did otherwise appreciate), it follows the natural ebbs and flows of a conversation between two people in the know, but they do nothing to compensate for gaps in conversation.
My biggest qualm, however, is with the editors of the book. It feels like a lot of the questions they asked the feminists were outright pandering to the interviewee or extremely leading. The introduction itself was also clear that the editors had "an agenda" as the kids would call it. Which only irks me because it makes these interviews feel like a much less genuine inquiry. Also speaking of the introduction, the authors used the most pretentious words and phrasing I've ever read.
December 13, 2020
The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci once noted that in his world, marked by fascism – the fascism that would imprison and in doing so kill him – “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” Now, as then, those monsters take on myriad and diverse forms and shapes. Some are obvious – the white supremacy and reactionary national populism that dominate in unusually obvious ways our various nation and international polities. Some are less obvious although equally woven into the fundamental structures of our world, such as patriarchal power and the sort of liberal ‘lean in’ feminism that sustains the class and caste hierarchy that reinforces that ‘rule of the father’. In many national contexts, although far from most of them, that form of feminism that seeks admission to the hierarchies of power has become increasingly mainstreamed.
The attention and legitimacy of that liberal entryist feminism has aided in the marginalisation and deligitmation of other forms of feminist theory and practice, such as of the kind considered in this fabulous collection of interviews with a number of leading thinkers and players in a range of much more transformational feminist modes of theory and practice. Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah, the editors and interviewers, have gathered together 10 of the leading voices in forms of feminism seeking fundamental transformation as a path to liberation.
These 10 voices are clustered into three groups, focusing on diaspora, migration and empire, on struggles centred on colonialism and capitalism, and on the increasingly powerful tendency of abolition feminism. All of these conversations build a notion of feminist theory and practice (as well as of praxis) that engages multiple strands of oppression and alienation, accentuating the power of the intersectional in both analysis and in struggle. Along with these intersections of oppression, there is a rich engagement with parallel theoretical strands, leading to spirited engagements with, among others, Marxism, decoloniality, Indigeneity, queer theories and labour movement politics.
Crucially, each of the interviewees weaves their practice into their analyses, more often than not accentuating their biographies not only in their coming-to-consciousness, but also in their developing analyses. The result is 10 rich, open, outward looking discussions, often with strong reflective moments. In her conclusion, Lisa Lowe argues that “This volume moves us to reckon with our present time” (p226), which it does – but it also calls on us to assess futures, possibilities, probabilities, desirabilities and the viable.
If there is a limitation to the collection, even with its notably internationalist outlook, is its heavy orientation towards an Anglo-American North Atlantic nexus, even though two of the contributors are grounded in South Asia and one Indigenous to the lands claimed by Canada, with Leanne Betsamosake Simpson’s interview being the only one that breaks with the dominant strands of Euro-American philosophical outlooks.
Yet even with that limitation, these are voices for this monstrous times that offer rejuvenated hope for new ways of struggle that are not (just) defensive, but that grapple with the complexities of our times and out social realities and materialities. Highly recommended both for those new to these approaches, it’s a great introduction, and those not so new, who will find much to reflect and act on.
The attention and legitimacy of that liberal entryist feminism has aided in the marginalisation and deligitmation of other forms of feminist theory and practice, such as of the kind considered in this fabulous collection of interviews with a number of leading thinkers and players in a range of much more transformational feminist modes of theory and practice. Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah, the editors and interviewers, have gathered together 10 of the leading voices in forms of feminism seeking fundamental transformation as a path to liberation.
These 10 voices are clustered into three groups, focusing on diaspora, migration and empire, on struggles centred on colonialism and capitalism, and on the increasingly powerful tendency of abolition feminism. All of these conversations build a notion of feminist theory and practice (as well as of praxis) that engages multiple strands of oppression and alienation, accentuating the power of the intersectional in both analysis and in struggle. Along with these intersections of oppression, there is a rich engagement with parallel theoretical strands, leading to spirited engagements with, among others, Marxism, decoloniality, Indigeneity, queer theories and labour movement politics.
