Tag Archives: Class

Events

Wednesday 26th March 2025- Revolutionary and Enemy Feminisms

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On Wednesday 26th March 2025, from 7.30-9.30pm, Stroud Radical Reading Group will host a discussion of two books looking at feminisms. The discussion will follow International Women’s Day, which is held annually on the 8th March. We suggest people pick one or other of the books to read in full, or read excerpts from both – see below for links to buy the books at a discount from the local Yellow Lighted Bookshop and a variety of free text, audio, and visual resources relevant to the books.

  • Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought, Edited by Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah
  • Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation, by Sophie Lewis

We will meet at Creative Sustainability’s shopfront space at 10 John St, GL5 2HA (a short distance from the town centre train or bus station, with parking available nearby at Church St).

Entry is free and everyone is welcome – you do not need to have attended previous sessions, and we do our best to make the sessions welcoming to people who have not been to reading groups or similar settings like university seminars before.

More information about the books, venue and how sessions work is below.

About the books:

Revolutionary Feminisms – “Black, anti-colonial, anti-racist feminist thought is often sidelined in mainstream discourses that transform feminism into simplistic calculations of how many women are in positions of power.

This book sets the record straight. Through interviews with key scholars, including Angela Y. Davis and Silvia Federici, [Editors of Revolutionary Feminisms, Brenna] Bhandar and [Rafeef] Ziadah present a serious and thorough discussion of race, class, gender, and sexuality not merely as intersections to be noted or additives to be mixed in, but as co-constitutive factors that must be reckoned with if we are to build effective coalitions.”

Enemy Feminisms – “In a time of rising fascism, ceaseless attacks on reproductive justice, and violent transphobia, we need to reckon with what Western feminism has wrought if we have any hope of building the feminist world we need. Sophie Lewis offers an unflinching tour of enemy feminisms, from 19th century imperial feminists and police officers to 20th century KKK feminists and pornophobes to today’s anti-abortion and TERF feminists.

Enemy feminisms exist. Feminism is not an inherent political good. Only when we acknowledge that can we finally reckon with the ways these feminisms have pushed us toward counterproductive and even violent ends. And only then can we finally engage in feminist strategizing that is truly antifascist.

At once a left transfeminist battlecry against cisness, a decolonial takedown of nationalist womanhoods, and a sex-radical retort to femmephobia in all its guises, Enemy Feminisms is above all a fierce, brilliant love letter to feminism.”

Buy the books

When looking at your “basket” enter the “couponcode” 25stroudradical for a 15% discount. Pick up book from Nailsworth, Tetbury or Chalford shops, or get books delivered to your door for £3.50 postage. If posting books, you may wish to buy other books we are reading this year.

Free Resources

Text Resources

  1. TERF Island – There Have Always Been Enemies Inside the Feminist Camp | lux-magazine.com [5,000 words]
  2. How the Girlboss Lost: Sophie Lewis on the Rise and Fall of a Feminist Moment – Leaning Into the Death of Lean-In Feminism and Its Many Resurrections in Our Conflicted Zeitgeist | lithub.com [3,150 words]
  3. Lipstick on the Pigs​ | Kamala Harris and the Lineage of the Female Cop | thedriftmag.com [4,600 words]
EnemyFeminismsExcerptsDownload

Audio/visual resources

About our events and the venue

Stroud Radical Reading Group events are free to attend, though we will make a collection to cover venue hire costs – please bring some cash. We try to create a comfortable discussion space for everyone, including people who have not been part of a reading group or been to university. Anyone is welcome to listen to the discussion, though we encourage contributions only from those who have read at least some of the book we are discussing. There is an opportunity for more informal discussion after the session in the Ale House pub for anyone who wants to continue their evening.

About the venue

We will meet at the Creative Sustainability shopfront space at 10 John St, GL5 2HA (round the corner from Iceland and next to the Ale House pub). This is close to the train station and not far from the bus station. There are stands to lock bikes to outside, and parking for cars nearby at Church St car park. There are no toilets at the venue. There is a small step to access the building, which is then step free). The room is well lit. Please get in touch if you’d like to get more of an idea of what the sessions are like or if you have any accessibility needs.

