Tag: full text

do you have any recommendations for someone who’s just getting into feminist literature? thanks!

Yes! This is hard because it depends on how far back you want to go, and where your primary interests lie….Also, by feminist literature are you looking for theory or for fiction with a feminist bent? If it is the latter you are searching for, I apologize because I already compiled a bunch of theory for you and then realized that might not be what you had in mind. 

Edit: I was going to write descriptions and organize this in a more effective way, but I need to move out of my apartment this afternoon and I haven’t slept in two days. Thus, lamentably, I am afraid that I was too ambitious and sprawling and have perhaps merely compiled a useless dump of PDFs instead of offering you succinct and cogent guidance. My apologies.

Anyway; I have bolded and starred the texts that I enjoy most. Most link to full text PDFs. 

Early feminist thought: 

If you were taking a intro feminist philosophy class they’d probably tell you to start with Mary Wollstonecraft’s  A Vindication of the Rights of Women
[1792]  which was written as a response to Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution in which Burke argued that the French Revolution would fail and that society was ultimately bolstered and held intact by traditional structures of property and class. Wollstonecraft echoed Thomas Paine in writing against Burke but augmented his position by further arguing in a humanist bent for the inherent rights of women as equal to that of men. It’s rather dry reading and certainly dated, but is a seminal text that is worth checking out if you want background on more contemporary feminism.

About a half century later you have Sojourner Truth (side note: alongside Joan of Arc, my first heroine as a child) whose A’int I A Woman Speech is underrepresented in feminist philosophy classes but should be included as a canonical text for around this time period as an early rebuke to the white-centric, racist rhetoric of mainstream feminism. 

Virginia Woolf—A Room of One’s Own

The Second Wave

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir **

Influenced by existential thought, de Beauvoir writes of the existential unfolding of a woman ’s life; of the ways in which her attitude towards her embodied selfhood alters throughout her lifespan and how this attitude is crafted by society. Sartre observed that whatever we perceive, including other people, is rendered as an ‘object’ to our gaze and is defined by us. de Beauvoir extends this concept to argue that as man “is the Subject, he is the Absolute; she is the Other”.  The meaning of what it is to be a woman is given by men.” Thus,  women are constantly under siege in a painful conflict between their humanity and their femininity. de Beauvoir writes of the traumatic process, beginning in puberty, by which women lose their selfhood, their agency, “becoming flesh” in the eyes of the society in which they function. In other words, de Beauvoir was perhaps the first to argue that women are not born but made, enmeshed in vast and complex economic, religious, material, cultural, and ideological structures that fabricate and enforce ideas of femininity. While identity theory in the 1970′s led to a massive backlash against de Beauvoir, the immense debt that contemporary feminists owe her is finally being acknowledged once more. I cannot recommend this text enough. 

Sexual Politics by Kate Millet 

Sexual Politics’s primary focus is an in-depth analysis of the patriarchal bias that underlies literary production. It was the first major work to apply feminist theory to specific works of literature. Authors that Millet critiques include D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer. 

The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution by Shulamith Firestone ***

“An international bestseller, originally published in 1970, when Shulamith Firestone was just twenty-five years old, The Dialectic of Sex was the first book of the women’s liberation movement to put forth a feminist theory of politics.”

When I first read this book in my freshman year of college, I was completely put off by it. While I had considered myself a strident feminist since age seven, I’d never had any grounding in feminist theory outside of what was easily accessible within the pop-culture saturated, lazy liberal bourgeois mainstream. I was thrown by radical ideas that I’d never encountered and defensive about Firestone’s desire to abolish procreative sex, childhood, monogamy, and natural (physiological vs. mechanized) reproduction. 

While I am, perhaps sadly, too cynical and too conventional to jump on board with all of Firestone’s arguments, I’ve grown to love this text in my twenties, both for its willingness to dream wildly and fiercely of how we might construct a more egalitarian society and for its cogent and compelling analysis of feminism as the supplementary radical ideology that unifies Marxist and Freudian concepts and paves the way toward revolution. Ahead of her time to an astonishing degree, she initiated conversations about the ethical necessity to abolish gender  that have only truly reached the mainstream consciousness during the last few years.

Overviews of Feminism:

FEMINIST THEORY: from margin
to center by  bell hooks 

Race and Feminism

On Being White: Thinking Toward a Feminist Understanding of Race and Race Supremacy by Marilyn Frye From The Politics Of Reality: Essays In Feminist Theory (The Crossing Press 1983) **

bell hooks- Essentialism and Experience

bell hooks–Talking Back: thinking feminist. thinking black.

bell hooks–Ain’t I a Woman?

