A cleareyed and impassioned plea for a just world.
Revising the meaning and goals of feminism.
Bianco, a cultural critic and editor at the Stanford Social Innovation Review, makes her book debut with a bold and compelling critique of feminism’s focus on equality. Describing herself as “a capital-A, capital-F Angry Feminist,” the author asserts that women have been duped into believing “a myth perpetuated to coax women into complicity with their oppression.” What have been identified as political, economic, or social inequalities, she claims, “are nothing but the measured effects of the discrimination of difference in relation to the white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchy.” The term equality, she contends, is unclear, with different meanings for men and women, for those with power and those without. Rather than adopt a politics that aims for attainment of the same rights, privileges, and power as white men, Bianco proposes that feminists aim to dismantle these patriarchal institutions and engage in embracing freedom. Freedom of body, mind, and movement, she asserts, involves “an ongoing process of self-creation and world-building rooted in accountability and care.” Accountability, which she sees as “the critical difference between white freedom and feminist freedom,” is central to her argument. Feminism must become “an ethics from which a politics emerges,” a value system grounded in respect, integrity, and collective well-being. Bianco draws on feminist scholars and critics—Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Johnson, to name a few—as well as her own experiences as a 40-something Harvard-educated white woman, lesbian, and athlete to discuss salient issues for women’s lives, such as abortion, gender, sexuality, queer identity, race, capitalism, and assisted death. Practicing freedom, she writes, can counter the “equality mindset” that posits a “hierarchical opposition of man above woman” and instead “can create a world that values the dignity, belonging, and joy of all people.”
A cleareyed and impassioned plea for a just world.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781541702424
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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