Crucially, each of the interviewees weaves their practice into their analyses, more often than not accentuating their biographies not only in their coming-to-consciousness, but also in their developing analyses. The result is 10 rich, open, outward looking discussions, often with strong reflective moments. In her conclusion, Lisa Lowe argues that “This volume moves us to reckon with our present time” (p226), which it does – but it also calls on us to assess futures, possibilities, probabilities, desirabilities and the viable.
If there is a limitation to the collection, even with its notably internationalist outlook, is its heavy orientation towards an Anglo-American North Atlantic nexus, even though two of the contributors are grounded in South Asia and one Indigenous to the lands claimed by Canada, with Leanne Betsamosake Simpson’s interview being the only one that breaks with the dominant strands of Euro-American philosophical outlooks.
Yet even with that limitation, these are voices for this monstrous times that offer rejuvenated hope for new ways of struggle that are not (just) defensive, but that grapple with the complexities of our times and out social realities and materialities. Highly recommended both for those new to these approaches, it’s a great introduction, and those not so new, who will find much to reflect and act on.
Want to read
March 2, 2025Maybe no one knows what to do: quoting Angela Y. Davis in her 2016 Steve Biko Memorial Lecture: "Legacies and Unfinished Activisms:"
"Students are now recognising that the legacies of past struggles are not static. if these legacies mean anything at all, they are mandates to develop new strategies, new technologies of struggles. And these legacies, when they are taken up by new generations reveal unfulfilled promises fo the past and therefore give rise to new activisms. As an activist of Steve Biko's generation, I have to constantly remind myself that the struggles of our contemporary times should be thought of as productive contradictions because they constitute a rupture with past struggles, but at the same time they reside on a continuum with those struggles and they have been enabled by activisms of the past. They are unfinished activisms" (2).
Cites Lisa Lowe, who argues that connections "between the emergence of European liberalism, settler colonialism in the Americas, the transatlantic African slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries' are often obscured by dominant understandings of the development of the liberal individual subject. " She investigates "how the figure of the liberal individual, and attendant political formations of freedom and democracy, have been produced through imperial forces of worldmaking and according to logics (such as commodity fetishism) that work - structurally, affectively and psychically - to abstract from and mask the imperial 'details' of their formation (Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents.)
Ruth Wilson Gilmore in Golden Gulag "analyses the spatial and financial abstractions that determined where and how prison expansion was planned in California in the 1990s; moreover, she brings these geographies into direct confrontation with the lived realities on the ground - the specific places, people and communities that bear the material consequences of the violence of abstraction. Her work is an object lesson in how to think about scale, and how to investigate the mutually constituting relationships between domestic spheres, local government, the state, and the global economy" (16)
Land and languages as sites of Indigenous resistance
example of South Asian woman who staged a feminist version of Ramlila "a p lay based on the Hindu epic of Ramayana . . we wanted to critique Sita's position as a woman, and we used the figure of a 'jester,' who provided a humorous though pointed commentary . . . here was a feminist stance presented through an idiom that was culturally familiar to those present" (42) - made me think of Arundhati Roy's analysis of Hinduism as (a) new and (b) a settler colonial ideology
Gail Lewis: "I've been trying to understand the dynamics of a working-class household of multiraciality, living in the mid-to-late twentieth century, and why my granddad - my white granddad - was committed to working-class politics, an absolute socialist, but racist as fuck, excuse me, when it came to his daughter and me? And how do you understand that? What did it mean?" (56)
About her memoir article "Birthing Racial Difference: Conversations with my Mother and Others" in Studies in the Maternal 1:1 2009, 1-21: "I decided to use myself as an example, a case study. But don't forget, I was very much schooled by Ambalavaner Sivanandan in a politics of linking the individual to the collective - that brilliant phrase of his: 'making an individual/local case into an issue, turning issues into causes and causes into movements and building in the process a new political culture" (Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism) - and it's also psychological, individual experience as well as social, it creates emotions and interiority, and forms our subjectivity and emotions (57).