Get in touch
Facebook event – invite friends/receive reminders
Join the Stroud Radical Reading Facebook Group for online discussion with others who attend the discussions

Events

November 27th 2024 – An Autobiography by Angela Davis

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On Wednesday 27th November 2024, from 7.30-9.30pm, Stroud Radical Reading Group will host a discussion of An Autobiography by Angela Davis. Entry is free and everyone is welcome. We will meet at 10 John St, GL5 2AH.

The book is a powerful and commanding account of the life of trailblazing political activist Angela Davis, detailing her journey from a childhood on Dynamite Hill in Birmingham, Alabama to one of the most significant political trials of the century. From her political activity in a New York high school to her work with the U.S. Communist Party, the Black Panther Party, and the Soledad Brothers; and from the faculty of the Philosophy Department at UCLA to the FBI’s list of the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. Told with warmth, brilliance, humour and conviction, this autobiography is a classic account of a life in struggle with echoes in our own time.

Find links to buy the book and free resources related to it below, as well as information about the venue for our events and our group. If you do not have time to read the full book, we recommend focusing on Part 4 – Flames. Download part 4 here (this is still a big section, over 100 pages). We welcome contributions to the discussion from anyone who has engaged with any of the resources – even if they haven’t finished Part 4 or the book, and anyone to join us to listen in even if they have not been able to engage with any of the resources.

We’ll be following this event with a discussion on autobiography by Benjamin Zephaniah in December, and it follows our discussion of “Speak Out!” – an anthology of work by the Brixton Black Women’s Group in October – but you are welcome to attend this event alone, and do not have been to any of our previous events to come along to this one.

Resources

AngelaDavisAutobiography-4FlamesDownload

About our events and the venue

Stroud Radical Reading Group events are free to attend, though we will make a collection to cover costs – please bring some cash. We try to create a comfortable discussion space for everyone, including people who have not been part of a reading group or been to university. Anyone is welcome to listen to the discussion, though we encourage contributions only from those who have read at least some of the book we are discussing.

We will meet at 10 John St, GL5 2AH. This is near the centre of town, a short walk from Stroud Railway Station and a slightly longer walk from the Merrywalks Bus Station. There are stands to lock bikes to outside, and parking for cars nearby in either Brunel Mall, Fawkes Place, or Church St car park. There is a low step to enter the building, which is flat. There are no toilet facilities. Please get in touch if you’d like to get more of an idea of what the sessions are like or if you have any accessibility needs.

Events

Books we will read in 2023

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Please see below a full list of the books we will read in 2023. Each monthly session will have its own page on the website providing links to excerpts (‘focus texts’) to enable those who aren’t able to buy/read full books to participate, discounted copies of the books, and audio/visual materials that act as alternatives/additions to the reading. For now, only January-May’s sessions has these details, but full details will be added, together with dates for sessions beyond January, ASAP.

* Wednesday January 25th: “We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-war Britain”, by Daniel Sonabend

* February: “No Pasaran! Antifascist dispatches from a World in crisis”, edited by Shane Burley

* March: “Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics” by Michael Richmond and Alex Charnley

* April: “The Post-Internet Far-Right and Ecofascism“, both by Sam Moore and Alex Roberts

* May: “White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism”, by Andreas Malm and The Zetkin Collective

* June – The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below by Peter Gelderloos

* July – After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration, by Holly Jean Buck

* August: Noughts and Crosses, by Malorie Blackman

* September: Disaster Anarchy – Mutual Aid and Radical Action by Rhiannon Firth

* October 2023 – Old Gods, New Enigmas by Mike Davis

* Nov 2023 – Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence by The Care Collective

Events

May 25th 2022: Working Class History

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On Wednesday 25th May 2022 at 7.30pm we will discuss “Working Class History: Everyday Acts of Resistance & Rebellion”, an “On This Day” format book by the Working Class History project.

Stroud Radical Reading Group events are free to attend. We will meet face-to-face for this session for the first time in over two years at the Exchange, Brick Row, GL5 3DF), but will attempt to also enable people to join via video call. Anyone is welcome, but we keep video call details private – please contact us for the Zoom details. You are welcome to attend to listen to the discussion even if you do not have time to engage with any of the content. Free resources are listed below, but if you can, please buy a copy from the Yellow Lighted Bookshop who are offering a £2.04 discount from the standard £16.99 price (12% off) if you enter the coupon code StroudRadical when viewing your basket. An ebook version is available from PM Press for $8.95 .

