Genre: Nonfiction
Length: 288 pages
Audiobook Length: 6 hours and 57 minutes
First Published: 2020
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Publisher’s Description
A potent and electrifying critique of today’s feminist movement announcing a fresh new voice in Black feminism
Today’s feminist movement has a glaring blind spot, and paradoxically, it is women. Mainstream feminists rarely talk about meeting basic needs as a feminist issue, argues Mikki Kendall, but food insecurity, access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues. All too often, however, the focus is not on basic survival for the many, but on increasing privilege for the few. That feminists refuse to prioritize these issues has only exacerbated the age-old problem of both internecine discord, and women who rebuff at carrying the title. Moreover, prominent white feminists broadly suffer from their own myopia with regard to how things like race, class, sexual orientation, and ability intersect with gender. How can we stand in solidarity as a movement, Kendall asks, when there is the distinct likelihood that some women are oppressing others?
In her searing collection of essays, Mikki Kendall takes aim at the legitimacy of the modern feminist movement arguing that it has chronically failed to address the needs of all but a few women. Drawing on her own experiences with hunger, violence, and hypersexualization, along with incisive commentary on politics, pop culture, the stigma of mental health, and more, Hood Feminism delivers an irrefutable indictment of a movement in flux. An unforgettable debut, Kendall has written a ferocious clarion call to all would-be feminists to live out the true mandate of the movement in thought and in deed.
Quotes from Hood Feminism
Mainstream, white-centered feminism hasn’t just failed women of color, it has failed white women.
We rarely talk about basic needs as a feminist issue. Food insecurity and access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues. Instead of a framework that focuses on helping women get basic needs met, all too often the focus is not on survival but on increasing privilege.
Poverty is an apocalypse in slow motion, inexorable and generational.
No woman has to be respectable to be valuable.
Ignoring the treatment of the most marginalized women doesn’t set a standard that can protect any woman.
About Mikki Kendall
Mikki Kendall is a writer, speaker, blogger, and author of the books Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists and Hood Feminism. She currently lives in Chicago. Visit the author’s website →
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