The reading recs list may seem overwhelming at first, considering the wide range of types of sources (from anarchist zines to academic sociology) and topics (sex work, patriarchy, childhood, colonialism, and more!) So we made a quick beginner’s guide based on what questions you want to explore. Once you start by picking out one or two texts, then jumping off from there to explore more topics should be easier.
Make sure to check the footnotes on the main reading recommendations page, as there are some texts that require content notes or disclaimers.
Table of Contents:
- What even is anarcha-feminism?
- Anarchism is against all hierarchies, so doesn’t that include patriarchy by definition? Why do we need a specifically feminist anarchism?
- I’m new to feminism altogether…
- What is transfeminism?
- I’m new to anarchism
- …”Youth Liberation” sounds suspicious
- I came here because i read one of your articles about the politics of abuse. Where can i learn more?
- Social sciences and humanities for anarchists
What even is anarcha-feminism?
Start here: Coordenação Anarquista Brasileira, Feminism and Organized Anarchism, and/or Quiet Rumors (a collection of shorter works by various authors, including from some of the early anarchist feminists like Voltairine De Cleyre and Emma Goldman. Feel free to pick whichever essays seem interesting to you)
(We are also working on our own introduction to anarcha-feminism, which isn’t finished yet!)
Anarchism is ideologically against all hierarchies, so doesn’t that include patriarchy by definition? Why do we need a specifically feminist anarchism?<fn>If you are about to object that “anarchism is only against unjust hierarchies!” do not bother. Not only is Noam Chomsky not the inventor of anarchism, but that’s not even what he actually said or meant in that interview. Chomsky was arguing that the burden of proof is on those who want to enforce a hierarchy to show that it’s not oppressive, rather than being on those who want to resist that hierarchy to prove that it is oppressive — he was laying out a basic argument for starting from the assumption that every hierarchy is unjust until proven otherwise. This does not imply that there actually are such things as hierarchies that can be proven to be just. All it means is that if you want to enforce someone’s authority, it’s on you to prove it’s not oppressive. This was only ever a way of framing the anarchist default position of assuming hierarchies to be unjust in terms that were meant to be simple and comprehensible to a liberal-minded non-anarchist. Either way, a random interview with Noam Chomsky (in which he tries to explain what he explicitly describes as his personal approach to anarchism) is not and never was a foundational anarchist text.</fn>
Start here: Words to Fire Press, Betrayal: A Critical Analysis of Rape Culture in Anarchist Subcultures and Courtney Desiree Morris, Why Misogynists Make Great Informants.
Alternatively, you could start with Kristen Anderberg, a Man’s Heaven is a Woman’s Hell or Lilith, Gender Disobedience: Antifeminism and Insurrectionist Non-dialogue.
I’m new to feminism altogether…
Start here: John Berger, Ways of Seeing (an all-time classic and personal favorite) and Monique Wittig, One is Not Born a Woman, and read anything by Sara Ahmed
What is transfeminism?
Start here: Dialectical Feminism: An Unburial Theory by May Peterson, and the three-part Understanding Transmisogyny by Talia Bhatt
I’m new to anarchism
Start here: David Graeber, “Are You an Anarchist? The Answer Might Surprise You!” (this isn’t on the main reading list)
Comments from JD: We’re gonna be honest, most of the reading recs on the main page assume a certain amount of familiarity with anarchist principles. This is because the list was originally created with a presumed anarchist audience in mind. But if you’re totally new to it, we also recommend Errico Malatesta’s “Anarchy,” as a short, accessible, classic work of introductory anarchism.
…”Youth liberation” sounds suspicious
Start here: John Wall, Childism: The Challenge of Childhood to Ethics and the Humanities and Jenny Kitzinger, Who Are You Kidding? Children, Power, and the Struggle Against Sexual Abuse
Comments from JD: We don’t blame you if this phrase makes you feel a bit wary. It got our hackles up at first too. That instinctive sense of resistance is probably born of two things: first, it is true that there are bad actors who use appeals to youth “liberation” and “children’s agency” to dress up abuse apologia for adults to have sexual access to children in superficially “radical”-sounding language, and some of those bad actors have used the language of anarchism. Some have even used the language of feminism.<fn>The book Why We Lost the Sex Wars by Lorna Bracewell reviews this history reasonably well, but it’s hard to recommend it without qualification since, in our opinion, Bracewell exhibits a persistent tendency to reproduce the exact problem we’re talking about here, persistently equivocating on the potential harm of “intergenerational sex,” and characterizing the rejection of abuse apologia in mainstream feminism as “liberalizing.” The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan doesn’t specifically address the problem of feminist abuse apologists — she mentions it in passing — but it is still a good overview of the history of conflict and disagreement around sex, consent, and coercion in feminist movements.</fn> We firmly repudiate this abuse of anarchist, feminist, and liberationist language, and want it to be clear: children must be liberated from the hegemonic sexual violence that conditions their lives, not for the benefit of their sexual oppressors. Attacking rape culture on every front — always dismantling the power and entitlement of some people to access and control the bodies of others — lies at the heart of both anarchism and feminism.
Whether you’ve run into these kinds of arguments or not, the prospect that “youth liberation” would imply “abolishing the age of consent” tends to come up naturally for a lot of people. This is because of the second thing that probably causes the feeling of wariness about “youth liberation”: the fact that a core organizing principle in the hegemonic ideology of patriarchy is the notion that adults’ (almost unconditional, unaccountable) authority over children is the primary barrier that keeps children safe from harm, either by themselves or by others. We don’t believe that’s true — in fact, we believe that adult’s incredible power over children is the overwhelmingly most dominant source of harm and violence to children (as with all other forms of coercive power). With that in mind, the reading recommendations we have collected here lean strongly toward examining the role of sexual violence in producing and maintaining the adult-child hierarchy, and the role sexual violence against children as a unique gender-sex class plays in producing and maintaining broader societal structures of violence, from capitalism to colonialist expansion to the legacy of Ancient Rome.
I came here because I read one of your articles about the politics of intimate abuse. Where can I learn more?
Start here: Lee Shevek, Intimate Authoritarianism: The Ideology of Abuse and William Gillis, One Giant Red Flag, Folded Into a Book
Social sciences and humanities for anarchists
Here we’ve paired up anarchist theory<fn>Note that Toby Rollo’s Feral Children is featured in an issue of No! Against Adult Supremacy, but we don’t know if Rollo is an anarchist himself.</fn> with a non-anarchist text dealing with related themes we think anarchists would greatly benefit from. Although we think texts like On Agency and Speaking Out are worth reading for their own sake, reading them alongside the recommended anarchist theory draws out their striking significance to a specifically anarchist worldview.
Read as a pair: Toby Rollo, Feral Children: Settler Colonialism, Progress, and the Figure of the Child alongside Mills & Lefrançois, Child as Metaphor: Colonialism, Psy-Governance, and Epistemicide
Read as a pair: Walter Johnson, On Agency alongside David Graeber, Oppression
Read as a pair: David Graeber, Two Notions of Liberty Revisited alongside Ulrike Roth, Speaking Out? Child Sexual Abuse and the Enslaved Voice in the Cena Trimalchionis.
Comments from JD: some of our recommendations may seem like a strange genre of writing for anarchists — especially the ostensibly “apolitical” academic articles about topics as niche and varied as the Ancient Roman novel Satyricon and European literary culture’s history of recreational Orientalist sex tourism. In fact, most of the recommendations on our list are not particularly anarchist, and many are drawn from academic specialist fields. That is on purpose: we include these articles precisely because your average anarchist is very unlikely to stumble across them in their normal pursuit of “reading theory.” These texts aren’t “theory,” themselves, but they’re the kind of material that has always been the backbone of anarchist thought: crucial insights into the histories, practices, and contexts of power, social structures and hierarchies, and hegemonic ideologies. Some of them are selected precisely for their seeming nicheness — we want anarchists to question and challenge received ideological narratives about our collective social and intellectual history beyond the domain of topics most anarchists typically think about. In some cases, our recommendations are offered as a challenge to specific commonsense narratives that buttress the ideologies of the ruling class, yet are commonly and casually repeated even by anarchists. It’s not enough to “read theory,” anarchists must do theory. Anarchists must not be afraid to disrespect the intellectual giants of our cultural hegemony.
