The best recent books that bust white feminist myths

I love how this dazzling book reveals a deep truth that is known to so many women of color but obscured by the white feminist myth of individualism. There is no way we can be not related to each other, so the real question that matters for politics is not whether we will be related to each other; it is how we want to be.

Part excavation of settler colonialism—including its effects on Indigenous women—and part meditation on how to build solidarity without denying our complicity in oppressive structures, the book is visionary and even manages to be hopeful. It also draws attention to an issue that no 21st-century feminism can afford to ignore: our relationships with the land. I learned so much about what it means to show up for each other and about why we have to.

I, like Garbes, was a pandemic mom who lived through the brief moment in 2020 and 2001 when it seemed our culture was finally about to recognize that the world runs on unacknowledged work by women. Garbes writes from her experience as a mother of young kids and a descendant of mass migration of nurses out of the Philippines, to open a window into what a world that valued care work would look like.

I love how Garbes sees that giving care its due would require a radical, almost spiritual change, but also how the solutions she sees go beyond the symbolic. She seamlessly blends the agenda of “mothering for social change” with the agenda of supporting the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance’s fight for fair working conditions for paid domestic workers. This book is a really special blend of mom lit and feminist politics.

Speaking of women’s labor, Verges, a French feminist theorist from the island of Reunion, opens this manifesto with a question that I think really gets to the heart of global feminist politics: “Who cleans the world?” This simple question, she argues, explains the fundamental connection between feminism and the other key struggles of our time—the fact that capitalism creates “invisible work and disposable lives.”

Starting from the lives of women in the global South, who are literally found cleaning up the waste of the global North, she reveals that feminism cannot be a fight for the women of the global majority unless it fights racial and economic inequality on a planetary scale. Verges also offers a compelling analysis of #metoo: opposition to gender-based violence cannot begin and end with a focus on individual perpetrators, nor can we allow it to become part of an agenda that criminalizes Black and brown men; we need to dismantle the violence that is baked into the institutions that structure our everyday lives.

I watched in awe in 2015 as thousands of women took to the streets of Buenos Aires to protest the murder of a young woman and the culture of impunity surrounding gender-based violence. This chronicle of the movement, written by one of the founders of the Ni Una Menos collective, offers a passionate reminder that social change can still happen in the streets.

Ni Una Menos began as a movement against femicide, snowballed into a women’s strike, and became one of the driving forces behind the movements that have felled abortion bans all over Latin America in the last five years. In reading, I learned all kinds of lessons about feminist politics—about things like how to connect the concerns of trans and cis women and how to frame abortion restrictions as a form of gender-based violence rather than mere infringements on choice. 

I spend a lot of time thinking about what life after #girlboss looks like, and Benjamin’s book plants the seed of an answer. Benjamin opens the book with a meditation on the system that celebrates “exceptional” youth of color and how this system functions more to prop up the myth of colorblindness than to create a world in which all of us can thrive. The key to getting from that world to this one is to radically redistribute the power to imagine—so that we live in a world where it is not only the visions of tech billionaires that are shaping our future.

This might sound abstract, and it is, but the book is full of lovely exercises in liberating our power to envision the world otherwise. For example, Parker Brothers paid feminist Elisabeth Magie $500 in 1903 for a game intended to portray unrestricted capitalism as a dystopian nightmare and caution us against uncritically identifying with the winners. That game didn’t have to become Monopoly, and I like to think it’s not too late to make another game.