Queston re: shift from a collective idea of eminist politics to a more contempoary one that "valorises individual accomplishment" and how that is "read psychoanalytically": One socioeconomic and psychological struggle is between " anarcissistic one where the maintenance of yourself0 your ego, the maintenance of your own individuality, protection of self and what's yours - is ni constant conflict with teh desire and need to have connection with others. These pulls iare in constant conflict because, you must remember, psychoanalysis is a model fo conflict, just as Marxism is.
"Part of psychic life is this battle between a pull towards individuation and separation, on ther one hand, and a pull towards connectiona dndependence, on the other. In the context of an attack on welfare, socila relations were imagined in the welfare state as connections between strangers; of course, these were national strangers, but strangers nevertheless, and we didn't want 'outsiders.' . . . [the discourse of the nanny-state dependency] easily travels into psychic life, where it causes an increased conflict: a pull between individuation and autonomy, a fantasiesed omnipotence.
"The push back into self-reliance, self-actualisation, on one hand can feel good, and dependency can feel like a narcissistic wound that leaves us saying 'Yes, please, I'll have some of that fantasy of omnipotence, of independence in an era of Brexit in which we can delude ourselves about some return to greatness. Yes, I'll have some of that.' but it collapses because there isn't enough affordable, decent housing , and you are on a zero-our contract that doesn't guarantee regular income, but is okay because it means you can balance the thousand demands you have on your time and emotional resources each week. [And the banks have been playing with your life since 2008], and there's the collapse of the capacity to be independent; suddenly you need a welfare state that's gone, and the pressure that imposes via a sense of failure mobilises feelings of shame, and in psychoanalytic thinking, there's a real sense of a fear of annihilation, especially in the Kleinian school, where there's a sense of that's what the death drive is. (It's a bit different in the Freudian school, and in the Winnicottian, there is not a conception of the death drive.)
"There is a constant fear that I'm going to be eradicated if I'm not independent, if I'm not strong enough in terms of my ego, if my sense of self is threatened or if I'm so dependent that I'm going to disappear. And that means I can start mobilising psychic defences to try and ward off those feelings that are unbearable and unintelligible. So everything can tap into that and promote feelings of hatred, the feeling of being threatened, that somebody has come and taken what's mine and gone 'Look, there are no jobs, and even though there are no immigrants round here, the immigrants have taken the jobs and I don't fucking understand what's going on anymore.' And psychically, in unconscious fantasy, that makes sense because I can't be independent; I can't get a job; I can't do what I'm supposed to do as a proper adult, especially if I'm a man - look after my family, that kind of stuff." (65-66).
ensuring that a market logic handled welfare instead of the logic of meeting needs
her concerns about the class state that "produces a disciplined, pacified working class that also produces subordinated, racialised, gendered subjects" is also a welfare state that did, in fact, support mums and households and welfare services
Beyond the Pale includes the story of Catherine Impey, an anti-racist Quaker "who ran her own anti-imperialist publication, and the young journalist Ida B. Wells, who were introduced to each other by Frederick Douglass."
Silvia Federici who points out that it was feminism that made the trans movement possible by separating sex and gender.
"Students are now recognising that the legacies of past struggles are not static. if these legacies mean anything at all, they are mandates to develop new strategies, new technologies of struggles. And these legacies, when they are taken up by new generations reveal unfulfilled promises fo the past and therefore give rise to new activisms. As an activist of Steve Biko's generation, I have to constantly remind myself that the struggles of our contemporary times should be thought of as productive contradictions because they constitute a rupture with past struggles, but at the same time they reside on a continuum with those struggles and they have been enabled by activisms of the past. They are unfinished activisms" (2).
Cites Lisa Lowe, who argues that connections "between the emergence of European liberalism, settler colonialism in the Americas, the transatlantic African slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries' are often obscured by dominant understandings of the development of the liberal individual subject. " She investigates "how the figure of the liberal individual, and attendant political formations of freedom and democracy, have been produced through imperial forces of worldmaking and according to logics (such as commodity fetishism) that work - structurally, affectively and psychically - to abstract from and mask the imperial 'details' of their formation (Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents.)