We will focus our discussion on the entries for May, the month of International Workers Day – or May Day – marked since 1886 when a general strike took place in the USA in pursuit of an eight-hour limit on the working day, and the several innocent anarchist workers were framed on false charges of throwing a bomb at police breaking up a demonstration in involving 400,000 workers in Chicago that started May 1st 1886, and later executed.

A preview of the ebook is available online, and covers the foreword introduction, and first 5 daily entries. Daily entries can be read as indidivual posts on the WCH Facebook page, or via @wrkclasshistory on twitter.

You may like to listen to some of the podcasts associated with the project. One episode linked below features a discussion with the authors about the book, while two short series cover topics relevant to our most recent previous sessions on LGBTQ+ people and movements.

About the book:

“Working Class History presents a distinct selection of people’s history through hundreds of “on this day in history” anniversaries that are as diverse and international as the working class itself. Women, young people, people of color, workers, migrants, Indigenous peoples, LGBTQ people, disabled people, older people, the unemployed, home workers, and every other part of the working class have organized and taken action that has shaped our world, and improvements in living and working conditions have been won only by years of violent conflict and sacrifice. These everyday acts of resistance and rebellion highlight just some of those who have struggled for a better world and provide lessons and inspiration for those of us fighting in the present. Going day by day, this book paints a picture of how and why the world came to be as it is, how some have tried to change it, and the lengths to which the rich and powerful have gone to maintain and increase their wealth and influence.

This handbook of grassroots movements, curated by the popular Working Class History project, features many hidden histories and untold stories, reinforced with inspiring images, extensive references and further reading, and a foreword from legendary author and dissident Noam Chomsky. Founded in 2014, Working Class History is an international collective of worker-activists who launched a social media project and podcast to uncover our collective history of fighting for a better world and promote it to educate and inspire a new generation of activists. Despite our small size and minimal budget, we have grown to become the most popular online people’s history project in English, reaching an audience of tens of millions each month. We do not receive any institutional or corporate funding or backing of any kind.”

Events

July 21st 2021: Zami by Audre Lorde

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Our next session will be on Wednesday 21st July, 7.30-9.30pm on Zoom (contact us for details).

We will discuss Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde on 21st July. This is the second in a series of three texts on Feminism, to be followed by Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici (August 18th). Full details for that session to be added to the website ASAP. In June we discussed Lola Olufemi’s Feminism, Interrupted – Disrupting Power (click to catch up with free excerpts/audio-visual content).

Order the book from the Yellow Lighted Bookshop. Once you’ve ordered the book(s) you want, enter “StroudRadical” to the “Coupon Code” box at the checkout, click “Apply Coupon” – and the bill will be reduced by 10%. You can then either collect from Nailsworth, Tetbury or Chalford shops, or have the book(s) delivered by RoyalMail or the Bike Drop (£3.50 for delivery.

Audrew Lorde was an American writer, feminist, womanist, librarian, and civil rights activist. Zami is a “biomythography”, a term coined by Lorde that combines “biography” and “mythology”. As well as Lorde’s life, the book explores racism, lesbianism, mother-daughter relationships, and McCarthyism (accusations of treason related to Communism, named after the US Senator and the ‘red scare’ era of 1940s and 1950s America).

“A little black girl opens her eyes in 1930s Harlem, weak and half-blind. On she stumbles – through teenage pain and loneliness, but then to happiness in friendship, work and sex, from Washington Heights to Mexico, always changing, always strong. This is Audre Lorde’s story. A rapturous, life-affirming autobiographical novel by the ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior poet’, it changed the literary landscape.”

– from the Penguin Classics edition

There is a 50 minute audio recording of Audre Lorde reading excerpts of the book and speaking about her life available on YouTube (at the link and embedded below).

Want to read more? You can read Lorde’s 1980 paper “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” (pdf) at the link.

Events

23rd October – Antonio Gramsci on Working Class Education and Culture

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As part of a series on Culture, Memory and Resistance, Stroud Radical Reading Group will discuss work by Antonio Gramsci on October 23rd at Atelier Stroud, 19A Lower St, Stroud, GL5 2HT, 7.30-9.30pm (there is a small amount of parking at Atelier, alternatively a short walk from Parliament St car park, or a 15 minute walk from Stroud train and bus stations).

