Tag Archives: Feminism

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

October 30th 2024 – Speak Out! The Brixton Black Women’s Group

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On Wednesday 30th October 2024, from 7.30-9.30pm, Stroud Radical Reading Group will host a discussion of Speak Out, A Brixton Black Women’s Group Reader, edited by Milo Miller. Entry is free and everyone is welcome. We will meet at 10 John St, GL5 2AH. 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.

The book brings together the writings of Brixton Black Women’s Group for the first time. Established in response to the lack of interest in women’s issues experienced in male-dominated Black organisations, the Brixton Black Women’s Group’s aim was to create a distinct space where women of African and Asian descent could meet to focus on political, social and cultural issues as they affected black women. BBWG published its own newsletter, Speak Out, which kept alive the debate about the relevance of feminism to black politics and provided a black women’s perspective on immigration, housing, health and culture.

We’ll be discussing the book in UK Black History Month, and following it with discussions on autobiographies by Angela Davis and Benjamin Zephaniah at our events in November and December, but you do not need to attend all three events or have been to any of our previous events to come along to this one.

Resources

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.

Reviews

“For a new generation of feminist thinkers the relevance of this collection cannot be overstated. Intended for local distribution, the articles are a testament to the continuous theoretical study, fierce discipline, comradeliness and revolutionary love central to resistance against the most violent arms of the state…A balm, an instruction manual a historical object that defies temporality and a response to the forces that seek to depoliticise the history of racialised women’s struggle for freedom in Britain.

Lola Olufemi, author of Feminism Interrupted [which we discussed in 2021]

“An important testament to the pioneering Black British feminists of the 1970s and ’80s who set up groups and centres, and bravely and brilliantly campaigned against discrimination and for social change in the face of extreme opposition. Long ignored and undervalued, their grassroots activism adds unique and essential layers to the recorded histories of the era”

Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other

Events

Wednesday 6th December 2023: The Care Manifesto

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On Wednesday 6th December 2023, from 7.30-9.30pm, Stroud Radical Reading Group will discuss The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence by The Care Collective.

We’ll meet at 10 John St – the old Electric Bike Shop, next to the Ale House pub and currently home to Access Bike/Creative Sustainability. More info on the venue below.

As publishers Verso say: “The Care Manifesto puts care at the heart of the debates of our current crisis: from intimate care—childcare, healthcare, elder care—to care for the natural world. We live in a world where carelessness reigns, but it does not have to be this way.”

On this webpage you can find free resources including free downloads of two chapters and a free online version of the whole book, details to buy a copy of the book at a discount, and information about the author, the book, how our sessions work, and the venue.

We will focus our discussion on chapters 3 and 6, and the following questions. Thanks to Benjamin – who will introduce the session – for coming up with these:

  1. What can we do to create more caring kinships/communities/states?
  2. Is there a conflict between indiscriminate and emotionally invested care? Can/should either be enforced?
  3. In a world so empty of care, should caring people extend their care as far as possible to make up for this, or is it enough to care as much as they would in a caring world?
  4. What role does the state have in a non-hierarchical caring society?

We enourage people to read the whole 97 page book but you are also welcome to listen to the discussion and ask questions even if you haven’t read the book (or engaged with other the free resources).

Resources related to the book are available below – most are free. We like to ensure everyone can attendee our sessions and get something out of them even if they can’t afford to buy a copy of the book or the time to read it. We would encourage people to read/listen to as much as possible, but you are welcome to attend and listen along even if you are unable to engage with any of the below. Audio/visual materials are provided for anyone who prefers these to reading – don’t feel you have to read content to attend the ‘reading’ group. The aim is to discuss the ideas – however they have been presented.

Resources

This book is the third in a 3-part series on Crisis, Mutual Aid, and Radical Action, following books by Mike Davis on Marxism in the Anthropocene and Rhiannon Firth on Mutual Aid and Radical Action . You can come even if you didn’t attend the previous events.

