This month's book club pick is "Femlandia" by Christina Dalcher
Hello fellow book lovers!
Summer is over and this month's BitchReads list is full of books you can cozy up with—plus a few to start getting you into the haunting spirit. Our list includes an introduction to trap feminism, an essential meditation on police abolition, funny reflections on bisexuality, and a YA novel about an intersex teen. Want some company with your reading? Pick up this month's BitchReads book pick, Femlandia by Christina Dalcher, to read along with your fellow book club members. And when you're done? Join us for the end-of-month live BitchReads event!
Happy reading!
Rosa Cartagena,
senior editor
THIS MONTH'S BOOK CLUB PICK:
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This month's BitchReads pick is Christina Dalcher’s latest dystopian feminist novel, which centers a popular locus of cultural and historical fascination: the women’s commune. Amid a catastrophic economic downfall that’s left the entire country unstable, hungry, and violent, Miranda is a desperate mother running out of options. She takes her daughter to a separatist collective that she had avoided for years—created by her estranged mother, Win—and quickly learns that the rules are severe, the Sisters are harsh, and there’s something sinister about the secretive methods they use to reproduce.
Pick up your copy and join us on October 27, 4pm PT/7pm ET, for the live BitchReads chat with Christina Dalcher.
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13 BOOKS FEMINISTS SHOULD READ THIS MONTH:
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by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson
In her debut book, public school art teacher Jocelyn Nicole Johnson ties together a novella and five short stories that explore racial and environmental social anxieties in Virginia. Partially inspired by the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Johnson’s title novella starts with a harrowing escape from the torch-wielding men who “came at dusk blaring an operatic O say can you see.” The protagonist Da’Naisha, a descendant of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, leads the Black and Brown survivors to safe shelter—at her ancestor’s former plantation Monticello.
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In this part memoir, part Black feminist treatise, Bowen shares her framework of trap feminism, which she developed to better explain how Black women have defined trap music and how trap culture has influenced Black womanhood; her sharp insight shines throughout. She’s candid and comical as she narrates her life and links lines from Megan Thee Stallion, Saucy Santana, Chella H with her experiences resisting racism, fatphobia, classism, sexism, and homophobia. Underlining her theory with scholarly moments, Bowen offers a fresh, inclusive Black feminist perspective that’s defiant, brash, and bad as hell.
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A leading historian of Black women’s activism, Keisha N. Blain's latest book examines one of the most impactful civil rights fighters in the past century: Fannie Lou Hamer. Blain delves into Hamer’s expectation-shattering life as a voting rights organizer and Black feminist intellectual with an essential voice that resonates today. Hamer minced no words: “The changes we have to have in this country are going to be for the liberation of all people—because nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
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This fun romp through the history of social drinking habits explores how and why alcohol consumption became gendered—from the actual types and flavors of a drink to the perceptions of the women drinking it. O’Meara zooms out for a global perspective, highlighting the wine-flushed women of the Tang dynasty and the hard-working Christian brewnuns. Notable mentions include Venus of Laussel, a 25,000-year-old stone carving thought to be one of the first depictions of a woman drinking, and, more recently, Fawn Weaver, the mastermind behind Uncle Nearest—named for the Black distiller who taught Jack Daniels how to make whiskey.
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As calls for abolishing the police gain more traction in mainstream political discourse, this book serves as an introduction and meditation on the concept of abolition and the myriad ways that it could manifest in the United States. Lawyer, activist, and community organizer Derecka Purnell invites readers to have questions, be skeptical, but above all to understand that we’re living in a crucial time that demands creative, equitable, and just solutions—and it’s on us to dream and experiment with what those can be.
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*Every book recommendation in this list comes from a Bitch Media editor with complete editorial independence. Bitch Media is an affiliate of Bookshop.org though, so we want to make sure that you know that a small percentage of any books you click through and purchase will come back to Bitch as a commission. Bookshop.org does not ship internationally.
Bitch Media is an award-winning, nonprofit, feminist media outlet. We're community funded because we believe that there's no for-profit way to make truly independent, intersectional feminist media. If our work has to compete with a self-interested advertiser or a major investor, it's never going to be the kind of world-changing, movement-making, uncompromising work that needs to be done. It'll just be another contract negotiated in a patriarchal world. You like our attitude? Us too.
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