Books like Angry Women by Andrea Juno

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie redefines feminism for the 21st century, drawing on her experiences and TL;DER sexual politics, urging everyone to embrace feminist principles.

319 pages ; 23 cm

A timely collection of essays by Rebecca Solnit that examines gender, feminism, misogyny, and the cultural treatment of women with sharp insight and humor.

The Female Brain explains how women’s minds work, drawing on two decades of research and clinical practice to reveal the unique neurological and hormonal influences on female behavior.

In Female Rage, Mary Valentis and Anne Devane, both professors of literature, confront rage head-on, explaining why it is epidemic among women, why women need to acknowledge it, and how they can use it to empower their lives. Drawing on examples from mythology (particularly the myth of Medusa), literature, and film, as well as interviews with women and psychotherapists, Valentis and Devane let readers know that rage is a part of every woman's experience. Beginning with the rage of the little girl who perceives that being male confers privilege and moving on to the young woman who hides her feelings behind the mask of a pretty face, the authors discuss the all-too-common dependency among women that leads to victimization in relationships. And they explain how innocence and gullibility sow the seeds of rage. . The authors also discuss the physical and emotional problems, such as depression, anorexia, and bulimia, that result when rage is turned inward. They talk about the tendency to label enraged women as hysterical or crazy, about how women tend to direct their rage toward other women, and about the rage experienced by older women against a culture that deifies youth. Most important, they caution us not to become stuck in rage and indulge in fantasies of revenge. Instead, they coach us in how to find our undercurrent of rage, train it, and use it to fulfill our dreams.

Feminist film theory has made the psychic and political limitations of representational visibility abundantly clear. Yet the Left continues to promote visibility politics as a crucial aspect of progressive struggle. Unmarked examines the fraught relation between political and representational visibility and invisibility within both mainstream and avant-garde art. Suggesting that there may be some political power in an active disappearance from the visual field, Phelan looks carefully at examples of such absences in photography, film, theatre, the iconography of anti-abortion demonstrations, and performance art. A boldly specultative analysis of contemporary culture, Unmarked is a controversial study of the politics of performance. Situating performance theory within emerging theories of psychoanalysis, feminism, and cultural studies, Phelan argues that the non-reproductive power of performance offers a different way of thinking about cultural production and reproduction more generally. Written from and for the Left, Phelan's readings of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Mira Schor, Yvonne Rainer, Jennie Livingstone, Tom Stoppard, Angelika Festa and Operation Rescue radically rethink the politics of cultural representation.