In this timely, much-needed book, theologian, social psychologist, and activist Christena Cleveland recounts her personal journey to dismantle the cultural “whitemalegod” and uncover the Sacred Black Feminine, introducing a Black Female God who imbues us with hope, healing, and liberating presence.

For years, Christena Cleveland spoke about racial reconciliation to congregations, justice organizations, and colleges. But she increasingly felt she could no longer trust in the God she’d been implicitly taught to worship—a white male God who preferentially empowered white men despite his claim to love all people. A God who clearly did not relate to, advocate for, or affirm a Black woman like Christena. 

Her crisis of faith sent her on an intellectual and spiritual journey through history and across France, on a 400-mile walking pilgrimage to the ancient shrines of Black Madonnas to find healing in the Sacred Black Feminine. God Is a Black Woman is the chronicle of her liberating transformation and a critique of a society shaped  by white patriarchal Christianity and culture. Christena reveals how America’s collective idea of God as a white man has perpetuated hurt, hopelessness, and racial and gender oppression. Integrating her powerful personal story, womanist ideology, as well as theological, historical, and social science research, she invites us to take seriously the truth that God is not white nor male and gives us a new and hopeful path for connecting with the divine and honoring the sacredness of all Black people.

Strengthen the relationships that mean the most, heal with your sisters, and transform your life for the better with the licensed clinical psychologist who founded the award-winning podcast Therapy for Black Girls.

Sisterhood is that sacred space where all the masks that are worn for the world fall off. It’s the place where you lay down your load, refill your cup, and laugh until your belly aches. Our sister circles literally prolong our lives. However, building and keeping healthy friendships take work. How must these friendships evolve as we age? What practices can we put in place? Can they be the key to unlocking a more fulfilled existence? The answer is yes.

Dr. Joy Harden Bradford has been doing the work to help Black women heal together for more than twenty years. In a sisterhood community with more than half a million members, she’s the go-to therapist for Black women looking to prioritize their mental health and become the best possible versions of themselves. Now she’s sharing all she’s learned using the tenets of psychology and group therapy to help us foster relationships that are not only positive, but transformative.

In Sisterhood Heals you will

• discover the ways in which your present-day relationships with Black women have been influenced by your past
• identify the recurring role you play in your friend group and how it influences your relationships
• learn new strategies to grow and sustain healthy, nurturing friendships as well as how to rebuild after a rupture

Dr. Joy brings the warmth, wisdom, empathy, and levity found in our girlfriends to these pages, and reminds us that during difficult times sisterhood is often a lifeline with the power to help us experience fuller, more satisfying lives.

What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.

Longtime organizers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes examine some of the political lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the convergence of mass protest and mass formations of mutual aid, and consider what this confluence of power can teach us about a future that will require mass acts of care, rescue and defense, in the face of both state violence and environmental disaster.

The book is intended to aid and empower activists and organizers as they attempt to map their own journeys through the work of justice-making. It includes insights from a spectrum of experienced organizers, including Sharon Lungo, Carlos Saavedra, Ejeris Dixon, Barbara Ransby, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore about some of the difficult and joyous lessons they have learned in their work.

We all deserve sex that's great for everyone involved. Let sexual liberation be your guide to a truly satisfying sex life.

How we define good sex and the conditions that facilitate it will require a liberatory approach, because intersecting oppressions impose impossible sexual standards on most of us. Instead of intimate justice, we experience blocks to accessing the ingredients for erotic equity.

Good Sex presents the ingredients to revolutionize your sexual menu in a way that works well for you, including intimacy, fun, pleasure, nastiness, and connection. Each chapter offers more than just theory and science. Good Sex outlines action steps to understand, define, and practice sexual liberation in your personalized way, replacing the unseasoned sexual menu most of us were socialized into.

In The Disordered Cosmos, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shares her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest theories of dark matter -- all with a new spin informed by history, politics, and the wisdom of Star Trek.

What does “feminism” mean today? That is the question at the heart of We Should All Be Feminists, a personal, eloquently-argued essay—adapted from her much-viewed TEDx talk of the same name—by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun. With humor and levity, here Adichie offers readers a unique definition of feminism for the twenty-first century—one rooted in inclusion and awareness. She shines a light not only on blatant discrimination, but also the more insidious, institutional behaviors that marginalize women around the world, in order to help readers of all walks of life better understand the often masked realities of sexual politics. Throughout, she draws extensively on her own experiences—in the U.S., in her native Nigeria, and abroad—offering an artfully nuanced explanation of why the gender divide is harmful for women and men, alike. Argued in the same observant, witty and clever prose that has made Adichie a bestselling novelist, here is one remarkable author’s exploration of what it means to be a woman today—and an of-the-moment rallying cry for why we should all be feminists.

