Common threads · 6 books
A route through freedom, gender, race, care, and political equality, with disagreements inside feminism treated as part of the subject.
Books, curator notes, and what to read next.
Simone de Beauvoir
Begin with the introduction, then selected chapters on lived experience. Ask how becoming a woman relates to social conditions and freedom.
Next: Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
bell hooks
hooks asks who a feminist movement speaks for and whose labor it relies on. Keep class and racial power in the frame.
Next: Black Feminist Thought
Patricia Hill Collins
Collins connects lived experience, institutions, and intellectual traditions. Track how authority to know is distributed.
Next: Gender Trouble
Judith Butler
Butler questions how gender categories are produced. Distinguish performativity from the idea of freely choosing a costume.
Next: Justice and the Politics of Difference
Iris Marion Young
Young shifts attention from distribution to oppression and institutions. Compare the five faces of oppression with familiar equality tests.
Next: The Ethics of Care
Virginia Held
Held carries care into public institutions and global relations. Compare caring practices with appeals to abstract rights.
Also includes Black Feminist Thought
A study of credibility, silencing, and shared ignorance, moving from individual encounters to institutions that decide whose knowledge counts.
Also includes Justice and the Politics of Difference
A political philosophy seminar on rights, distribution, oppression, and capabilities. Try each theory on the same real disagreement.
Also includes Black Feminist Thought
Identity, recognition, domination, and embodied habit. Compare accounts of racial experience with the institutions that sustain racial categories.
