Introducing another Year of Feminist Classics

As Iris mentioned in our previous post, we would like to extent the Year of Feminist Classics into 2012. However, the chaos of the holiday season and several life events prevented us from getting organised as quickly as we’d have liked, and as a result we ended up deciding to run the project from February 2012 to February 2013. This will give everyone more time to prepare, and will also prevent us from having to wrap things up amongst the end of the year rush in the future.

There’s another important change in how the project is run: we have invited several other co-hosts to join us. All of them are bloggers we admire and whose perspectives we know will contribute a lot to our discussions, and many were active participants last year. Now that there are more of us, we’ll be working in teams whenever possible to make sure there’s always someone around even if life gets in the way of reading and blogging.

Over the past few weeks, the new team tried to come up with a diverse, well-rounded reading list that addresses some of the gaps and blind spots we found in the texts we read last year. Some of our choices are more recent than the ones from the first year’s list, but we believe they’re all more than important and influential enough to be called classics.

Without further ado, here’s our reading list for the New Year:

• February – Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks (Amy)
• March – The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine De Pizan (Jean)
• April – Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano (Cass)
• May – Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë read alongside Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (Iris)
• June – Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg (Emily)
• July – Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (Nancy)
• August – The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (Lauren)
• September – Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldua (Melissa)
• October – The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (Jodie)
• November – Beyond the Veil by Fatema Mernissi (Ana)
• December – Women, Race, and Class by Angela Davis (Emily Jane)
• January – Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practising Solidarity by Chandra Talpade Mohanty (Eva)

We invite you all to think of this project as an informal feminist reading group. You don’t have to commit to joining the discussion every month, but we’d love to hear your thoughts whenever you’re able to. We’re very excited to read these books together, and we hope we’ll have the opportunity to continue to learn from each other and from you.

So, who’s with us? Let us know and we’ll be happy to add you to this year’s participants list. We’d also really appreciate it if you helped us spread the word to other readers.