About the venue

We’ll meet at 10 John St – the old Electric Bike Shop, next to the Ale House pub and currently home to Access Bike/Creative Sustainability. There’s one small step to enter the shop, then access is level. There are a couple of sofas and some harder chairs. There’s good lighting, and lots of room. It’s not an easy space to keep warm but there are heaters and some blankets. If you have any questions about acessibility or the venue, please get in touch.

About the author and the book

The Care Collective was formed in 2017, originally as a London-based reading group aiming to understand and address the multiple and extreme crises of care. Each coming from a different discipline, we have been active both collectively and individually in diverse personal, academic and political contexts. Members include: Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg, and Lynne Segal.

Publishers Verso say:

The Care Manifesto puts care at the heart of the debates of our current crisis: from intimate care—childcare, healthcare, elder care—to care for the natural world. We live in a world where carelessness reigns, but it does not have to be this way.

The Care Manifesto puts forth a vision for a truly caring world. The authors want to reimagine the role of care in our everyday lives, making it the organising principle in every dimension and at every scale of life. We are all dependent on each other, and only by nurturing these interdependencies can we cultivate a world in which each and every one of us can not only live but thrive.

The Care Manifesto demands that we must put care at the heart of the state and the economy. A caring government must promote collective joy, not the satisfaction of individual desire. This means the transformation of how we organise work through co-operatives, localism and nationalisation. It proposes the expansion of our understanding of kinship for a more ‘promiscuous care’. It calls for caring places through the reclamation of public space, to make a more convivial city. It sets out an agenda for the environment, most urgent of all, putting care at the centre of our relationship to the natural world.”

Endorsements:

“The Care Manifesto is a radiant invitation to transform our economy and society, a roadmap for how we can emerge from overlapping crises and weave a new social fabric. The ethic of universal care is an antidote to the spiralling carelessness that our current system shows towards people and the planet. The authors understand that care is not a commodity: it’s a practice, a core value, and an organizing principle on which a new politics can and must be built.” – Naomi Klein

“This manifesto is a call to action for global progressives. The Care Collective shows the “systemic carelessness” of existing political, economic, and kinship orders are broken both for humans and the planet. They demonstrate that capacious care offers a practical and already existing starting point for change on all levels” – Joan Tronto, author of Caring Democracy

“In showing us the power of mutual aid, coalition-building and solidarity, this book aids us in ensuring our activism is enacted through our daily actions within our communities and that whilst change starts within us, it doesn’t end there” – Adele Walton, gal-dem

caremanifestoch3and6Download
Events

Oct 26th 2022: Living My Life by Emma Goldman

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On Friday 21st October 2022, from 7.30-9.30pm at The Exchange, Brick Row, Stroud (GL5 1DF), Stroud Radical Reading Group will discuss Emma Goldman’s autobiography Living My Life (discounted copies are available from a local bookshop – click the previous link/see more details below).

If you do not have time to read the fill book (which approaches 600 pages), please focus on the Introduction, Chapter 42/XLII, pages 311-322 of the Penguin Classics edition (in which she discusses the Mother Earth radical newspaper she published, censorship, Feminism and homosexuality), and/or Chapter 52/LII, pages 403-527 of the Penguin Classics edition (which covers Goldman’s experiences in the early Soviet Union).

Buy a copy of the book with a 12% discount from the Yellow Lighted Bookshop. To claim the 12% discount (which reduces the price by £1.92 from £15.99 to £14.07), add the book to your basket, then click to ‘view your basket’, type “StroudRadical”in the ‘Coupon Code’ box, click ‘apply coupon’ and then proceed.

Our events are free to attend, though we will collect donations to cover the costs of venue hire on a donate-what-you-can-afford basis. We try to ensure the discussions are welcoming to new people, including people who have never been to a reading group before – and you don’t have to have been to university. You don’t even have to have read any of the book – you can just come along and listen to the discussion. Some free resources including a sample chapter we’ll focus our discussion on are included below though, and we’d encourage people to read/listen to as much as they can ahead of the session.

