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by Crystal Paul of Bustle

1. Women, Race, and Class by Angela Y. Davis

This is definitely one of the must-reads for any intersectional feminist. A bit dated at this point, but still important, it takes a look at the very issues of exclusion that have hindered the feminist movement since abolition days.

2. Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

Honestly, this will just be one of the best books you’ll ever read. It’s not only an important queer, feminist book, it’s also just a beautifully told story of struggle and love.

3. Woman, Native, Other by Trinh T. Minh-ha

Minh-ha delivers a full-frontal attack against the notion of erasure as a means of unified feminism. She argues for a feminism that fights against oppression of all kinds, because women all over the world face oppression at the hands of different forces and factors. And she attacks everything that “others” everything non-white or non-Western. It’s bold and awesome and a classic of postcolonial feminist theory.

4. Assata by Assata Shakur

Assata is part memoir of the radical awakening of a young black woman in the ‘60s and ‘70s, part personal testimony of a broken, racist justice system. In all its parts it’s a lyrical, addictive read that immerses you in one of the most important eras in the Black liberation struggle. By the end you’ll be outraged, angry, and itching for revolution.

5. Random Family by Adrian LeBlanc

Adrian LeBlanc took a lot of care with this book. Working over 10 years and forming close relationships with the families she writes about, LeBlanc offers up an intimate portrait of the lives of two women in a social class that often goes overlooked or misrepresented in popular U.S. culture and scholarly study. It’s importance is in the deeply personal rather treatment, rather than the almost zoological portrayals that often befall lower economic classes.

6. Sex Workers Unite! A History of the Movement from Stonewall to Slutwalk by Melinda Chateauvert

Sex workers are often cast as unwilling victims. Melinda Chateauvert challenges this portrayal by showing that many sex workers are in fact empowered, legitimate workers and have been powerful agents of social change throughout history. This book will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about sex work.

7. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions by Paula Gunn Allen

An oldie but a goodie, The Sacred Hoop is a corrective on the crucial role of indigenous women in history and tribal tradition. It’s not a perfect book, but it’s an important one that asserts the presence of Native American women.

8. This Bridge Called My Back by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa

This anthology is incredible! It’s got essays, interviews, poetry, and even visual art from women of so many different backgrounds. It’s kind of what intersectional feminism should look like in book form. Or, at least, darn close to it.

9. Women and Gender in Islam by Leila Ahmed

Need to check your assumptions about Islam and the treatment of women in the Middle East? Leila Ahmed’s book is an invitation to do just that. So many stereotypes and assumptions about Muslim women and their treatment under Islam abound, but one can hardly make snap judgements about Islam any more than you can about any other religion. Ahmed dives into the text itself and the history of the Western gaze that has led to misunderstanding about Islam and gender.

10. Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

With Gender Trouble, Judith Butler went straight for bold by questioning the very notion of gender as a part of feminism. If you took a Gender Studies course in college, it was probably on the syllabus. But it’s always worth another look, considering the book was originally written in the ‘90s, when Butler’s straight talk about the complexity of gender and sexuality was pretty ground-breaking. Since then, Butler’s reconsidered some of her ideas in newer books that are also worth picking up.

11. Brick Lane by Monica Ali

Not every book you read has to be a heavy non-fiction read. Actually getting a little fiction into your intersectional diet is a healthy way to dig into perspectives outside of your own on a more personal level. Brick Lane is a look at a young Bangladeshi woman coming of age in the middle of an arranged marriage and thrust into a new culture miles away from home. Whatever perspectives you’re looking to explore, there are so many stories out there that want to be read!

12. On Intersectionality by Kimberlé Crenshaw

Since an intersectional feminist’s work is never done, naturally, you can look forward to a new book on intersectionality straight from the woman herself. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s latest comes out in October this year.

Women, Culture, & Politics | Angela Davis

The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues | Angela Davis

Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, & the Sacred | M. Jacqui Alexander

The Womanist Idea | Layli Marpayan

But Some of Us Are Brave: All the Women are White and All the Blacks are Men | Akasha Gloria Hull

Sylvia Winter: On Being Human as Praxis | Katherine McKittrick

When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America | Paula J. Giddings

Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman | Michele Wallace

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction,and the Meaning of Liberty | Dorothy Roberts

The Greater Mississippi River Basin had a population somewhere between 5 and 12 million, the Eastern Woodlands had about as many, about as many in the Central Amazon, and almost as many on the American West Coast and North West Coast respectively. All of which saw 85 to 99 percent population losses in 2 or three generations after the others.

