pdf – Little Bristling Soul

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 ***