Shrew Reads You Must Check Out
Part of making change is being aware of what’s going on. Here are some amazing shrew reads, that can help you do just that.
Both fiction and non-fiction, you will find books on disability and ableism, feminism, race, class, and so much more!
This book breaks down Intersectional Feminist Theory. A theory coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw.
Explaining that the multiple parts of an individual–their identities– don’t exist separately, but rather combine to create each individual experience.
For an in depth look on what intersectionality is and its importance, check this one out!
Written by Dr. Andrea J. Nichols, a professor I’ve had the opportunity to study under, this book provides readers with an overview on what sex trafficking is, what it looks like and explores its causal roots.
However, the book doesn’t leave you hanging, and examines proposed solutions by various actors.
In addition, the book considers different schools of thoughts, and their approach to the global epidemic.
Allowing readers to see the efficacy of proposed solutions and ideas, this book will provide you with the basic tools to understand sex trafficking, and specifically what’s happening in the U.S.
This is one of my absolute favorites, and opened my eyes to the world and experience of disability for disabled bodies.
Here, Allison Kafer imagines a new world, and theorizes ideas about time and space that includes disabled bodies.
Kafer introduces readers, both unfamiliar and well versed, to the disability rights movement, and redraws the lines of existing movements as well as the boundaries of identity.
Again, this is another one of my favorites. This book is a collection of poems written by Lambda Award-winner Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha sings a queer disabled femme-of-colour love song filled with hard femme poetics and disability justice
The book explores disability from a queer femme-of-color lens. Check it out!
This book explores the impacts and effects of gender inequality from a global perspective. It will introduce you to feminist theory and methodology, and is one of the most widely used anthologies of feminist writings. One of the first of its kind, it also incorporates sexual orientation and sexual diversity.
If you’ve seen the show on Hulu, I hope you’ve read the book!
This book is a dystopia set in the near future. The Handmaid’s Tale describes a society struggling with a declining birth rate. However, their response is truly frightening. The Handmaid’s Tale‘s commentary on governmental power, reproductive rights, and resistance.
This is absolutely one of my favorite Shrew reads. It is a fictional book that I have recommended a thousand times, and will continue to do so.
This novel tells the story of a group of typical teenagers. We laugh, we cry, we love, and we hate with them, as they experience what it means to grow up.
Except, these teens are growing up in an institution for juveniles with disabilities.
While it is a fiction novel, the note from the author informs readers that some of what is written is based on events that have actually happened.
Commenting on disability, societal unwillingness to view disabled people as people, and a novel intended to fill the gap of prose featuring disabled characters, you have to check this one out.
The Bluest Eye forces readers to explore beauty, and more specifically societal standards of beauty.
Through the eyes of young Pecola Breedlove, readers see her intimate struggle of wanting to be beautiful. A young, dark skinned, curly haired girl, she prays every day for beauty. Her prayers come in response to mocking and bullying from her peers because of how she looks.
Toni Morrison has never let me down, and this book is just one of her amazing pieces that you must read.
This book features first hand accounts of Black women who have been most affected by racism, persistent poverty, class inequality, limited access to support resources or institutions.
These accounts uncover a chilling narrative, that may surprise some and to others read as a validation: Black women in marginalized communities are uniquely at risk of battering, rape, sexual harassment, stalking, and incest.
Beth E. Richie will light a fire in you as she illustrates that the threat of violence to Black women has never been more serious.
Arrested Justice brings issues of sexuality, class, age, and criminalization into focus right alongside of questions of public policy and gender violence, resulting in a compelling critique, a passionate re-framing of stories, and a call to action for change.
Toni Morrison’s Playing in The Dark brings readers to explore the presence of the “Africanist” in the fiction works of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemmingway.
This piece, illustrates how the themes of individualism and freedom, innocence and manhood, depend on the existence of a black population, that was manifestly unfree–and that came to serve white authors as embodiment of their own fears and desires.
Exile and Pride is easily another one of my favorites. First published in 1999, the groundbreaking Exile and Pride is essential to the history and future of disability politics.
Eli Clare’s revelatory writing about his experiences as a white disabled genderqueer activist/writer…unspools the multiple histories from which our ever-evolving sense of self unfolds.
His essays weave together memoir, history, and political thinking to explore meanings and experiences of home: home as place, community, bodies, identity, and activism.
Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book.
With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control—relegating millions to a permanent second-class status—even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness. In the words of Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, this book is a “call to action.”
What are you reading?
Do you know of a Shrew Read that’s not on this list? Let me know what you recommend!
Are you a content creator? Do you have work that should be on this list?
Want to check out my Shrew work? Read here!
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