Multiple factions if European interests killed all the natives they could and destroyed all the culture and history they could. They were not limited by gender, language, religion, culture, ethnic group, nationality, geography, or time period; just every single person they could.

Tw genocide, tw violence

When Columbus realized the pigs they brought were getting the Islanders sick he arranged to loose as many as possible ahead of them primarily into the Benne region, I believe. Cortez loaded sickened corpses into Tenochtitlan’s aqueducts, Spain deliberately targeted the priests of Mexican society first because they knew it would severely undermine the public ability to treat disease. When the post Incan city states developed a treatment for malaria, the Spanish deliberately targeted the cities producing the quinine treatment and made it illegal to sell it to non-christians. The Spanish took all the sick and forced them at sword-point to go back to their homes instead of to the sick houses or the temples throughout the new world, and forced anyone who wasn’t sick to work in the mines or the coin factories melting and pressing their cultural treasures down into Spanish coins. The English were just as bad, they started the smallpox blankets. A lot of the loss was not deliberate infections like this but it was preventable at a million different crossroads and every European culture took the opportunity to weaponize the plagues when they could.

They knew what they were doing, just cuz they didn’t know what germs were doesn’t mean they have some accidental relationship with it. Alexander the great used biological warfare after all, so it’s not like you can pretend the concept was alien to them, they wrote about it.

Besides they did plenty of old fashioned killing too, there were Spanish conquistadors that estimated their own personal, individual killings might have numbered over the ten thousands. They were sure they’d killed more than ten million in “New Spain” alone. They crucified people they smashed babies on the rocks, they set fire to buildings they forced women and children into and cooked their meals over the burning corpses, they loosed war dogs on people. They sold children into sex slavery to be raped by disease riddled pedos back in Europe and if taking their virginity didn’t cure the sick creeps the native children would be killed or sometimes sent back.

The English were just as bad, shooting children in front of their mothers and forcing them to mop their blood with their hair. Turning human scalps into currency. Feeding babies to dogs in front of their mothers and fathers. Killing whole villages and erasing them from their maps so that historians would think God had made it empty just for the English.

The Americans after them burned crops and drove several species of bison to extinction just to starve the plains tribes. They pushed the blankets too. On top of the wars of extermination and scalp hunting and concentration and laws defining natives as non-persons so that we’d never be protected by the Constitution.

And even if you wanna live in some dreamy fairytale where God just made a whoopsie and then there were no natives left, nobody forced them to erase our history. The Spanish burned every document they found to erase the literacy and literary tradition of the Central and South Americans. There are essentially three Aztec documents left and some excavated pottery, and some archeological inscriptions and that’s it. The single most advanced culture in math and anatomical medicine erased probably forever. Same to the Inca, the most advanced fiber and alloy engineers and economists gone forever. Nobody made them do that. Nobody forced the American colonizers to steal political technology and act like they invented democracy or sovereignty. Nobody forced them to build their cities on top of native ones and erase them from history forever. Baltimore was built on Chesapeake, which translates roughly to “city at the top of the great water” in most Algonquin tongues. My favorite example is Cumberland in Western MD, they didn’t even reshape the roads or anything, they paved the steps and walking paths natives had used for hundreds of years and now it’s almost impossible to drive cuz the streets are too narrow or steep. The culture that built them didn’t have horses. Phoenix AZ, called Phoenix cuz the settlers literally found an old city and “brought it back to life.” Did they save any history or cultural artifacts? No. Most cities on the east coast are like this. Nobody forced them to erase that history.

if you need convincing here are a few highlights from when my family and i went to see the official globe theatre production of a midsummer night’s dream:

they cast helena as a guy (helenus), first of all. they took a straight love square between two girls and two guys and made it a love square between a girl and three guys, only one of which was white. both sets of couples get happy endings and it’s fuckin adorable

it was reimagined with an indian setting

puck had a water pistol and kept shooting at the audience

historical accuracy?? who cares everyone’s gonna dress like a modern hipster teenager

bottom and his acting troupe sung bon jovi

oh yeah also the acting troupe were reimagined as globe theatre employees with delusions of acting skills

hermia and helenus sung single ladies by beyonce

innuendos. innuendoes everywhere

oberon walked onstage for the fight between oberon and titania drunk with a half-empty bottle of schweppes

lysander spent a significant length of time in the play wandering around in just boxers and a leather jacket

oberon made out with puck

and my personal favorite:

Earth was doing just fine with a mostly nitrogen/carbon dioxide atmosphere and everyone was happy to go on living in anaerobic bliss and then cyanobacteria suddenly hit the scene, altered the atmosphere composition so that there was a ton of oxygen gas and killed practically everything (97% or more of all species on earth).