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A history of feminist and lesbian thinking from the 1970s to the present
Across almost 50 years of writing, Susan Hawthorne’s essays on lesbian culture and politics take the reader on a journey through the concerns of radical feminists engaged in the Women’s Liberation Movement. Not only does she trace the experiments of lesbians creating a vibrant woman-loving culture, but she also traces the backlash against lesbians and a history of violence perpetrated by the state, corporations and individual men.
She begins with a recollection of a rape in her pre-feminist days, followed by a critique of the institution of heterosexuality and the role of lesbian feminism as a strategy. She is soon asking questions about lesbian existence. The essays span reflections on lesbian literature and the development of lesbian culture, including the politics of physical expression in circus.
Susan Hawthorne writes about cultural appropriation, depoliticisation and the erasure of lesbian inventiveness. She researches violence against lesbians including rape, torture and murder and the way in which this violence is ignored and often distorted by the media.
Her investigations include lesbian refugees, lesbian economics, violation of lesbian human rights and the impact of the transgender industrial complex on the existence of lesbians as a political force.
SEPTEMBER 2024 | ISBN 9781925950984 | Paperback | 360 pages | 152mm x 228mm
In this thought-provoking collection of articles drawn from her blog, The 11th Hour, Jennifer Bilek delves into the intricate relationship between transsexualism, transgenderism, and transhumanism. She sheds light on how the push for perceived human rights for marginalized groups often obscures broader societal dynamics.
Jennifer Bilek traces the evolution of transsexualism from a personal fetish into an industry that commodifies human reproductive sex, particularly womanhood. This process divorces it from its biological roots and its connection to the environment, reducing human reproductive sex to medically and technologically manipulated components.
She highlights how young people are sold the notion of expressing themselves and alleviating feelings of dissociation through the purchase of these manufactured identities with the term ‘transgender’.
Through an exploration of the transhumanist movement, Bilek investigates how its proponents blur the boundaries between humanity and mechanization. Society is undergoing a profound transformation away from the biological realities of reproductive sex, driven by emerging technologies that shape children's perceptions of their bodies from an early age. The narrative of gender identity transcendence exploits their vulnerability, pushing them toward an increasingly medicalized future.
Her thorough analysis exposes the technological and financial motivations behind a political agenda masquerading as a human rights movement. This agenda seeks to redefine reproductive norms and propel society toward a posthuman future, ultimately undermining womanhood and eroding women's rights.
2 JULY 2024 | ISBN 9781922964106 | Paperback | 224 pages | 152 mm x 228 mm
Thousands of pages of books, millions of characters in tweets and hundreds of blogs have been devoted to explaining the distinction between sex and gender, but far from clarifying anything, bewilderment for ordinary people is only growing.
The concept of gender is central to a vaguely progressive-looking set of ideas based on the maxim that people possess a so-called ‘gender identity’. The real problem arises when this nebulous concept, bandied about with different and even incompatible meanings by different groups, is used as a prop to introduce policies that mark a huge setback for the rights of women and girls. The general public, watching the controversy from the sidelines, is confused by conflicting claims about whose rights are being infringed.
In this incisive book, Laura Lecuona sets the record straight by reviewing the origin of the current uses of the key term gender and exploring the main theories of transgenderism. She discusses what lies behind the claims about pronoun usage and warns about the consequences of promoting the recognition of so-called transgender children. She points out the collateral damage arising from this activism, from the perpetuation of sexist roles to limitations on freedom of speech. She dares to confront the accusations of transphobia that often inhibit those who question the foundations of this financially-driven and increasingly dominant ideology and shows the devastating effects transactivism is having on women, both socially and politically.
Gender Identity: Lies and Dangers is essential reading for the urgently needed conversation we need to have about whose interests are being served with the advancement of transgender ideology and what this means for women’s sex-based rights.
Laura Lecuona’s book is remarkable in scope and a dose of political sanity that is badly needed.
—Janice G. Raymond
FEBRUARY 2024 | ISBN 9781925950908 | Paperback | 378 pages
If the human being is allowed to be genetically manipulated and made by artificial means in the laboratory in an unstoppable crescendo of experimentation, what will be left to defend?
This book is a radical critique of gender ideology and transhuman design. Silvia Guerini shows how the TQ+ rights agenda is being pushed by eugenicist capitalist technocrats at the top of Big Business, Big Philanthropy, Big Tech and Big Pharma companies. She argues that dissociation from our sexed bodies leads to dissociation from reality, with the human body transformed into a permanent construction site besieged by synthetic and artificial interventions. Erasure of the material dimension of bodies and sexual difference is an erasure of women. She explains how fundamental struggles such as the fight against genetic engineering and the fight against artificial reproduction can only advance in conjunction with an opposition to gender ideology. By linking ‘gender identity’ to the genetic modification of bodies, she warns that humanity itself is at risk of becoming a synthetic life form with synthetic emotions within a virtual, fluid, deconstructed metaverse. Today, being revolutionary means preserving everything that makes us human. It means defending the living world and nature as entities to be respected, not as parts that can be broken down and redesigned in a laboratory world.
