Suggested Readings

Some of our favorite zines, essays, and theory available online, for those looking to learn more about anarcha-feminism. These readings are selected by members of the collective for their relevance to the themes of our project, or our own individual anarchist thinking, and are deliberately limited to shorter texts (or collections of shorter texts) that can be read in one or two sittings, except the very last section. Not all of these works are explicitly anarchistic or feminist in their political sensibilities, some are works of history, sociology, anthropology, and so on, but all of them have influenced our anarcha-feminist thinking and the ethos of this project. The list will grow as we continue to add new items.

Note that some items may be listed in more than one section.

Also be sure to check the footnotes, as some of the texts, while we still recommend them, need to come with disclaimers or specific content notes.

Confused about where to start? Here’s a guide!

Anarcha-Feminism

Various Authors, Quiet Rumors: an Anarcha-Feminist Reader
Various Authors, Dangerous Spaces: Violent Resistance, Self-Defense, and Insurrectional Struggle Against Gender
Kristen Anderberg, a Man’s Heaven is a Woman’s Hell
Words to Fire Press, Betrayal: A Critical Analysis of Rape Culture in Anarchist Subcultures
Courtney Desiree Morris, Why Misogynists Make Great Informants
Ray Filar, Notes Toward a Theory of the Manarchist
Mona Eltahawy, How Many Rapists Must We Kill? ¹
Mona Eltahawy, Inciting Liberation
J. Rogue, De-Essentializing Anarchist Feminism: Lessons from the Transfeminist Movement
Coordenação Anarquista Brasileira, Feminism and Organized Anarchism
E. Connor & Beck Levy, Your Options Are Limitless: A Polemic
Lee Cicuta, Intimate Authoritarianism: The Ideology of Abuse
Lee Cicuta, Cry like a Fag, Scream Like a Woman
C.E., Undoing Sex: Against Sexual Optimism
Sky Palace, “To Be Liberated From Them (Or Through Them)”: A Call for a New Approach
Lovely Alyxander, Since 2010 At Least 1300 Women and Children Have Been Sexually or Physically Attacked by UK Cops. PT 1 – PT 2 – PT 3
Estelle Ellison, Pushing Back Against Mass Abuse Apologism
Anonymous, Why She Doesn’t Give a Fuck About Your Insurrection
Ramona, Safer Spaces, False Allegations, and the NYC Anarchist Bookfair
Lilith, Gender Disobedience: Antifeminism and Insurrectionist Non-dialogue

Feminism

Combahee River Collective, The Combahee River Collective Statement
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Sara Ahmed, A Killjoy Manifesto
Sara Ahmed, The Complainer as Carceral Feminist
Anonymous, Dangerous Intersections
Monique Wittig, One is Not Born a Woman
Young Women’s Empowerment Project, Girls Do What They Have to Do to Survive: Illuminating Methods Used by Girls in the Sex Trade to Fight Back and Heal
Juno Mac and Molly Smith, Sex
Juno Mac and Molly Smith, Work
Linda Martín Alcoff, Norming Sexual Practices (from Rape and Resistance)
Madeline Lane-McKinley, On Complaints and Apologies: Feminist Theses Against Carceralism
Emi Koyami, Understanding the Complexities of Sex Trafficking and Sex Work/Trade (Foldable zine version)
L. Cornum, First Women, Then the Nation: Confronting Colonial Gender Violence in Canada and the US
M. Sandovsky, Letters to L: Paranoia and Visions
Rebecca Hall, Not Killing Me Softly: African American Women, Slave Revolts, and Historical Constructions of Racialized Gender
Hannah Summers, The Illusion of the “Real” Rape Victim
Donna Haraway, Situation Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective
Ann Ferguson, Sex War: The Debate between Radical and Libertarian Feminists ²
Joy James, Violations
Monique Plaza, Our Damages and Their Compensation: The Will Not to Know of Michel Foucault
Stephen P. Knadler, Leo Bersani and the Nostalgia for White Male Radicalism
Moya Bailey, They aren’t talking about me…

Transfeminism

Note: all the texts below are products of a specific sociocultural and historical context. The language and terminology of both radical transfeminist circles and broader society has changed over time, and especially since the trans tipping point around 2014, and some of the texts below use outdated language or terms that are now dispreferred, but were commonly used or preferred among radical trans politics at the time of writing. Please keep this in mind as you read.<fn>For example, In contemporary discourse (especially in the UK), the word “transwoman,” written without a space in between, is frequently used as a transphobic dogwhistle by TERFs. This has not always been the case, and for this reason the term occasionally crops up in radical trans politics and transfeminist writing entirely without this baggage.</fn>

