Posts Tagged Not Oprah’s Book Club

Not Oprah’s Book Club: Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

Do Muslim women need saving? Lila Abu-Lughod’s question challenges what has become, in her words, the “new common sense”: a “moral mainstreaming of global women’s rights” that urges Westerners to intervene on behalf of faraway women held hostage by “backwards” religious beliefs. As feminists, we might see reason to celebrate a global, energized focus on gender. But Abu-Lughod argues persuasively that we have to approach these appeals with caution. Her analysis upsets not only wrong-headed ideas about the “Muslim women” we seek to save, but also fantasies of freedom and consent that form the basis of Western feminism.

Do Muslim women need saving? Lila Abu-Lughod’s question challenges what has become, in her words, the “new common sense”: a “moral mainstreaming of global women’s rights” that urges Westerners to intervene on behalf of faraway women ...

Not Oprah’s Book Club: Coming Up Short

Ed. note: This is a guest post from Madeleine Schwartz. Madeleine is a  freelance writer who has written for The Believer, Dissent Magazine, and The New Inquiry, among other publications.

To read most pieces on Millennials, you would think that everyone born between 1981 and 2000 was white, wealthy, and facing a wonderful world of choice. Articles describe a selfish generation unable to commit, or young people who waltz from one experience to another without giving back. Absent is any description of the youth who fall outside of the narrow band of privilege.

Jennifer Silva’s Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty fills this gap. Silva, a post-doctoral fellow in sociology at Harvard, interviewed 100 working-class men and women over the ...

Ed. note: This is a guest post from Madeleine Schwartz. Madeleine is a  freelance writer who has written for The Believer, Dissent Magazine, and The New Inquiry, among other publications.

To read most pieces on Millennials, you would ...

Not Oprah’s Book Club: Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat

Ed. note: This is a guest post from Emily Villano. Emily is a recent college graduate and a feminist, living and writing in Central Oregon.

Edwidge Danticat has stated that though her body is in the United States, her imagination lies in Haiti. She writes about Haiti in Brooklyn, NY, with her debut novel Breathe, Eyes, Memory; in the Dominican Republic, with The Farming of Bones, her hauntingly intimate portrayal of the Haitian Massacre; in the fraught memories of state-sponsored torture, with The Dew Breaker; in the U.S. immigrant detention center, with her memoir Brother, I’m Dying. Danticat’s books deftly thread personal and political histories, issues of gender, race, class, and nationality, and evoke a Haiti at once distinctive and ...

Ed. note: This is a guest post from Emily Villano. Emily is a recent college graduate and a feminist, living and writing in Central Oregon.

Edwidge Danticat has stated that though her body is in the United States, ...

Not Oprah’s Book Club: Republic of Outsiders

In journalist Alissa Quart’s new book, Republic of Outsiders: The Power of Amateurs, Dreamers, and Rebels, she repositions the world. Reading it, you get a sense that the true power brokers are not the Wall Street hotheads or the arrogant doctors or the record label moguls, but those brave and brilliant enough to see these false gods for what they are and re-imagine and remake unapologetically. Add in the catalytic force of the Internet to bring these brave and brilliant social rebels together, and you’ve got a very interesting moment and a very “of the moment” book.

Quart was, she claims, searching for the “America within America”–the places and spaces where people are using various forms of ...

In journalist Alissa Quart’s new book, Republic of Outsiders: The Power of Amateurs, Dreamers, and Rebels, she repositions the world. Reading it, you get a sense that the true power brokers are not ...

Not Oprah’s Book Club: Searching For Zion

The first time I learned I was American was my first trip abroad to America’s colonial ancestor, England, where I circled a plexiglass-protected 15th century Benin mask at the British Museum. An older white Englishman engaged me in a conversation and when he called me American, it made my ears ring. For the remainder of my trip I observed, Londoners knew immediately by my walk, my posture, my voice (I didn’t talk loudly for fear that I’d get lumped the obnoxious Americans) that I was American. I can’t tell you how shocking that experience was. Even in America I never thought of myself as American. Immediately, I found myself searching for an exceptions, to footnote my American-ness. ...

The first time I learned I was American was my first trip abroad to America’s colonial ancestor, England, where I circled a plexiglass-protected 15th century Benin mask at the British Museum. An older white ...

Not Oprah’s Book Club: This is How You Lose Her


Ed. note: This post is part of the second round of the Feministing “So You Think You Can Blog” contributor contest (background here). Stay tuned all week as our six finalists take turns turns covering the blog and giving us a sense of their personal contributor style. The winner of the contest and newest member of the Feministing team will be announced next week!

One of my closest friends—let’s call him Sal—worries about how the angry Reddit dudes are doing. Nonstop aggression, violation, transphobia, misogyny, and rape apologism are problematic, he explained to me on a search for the perfect afternoon snack, but they grow out of the loneliness of the ...

Ed. note: This post is part of the second round of the Feministing “So You Think You Can Blog” contributor contest (background here). Stay tuned all week as our six finalists take turns turns covering ...

Not Oprah’s Book Club: How Should a Person Be?

I generally make it a policy to read any book that people say is being misunderstood by smart, serious men, so Sheila Heti’s much-discussed How Should a Person Be? has been on my list for a while.

The book, which is described as “a novel from life” and is based on recorded conversations and emails between Heti and her actual friends, is about a character named Sheila leaving her marriage, having some intense sex, trying to finish a play commissioned by a feminist theater, and searching relentlessly trying to answer the most lofty of philosophical questions: “How should a person be?”

Above all, though, it’s about Sheila becoming friends with Margaux, an artist who, like Sheila, had “never had ...

I generally make it a policy to read any book that people say is being misunderstood by smart, serious men, so Sheila Heti’s much-discussed How Should a Person Be? has been on my list for ...

A Queer and Pleasant Danger

Not Oprah’s Book Club: A Queer and Pleasant Danger

A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The true story of a nice Jewish boy who joins the Church of Scientology and leaves twelve years later to become the lovely lady she is today is the new memoir from Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw and My Gender Workbook. The long subtitle outlines the narrative of the book. Kate takes us through a gender process from boy to girl to realizing she didn’t fit in either of these boxes. But the memoir is about so much more, including family trauma, and borderline personality disorder, the devaluing and ultimate power of cute, what the heck’s going on in Scientology, sex and sadomasochism, and staying alive. The book can be ...

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