Books like The Politics of Feminist Knowledge Transfer — picked by fans

When I first read this book, I had just started teaching gender in university classrooms and was studying gender training for my PhD research. This book crystallized for me what I found so fascinating and important about teaching and learning as a feminist.

In this book, the late great bell hooks weaves together personal experience with academic engagement in a way that is accessible and engaging. In dialogue with the iconic Brazilian education theorist Paolo Freire, she lays out her vision for education as a practice of freedom, as opposed to education that reinforces systems of domination. I assign parts of this book in my courses every year and recommend it to everyone interested in thinking about how education can be a liberatory practice.  

Resistance by students is common in gender training, and I was grappling with trying to understand under what conditions we accept knowledge as true, and what logic we use to disavow other forms of knowledge.

This book was a revelation for me when I was working through these questions. Against the preconception that education is about a technical knowledge transfer, Megan Boler insists that we understand emotion as central to teaching and learning. She reveals that emotions are central to how we know and what we know. In particular, her notion of a ’pedagogy of discomfort’ helped me think about what an ethical engagement with resistance and difficult questions of complicity might look like.

There are many different strands of feminism, but the ones I find most compelling show that gender is always inflected by other axes of difference. In fact, it is impossible to make sense of some of the dynamics of peacekeeper gender training without attending to histories of colonisation.

In this vein, this book brings a crucial decolonial perspective to questions of feminist pedagogy. It shows how and why liberation from patriarchy must be linked to liberation from coloniality and racism. In addition to its important insights into higher education and teaching and learning more broadly, I love the range of materials that Sara de Jong, Rosalba Icaza, and Olivia Rutazibwa have curated for this book. It features poetry, manifestos, and other creative forms of writing alongside more traditional academic essays.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was one of those rare academic authors who comes across as incredibly likable in her writing. I never met her, but her text just exudes warmth, humour, and relatability, in addition to (or perhaps even in spite of) being erudite and insightful.

In this collection of essays, she attends to questions of pedagogy—how we know and learn things—but examines sites of pedagogy beyond formal education or training. She reveals to the reader that the cat who brings her owner small prey is actually trying to teach the former how to hunt, and shares how studying Buddhism rearranged for her the landscape of how to think about death.

I love this book dearly because it made me think about questions of pedagogy in a completely novel theoretical register, and because it made me both laugh and cry in doing so.

Light on the Sound is a fascinating story and was a big inspiration for me. From the teenage, female protagonist who resists her oppression, to the fantastic creatures and imaginative ideas, this story has everything. Somtow writes with a vivid style that works well for the story, and he weaves everything together in unexpected ways.  

Unrecognised female labor is also the subject of this captivating non-fiction book by Hochschild, a sociologist drawing upon decades of research with fifty heterosexual couples in the Bay area. Hochschild is well-known for identifying ‘the second shift’ of childcare and domestic chores that working women often perform at home, on top of their professional commitment. This results in a rampant inequality of leisure time, and compounded with unequal pay in the workplace, exacerbates gender injustice in contemporary American society. But Hochschild also provides powerful examples of couples who counter-act this norm, while showing how individual attitudes towards gender and domestic responsibilities are influenced by class, ethnicity, and upbringing. Fascinating and illuminating. 

The Merry Spinster falls into my big bucket of fairytale retelling faves, but it hardly sticks to tradition: rather than simply following old plots, Lavery draws on the tone and style of classic fairy tales to create a gender-warped world where daughters use he/him pronouns and mermaids are sort of, but distinctly not, girls. Even better, the playful attitude towards gender now seems to foreshadow Lavery’s own coming out and transition, both occurring after he published this book—something that fills me with a special kind of trans-author love. Reading this for the first time, I had the sensation of slipping pleasantly into an utter dreamworld of gender/sexuality beauty, like a warm bath: I recommend you fall in, too.

James Tiptree Jr. is really Alice Sheldon. She wrote under a male pseudonym for many years due to the male domination of science fiction at the time. Meet Me at Infinity is a great introduction to her work, as it contains both fiction and biographical pieces. She’s a tremendous writer who I found to be very inspiring. Her ability to craft impactful stories with strong female characters is amazing. The Tiptree Award is named after her. 

I don't remember how I found this series, but I was immediately taken with the fast-paced romance stories featuring tough-as-nails women who find dragons as their mates. It’s tough to combine blood-thirsty and sexy, but somehow she pulls it off while mixing the species. Of all the series I’ve come across this one probably has the most raw sex, but it seems to work and isn’t too much to take. Sex is such a tricky thing in novels., it really needs to be done well or it’s a distraction. Again what I like in this series, is that the women drive the narrative. 

It’s a cliché, but the writing of Andrea Dworkin changed my life (often through painful internal struggle, but always for the better).

This is not her most well-known book, but this collection of essays and speeches was, for me, the most influential. Her speech “I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape,” delivered to a men’s group in 1983, helped me understand that radical feminism was not a threat to men but a gift.

A few years before she died (far too young, at age 58, in 2005), I had a chance to meet her, and in the few hours of a shared car trip, I felt the loving spirit that motivated her work.