Issue 1.4

  W. W. NORTON, APRIL 2022, 409 PP. SEXUAL ESSENTIALISM—the idea that men and women differ from each other in various innate and permanent ways—has rarely been a friend to feminists. Charles Darwin thought the rules of inheritance would prevent women from ever becoming the intellectual equals of men. E. O. Wilson, in his 1975 landmark Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, cited the sex division of hunter-gatherers as evidence for women’s natural inclination for homemaking. In

  LITTLEPUSS PRESS, OCTOBER 2022, 208 PP. TRANS WOMEN MOTHER each other when nobody else will. Cecilia Gentili is a legend among New York trans women; there must be hundreds for whom she is “mom.” It’s a hard role to play for trans women whose relationship to their own mothers is fraught. As Gentili says of hers, “I saw in your eyes so many times the wish that I was not your child.” While mom

DRAWN & QUARTERLY, SEPTEMBER 2022, 436 PP. YEARS AGO, MY parents gave me Step Aside, Pops by Kate Beaton for Christmas. It was a collection of short, witty comics about literature, history, and feminism, a follow-up to the best-selling 2011 collection Hark! A Vagrant, which began as a webcomic Beaton created while studying history and anthropology in college. I obsessed over Step Aside, Pops for the rest of my adolescence. I read it late at

  VERSO, JULY 2022, 224 PP. THE FIRST THING to like about Kristen Ghodsee’s Red Valkyries is how it disentangles liberal feminism from socialist feminism in easy language. Capitalism sits well with the former, she writes, because promoting women into executive positions may save their employers money (as women are generally paid less than men). The expansion of social services, on the other hand, costs money, and that means raising taxes or promoting more radical

  VERSO, APRIL 2022, 368 PP. Bread and roses loom large in activist and author Meredith Tax’s biography. She cofounded the early women’s liberation group of that name in l969, going on to cofound CARASA (Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse) in 1977, chair PEN American Center’s Women’s Committee in 1986, and spend the last thirty years fighting gender-based censorship and the rise of fundamentalism, among other radical acts. Tax recounts her own

  HOUSE OF ANANSI PRESS, AUGUST 2022, 224 PP. FOR DECADES, THE movement to address the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) in North America has used a range of strategies to show non-Native people what Native people have known for hundreds of years: Indigenous women and girls, as well as queer, trans, and Two-Spirit people, are disproportionately victims of violence and homicide. Activists have employed a wide range of strategies—social

BEACON PRESS, AUGUST 2022, 336 PP. IN THE ORIGINAL epilogue of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D.G. Kelley writes, But now is the time to think like poets, to envision and make visible a new society, a peaceful, cooperative, loving world without poverty and oppression, limited only by our imaginations. This passage was a universal favorite at the University of Louisville’s Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research (ABI), where staff like me

  BEACON PRESS, OCTOBER 2022, 344 PP. In the second year of my fiction MFA, just after quarantine lifted, I was sitting in the park with a few of my classmates. We were reacclimating to each other, and all the conversation felt like it was on stilts, ready to tip over into topics we might have avoided in mixed company a year ago: death, race. A classmate (white, male) squinted into the sun and complained

  Louise Bourgeois, Fallen Woman (Femme Maison), 1946-47. Private collection, New York. Louise Bourgeois, Femme-Maison, 1946-47. Private collection, New York. I DIDN’T KNOW a painting could make me feel as if I were falling. It happened for the first time when I saw an untitled 1948 painting by Louise Bourgeois in the current exhibit of her work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A vivisection of a seven-story apartment building, it suggests both an internal