05 // What to Read
The readings,
in the order they actually argue.
These are the texts the rest of this site is built on. Read them in any order, but read them with each other -- most of the arguments here are arguments WITH another reading on this list, not statements made in isolation.
- 01
Standpoint
Ain't I a Woman?
Sojourner Truth // Speech, Akron, Ohio, 1851
The short, devastating speech that becomes the founding text for almost everything else on this list. Truth, an unlettered formerly enslaved woman, walked into a white women's rights convention and asked a question that nineteenth-century feminism could not answer -- and that twentieth-century intersectionality would spend a hundred years trying to.
"And ain't I a woman?"
- 02
Standpoint
Outgrowing the Compact of the Fathers
W.E.B. Du Bois // 1987
Du Bois on double consciousness as an analytic, not a wound: the way being seen through someone else's eyes is also a way of seeing the system more clearly than the people running it can. The conceptual ancestor of standpoint epistemology.
Marginal sight is not partial sight. It is, often, the most complete sight there is.
- 03
Standpoint
The Problem That Has No Name
Betty Friedan // The Feminine Mystique, 1963
The chapter that named what mid-century American suburban women weren't supposed to be allowed to feel. A useful primary text -- and a useful object lesson, since the 'women' Friedan describes are a very specific demographic, a point hooks and others will press hard.
"Each suburban wife struggled with it alone ... she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question -- 'Is this all?'"
- 04
Intersectionality
Where We Stand: Class Matters (Introduction)
bell hooks // Routledge, 2000
hooks insists that any feminism that ignores poverty has already misdescribed who women are. The introduction is short, personal, and unflinching about how class shapes who feminism has historically spoken for, and who it has overlooked.
"Nowadays it is fashionable to talk about race or gender; the uncool subject is class."
- 05
Standpoint
The Power of Self-Definition
Patricia Hill Collins // Black Feminist Thought, 1990
Hill Collins argues that Black women's lived knowledge is not raw material awaiting expert interpretation -- it is theory in its own right. The chapter is the clearest short statement of standpoint epistemology in the syllabus.
Self-definition is not vanity. It is the refusal to be defined into someone else's frame.
- 06
Gender as Category
"Night to His Day": The Social Construction of Gender
Judith Lorber // Paradoxes of Gender, 1994
Lorber's classic argument that gender is not a property of bodies but a social institution -- one so pervasive it disappears, the way water disappears for a fish. A foundational text for thinking about why 'masculine' and 'feminine' feel natural even when they aren't.
"Talking about gender for most people is the equivalent of fish talking about water."
- 07
Gender as Category
Transgender Studies: Queer Theory's Evil Twin
Susan Stryker // GLQ, 2004
Stryker stages transgender studies as a field that asks queer theory to take embodiment, medicine, and the lived materiality of gender seriously. A way into why 'gender' as an analytic is not the same as 'sexuality' as an analytic.
Trans studies refuses to let the body drop out of the conversation about identity.
- 08
Embodiment
Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment
Iris Marion Young // Human Studies, 1980
Young reads a single gesture -- the constrained, hesitant throw -- as the deposit of a lifetime of being told a body is fragile, watched, and not quite one's own. A short, beautiful argument for why feminism has to take the body seriously, not as biology, but as habit.
"The modalities of feminine bodily existence are rooted in the fact that feminine existence experiences the body as a mere thing."
- 09
Embodiment
The Beauty Myth
Naomi Wolf // William Morrow, 1991
Wolf argues that as women gained legal and political ground in the late 20th century, a new disciplinary regime moved in: an intensified, commercial standard of beauty that filled the space backlash could no longer occupy openly.
"The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily ... images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us."
- 10
Embodiment
Feminist Disability Studies
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson // Signs, 2005
Garland-Thomson argues that disability is not a niche concern bolted onto feminism -- it is a test of whether feminism's claims about the body can hold for ALL bodies. The piece reframes 'disability' as a system of meaning, not a list of conditions, and asks what feminism looks like when the normate body stops being the default.
"Integrating disability as a category of analysis ... transforms the foundations of feminist theory."
- 11
Colonial Critique
Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses
Chandra Talpade Mohanty // boundary 2, 1984
The canonical critique of how Western feminist scholarship has produced a singular figure -- 'the Third World Woman' -- as victim, and called the production of that figure solidarity. Required reading for anyone asking whose feminism a given argument assumes.
"The assumption of women as an already constituted, coherent group ... is the basis of the average third world woman."
- 12
Colonial Critique
The Coloniality of Gender
María Lugones // Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise, 2008
Lugones argues that 'gender' as we know it -- binary, dimorphic, heterosexual, patriarchal -- is itself a colonial export, imposed alongside race as part of the same system. The piece extends Aníbal Quijano's coloniality of power to insist that decolonization has to include decolonizing gender, not just adding women of color to existing frames.
"Biological dimorphism, heterosexual patriarchy are all characteristic of ... the 'light' side of the colonial/modern organization of gender."
- 13
Standpoint
Speculative Method-Making for Feminist Futures: Insights from Black Feminist Science and Afrofuturist Work
Jessie Daniels et al.
An argument that feminist research methods themselves can be speculative -- that imagining otherwise is part of the work, not a distraction from it. Pairs Black feminist science studies with Afrofuturism to ask what counts as data and who gets to invent the future.
If the future has been imagined badly, imagining it differently is method, not escape.
- 14
Reproductive Justice
Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
Dorothy Roberts // Pantheon, 1997
The long history the abortion debate keeps forgetting: forced sterilization, welfare-era contraception coercion, and the criminalization of Black motherhood. Roberts is the source you cannot skip if you want to understand what reproductive justice was built to name.
"The systematic, institutionalized denial of reproductive freedom has uniquely marked Black women's history in America."
- 15
Reproductive Justice
Reproductive Justice and the Post-Roe Landscape
Leandra Hinojosa Hernández & Sarah De Los Santos Upton // 2023
The reading that grounds our case study. Hernández and De Los Santos Upton write as Chicana feminist scholars in the wake of Dobbs, and show how mainstream coverage erased queer, BIPOC, and immigrant voices from a debate staged in their name.
"This debate, time and time again, is about much more than abortion."
- 16
Reproductive Justice
My Body Is My Own (State of World Population Report)
UNFPA // United Nations Population Fund, 2021
A global, data-rich companion to the U.S.-focused readings. The UNFPA frames bodily autonomy not as a single right but as a set of conditions -- legal, economic, medical, social -- that determine whether a person can actually act on the rights they nominally have.
Roughly half of women in the surveyed countries are not free to make decisions about their own bodies.
A note on access: many of these texts sit behind library paywalls or in print-only editions. If you are a student, your library almost certainly has them. If you are not, your nearest public library can almost certainly get them for you.