Ruth Wilson Gilmore in Golden Gulag "analyses the spatial and financial abstractions that determined where and how prison expansion was planned in California in the 1990s; moreover, she brings these geographies into direct confrontation with the lived realities on the ground - the specific places, people and communities that bear the material consequences of the violence of abstraction. Her work is an object lesson in how to think about scale, and how to investigate the mutually constituting relationships between domestic spheres, local government, the state, and the global economy" (16)
Land and languages as sites of Indigenous resistance
example of South Asian woman who staged a feminist version of Ramlila "a p lay based on the Hindu epic of Ramayana . . we wanted to critique Sita's position as a woman, and we used the figure of a 'jester,' who provided a humorous though pointed commentary . . . here was a feminist stance presented through an idiom that was culturally familiar to those present" (42) - made me think of Arundhati Roy's analysis of Hinduism as (a) new and (b) a settler colonial ideology
Gail Lewis: "I've been trying to understand the dynamics of a working-class household of multiraciality, living in the mid-to-late twentieth century, and why my granddad - my white granddad - was committed to working-class politics, an absolute socialist, but racist as fuck, excuse me, when it came to his daughter and me? And how do you understand that? What did it mean?" (56)
About her memoir article "Birthing Racial Difference: Conversations with my Mother and Others" in Studies in the Maternal 1:1 2009, 1-21: "I decided to use myself as an example, a case study. But don't forget, I was very much schooled by Ambalavaner Sivanandan in a politics of linking the individual to the collective - that brilliant phrase of his: 'making an individual/local case into an issue, turning issues into causes and causes into movements and building in the process a new political culture" (Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism) - and it's also psychological, individual experience as well as social, it creates emotions and interiority, and forms our subjectivity and emotions (57).
Queston re: shift from a collective idea of eminist politics to a more contempoary one that "valorises individual accomplishment" and how that is "read psychoanalytically": One socioeconomic and psychological struggle is between " anarcissistic one where the maintenance of yourself0 your ego, the maintenance of your own individuality, protection of self and what's yours - is ni constant conflict with teh desire and need to have connection with others. These pulls iare in constant conflict because, you must remember, psychoanalysis is a model fo conflict, just as Marxism is.
"Part of psychic life is this battle between a pull towards individuation and separation, on ther one hand, and a pull towards connectiona dndependence, on the other. In the context of an attack on welfare, socila relations were imagined in the welfare state as connections between strangers; of course, these were national strangers, but strangers nevertheless, and we didn't want 'outsiders.' . . . [the discourse of the nanny-state dependency] easily travels into psychic life, where it causes an increased conflict: a pull between individuation and autonomy, a fantasiesed omnipotence.
"The push back into self-reliance, self-actualisation, on one hand can feel good, and dependency can feel like a narcissistic wound that leaves us saying 'Yes, please, I'll have some of that fantasy of omnipotence, of independence in an era of Brexit in which we can delude ourselves about some return to greatness. Yes, I'll have some of that.' but it collapses because there isn't enough affordable, decent housing , and you are on a zero-our contract that doesn't guarantee regular income, but is okay because it means you can balance the thousand demands you have on your time and emotional resources each week. [And the banks have been playing with your life since 2008], and there's the collapse of the capacity to be independent; suddenly you need a welfare state that's gone, and the pressure that imposes via a sense of failure mobilises feelings of shame, and in psychoanalytic thinking, there's a real sense of a fear of annihilation, especially in the Kleinian school, where there's a sense of that's what the death drive is. (It's a bit different in the Freudian school, and in the Winnicottian, there is not a conception of the death drive.)
"There is a constant fear that I'm going to be eradicated if I'm not independent, if I'm not strong enough in terms of my ego, if my sense of self is threatened or if I'm so dependent that I'm going to disappear. And that means I can start mobilising psychic defences to try and ward off those feelings that are unbearable and unintelligible. So everything can tap into that and promote feelings of hatred, the feeling of being threatened, that somebody has come and taken what's mine and gone 'Look, there are no jobs, and even though there are no immigrants round here, the immigrants have taken the jobs and I don't fucking understand what's going on anymore.' And psychically, in unconscious fantasy, that makes sense because I can't be independent; I can't get a job; I can't do what I'm supposed to do as a proper adult, especially if I'm a man - look after my family, that kind of stuff." (65-66).
ensuring that a market logic handled welfare instead of the logic of meeting needs
her concerns about the class state that "produces a disciplined, pacified working class that also produces subordinated, racialised, gendered subjects" is also a welfare state that did, in fact, support mums and households and welfare services
Beyond the Pale includes the story of Catherine Impey, an anti-racist Quaker "who ran her own anti-imperialist publication, and the young journalist Ida B. Wells, who were introduced to each other by Frederick Douglass."