We will discuss writings on “Working Class Education and Culture (3.5Mb pdf download)” by Italian Marxist philosopher and communist politician, Antonio Gramsci. Included in this pdf download of our focus chapter for discussion is the introduction to the book by Eric Hobsbawm. Much of Gramsci’s writing concerns ideas about the role of culture and ideology in maintaining the status quo through the development of “common sense” values and norms, rather than merely through violence, economic force, or coercion. Radical Readers are encouraged to explore Gramsci’s larger body of work if they wish. Our focus chapter is one set of texts from a larger Gramsci Reader (selected writings, 1916-1935 – 56Mb pdf download), edited by David Forgacs -chapters 6, 7, 11 and 12 are more relevant to questions of culture and “hegemony” for anyone interested in additional reading.

The session with be introduced by Stroud resident and recovering Trotskyist, Jeremy Green.

As people have different styles of learning, we like to include audio and visual materials where possible. You may wish to listen to this Desolation Radio podcast episode on Gramsci (80mins), or watch this short video introduction to key concept ‘hegemony’:

The session is followed by our November session Post-War to Post-Wall, as part of the Berliner Zeitgeist programme, and was preceded by Insurgent Empire – Stroud Radical Reading Group on 25th September.

Stroud Radical Reading Group events are free to attend but we ask for a donation of £2-3 from anyone who can afford it to cover venue costs. Please contact us about any accessibility requirements. We aim to make the sessions a welcoming space for anyone interested in the topic, you do not need to have a university education or have ever been to a reading group before, and we even welcome people who have not read the text but would like to listen! Please contact us if you have any questions.

Events

“Natives: race and class in the ruins of Empire” by Akala

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Our second reading of 2019 will be on Wednesday 20th February, 7.30-9.30pm at Black Book Cafe at the bottom of Nelson St: “Natives: race and class in the ruins of Empire” by Akala. We ask for a donation of £1-3 to cover the costs of the venue, and – though anyone is welcome to listen – we request that the discussion is focused on and mainly involves those who have read the text.

The reading forms a part of our mini-series: “Britain: Class, Race and Gender in past, present and future”.

In Natives, Akala takes his own experiences – with education, the police, identity and everything in between – and uses them to look at the social, historical and political factors that have left us where we are today. From the first time he was stopped and searched as a child, to the day he realised his mum was white, to his first encounters with racist teachers; race and class have shaped Akala’s life and outlook.

We will focus on Chapters 5 and 6 (“Empire and Slavery in the British Memory (pdf)” and “Scotland and Jamaica (pdf)”, pages 123-168) of this best-selling book by BAFTA and MOBO award-winning hip hop artist, writer and social entrepreneur Akala.

A PDF of the full text of Natives can be read and downloaded online.

Facebook event page: Natives by Akala.

There is a wealth of material from Akala online, including his music and a number of lectures, in the video below, Akala presents Natives at the Edinburgh International Book Festival:

Events

Britannia Unchained?

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The first sessions of Stroud Radical Reading Group in 2019 will form a mini-series: “Britain: Class, Race and Gender in past, present and future.” We’ll meet at the Black Book Cafe at the bottom of Nelson St (next to the Laundrette), 7.30-9.30pm, usually the third Wednesday of the month.

Our first session will focus on “Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Prosperity”, written by several British Conservative Party right-wing MPs (Chris Skidmore, Kwasi Kwarteng, Dominic Raab, and Priti Patel). It was released in September 2012, arguing that Britain should adopt a different and radical approach to business and economics or risk “an inevitable slide into mediocrity”. We will focus on the title chapter “Britannia Unchained” and the conclusion, pages 100-116.

To offer insight and alternative perspectives, we have also selected
* Molly Scott Cato’s BadBoysOfBrexit website, and
* Paul Kingsnorth’s “Brexit & the culture of Progress”.

Readers may elect to focus on one of the three, or dip into each.

Additional notes:

Molly Scott Cato is Green Party MEP for the South West (including Stroud). Readers may also like to browse the section of Molly’s website devoted to Brexit.

Paul Kingsnorth’s views were also covered in “The lie of the land: does environmentalism have a future in the age of Trump?” published in the Guardian in March 2017.

The following events in the series – Britain: Class, Race and Gender in past, present and future are:

Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire by Akala – 20th February
Why I’m No Longer Talking (To White People) About Race – Reni Eddo-Lodge – 20th March
“Me And White Supremacy Workbook” – Layla Saad – 17th April