You have to know. To understand. Nothing happens in a vacuum.
On August 9, 2014 everything changed. The World Changed. Every word written here, every book listed, every reason for this list, all of it happens in a world that is not what it was before. Before Ferguson. Before Gamergate. Before all of the conversations that stripped complacency from awareness and left me grasping for some kind of sedative that would keep me from falling back into the abyss, but that had room for laughter and romance and silliness. And, yes, those are resistance and they are needed. Reading quiets the storm in my head. Gives me a map, a way toward something better. There are whole lists of books for anyone interested.
Here is the shape of my on-ramp:
Bad Feminist is a collection of essays that catapulted Roxane Gay into think-piece stardom. Her social media presence is inimitable and intimate and her essays are no different. They range from the questions that women have about enjoying pop culture in a world where all pop culture uses our bodies as objects, sometimes violently, to just how competitive a person can get about Scrabble. Her work is complicated and wide-spread. She sees much and writes with the awareness that brings her. It is not an easy collection. There is rape and there are terrible repercussions of rape. There is discomfort and bad decision making. All of the things that make adulting such a you-tube phenomenon.
Unspeakable Things comes from a young woman who brings something utterly troubling to the table: a picture of life on the ground floor of revolution and exactly how full of shit it is. Laurie Penny writes about the realities of sexual politics in activism and the presence of rape culture in the Occupy movement. She writes about the effects of the recession on the men in her life. She writes about the growing awareness of young men that the patriarchy doesn't care about them anymore than it cares about women. She, also, writes about rape.
The thread that binds.
Roxane Gay's book came out in August of 2014, Laurie Penny's in September. They signaled the beginning of a different kind of feminist bookshelf - one explicitly connected to the world of pop culture and social media. This is not to say that feminists and social justice activists have not used social media for years - quite the opposite, in fact. Publishing and bookstores in the white majority main stream book world are finally catching on. It takes a while. The status quo is heavy and persistent. Or so we are told.
More than one person I talked to read bits of these books and put them down, saying that it wasn't like they disagreed with anything in them, but that the conversations are 40+ years old and shouldn't we have stopped having them by now.
I overheard a deeply privileged woman expressing a common theme among white ladies: Gay's feminism is fine, but too much in the world of pop-culture.
Penny's book was criticized by a friend of mine for not seeing how dangerous the world is for women of color. She pointed out that the kind of revolution that many white activists think they are advocating for puts many marginalized people in grave and immediate danger.
We do not get to choose the revolutionary narrative. It is not our right. Or our privilege.
These books were the place I began. I am working to read more, to think more, to be unwilling to turn off my brain in order to laugh or be transported. I like my brain. It thinks things. Turning if off or walking away from is simply good practice for collusion with oppression.
#40days40books list
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