Literary and theoretical texts for all your Feminist Theory needs.
Primary Literary Texts
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
Oh, Jane Eyre. We've read Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and we know it's so wrong, so why does it feel so good? Why do we cheer when plucky, plain Jane gives Edward Rochester a piece of her mind, and...
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1967)
We can't very well tell you to read Jane Eyre (1847) without recommending Wide Sargasso Sea too. These novels may have been published over a hundred years apart, but they go together like pean...
Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)
Virginia Woolf wrote Orlando for her lover Vita Sackville-West, and it's chock-full of all kinds of goodness. Its eponymous hero (i.e., the dude who's name is in the title) begins his life as...
Loving in the War Years by Cherríe Moraga (1983)
Cherríe Moraga co-edited the groundbreaking essay collection This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color with Gloria Anzaldúa, and she's a prominent Chicana poet and criti...
Collected Poems by Audre Lorde (2000)
We've shown you some of Audre Lorde's critical thinking, so now it's time for you to enjoy her poetry. Since her earliest collections are hard to come by in print, dipping your toes into an edition...
Primary Theoretical Texts
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (1984)
If you're going to read Audre Lorde's poems, why not read more of her critical work while you're at it? Sister Outsider collects most of Lorde's best known essays, including "The Master's Tool...
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979)
This text is such a classic, you can't not read it—just keep in mind that you should take it with a healthy dose of postcolonial scholarship on the side.Aside from evil queens and beautiful princ...
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler (1990)
This one's a real doozy, but it's worth taking for a spin. After all, Judith Butler's work, from Gender Trouble onwards, has inspired some pretty huge controversies in contemporary feminism, n...
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature by Donna Haraway (1991)
Folks, we ain't about to get tired of saying that cyborgs are the best. You can sign us up for anything that gives us room to gush about T-2 and TNG and BSG and any other nerd acronym you want to t...
The Cultural Politics of Emotion by Sara Ahmed (2004)
If you're feeling ready to branch out into the up-and-coming feminisms of today, why not get started with Sara Ahmed's The Cultural Politics of Emotion? Like other folks dipping their fingers into...