Various Authors, Dangerous Spaces: Violent Resistance, Self-Defense, and Insurrectional Struggle Against Gender
Lee Cicuta, Butch Anarchy
Jules Joanne Gleeson & Nathaniel Dickson, The Future of Trans Politics
J. Rogue, De-Essentializing Anarchist Feminism: Lessons from the Transfeminist Movement
Emi Koyami, The Tranfeminist Manifesto ³
Sayak Valencia (translated by Olga Arnaiz Zhuravleva), Necropolitics, Postmortem/Transmortem Politics, and Transfeminisms in the Sexual Economies of Death
Jennifer Worley, “Street Power” and the Claiming of Public Space: San Francisco’s “Vanguard” and Pre-Stonewall Queer Radicalism
Joni Alizah Cohen, The Eradication of “Talmudic Abstractions”: Anti-Semitism, Transmisogyny and the National Socialist Project
Brooke Holmes, Marked Bodies: Gender, Race, Class, Age, Disability, and Disease
Talia Bhatt, Understanding Transmisogyny, Part I: Misogyny and Heterosexualism
Talia Bhatt, Understanding Transmisogyny, Part II: Homophobia and Transphobia
Talia Bhatt, Understanding Transmisogyny, Part III: Constructing the Transsexual
Talia Bhatt, The Third Sex
May Peterson, Dialectical Feminism: An Unburial Theory
Sara Ahmed, An Affinity of Hammers

Anarchism

Lee Cicuta, Against a Liberal Abolitionism
David Graeber, Oppression
David Graeber, Dead Zones of the Imagination
David Graeber, i didn’t understand how widespread rape was. then the penny dropped
David Graeber, Two Notions of Liberty Revisited
William Gillis, When “Restorative Justice” Means Restoring Peace, Not Justice
William Gillis, Bad People
sasha k, Some Notes on Insurrectionary Anarchism
CrimeThinc, Accounting For Ourselves: Breaking the Impasse Around Sexual Assault in Anarchist Scenes
Zoé Samudzi & William C. Anderson, The Anarchism of Blackness
Revolutionary Anti-Authoritarians of Color, An Anarchist Introduction to Critical Race Theory
Håkan Geijar, Affinity Fraud and Exploitable Empathy
unsalted, Red Flags: Before You Join That Org…

Youth Liberation

John Wall, Childism: The Challenge of Childhood to Ethics and the Humanities
Toby Rollo, Feral Children: Settler Colonialism, Progress, and the Figure of the Child
Toby Rollo, The Color of Childhood: The Role of the Human/Child Binary in the Production of AntiBlack Racism
A. Mark Liddle, Gender, Desire, and Child Sexual Abuse: Accounting for the Male Majority
Mills & Lefrançois, Child as Metaphor: Colonialism, Psy-Governance, and Epistemicide
Ulrike Roth, Speaking Out? Child Sexual Abuse and the Enslaved Voice in the Cena Trimalchionis
Anarchasteminist, James Cantor, paedophilia, and the “Gender Critical” movement
Jenny Kitzinger, Who Are You Kidding? Children, Power, and the Struggle Against Sexual Abuse
Arthur Silber, On Torture: The Truth That Lies Within (Excerpt)
Lee Cicuta, The Right Wing Hates Children: the Weaponization of “Groomer”
Jennifer Worley, “Street Power” and the Claiming of Public Space: San Francisco’s “Vanguard” and Pre-Stonewall Queer Radicalism
Wesley Ware, Rounding Up the Homosexuals: The Impact of Juvenile Court on Queer and Trans/Gender-Non-Conforming Youth
Suzanne Zeedyk & Fionna Raitt, False Memory Syndrome: Undermining the credibility of
complainants in sexual offences

Books and Longer Works

In general, the above recommendations are intentionally limited only to texts that are relatively short, can be read in one or two sittings. Below are a few longer works that we think are invaluable sources for any anarchist, feminist, or liberation-minded person.

Juno Mac and Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights (not available on LibGen, but available on Z-Lib with the Tor Browser and Z-Lib login)
Sherronda J. Brown, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture
Patrick Joseph Ryan, Master-Servant Childhood: A History of the Idea of Childhood in Medieval English Culture
Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
Jules Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child (not available on LibGen, but available on Z-Lib with the Tor Browser and Z-Lib login)

We DON’T Recommend…

Some commonly recommended and cited books and articles aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, for various reasons. But people still ask us what we think of them all the time (because of how commonly they are recommended!) So for convenience, we’ve decided to start including a few of the texts that people have asked us about, but that we don’t particularly see as useful sources for anarchist ethics or theory — either because they’re just not that good, or because (as is sometimes the case) they’re actively pernicious or promote oppressive ideologies in the guise of “radical” language. Are we saying no one should be allowed to read them or that it is bad or morally wrong to read them? No. I mean, we read them, didn’t we? We’re just noting that we don’t particularly recommend them. As with the recommendations, our list will grow as we think of things.