Gloria Anzaldúa—Borderlands/La Frontera ***

Masculinity and Feminism: 

We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity by bell hooks 

Gender Dynamics and Romantic Partnership: 

All About Love by bell hooks ***

The Will to Change by bell hooks (sorry, no pdf on this one)***

Sexuality

This Sex Which Is Not One by Luce Irigaray***

Sexology and Antifeminism, Sheila Jeffreys (PDF)

Toward a Feminist Praxis of Sexuality, Wendy Stock (PDF)

Eroticizing Women’s Subordination, Sheila Jeffreys (PDF)

Nebulously and Generally Categorized Third-Wave Feminism/Poststructuralism 

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler*** 

The Complete Works of Andrea Dworkin*** 

http://www.mediafire.com/file/kqsshslvh9xd9rr/The+Complete+Works+of+Andrea+Dworkin+%28pdf%29.zip

Rape

Rape Redefined*
Catharine A. MacKinnon

Catharine A. MacKinnon: In Their Hands: Restoring Institutional Liability for
Sexual Harassment in Education

Bodies 

Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body by Susan Bordo*** (Sadly, I cannot find this in a PDF)

The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment by Maud Ellmann***

I write in the night, but I see not only the tyranny. If that were so, I would probably not have the courage to continue. I see people sleeping, stirring, getting up to drink water, whispering their projects or their fears, making love, praying, cooking something while the rest of the family sleeps, in Baghdad and Chicago. (Yes, I see too the forever invincible Kurds, 4,000 of whom were gassed, with U.S. compliance, by Saddam Hussein.) I see pastry cooks working in Teheran, and the shepherds, thought of as bandits, sleeping beside their sheep in Sardinia; I see a man in the Friedrichshain quarter of Berlin sitting in his pajamas with a bottle of beer reading Heidegger and he has the hands of a proletarian. I see a small boat of illegal immigrants off the Spanish coast near Alicante; I see a mother in Ghana, her name is Aya, which means Born on Friday, swaying her baby to sleep; I see the ruins of Kabul and a man going home; and I know that, despite the pain, the ingenuity of the survivors is undiminished, an ingenuity which scavenges and collects energy, and, in the ceaseless cunning of this ingenuity, there is a spiritual value, something like the Holy Ghost. 

I am convinced of this in the night, although I don’t know why. The next step is to reject all the tyranny’s discourse. Its terms are crap. In the interminably repetitive speeches, announcements, press conferences, and threats, the recurrent terms are Democracy, Justice, Human Rights, Terrorism. Each word in the context signifies the opposite of what it was once meant to. Each has been trafficked; each has become a gang’s code word, stolen from humanity. 

Democracy is a proposal (rarely realized) about decision-making; it has little to do with election campaigns. Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in the light of, consultation with the governed. This is dependent upon the governed being adequately informed about the issues in question, and upon the decision-makers having the capacity and will to listen and take account of what they have heard. 

Democracy should not be confused with the “freedoms” of binary choices, the publication of opinion polls, or the crowding of people into statistics. These are its pretense. 

Today the fundamental decisions, which effect the unnecessary pain increasingly suffered across the planet, are being made unilaterally without any open consultation or participation. For instance, how many U.S. citizens, if consulted, would have said Yes to George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol over the carbon-dioxide greenhouse effect, which is already provoking disastrous floods in many places and threatens, within the next twenty-five years, far worse disasters?

 It is a little more than a century ago that Dvorák composed his Symphony from the New World. He wrote it while directing the National Conservatory of Music in New York, and the writing of it inspired him to compose, eighteen months later, still in New York, his sublime Cello Concerto. In the symphony, the horizons and rolling hills of his native Bohemia become the promises of the New World. Not grandiloquent but loud and continuing, for they correspond to the longings of thse without power, of those who are wrongly called simple, of those the U.S. Constitution addressed in 1787. I know of no other work of art that expresses so directly and yet so toughly (Dvorák was the son of a peasant, and his father once dreamed of his becoming a butcher) the beliefs that inspired generation after generation of migrants who became U.S. citizens. For Dvorák the force of those beliefs was inseparable from a kind of tenderness, a respect for life such as can be found intimately among the governed (as distinct from the governors) everywhere. And it was in this spirit that the symphony was publicly received when it was first performed at Carnegie Hall on December 16, 1893. Dvorák was asked what he thought about the future of American music, and he recommended that U.S. composers listen to the music of the Indians and blacks. The Symphony from the New World expressed a hopefulness without frontiers which, paradoxically, is welcoming because centered on an idea of home. A utopian paradox.

