International Women’s Day
To mark International Women’s Day this year, Between the Lines is having a flash sale of our books on feminism, women’s movements, and gender politics. Now is your chance to get a 20% discount on front-list, back-list, and even forthcoming titles! Peruse below to explore books on women and work, Marxist-feminist philosophy, the intersections of blackness and gender, feminism in the university, reproductive rights, and more! The sale runs from March 7 until March 14.
An investigation of feminist theory written in an accessible style and grounded in personal testimony, this classic by bell hooks includes chapters on feminist scholarship, feminism and militarism, homophobia in Black communities, self-recovery, violence in intimate relationships, overcoming white supremacy, and class and education.
In Jeannie’s Demise, historian Ian Radforth brings to life an era in which abortion was illegal, criminal proceedings were a spectator sport, and coded advertisements for back-alley procedures ran in the margins of newspapers. At the centre of the story is the elusive and doomed Jeannie Gilmour, a minister’s daughter whose independent spirit can only be glimpsed through secondhand accounts and courtroom reports. Part gripping procedural, part meticulous autopsy, Jeannie’s Demise opens a rare window into the hidden history of a woman’s right to choose.
Known for her subversive practice of giving body, voice, and image to her own texts, Grada Kilomba’s Plantation Memories is a compilation of episodes of everyday racism written in the form of short psychoanalytical stories. From the question “Where do you come from?” to Hair Politics to the N-word, the book is a strong, eloquent, and elaborate piece that deconstructs the normality of everyday racism and exposes the violence of being placed as the Other.
Radical activist, thinker, and comrade of Walter Rodney, Andaiye was one of the Caribbean’s most important political voices. For the first time, her writings are published here in one collection. Through essays, letters, and journal entries, Andaiye’s thinking on the intersections of gender, race, class, and power are powerfully articulated, Caribbean histories emerge, and stories from a life lived at the barricades are revealed.
In Bent Out of Shape, award-winning ergonomist Karen Messing is talking with women—women who wire circuit boards, sew clothes, clean toilets, drive forklifts, care for children, serve food, run labs. What she finds is a workforce in harm’s way, choked into silence, whose physical and mental health invariably comes in second place: underestimated, underrepresented, understudied, underpaid. Her findings leap into candid, deeply reported storytelling that follows in the muckraking tradition of social critic Barbara Ehrenreich.
This fascinating book uncovers the little-known, surprisingly radical history of the Portuguese immigrant women who worked as night-time office cleaners and daytime “cleaning ladies” in postwar Toronto. Richly detailed and engagingly written, Cleaning Up is an archival treasure about an undersung piece of working-class history in urban North America.
Higher Expectations
How to Survive Academia, Make it Better for Others, and Transform the University
Universities are broken: they’re built on systems that are discriminatory, hierarchical, and individualistic. This hurts the people that work and learn in them and limits the potential for universities to contribute to a better world. But we can raise our expectations. Hawkins and Kern envision a university transformed by collaboration, care, equity, justice, and multiple knowledges. This book is a must-have for feminists working in academia today.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of young people pack their bags to study or volunteer abroad. Beyond Guilt Trips helps us to unpack our Western baggage, so that we are better able to understand our uncomfortable feelings about who we are, where we come from, and how much we have. Through engaging personal travel stories and thought-provoking questions about the ethics and politics of our travel, Anu Taranth shows readers ways to grapple with their discomfort and navigate differences through accountability and connection.
Beyond the Periphery of the Skin
Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism
In this book renowned Marxist-feminist philosopher Silvia Federici surveys the new paradigms that today govern how the body is conceived in the collective radical imagination, as well as the new disciplinary regimes state and capital are deploying in response to mounting revolt against the daily attacks on our everyday reproduction. In this process she confronts some of the most important questions for contemporary radical political projects. What does “the body” mean, today, as a category of social/political action? What are the processes by which it is constituted? How do we dismantle the tools by which our bodies have been “enclosed” and collectively reclaim our capacity to govern them?
In this book Susan Ferguson explores the ways in which feminists have conceptualized women’s work and placed labour, and its reproduction, at the heart of their program for emancipation. Engaging with feminist critiques of work, Ferguson argues that women’s emancipation depends upon a reorganization and radical reimagining of all labour, and advocates for an inclusive politics that reconceptualizes women’s work and work in general.
Shout Your Abortion is a collection of photos, essays, and creative work inspired by the movement of the same name, a template for building new communities of healing, and a call to action. This book documents some of the projects and illuminates the individuals who have breathed life into this movement, illustrating the profound liberatory and political power of defying shame and claiming sole authorship of our experiences.
Inspired by the legacy of radical and queer Black feminists of the 1970s and ’80s, Revolutionary Mothering places marginalized mothers of color at the center of a world of necessary transformation. The challenges we face as movements working for racial, economic, reproductive, gender, and food justice, as well as anti-violence, anti-imperialist, and queer liberation are the same challenges that many mothers face every day. Revolutionary Mothering is a movement-shifting anthology committed to birthing new worlds, full of faith and hope for what we can raise up together.
You can browse all sales titles here.