The idea of the ‘neutral’ body and body modification pave the way for the construction of the post-human cyborg and the genetic engineering of bodies. Is the last bioethical barrier about to be breached to give way to transhumanist demands? And at what cost?
OCTOBER 2023 | 9781925950885 | Paperback | 168 pages
Decolonizing feminism always prioritizes the collective liberation of Indigenous and other women and names patriarchy as the central component of women’s oppression.
In Not Sacred, Not Squaws, Cherry Smiley analyses colonization and proposes a decolonized feminism enlivened by Indigenous feminist theory.
Building on the work of grassroots radical feminist theorists, Cherry Smiley outlines a female-centered theory of colonization and describes the historical and contemporary landscape in which male violence against Indigenous women in Canada and New Zealand is the norm. She calls out ‘sex work’ as a patriarchal colonizing practice and a form of male violence against women.
Questioning her own uncritical acceptance of the historical social and political status of Indigenous women in Canada – which she now recognizes as male-centred Indigenous theorizing – she examines the roles of culture and tradition in the oppression of Indigenous women and constructs an alternative decolonizing feminist methodology.
This book is a refreshing feminist contemporary challenge to the patriarchal ideology that governs our world and a vigorous and irreverent defence against the attempts to silence Indigenous radical feminists.
APRIL 2023 | ISBN 9781925950649 | Paperback | 257 pages
Kajsa Ekis Ekman
Translated by Kristina Mäki
A brilliant examination of the intellectually incoherent and anti-feminist character of gender identity theory
In this groundbreaking book, Swedish feminist and Marxist, Kajsa Ekis Ekman, traces the ideological roots of the new definition of woman. She shows how biological determinism is back – but minus the biology. So too are stereotypes: womanhood is no longer about having a vagina, but pink ribbons and dolls. Masculinity is no longer synonymous with having a penis but with war and machines. We are told being a woman is a gender identity that anyone can claim and that can only be determined by one’s own feelings.
In countries such as Norway, Canada, Argentina, Australia and New Zealand, self-identity laws have already been enacted that give anyone the right to change his or her legal sex. At the same time, the industry for gender reassignment surgery is growing at an unprecedented pace. Seven out of ten teenagers who seek interventions are now girls.
The new definition of sex has been hailed as progressive. But is it really? What ideology is expressed by it? What consequences will it have? And for whom?
FEBRUARY 2023 | ISBN 9781925950663 | Paperback | 152 x 228 pp | 380 pages
From racialised police brutality to climate change, #MeToo, ‘trans rights’, COVID-19, the prospect of nuclear war and the prevalence of trauma – we are constantly bombarded with high stakes problems that we are expected to speak out about and act on. On closer inspection, the popular solutions to each of these problems aren’t easy to reconcile. Black Lives Matter activists demand prison abolition, while #MeToo feminists want rapists in jail – and while our objections to war and police brutality make us suspicious of state institutions in general, our responses to climate change and COVID-19 reinforce our dependency on them.
Out of the Fog cuts through the confusion. Renée Gerlich suggests that readers move beyond feeling overwhelmed and emotionally manipulated. She draws on a radical feminist tradition that demonstrates how our despair is connected to our most pressing social problems, and offers a framework for assessing and interpreting the current political landscape.
Out of the Fog delivers clarity and guidance in this bewildering time. Renée Gerlich’s insights will help you develop the capacity to speak with an authentic voice and to act purposefully and with impact in the world.
...understanding how our private heartbreak relates to our large-scale problems is the only way we can unravel the helplessness we feel, claim our voices, and take action in the way we deeply crave. We cannot do any of these things while living with the cognitive dissonance of competing ideas, priorities, solutions, and top-down paternalism.
NOVEMBER 2022 | ISBN 9781925950540 | Paperback | 252 pages | 228 x 152mm
In this blisteringly persuasive and piercingly intelligent book, Sheila Jeffreys argues that women live under penile imperialism, a regime in which men are assumed to have a ‘sex right’ of access to the bodies of women and girls.
She reasons that the ‘sexual revolution’ that began in the 1960s unleashed an explicit male sexual liberation and that even now, under current laws and cultural mores, women do not have the right to self-determination in relation to their bodies.
Sheila Jeffreys argues that the exercise of the male sex right has mainstreamed misogynist attitudes and so-called sexual freedom has meant the freedom of men to use women and children with impunity.
The power dynamics of sex, rather than being eliminated, has been eroticised, supported by state regulations and structures that have further entrenched male domination. And while men’s sexual fetishisms such as BDSM and transvestism have been normalised, women now have to fight as their spaces are being erased and their voices silenced in a faux inclusivity that has ‘naturalised’ sexual harassment.