Silvia Federici who points out that it was feminism that made the trans movement possible by separating sex and gender.
February 21, 2025
This is NOT a book for people that are beginners in academic feminist theory. Let me make that clear right off the bat. Personally, I am not well-versed in it and that made this book very hard to read at times. The interviewers and interviewees were constantly throwing out academic terminology and never really describing what they meant. This makes sense for the format, because it’s ultimately written like a conversation between people who know what they’re talking about. But I also think this could have been a really valuable introductory text had some more care been put into making it more accessible. That was more of what I was expecting when I picked it up, so I did find myself a bit disappointed by this book.
However, there’s a lot of great stuff here. I loved the discussion of abolition feminism, particularly Angela Davis’s section which I found to be very accessible. I really liked how a lot of these feminists built upon Marxism and its defects, and ultimately this book gave me a lot of academics to look into and learn from, which is great. But don’t come into this expecting an easy read because it is not that.
Another thing I wanted to add: I was disappointed by Silvia Federici’s comments about how children shouldn’t be transitioning at a young age. Felt transphobic. I loved Caliban and the Witch and was excited to learn more about her work, but that kinda ruined her section for me.
However, there’s a lot of great stuff here. I loved the discussion of abolition feminism, particularly Angela Davis’s section which I found to be very accessible. I really liked how a lot of these feminists built upon Marxism and its defects, and ultimately this book gave me a lot of academics to look into and learn from, which is great. But don’t come into this expecting an easy read because it is not that.
Another thing I wanted to add: I was disappointed by Silvia Federici’s comments about how children shouldn’t be transitioning at a young age. Felt transphobic. I loved Caliban and the Witch and was excited to learn more about her work, but that kinda ruined her section for me.
November 14, 2023
I am no fan of conversations in books, especially non-fiction, so I should have made more of a note of that specific phrase in the title.
This book feels too comfortable to me, which is rather unsettling when the topics are so important and academically complex. I will try to explain. The Q&A format feels too accommodating and scripted. Almost too easy, like a chat between pals about things they both already know and agree upon. Hardly revolutionary or radical for me. I get that people working in the same fields, or intersecting fields, will possibly know each other and what they write about, but that doesn't mean you can't challenge your subject with harder questions, or confront them with unfamiliar topics.
Possibly a good book for beginners, but this has all been said before, again.
Taxonomy is not critique.
True social/political alliances are built on shared interests, not shared identities.
Social struggles are being reduced to commodity fetishes by citizens and academics.
This book feels too comfortable to me, which is rather unsettling when the topics are so important and academically complex. I will try to explain. The Q&A format feels too accommodating and scripted. Almost too easy, like a chat between pals about things they both already know and agree upon. Hardly revolutionary or radical for me. I get that people working in the same fields, or intersecting fields, will possibly know each other and what they write about, but that doesn't mean you can't challenge your subject with harder questions, or confront them with unfamiliar topics.
Possibly a good book for beginners, but this has all been said before, again.
Taxonomy is not critique.
True social/political alliances are built on shared interests, not shared identities.
Social struggles are being reduced to commodity fetishes by citizens and academics.
December 7, 2024
Any book that focuses on academic feminists in the global north while excluding militant feminists in the global south dedicated to praxis rather than critical theory is going to be limited in how “revolutionary” it really is.
April 25, 2023
non-fiction text featuring numerous feminist thinkers and activists. I enjoyed the interview format of the book as well as how the feminist thinkers and their influences are referenced across the text by other thinkers. I liked how I was introduced to new thinkers I wasn’t familiar with before reading. the text felt a little dry at times, though. overall, I would recommend this to feminists looking for an insight into different feminist activists and are ready for an intellectual read.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews