I
love, love, love fictional worlds that reimagine gender, but nothing can beat real
life!
The Invention of Women is an accessible and riveting description
of how the Yoruba people in West Africa organize a culture based on seniority
rather than Western binary genders. This is a mind-blowing book for anyone who
is interested in gender and how human beings don’t have to be trapped in one
way of doing things.
The "woman question", this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western contruction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures. Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age.
Rhea Ewing’s Fine is a must read for anyone
interested in gender.
It’s a compassionate and nuanced compilation of
interviews with people across the gender spectrum about their experience with
gender and how they make sense of it. There’s no agenda, and there’s no simple
takeaway, just a glimpse into real people’s lived experiences.
The
comic/graphic novel format adds brilliantly to the reader’s exploration of what
gender is and how it works.
For fans of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Meg-John Barker's Queer, Fine is an essential graphic memoir about the intricacies of gender identity and expression. As Rhea Ewing neared university graduation in 2012, they became consumed by the question: What is gender?
This obsession sparked a quest in their quiet Midwest town, where they anxiously approached both friends and strangers for interviews to turn into comics. A decade later, their project has exploded into a fantastical and informative portrait of a surprisingly vast community spread across the America. Questions such as How do you identify? invited deep and honest accounts…
Light From Uncommon Stars is a
ray of sunshine when times are tough and the news is depressing.
It’s a yummy
and affirming sci-fi book where marginalized people, particularly trans women, get to thrive. Instead of
solving problems by killing people, small and affirming acts of allyship,
friendship, and love add up to a better world. The story is beautifully done,
nonviolent, and hopeful.
Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in Ryka Aoki's Light From Uncommon Stars, a defiantly joyful adventure set in California's San Gabriel Valley, with cursed violins, Faustian bargains, and queer alien courtship over fresh-made donuts.
Shizuka Satomi made a deal with the devil: to escape damnation, she must entice seven other violin prodigies to trade their souls for success. She has already delivered six.
When Katrina Nguyen, a young transgender runaway, catches Shizuka's ear with her wild talent, Shizuka can almost feel the curse lifting. She's found her final candidate.
I
wrote Pledging Season because I love playing with gender and imagining new
worlds. Often science fiction about gender starts by positing some change in
biology, but there’s really no need! Come explore a world where humans are the
same, but gender is just… different.
I
also wanted to write a book that doesn’t use violence to solve its problems. I grew up on stories where the solution to bad things happening was to
find and kill a bad guy – but that’s just not going to work for big problems
like climate change that are shaping my kids’ lives. I hope this book helps
carve out a little more imaginative space for how we can do things differently.
There are dragons. And chocolate. What more
could anyone want?
My son loves this book because the main character,
Aventurine, gets to resolve big, scary things without hurting anyone. Even
giant, fire-breathing dragons can be talked out of destroying the city once you
understand what they want.
Also, his mother tends to make more desserts when
this book is in the bedtime reading rotation. Yum!
Aventurine is the fiercest, bravest kind of dragon, and she's ready to prove it to her family by leaving the safety of their mountain cave and capturing the most dangerous prey of all: a human.
But when the human she captures tricks her into drinking enchanted hot chocolate, she finds herself transformed into a puny human girl with tiny blunt teeth, no fire, and not one single claw. She's still the fiercest creature in these mountains though - and now she's found her true passion: chocolate! All she has to do is walk on two feet to the human city,…