These include:

Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex (Why not?)
Sarah Schulman, Conflict is Not Abuse (Why not?)

Content Note: this essay by queer anarchist Mona Eltahawy has some significant oversights, especially in its casual use of problematic language of “socialization”, language that has been used to deny the gendered experiences of trans women and to articulate and enact violence against trans women, as well as its lack of focus on trans survivors/sexual violence against trans and nonbinary people. These are serious flaws, and the essay must be read critically and carefully through this lens, and especially through a critical transfeminist lens. In our opinion, they do not structurally compromise the essay’s core argument, and correcting them only strengthens that core. Trans people–trans women, trans men, trans non-binary folks–all experience even higher rates of sexual violence than cis women. This happens to them simply because they are trans. If we carry the essay’s logic through with this in mind, then the unavoidable conclusion is that insurrectionary anti-patriarchal resistance of all forms–very much not limited to the intentionally provocative and most literal case of a survivor literally killing their rapist–can mean nothing other than total war on transphobes. We also believe that the the “socialization” language may be addressed by following through with the logic that if women in general can be said to have been “socialized” (briefly setting aside the criticisms we have of socialization theory as a whole) to tolerate violence from men as inevitable, trans women are “socialized” the exact same way–as the “natural targets” of violence. Likewise, trans men are not “socialized” as men or as agents of violence, but as “natural targets” of violence. Trans people, by virtue of their transgression of patriarchal coercive gender roles, are targeted for additional punishment as the river of violence flows downhill.
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We include Ann Ferguson’s piece as a recommendation because it is a reasonably succinct and accurate contemporaneous summary of the feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s, including the things both “sides” got right or got wrong, but its conclusions and suggested resolutions to the problem are a bit outdated and reflect Ferguson’s discursive context at the time it was written. Among other things, the piece passes rather quickly over the topic of sex-positive feminists’ endorsement of “adult/child sex” and alliance with the boy-love movement, which contemporary readers will likely find jarring, especially because of how starkly different it is from the other topics of debate in the Sex Wars. (We note that the words “very young” are doing a lot of legwork in Ferguson’s conclusion.) The fact that it provokes no more comment than any of the other topics of debate must be understood as an indication of just how much the debate about “adult/child sex” (and whether “boy-lovers” constituted an oppressed sexual minority) was as prominent a point of contention between sex-positive feminists and antiporn feminists as any of the more well-known debates of the time, although contemporary liberal feminists usually elide, selectively forget, or downplay this aspect of the conflict.
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While the Transfeminist Manifesto is an important seminal text, it is also shaped by the time and context in which it was written — it’s sort of a snapshot of a particular era in some ways — and Koyami could not benefit from the twenty years of development of transfeminist thought that we are benefitting from, in no small part thanks to her. At times, Koyami approaches from an attitude of seeking to “reconcile” anti-trans feminists with anti-feminist trans women, and as a result it can feel like “we can all learn from each other’s perspectives,” in a way that misses the mark. We love some aspects — that Koyami demands a feminism that understand so-called “biological sex” to be socially constructed (often through medical violence against intersex people), for example — but we disagree with some of the other ways Koyami approaches transfeminism, most specifically her approach to “the question of male privilege” in the third section. We asked some transfeminist comrades for their thoughts, and one woman said, “I don’t think it’s hard to understand why she went for this move, as indeed many have, but especially when we look at her conclusion, I think it’s just reproducing the already transmisogynist bent of existing feminist analysis.” We agree, and this describes our issue with that section pretty well.
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Content Note: although many of the texts dealing with subjects like sexuality and exploitation recommended on this page necessarily cover sensitive and difficult subjects, there is a long-standing academic tradition of treating topics like sexual exploitation of colonized subalterns or children (in this case, both) with an equivocating attitude toward their oppressiveness, even sometimes bordering on excusing these oppressive practices, generally in the name of what might be called “vulgar social constructionism” or a mistaken conflation of intellectual cultural relativism with ethical relativism. While this text by Joseph Boone is not the worst of this tradition, it may be difficult for some readers to stomach due to its tendency (in our opinion) toward relativizing the harm of white European sex tourism in colonized regions and sexual exploitation of young people. The reason we recommend it is because it explores the under-discussed topic of orientalist sex tourism in South-West Asia and North Africa among European and ex-pat white cis men of the academic and literary elite, many of whom are highly regarded as literary “Great Men” in the leftist and radical intellectual milieu. We believe there is value in deconstructing the elevated legacies and reputations of cis white “Great Men” in the context of the exploitation (especially of subaltern, colonized, racialized, and subjugated people) they participated in, especially when the erasure of that exploitation acts as a colonialist epistemic mechanism through which white cis men’s elevated reputations are constructed and upheld.
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