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An invigorating exploration of impactful feminist movements and strategies for replicating their success

In The Everyday Feminist: The Key to Sustainable Social Impact-Driving Movements We Need Now More than Ever, accomplished feminist activist and executive Latanya Mapp Frett delivers a powerful and practical exploration of the factors that make a feminist social movement impactful in its place and time. In the book, you'll discover popular and not-so-popular social movements and the leaders, art, research, and narratives that drove them.

The author explains what made these social movements so effective and explains the steps that organizations, nonprofits, and social impact professionals can take to replicate that success on the ground and in the present.

The book also includes:

• Discussions of the importance of feminist funds in bankrolling critical feminist movements
• Explanations of the roles played by men and boys in building a feminist future
• Actionable and straightforward advice applicable to everyone trying to make a difference for women around the world

An essential text for feminist advocates who find themselves in an increasingly challenging political and social environment, The Everyday Feminist is the practical blueprint to social change that lawmakers, activists, entrepreneurs, and non-profit professionals have been waiting for.

The new book from the New York Times bestselling author of The Three Mothers.

In Erased, Anna Malaika Tubbs recovers all that American patriarchy has tried to destroy.

Patriarchy has oppressed women and denied their contributions worldwide, but the United States of America has its own unique gendered hierarchy. Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs applies her signature blend of approachable yet rigorous analysis in this definitive and groundbreaking history of American patriarchy. She proves that humanity in the United States is determined by gender in a limited and flawed binary that is also always tied to whiteness. Tubbs shows how a fabricated hierarchy became so deeply ingrained over time that it now goes unnoticed, along with everything it intentionally conceals.

From the founding fathers to the current Supreme Court justices, from the treatment of enslaved women to the American maternal health crises, from the exclusion of women in the Constitution to the continued lack of an Equal Rights Amendment, Tubbs brings together academic research, the stories of freedom fighters both past and present, and her own experiences to reveal what is erased in the wake of American patriarchy. The system has survived by hiding the tools that are necessary to dismantle it. But Tubbs beautifully reminds us that those tools, including our intuition, courage, ancient wisdom, and power, are still well within our reach.

Erased is the story of the United States from a new perspective: one where the people who shaped this country–who have been oppressed and whose contributions have been denied–are at the center, reminding us that we can restore what has been strategically kept from us. Once again, Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs has written a book that will be a touchstone for conversations on gender, race, and equity for years to come.

In Sisters of the Yam, bell hooks reflects on the ways in which the emotional health of black women has been and continues to be impacted by sexism and racism. Desiring to create a context where black females could both work on their individual efforts for self actualization while remaining connected to a larger world of collective struggle, hooks articulates the link between self recovery and political resistance. Both an expression of the joy of self healing and the need to be ever vigilant in the struggle for equality, Sisters of the Yam continues to speak to the experience of black womanhood.

A new edition of the groundbreaking classic essay collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple in which she coins the term “womanist” as she speaks out as a Black woman, a writer, a mother, and a feminist on topics ranging from the personal to the political

“When I graduated from college as an undergraduate, my father gave me Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. It was a beaten-up paperback in 1999, and it’s even more battered now.” —Jesmyn Ward, in the New York Times Book Review

“Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.”

Originally published forty years ago, Alice Walker’s first collection of nonfiction is a dazzling compendium that remains both timely and relevant. In these thirty-six essays, Walker contemplates her own work and that of other writers, considers the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, and writes vividly and courageously about a scarring childhood injury. Throughout, Walker explores the theories and practices of feminists and feminism, incorporating what she calls the “womanist” tradition of black women—insights that are vital to understanding our lives and society today.

When Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center was first published in 1984, it was welcomed and praised by feminist thinkers who wanted a new vision. Even so, individual readers frequently found the theory "unsettling" or "provocative." Today, the blueprint for feminist movement presented in the book remains as provocative and relevant as ever. Written in hooks's characteristic direct style, Feminist Theory embodies the hope that feminists can find a common language to spread the word and create a mass, global feminist movement.

Sex is for sale in more ways than ever. It can be bought and sold online, in sex clubs, on the street, and around the world. As with many industries, discrimination, exploitation, and inequality persist in sex work. Yet it also offers autonomy, job satisfaction, and even pleasurable experiences for those involved. Sex Work Today explores these contradictions, offering an intimate look at the benefits and challenges of sex work across geographic contexts.