““The most dangerous woman in America,” as J. Edgar Hoover described her, took pen in hand in June 1928 to write the events of her tumultuous life. “Red Emma” Goldman, who the popular press claimed owned no God, had no religion, would kill all rulers, and overthrow all laws, chose to begin her autobiography on her fifty-ninth birthday, a task she would later say was the “hardest and most painful” she had ever undertaken. As she wrote about her life, she confronted not only her own loneliness but also the disappointment of her political hopes, the dream that anarchism, which she called her “beautiful ideal,” would take root in her lifetime among the people whose benefit she believed she served…

Eight years earlier, in 1920, America, her adopted country, had deported her as a subversive, leaving her feeling “an alien everywhere,” as she wrote to her friend in exile Alexander Berkman (Nowhere at Home, 170). A permanent, often unwelcome guest in someone else’s country, she would infuse her writing with a sense of loneliness and despair. To Berkman she wrote “hardly anything has come of our years of effort” (ibid., 49). On the eve of fascist victories in Europe, she felt as well the nearness of catastrophe, the likelihood that once again, as it had in 1914, Europe would be convulsed by war.

Underlying this sense of impending disaster, she was aware that political radicals on the left were embracing the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, a revolution she believed had betrayed the expectations of the Russian peasants and workers in whose name Lenin’s government served.” – Miriam Brody in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of the book

The Exchange has step-free access. We will keep windows open for ventilation, hand sanitiser is provided, and we ask people who are ill to stay away (whether they are ill with covid or something else). Attendees do not generally wear masks but we will be respectful to anyone who chooses to and other members may wear masks at request of other attendees – let us know your preferences in advance. Please contact us if you have any accessibility requirements – or other questions about how the events work.

Freely available resources related to the book are available below. We like to ensure everyone can attendee our sessions and get something out of them even if they can’t afford to buy a copy of the book or the time to read it.

ch42livingmylifeDownload ch 42
ch52livingmylifeDownload CH 52
Events

The Purpose of Power – by Alicia Garza. August 2022

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On Monday August 29th 2022, from 7.30-9.30pm at The Exchange, Brick Row, Stroud (GL5 1DF), Stroud Radical Reading Group will discuss Alicia Garza’s book The Purpose of Power: How to build movements for the 21st Century (discounted copies are available from a local bookshop – click the previous link/see below).

Our events are free to attend, though we will collect donations to cover the costs of venue hire on a donate-what-you-can-afford basis. We try to ensure the discussions are welcoming to new people, including people who have never been to a reading group before – and you don’t have to have been to university. You don’t even have to have read any of the book – you can just come along and listen to the discussion. Some free resources including a sample chapter we’ll focus our discussion on are included below though, and we’d encourage people to read/listen to as much as they can ahead of the session.

“Black Lives Matter began as a hashtag when Alicia Garza wrote what she calls ‘a love letter to Black people’ on Facebook. But hashtags don’t build movements, she tells us. People do.

Interwoven with Garza’s experience of life as a Black woman, The Purpose of Power is the story of how she responded to the persistent message that Black lives are of less value than white lives by galvanizing people to create change. It’s an insight into grass roots organizing to deliver basic needs – affordable housing, workplace protections, access to good education – to those locked out of the economy by racism.

It is an attempt not only to make sense of where Black Lives Matter came from but also to understand the possibilities that Black Lives Matter and movements like it hold for our collective futures. Ultimately, it’s an appeal to hearts and minds, demanding that we think about our privileges and prejudices and ask how we might contribute to the change we want to see in the world”

– Publisher information about the book

We will focus our discussion on Chapter 1 – which is available free. We encourage people to buy a copy of the book and read as much as possible, but appreciate not everyone can afford this in terms of either money or time – or may prefer audio/visual content. Below we provide links to another excerpt from the book, and two interview with Alicia Garza (one a video, the other text), which are all freely available.

The Exchange has step-free access. We will keep windows open for ventilation, hand sanitiser is provided, and we ask people who are ill to stay away (whether they are ill with covid or something else). Attendees do not generally wear masks but we will be respectful to anyone who chooses to and other members may wear masks at request of other attendees – let us know your preferences in advance. Please contact us if you have any accessibility requirements – or other questions about how the events work.

