A hit-and-miss broadside against two centuries of missteps by mainstream feminists.
A professor of women’s and gender studies faults feminism’s focus on White women like Margaret Sanger and Betty Friedan and its neglect of activists from marginalized groups.
Schuller melds history and gender theory in a jeremiad against “white feminism,” which attracts “people of all sexes, races, sexualities, and class backgrounds, though straight, white, middle-class women have been its primary architects.” In a 200-year “counterhistory of feminism,” the author argues fiercely that White, capitalist feminists have furthered their own aims while harming minorities or slighting their contributions. The remedy doesn’t lie in practices such as “liberals’ favorite elixirs: awareness, diversity, equity, and inclusion.” As Schuller notes, “inclusivity within capitalism is a fool’s errand. Its core problem is that it presents capitalism as the deliverer of equality, when capitalism is actually a chief engine of social harm.” The solution consists of an intersectional fight against “racism, sexism, and capitalism” led by those mainstream people feminism has thrown under a bus, including Black, Indigenous, Latinx, poor, LGBTQ+, and other Americans. In each chapter, Schuller compares the misguided efforts of a prominent White feminist with the more enlightened work of a marginalized activist. She begins by contrasting Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s opposition to the 15th Amendment with the vision of the poet Frances E.W. Harper, who “called out white women for consistently choosing sex over race.” Schuller ends by comparing Sheryl Sandberg’s capitalist “leaning in” with the “squadding up” of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who ran as a Democratic Socialist. Each woman in the book has made vital contributions, but some pairings come across as strained efforts to retrofit their subjects’ views to conform to 21st-century academic ideals. For example, Schuller describes the writers Harriet Jacobs and Zitkala-Sa as “intersectional feminists” more than a century before that term came into wide use. This book may have high appeal for readers who share the author’s anti-capitalist sentiments; the unpersuaded are likely to remain so.
A hit-and-miss broadside against two centuries of missteps by mainstream feminists.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64503-689-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bold Type Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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