Featuring thirty-one original essays by sex workers, advocates, researchers, and activists, Sex Work Today is the first compilation of research on new forms of digital sex such as camming, sugar dating, and AI sex dolls. Providing a lens to understand contemporary labor dynamics and the nature of sex work itself, this collection captures formerly ignored aspects of the sex industry including: fatphobia and disability; transmasculine and nonbinary sex workers; racialized emotional labor in the digital sex industry; high job satisfaction among professional dominatrixes; and sex worker scholars.

With federal policies ostensibly aimed at combating sex trafficking–affecting all sex workers–understanding this industry is more vital than ever. Decentering Western, white, cisgender voices, Sex Work Today underscores the global repercussions of these misaligned policies, which make sex work more challenging and less safe, and provides valuable insights for those seeking to shape policies, challenge prejudices, and foster a safer and more equitable world for all.

A collection of Sojourner Truth's iconic words, including her famous speech at the 1851 Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio

A former slave and one of the most powerful orators of her time, Sojourner Truth fought for the equal rights of black women throughout her life. This selection of her impassioned speeches is accompanied by the words of other inspiring African-American female campaigners from the nineteenth century.

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives--and upended them. Now Penguin brings you a new set of the acclaimed Great Ideas, a curated library of selections from the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

In We Want for Our Sisters What We Want for Ourselves, Dr. Patricia Dixon (aka Ra Heter) debunks myths about monogamy and polygyny and challenges us to rethink our approach to marriage and family. This book reveals that before European domination, polygyny was an accepted marriage and family practice in over eighty percent of the world's cultures. Even in Western societies, polygyny has always been practiced. However, because it is done under a myth of monogamy, this creates a "peculiar" form of the practice. This peculiar form of polygyny was practiced in early European history in Greece and Rome. It was also practiced during slavery in the U.S. to the detriment of African American women and their families. Even in contemporary America, because closed polygyny is practiced in various forms, under the guise of monogamy, it continues to disempower African American women and undermine their marriages and families.

Dr. Dixon offers many reasons to support polygyny, most importantly, the shortage of available African American men. Through extensive interviews, she offers an insider's look at polygynous marriages, showing readers its benefits and disadvantages, interpersonal dynamics, how financial, sexual, and parental responsibilities are determined, and the legal, moral and cultural challenges that must be overcome in order to make polygynous marriages possible within American society. Finally, she calls for African American women to move toward building marriages based on love, truth, community, and ultimately a womanist ethic of care for sisters.

What is feminism? In this short, accessible primer, bell hooks explores the nature of feminism and its positive promise to eliminate sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. With her characteristic clarity and directness, hooks encourages readers to see how feminism can touch and change their lives―to see that feminism is for everybody.

From an award-winning historian, an alternative model of feminism driven by the legacy of Black women who took justice into their own hands 
  
So often failed by the state, demeaned by racism and sexism, and denied respectable means of redress, Black women have nevertheless patiently resisted myriad injustices. Yet history shows an alternative path. It involved razors, pistols, hatchets, and blackjacks, and playacting for courts and reporters—whatever it took to beat the system. In a world where Black women are castigated and caricatured for being angry, Vengeance Feminism tells the story of those who leaned into their fury, crafting a different kind of ideology that scratched and stabbed and sometimes even succeeded. 

Vengeance Feminism is about the Black women who hit back—not always figuratively, and not necessarily nobly either. Weaving together historical narrative with Black feminist analysis, Gross illuminates the stories of Black women who fought for their dignity on their own terms, from the nineteenth-century “badger thieves” who robbed men on the streets of Philadelphia to victims of intimate partner violence who defended their honor and bodily autonomy with deadly force. 
 
Reckoning with women who lied, robbed, and cheated a racist, misogynistic world, Vengeance Feminism grapples with the volatile power of violence in pursuit of racial and gender justice.

Rachel Afi Quinn investigates how visual media portray Dominican women and how women represent themselves in their own creative endeavors in response to existing stereotypes. Delving into the dynamic realities and uniquely racialized gendered experiences of women in Santo Domingo, Quinn reveals the way racial ambiguity and color hierarchy work to shape experiences of identity and subjectivity in the Dominican Republic. She merges analyses of context and interviews with young Dominican women to offer rare insights into a Caribbean society in which the tourist industry and popular media reward, and rely upon, the ability of Dominican women to transform themselves to perform gender, race, and class.