Resources

Events

26th January 2022: bell hooks – All About Love

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On Wednesday January 26th, we will discuss bell hooks’ All About Love: New Visions (wikipedia link). This is an online event, which will be held via videocall. Anyone is welcome, but we keep link details private – please contact us for the Zoom details.

bell hooks was an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist. She died on December 15th 2021, and we will discuss her work to mark her passing. bell hooks published more than 30 books and many scholarly articles, and taught at Stanford and Yale universities. Her work explored race, capitalism, and gender, and the ways in which systems of oppression and class domination are perpetuated. All About Love was published in the year 2000. Through personal anecdotes and discussion of psychological and philosophical ideas, hooks argues that our culture has lost the true meaning of love, and believes it is because we have no shared definition.

Stroud Radical Reading Group events are free to attend. 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 of the book from the Yellow Lighted Bookshop using the following link (adding the “StroudRadical” Coupon Code will get you 10% off the standard price). Order a copy of All About Love.

We will focus our discussion on the opening chapters of the book (Preface, Introduction, Chapter 1 – Clarity: Give Love Words, and Chapter 2 – Justice: Childhood Love Lessons). Download a pdf version of these chapters for free below. We encourage people to read more of the book if possible (you can also read the full text of the book free as a pdf). If you prefer audio/visual content to reading, you may prefer to listen to a 10 minute interview where bell books discusses the book, or watch/listen to a 70 minute video of bell hooks speaking about love at a library in Harlem from the year 2000 (full captions are provided).

bellhooksAllAboutLoveIntroChsDownload

“A visionary and accessible book, bell hooks’s All About Love offers radical new ways to think about love. Here, hooks, one of our most acute social critics, takes the themes that put her on the map – the relationship between love and sexuality, and the interconnectedness between the public and the private – and challenges the prevailing notion that romantic love is more important than all other bonds.”

“All About Love is a blueprint for finding myriad types of love, which hold the redemptive power to change our minds and lives.” – Publisher jacket text

Events

Aug 18th 2021: CALIBAN AND THE WITCH

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We will discuss Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici on Wednesday August 18th, from 7.30pm.

We encourage people to read the full book (see links to buy the book/read a free pdf below), but appreciate not everyone will have time. Please read the Preface and Introduction if you can, or engage with either the video or podcast interview below. You are welcome to attend to listen to the discussion even if you do not have time to engage with any of the content.

“A cult classic since its publication in the early years of this century, Caliban and the Witch is Silvia Federici’s history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages through the European witch-hunts, the rise of scientific rationalism and the colonisation of the Americas, it gives a panoramic account of the often horrific violence with which the unruly human material of pre-capitalist societies was transformed into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms.

It is a study of indigenous traditions crushed, of the enclosure of women’s reproductive powers within the nuclear family, and of how our modern world was forged in blood.”- Book jacket text from the publisher

This is an online event, which will be held via Zoom. For Zoom details, which we keep private to group members, please contact us. Stroud Radical Reading Group events are free to attend. Please contact us about any accessibility requirements.

Download the Preface and Introduction below, and read on for other content options include link to buy the book and details of how to get a 10% discount.

federicicalibanwitchintroDownload

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 welcome people who have not read the book but would like to listen! Please contact us if you have any questions.

This is the third in a series of three texts on Feminism, and the first in a series on the makings of modern inequality. You are welcome to attend this event standalone, but may be interested in catching up on the preceding events discussing Lola Olufemi’s Feminism Interrupted, and Audre Lorde’s Zami.

Silvia Federici is an Italian and American scholar, teacher, and activist from the radical autonomist feminist Marxist and anarchist tradition. She has taught at several universities in the US and also in Nigeria, and is the author of many works, which also include Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. She was co-founder of the International Feminist Collective, an organizer with the Wages for Housework Campaign.

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 June 2021: Feminism Interrupted by Lola Olufemi

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Our next session will be on Wednesday 23rd June, 7.30-9.30pm on Zoom (contact us for details).