 Today the power of the same country that inspired such hopes has fallen into the hands of a coterie of fanatical (wanting to limit everything except the power of capital), ignorant (recognizing only the reality of their own firepower, hypocritical (two measures for all ethical judgments, one for us and another for them), and ruthless B-52 plotters. How did this happen? The question is rhetorical, for there is no single answer, and it is idle, for no answer will dent their power yet. But to ask it in this way in the night reveals the enormity of what has happened.

—from WHERE ARE WE? by John Berger, from the introduction to Between the Eyes, Essays on Photography and Politics, by David Levi Strauss, excerpted in the March 2003 Harper’s

full text here

“Everyone knows that pain is endemic to life, and wants to forget this or relativize it. All the variants of the myth of a Fall from the Golden Age, before pain existed, are an attempt to relativize the pain suffered on earth. So too is the invention of Hell, the adjacent kingdom of pain-as-punishment. Likewise the discovery of Sacrifice. And later, much later, the principle of Forgiveness. One could argue that philosophy began with the question: why pain? 

Yet, when all this has been said, the present pain of living in the world is perhaps in some ways unprecedented. Consumerist ideology, which has become the most powerful and invasive on the planet, sets out to persuade us that pain is an accident, something that we can insure against. This is the logical basis for the ideology’s pitilessness. 

I write in the night, although it is daytime. A day in early October 2002. For almost a week the sky above Paris has been blue. Each day the sunset is a little earlier and each day gloriously beautiful. Many fear that before long, U.S. military forces will be launching the “preventive” war against Iraq, so that the U.S. oil corporations can lay their hands on further and supposedly safer oil supplies. Others hope that this can be avoided. Between the announced decisions and the secret calculations, everything is kept unclear, since lies prepare the way for missiles. I write in a night of shame. 

By shame I do not mean individual guilt. Shame, as I’m coming to understand it, is a species feeling which, in the long run, corrodes the capacity for hope and prevents us looking far ahead. We look down at our feet, thinking only of the next small step. People everywhere, under very different conditions, are asking themselves: Where are we? The question is historical not geographical. What are we living through? Where are we being taken? What have we lost? How to continue without a plausible vision of the future? Why have we lost any view of what is beyond a lifetime? 

The well-heeled experts answer: Globalization. Postmodernism. Communications Revolution. Economic Liberalism. The terms are tautological and evasive. To the anguished question of Where are we? the experts murmur: Nowhere. Might it not be better to see and declare that we are living through the most tyrannical-because the most pervasive-chaos that has ever existed? It’s not easy to grasp the nature of the tyranny, for its power structure (ranging from the 200 largest multinational corporations to the Pentagon) is interlocking yet diffuse, dictatorial yet anonymous, ubiquitous yet placeless. It tyrannizes from offshore, not only in terms of Fiscal Law but in terms of any political control beyond its own. Its aim is to delocalize the entire world. Its ideological strategy, beside which Bin Laden’s is a fairy tale, is to undermine the existent so that everything collapses into its special version of the virtual, from the realm of which -and this is the tyranny’s credo-there will be a never-ending source of profit. It sounds stupid. Tyrannies are stupid. This one is destroying at every level the life of the planet on which it operates…. 

The shame begins with the contestation (which we all acknowledge somewhere but, out of powerlessness, dismiss) that much of the present suffering could be alleviated or avoided if certain realistic and relatively simple decisions were taken. There is a very direct relation today between the minutes of meetings and minutes of agony. 

Does anyone deserve to be condemned to certain death simply because they don’t have access to treatment which would cost less than $2 a day? This was a question posed by the director-general of the World Health Organization last July. She was talking about the AIDS epidemic, in Africa and elsewhere, in which an estimated 68 million people will die within the next eighteen years.

 I’m talking about the pain of living in the present world. Most analyses and prognoses about what is happening are understandably presented and studied within the framework of their separate disciplines, economics, politics, media studies, public health, ecology, national defense, criminology, education, etc. In reality, each of these separate fields is joined to another to make up the real terrain of what is being lived. It happens that in their lives people suffer from wrongs which are classified in separate categories, and suffer them simultaneously and inseparably. 

A current example: some Kurds who fled recently to Cherbourg, and have been refused asylum and risk being repatriated to Turkey, are poor, politically undesirable, landless, exhausted, illegal, and the clients of nobody. And they suffer each of these conditions at one and the same second! To take in what is happening, an interdisciplinary vision is necessary in order to connect the “fields” which are institutionally kept separate. And any such vision is bound to be (in the original sense of the word) political. The precondition for thinking politically on a global scale is to see the unity of the unnecessary suffering taking place. This is the starting point.“ 

—from WHERE ARE WE? by John Berger, from the introduction to Between the Eyes, Essays on Photography and Politics, by David Levi Strauss, excerpted in the March 2003 Harper’s

full text here