Race & Gender Studies

During a period when writing was often the only form of self-expression for women, Her Own Life contains extracts from the autobiographical texts of twelve seventeenth-century women addressing a wide range of issues central to their lives.

"The most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind."--The New York Times (Editors' Choice)

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR--The New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Shelf Awareness, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews

Antiracism is a transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism--and, even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. At its core, racism is a powerful system that creates false hierarchies of human value; its warped logic extends beyond race, from the way we regard people of different ethnicities or skin colors to the way we treat people of different sexes, gender identities, and body types. Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas--from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities--that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves.

Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism. This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society.

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 in a revolutionary analysis of male supremacy, Dworkin was a philosopher outside and against the academy who wrote with a singular, apocalyptic urgency.

Last Days at Hot Slit brings together selections from Dworkin's work, both fiction and nonfiction, with the aim of putting the contentious positions she's best known for in dialogue with her literary oeuvre. The collection charts her path from the militant primer Woman Hating (1974), to the formally complex polemics of Pornography (1979) and Intercourse (1987) and the raw experimentalism of her final novel Mercy (1990). It also includes "Goodbye to All This" (1983), a scathing chapter from an unpublished manuscript that calls out her feminist adversaries, and "My Suicide" (1999), a despairing long-form essay found on her hard drive after her death in 2005.

"This perceptive resource on radical black liberation movements in the 21st century can inform anyone wanting to better understand . . . how to make social change."--Publishers Weekly

The breadth and impact of Black Lives Matter in the United States has been extraordinary. Between 2012 and 2016, thousands of people marched, rallied, held vigils, and engaged in direct actions to protest and draw attention to state and vigilante violence against Black people. What began as outrage over the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin and the exoneration of his killer, and accelerated during the Ferguson uprising of 2014, has evolved into a resurgent Black Freedom Movement, which includes a network of more than fifty organizations working together under the rubric of the Movement for Black Lives coalition. Employing a range of creative tactics and embracing group-centered leadership models, these visionary young organizers, many of them women, and many of them queer, are not only calling for an end to police violence, but demanding racial justice, gender justice, and systemic change.

In Making All Black Lives Matter, award-winning historian and longtime activist Barbara Ransby outlines the scope and genealogy of this movement, documenting its roots in Black feminist politics and situating it squarely in a Black radical tradition, one that is anticapitalist, internationalist, and focused on some of the most marginalized members of the Black community. From the perspective of a participant-observer, Ransby maps the movement, profiles many of its lesser-known leaders, measures its impact, outlines its challenges, and looks toward its future.

The third edition of the iconic collection Making Space for Indigenous Feminism features feminist, queer and two-spirit voices from across generations and locations.

Feminism has much to offer Indigenous women, and all Indigenous Peoples, in their struggles against oppression. Indigenous feminists in the first edition fought for feminism to be considered a valid and essential intellectual and activist position. The second edition animated Indigenous feminisms through real-world applications. This third edition, curated by award-wining scholar Gina Starblanket, reflects and celebrates Indigenous feminism's intergenerational longevity through the changing landscape of anti-colonial struggle and theory. Diverse contributors examine Indigenous feminism's ongoing relevance to contemporary contexts and debates, including queer and two-spirit approaches to decolonization, gendered and sexualized violence, storytelling and narrative, digital and land-based presence, Black and Indigenous relationalities and more. This book bridges generations of powerful Indigenous feminist thinking to demonstrate the movement's cruciality for today.

This remarkable collection of twenty stories about motherhood by writers who are mothers evokes every stage of the journey, from pregnancy and birth through the childhood years, adolescence, and adulthood. Together they depict the complexity of mothering in America today as woman are actually experience it.

The works gathered here constitute a step toward a new mothers literature that puts to rest the long-held myth that has separated motherhood from a woman's creativity. In these pages women from all walks of life, single, married, divorced or just out of their teens and well into their eighties, rich and poor, black and white, grapple with the realities of motherhood - sacrifice and boundless joy, self-doubt and miracles of the every day. Whether you are a new mother, a seasoned mother, or a grandmother many times over you will find yourself in this book.

Contributors: Mary Grimm, Laurie Colwin, Perri Klass, Kate Braverman, Molly Giles, Mary Gordon, Ronnie Sandroff, Roxana Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Marian Thurm, Paula K. Gover, Marsha Lee Berkman, Melissa Pritchard, Jane Shapiro, Julia Whitty, Alice Elliott Dark, J. California Cooper, Sue Miller, Eileen Fitzgerald.

Marinella's masterpiece, The Nobility and Excellence of Women, and the Defects and Vices of Men was first published in 1600, composed at a furious pace in answer to Giusepe Passi's diatribe about women's alleged defects. This polemic displays Marinella's vast knowledge of the Italian poetic tradition and demonstrates her ability to argue against authors of the misogynist tradition from Boccaccio to Torquato Tasso. Trying to effect real social change, Marinella argued that morally, intellectually, and in many other ways, women are superior to men.