We will discuss Lola Olufemi’s Feminism, Interrupted – Disrupting Power. This will be the first in a series of three texts in a series on Feminism, also featuring Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde (July 21st), and Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici (August 18th). Full details for those sessions will be added to the website ASAP.

This is an online event, which will be held via Zoom. For Zoom details, which we keep private to group members, please contact us. Stroud Radical Reading Group events are free to attend. 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 welcome people who have not read the book but would like to listen! Please contact us if you have any questions.

For this session, if you do not read the book, or are interested in additional material, please take a look at one or more of the below:

“More than just a slogan on a t-shirt, feminism is a radical tool for fighting back against structural violence and injustice. Feminism, Interrupted is a bold call to seize feminism back from the cultural gatekeepers and return it to its radical roots.

Lola Olufemi explores state violence against women, the fight for reproductive justice, transmisogyny, gendered Islamophobia and solidarity with global struggles, showing that the fight for gendered liberation can change the world for everybody when we refuse to think of it solely as women’s work. Including testimonials from Sisters Uncut, migrant groups working for reproductive justice, prison abolitionists and activists involved in the international fight for Kurdish and Palestinian rights, Olufemi emphasises the link between feminism and grassroots organising.

Reclaiming feminism from the clutches of the consumerist, neoliberal model, Feminism, Interrupted shows that when ‘feminist’ is more than a label, it holds the potential for radical transformative work.”

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and organiser from London. She facilitates workshops on feminism and histories of political organising in schools, universities and local communities. She is the co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University: Being a Woman of Colour at Cambridge and Other Institutions of Power and Elitism (Verve Poetry Press, 2019).

Events

2020 series 1 – Praxis: activism, social movement, and revolution

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Our monthly events in early 2020 will form a series on “Praxis: activism, social movements, and revolution”. Each of these three events will be held on Wednesdays, 7.30-9.30pm at The Exchange Stroud (GL5 1DF). Dates and links to full information below

SRRG3b.jpg
Poster for Stroud Radical Reading Group first series of 2020

Download the poster above (pdf, 1.25Mb) or a portrait format poster (pdf, 1.25Mb).

January 22nd: Why Social Movements Matter (click for full details)

We will focus our discussion on Chapter 4: “Practice-Oriented Thinking: ‘The Philosophers Have Only Interpreted the World’ (you will need to email us for the text, but are encouraged to read the full book, which can be ordered for next day delivery from Stroud Bookshop, £19.95). Why Social Movements Matter explains social movements for a general educated readership, shows how much social movements are part of our everyday lives, and how in many ways they have shaped the world we live in over centuries.

February 19th: Revolution in Rojava (full details)

We will focus our discussion on Chapter 5 “A Women’s Revolution” (pages 82-102) of Revolution in Rojava – Democratic Autonomy and Women’s Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan (pdf, 4.7Mb)  by Michael Knapp, Anja Flach, and Ercan Ayboga (translated by Janet Biehl). Since a 2012 revolution, and following the wider civil uprising in Syria beginning in 2011, Rojava is an autonomous region in northeastern Syria with direct democratic ambitions based on an anarchistic and libertarian socialist ideology – promoting decentralization, gender equality, environmental sustainability and pluralistic tolerance for religious, cultural and political diversity. We recommend you also read the Foreword (by David Graeber) and Introduction if you are unfamiliar with Rojava (pages 12-25). Copies of the book are available from Pluto press priced at £17.99 paperback, £3.99 ebook.

March 18th: Fat Activism (full details)

We will discuss “What’s Fat Activism?” (pdf) by Charlotte Cooper, exploring what we can learn from the history of fat activism, as well as touching on how we can unpick the ways we’ve been shaped by harmful, moralising discourses around food and weight that surround us. The article covers similar ground to Cooper’s book Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement (HammerOn press, paperback £16, ebook £10), a rare insider’s view of fat people speaking about their lives and politics on their own terms. As ever, we have selected a shorter text to focus our discussion but recommend readers read the full book if they are able.