Engaging and astute, Being La Dominicana reveals the little-studied world of today's young Dominican women and what their personal stories and transnational experiences can tell us about the larger neoliberal world.

Representations of Blackness have always been integral to our understanding of of the modern world. In Black Meme, Legacy Russell, award-winning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the construct, culture, and material of the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to present day. Mining both archival and contemporary media Russell explores the impact of Blackness, Black life, and death on contemporary conceptions of viral culture, borne in the age of the internet.

These meditations include: the circulation of Lynching postcards; Jet Magazine’s publication of a picture of Emmett Till in his open casket; how the televised broadcast of protesters in Selma enters the nation’s living room and changed the debate on civil rights; how a citizen-recorded video of the Rodney King beating at the hands of the LAPD became known as the “first viral video”; what the Anita Hill hearings tell us about the media’s creation of the Black icon; Tamara Lanier’s fight to reclaim the photos of her enslaved ancestors, Renty and Delia, from Harvard’s archive; the Facebook Live recording by Lavish “Diamond” Reynolds of the murder of her partner Philando Castile by the police after being stopped for a broken tail light; and more.

In a failing city, a government program incentivizes couples to “conjoin”—surgically attach themselves to one another—promising a flourishing economy, ecological revitalization, and personal fulfillment. A student writing her dissertation on the program’s history begins to suffer from insomnia. As her world unravels and under the weight of expectations by both society and her close friends, she worries that maybe they are all right when they tell her it would be better—for the good of another person and for the good of the country—to sacrifice everything that she is and get conjoined. Mending Bodies blends body horror and political allegory to explore a world where even the motives of those you love most are shaped by larger forces.

In How We Write Now Jennifer C. Nash examines how Black feminists use beautiful writing to allow writers and readers to stay close to the field’s central object and preoccupation: loss. She demonstrates how contemporary Black feminist writers and theorists such as Jesmyn Ward, Elizabeth Alexander, Christina Sharpe, and Natasha Trethewey mobilize their prose to ask readers to feel, undo, and reassemble themselves. These intimate invitations are more than a set of tools for decoding the social world; Black feminist prose becomes a mode of living and feeling, dreaming and being, and a distinctly affective project that treats loss as not only paradigmatic of Black life but also an aesthetic question. Through her own beautiful writing, Nash shows how Black feminism offers itself as a companion to readers to chart their own lives with and in loss, from devastating personal losses to organizing around the movement for Black lives. Charting her own losses, Nash reminds us that even as Black feminist writers get as close to loss as possible, it remains a slippery object that troubles memory and eludes capture.

Home Girls, the pioneering anthology of Black feminist thought, features writing by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women's lives and contains work by many of feminism's foremost thinkers. This edition features an updated list of contributor biographies and an all-new preface that provides Barbara Smith the opportunity to look back on forty years of the struggle, as well as the influence the work in this book has had on generations of feminists. The preface from the previous Rutgers edition remains, as well as all of the original pieces, set in a fresh new package. 

Contributors: Tania Abdulahad, Donna Allegra, Barbara A. Banks, Becky Birtha, Cenen, Cheryl Clarke, Michelle Cliff, Michelle T. Clinton, Willi (Willie) M. Coleman, Toi Derricotte, Alexis De Veaux, Jewelle L. Gomez, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Patricia Spears Jones, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Raymina Y. Mays, Deidre McCalla, Chirlane McCray, Pat Parker, Linda C. Powell, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Spring Redd, Gwendolyn Rogers, Kate Rushin, Ann Allen Shockley, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Shirley O. Steele, Luisah Teish, Jameelah Waheed, Alice Walker, and Renita J. Weems.

A classic work of feminist scholarship, Ain't I a Woman has become a must-read for all those interested in the nature of black womanhood. Examining the impact of sexism on black women during slavery, the devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism among feminists, and the black woman's involvement with feminism, hooks attempts to move us beyond racist and sexist assumptions. The result is nothing short of groundbreaking, giving this book a critical place on every feminist scholar's bookshelf.

In the critical essays collected in Black Looks, bell hooks interrogates old narratives and argues for alternative ways to look at blackness, black subjectivity, and whiteness. Her focus is on spectatorship―in particular, the way blackness and black people are experienced in literature, music, television, and especially film―and her aim is to create a radical intervention into the way we talk about race and representation. As she describes: "the essays in Black Looks are meant to challenge and unsettle, to disrupt and subvert." As students, scholars, activists, intellectuals, and any other readers who have engaged with the book since its original release in 1992 can attest, that's exactly what these pieces do.