Books like Touching Feeling

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.

I had been designing and delivering gender training for many years and was researching it for my Phd when this book came out. Its publication was akin to finding an oasis in a desert. Even though gender training has become, as the editors Maria Bustelo, Lucy Ferguson, and Maxime Forest point out in their introduction to this collection of essays, the most widely used tool for gender mainstreaming worldwide, remarkably little has been written about it.

This smart and expertly curated book is one of the first to fill this gap. Featuring writing by both professionals involved in gender training and academics researching it, it shows that the concerns of feminist pedagogy reach beyond formal education, into spheres of public policy through adult learning and training practices.

I like a scholarly bin fire as much as the next person. Leys’ book assembles all the dross of twentieth-century psychological essentialism, douses it in gallons of scholarly scorn, and lights a match.

I think it is massively important that the personalities and authorities that give scientific ideas their power and traction are exposed and critiqued, as a means of moving the needle on emotion knowledge production. This is a scholarly book, no question, but I love it for its unrelenting demolition job.

A major factor in our extreme polarization is the distorted, overly pessimistic views people on both sides can have of their fellow citizens.

As Stone points out, we can dislike the people on the "other side" much more than we should, even based on our own standards for disliking people. If you're looking for an in-depth, academic examination of our "undue hate," this is the book to read. 

Our distorted perceptions are very important because the animosity and disrespect and insults we aim at the "other side" helps create their animosity, which in turn gives more power to highly polarized and polarizing leaders, and other influencers.

Decades ago, when I was a young and confused college writing instructor, I found this book; although later in my teaching career, I developed a different approach from Elbow’s, I’ll always be grateful to him for this foundational book. Elbow was one of a number of teachers at the time who realized the need to show inexperienced writers that writing is not a one-step, blank-page-to-final-draft affair; it’s a process.

Elbow’s technique of freewriting now appears in every writing workshop. Other techniques from the book, especially focused freewriting and considering the audience, are less well-known but extremely useful. This book gave me my start as a writer and writing teacher.

In Latin America, the long shadow of Iberian imperialism and the racist caste system it left behind continue to dampen or mute expressions of indigeneity in our communities.

Speculative Fiction for Dreamers is a welcome countermeasure against this suppression of indigenous languages, myths, and traditions in Latin American storytelling. The contributors weave a tapestry of more-than-indigenous futurity, that is chimeric and cyborgian, a meshwork of continents and cosmovisions that blueprint futures and alternate presents in communion with ancestral pasts.

From Samy Figaredo’s Taíno-inspired play, to Ernest Hogan’s short story set in new Aztlán, the stories, comics, and poems in this anthology provide a Latin American perspective on indigenous speculative fiction.

What made this book so interesting was Nesbitt’s investigation into the way rum has been used as a literary device. References to rum in novels, short stories, music, and other forms of popular culture allow Nesbitt to expose the way rum has shaped historical constructs of colonialism, racism, and patriarchy in the Caribbean.

For example, Nesbitt juxtaposes characters from Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diaries (1998) with characters in V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street (1959) to expose the way sexism and masculine drinking practices reinforce colonialist and imperialist tropes of the Caribbean as a dangerous place stuck in an unchanging cycle of alcoholic malaise. In Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), references to rum reveal insights into colonial expectations of feminine respectability.

As a literary device, rum makes the Caribbean exotic, which has been used to demonize and eroticize Caribbean peoples. Rum was born in the coercive and dangerous environment of… show more.

James Alan McPherson, a writer I’d long admired and my teacher at the University of Iowa, introduced me to The Hero and the Blues. Murray and Ralph Ellison were friends and intellectual sparring partners who worked out their ideas in conversation, and in letters to one another, so it’s not surprising that many of the same ideas occur in their work.

Here, Murray argues that the hallmark of great artists, Shakespeare, Duke Ellington, and Thomas Mann, is their ability to improvise; that is, to take what they’ve learned through formal study and come up with something new. More than that, Murray writes convincingly, the blues has been essential in affirming the humanity of black Americans despite challenges complicated by the particularities of our situation.

As with Ellison, I keep coming back to Murray, again and again, for inspiration and affirmation.