What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorA Queer History of the United States
Michael Bronski · 287 pages
"A Queer History of the United States is groundbreaking and accessible. It looks at how American culture has shaped the LGBT, or queer, experience, while simultaneously arguing that LGBT people not only shaped but were pivotal in creating our country. Using numerous primary documents and literature, as well as social histories, Bronski's book takes the reader through the centuries--from Columbus'
Bad Feminist
Roxane Gay · 360 pages
A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay. "Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink, all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I'm not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once l
Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence
Adrienne Rich · 32 pages
Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore · 354 pages
Nobody Passes is a collection of essays that confronts and challenges the very notion of belonging. By examining the perilous intersections of identity, categorization, and community, contributors challenge societal mores and countercultural norms. Nobody Passes explores and critiques the various systems of power seen (or not seen) in the act of 2passing.3 In a pass-fail situation, standards for a
Female Masculinity
J. Jack Halberstam · 344 pages
Masculinity without men. In Female Masculinity Jack Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two hundred years. Providing the first full-length study on this subject, Halberstam catalogs the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenth-century pre-lesbian practi
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
Judith Butler · 221 pages
One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the femin
Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work
Melissa Gira Grant · 136 pages
Sex work and conditions within the sex industry are frequent topics of discussion in mainstream culture and media, but rarely do these discussions include sex workers themselves, and rarely do they deviate from the position that sex workers must be saved from their evil industry's position that New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof repeatedly advocates. This work turns this position on its hea
Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer
Riki Anne Wilchins · 176 pages
"In this introduction to the work of postmodern sex and gender theorists, gender activist Riki Wilchins explains the key ideas that have shaped contemporary sex and gender studies. Using straightforward prose and concrete examples from LGBT politics - as well as her own life - Wilchins makes thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, and Judith Butler easily accessible to students, activists, and others who
Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World
Shereen El Feki · 345 pages
A groundbreaking examination of changing sexual attitudes and behaviors in the Middle East identifies the sexual factors behind key political, economic, social, and religious trends impacting the region.
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Samuel R. Delany · 203 pages
If one street in America can claim to be the most infamous, it is surely Forty-second Street. Once known for its peep shows, street corner hustlers, and movie houses, Forty-second Street has been overwhelmed by the quest for safety - from safe sex and safe neighborhoods to safe cities and safe relationships. Now defined by corporate theme stores and large, neon-lit cafes, Forty-second Street has,
Intercourse
Andrea Dworkin · 315 pages
Dworkin argues that in a male supremacist society, sex between men and women constitutes a central part of women's subordination to men.
Full Frontal Feminism
Jessica Valenti · 275 pages
Newly revised and updated, the #1 must-read book for a new generation of feminists who refuse to accept anything less than equality and justice for all women Now in its updated second edition, Full Frontal Feminism embodies the forward-looking messages that bestselling author Jessica Valenti propagated as founder of the popular website, Feministing.com. Smart and relatable, the book serves as a
PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality
Carol Queen, Lawrence Schimel · 199 pages
PoMo: short for PostModern; in th earts, a movement following after and in direct reaction to Modernism; culturally, an outlook that acknowledges diverse and complex points of view. PoMoSexual: the queer erotic reality beyond the boundaries of gender, separatism, and essentialist notions of sexual orientation.
When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present
Gail Collins · 471 pages
Tells how American women got from there to here, in politics, fashion, economics, sex, families and work in the past five decades.
A return to modesty: Discovering the lost virtue
Wendy Shalit · 291 pages
Where once a young woman had to be ashamed of her sexual experience, today she is ashamed of her sexual inexperience. Where not long ago an unmarried woman was ashamed to give public evidence of sexual desire by living with someone, today she must be ashamed to give evidence of romantic desire. From sex education in grade school to coed bathrooms in college, today's young woman is being pressured
The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction
Michel Foucault · 176 pages
Returning to Reims
Didier Eribon, George Chauncey, Michael Lucey · 255 pages
On thinking the matter through, it doesn't seem exaggerated to assert that my coming out of the sexual closet, my desire to assume and assert my homosexuality, coincided within my personal trajectory with my shutting myself up inside what I might call a class closet. -- from Returning to Reims After his father dies, Didier Eribon returns to his hometown of Reims and rediscovers the working-class w
Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality
Gail Dines · 204 pages
This book takes an unflinching and intimate look at porn -- its hard-core and racist content, its unchecked profits, and how it distorts our identities. Astonishingly, the average age of first viewing porn is now 11.5 years for boys, and with the advent of the Internet, it's no surprise that young people are consuming more porn than ever. And, as Gail Dines shows, today's porn is strikingly differ
Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society
Nickie Roberts · 380 pages
'If prostitution is the world's oldest profession, then men writing about it is certainly the second oldest.' It was to retrieve an important part of women's history from the hands of male writers - who have defined prostitution from their own point of view as the client sex - that Nickie Roberts undertook this invigorating blend of social history and sexual politics. In her far-reaching narrative
The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Reality
Rachel Hills · 272 pages
"Fifty years after the sexual revolution, we are told that we live in a time of unprecedented sexual freedom. But beneath the veneer of glossy hedonism, millennial journalist Rachel Hills argues that we are in the grip of a new brand of sexual control. Cosmopolitan meets Foucault in this full-scale investigation of the role that sex plays in today's culture. Coming of age in the early 2000s, Rache
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America
Lillian Faderman · 373 pages
Lesbian life in America continues to evolve. As Lillian Faderman writes, there are “no constants with regard to lesbianism,” except that lesbians prefer women. In this book, Faderman reclaims the story of lesbian life in twentieth-century America, tracing the evolution of lesbian identity and subcultures from early networks to today’s diverse lifestyles. Faderman samples from journals, unpublis
What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman
Danielle Crittenden · 205 pages
Killing Rage: Ending Racism
bell hooks · 277 pages
One of our country's premier cultural and social critics, the author of such powerful and influential books as Ain't I a Woman and Black Looks, Bell Hooks has always maintained that eradicating racism and eradicating sexism must be achieved hand in hand. But whereas many women have been recognized for their writing on gender politics, the female voice has been all but locked out of the public disc