Sheila Jeffreys contends that women’s human rights are profoundly harmed and sexual violence is used more than ever to enforce social control of women.
This is a sobering and brilliant analysis of the modern predicament of women that is impossible to ignore.
SEPTEMBER 2022 | 9781925950700 | Paperback | 376 pages | 234 x 153mm
THIS BOOK IS PART OF THE GENDER CRITICAL COLLECTION
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ALSO AVAILABLE AS INDIVIDUAL CHAPTERS for AUD $10.00
Lifelike, replica women and girls produced for men’s sexual use, sex dolls and robots represent the literal objectification of women. They are marketed as companions, the means for men to create their ‘ideal’ woman, and as the “perfect girlfriend” that can be stored away after its use.
Advocates claim the development of sex dolls and robots should be actively encouraged and will have many benefits – but for who?
Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating exposes the inherent misogyny in the trade in sex dolls and robots modelled on the bodies of women and girls for men’s unlimited sexual use. From doll owners enacting violence and torture on their dolls, men choosing their dolls over their wives, dolls made in the likeness of specific women and the production of child sex abuse dolls, sex dolls and robots pose a serious threat to the status of women and girls.
“Sex dolls and robots in the female form function as an endorsement of men’s sexual rights, with women and girls positioned as sexual objects. The production of these products further cements women’s second class status.”
SEPTEMBER 2022 | 9781925950601 | Paperback | 216 pages | 228 x 228 mm
Shattering the popular myth that porn is harmless, the personal accounts of 25 brave women in “He Chose Porn over Me” reveal the real-life trauma experienced by women at the hands of their porn-consuming partners – men who were supposed to care for them.
This confronting but necessary book dares to tell the truth about pornography’s destructive impact – about the men who habitually use it and the women and children who are mistreated and discarded as a result.
The women in this book were collateral damage in their partner’s insatiable greed for porn. Their stories tell of the crushing of intimacy, respect, connection, love. Porn colonised their families, leaving women rejected and scarred. They were subjected to sexual terrorism in their own homes. The men, turbo-charged by pornography, were intoxicated by sexualised power. They didn’t care if they lost everything including their partners.
In this haunting expose, pornography is rightfully situated as an insidious tool of violence against women.
The contributors, now working to re-build their lives, found a confidante in Melinda Tankard Reist who supported them in the sharing of their experiences in these pages, and to warn other women – don’t date men who use porn …
He chose porn over me. Porn killed my marriage. It killed my trust. It destroyed my sense of self and understanding of true intimacy.
—Courtney
As long as pornography exists, we don’t stand a chance of creating a fair and equal world.
—Carla
I was being groomed to become a porn star in the bedroom.
—Maggie
He used me like a blow-up doll.
—Florence
AUGUST 2022 | 9781925950588 | Paperback | 208 pages | 216 x 140 mm
Marie-Josèphe Devillers and Ana-Luana Stoicea-Deram (Eds)
Surrogacy is not liberty. It is a crime. Women will not settle for junk liberty. We want real freedom – the substance, not just the appearance. We want real nourishment for our spirits. We want human dignity. We want it for all of us. We want it for women in Thailand and Bangladesh and Mexico as well as for the women who have not yet been born.
—Gena Corea
In this eloquent and blistering rejection of surrogacy, a range of international activists and experts in the field outline the fundamental human rights abuses that occur when surrogacy is legalised and reject neoliberal notions that the commodification of women’s bodies can ever be about the ‘choices’ women make.
Yoshie Yanagihara shows how feminist ideas have been twisted to extend men’s freedom and their rights to access surrogacy. Catherine Lynch rails against surrogacy as the creation of babies for the express purpose of removal from their mothers, outlining the tragic outcomes for adopted people. Phyllis Chesler argues that commercial surrogacy is matricidal, “slicing and dicing biological motherhood” into egg donor, ‘gestational’ mother and adoptive mother. Melissa Farley debunks the myth of ‘choice’ in surrogacy, arguing that in a male-dominated and racist system, the exploitative sale of women in surrogacy, like in prostitution, is inherently harmful —rich women do not make the choice to become surrogates or prostitutes.
Other contributors to this book, which is published in conjunction with the International Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood, are Gena Corea, Renate Klein, Gary Powell, Rita Banerji, Marie-Josèphe Devillers, Laura Isabel Gómez García, Alexandra Clément-Saby, Taina Bien-Aimé, Silvia Guerini, Laura Nuño Gómez and Eva Maria Bachinger.
Editors Marie-Josèphe Devillers and Ana-Luana Stoicea-Deram are long-term activists against surrogacy and live in France.
Harm cannot be regulated, because this would mean spreading and universalising it.
—Silvia Guerini
NOVEMBER 2021 | ISBN 9781925950427 | Paperback | 232 pages | 228 x 152 mm
In an age when falsehoods are commonly taken as truth, Janice Raymond’s new book illuminates the ‘doublethink’ of a transgender movement that is able to define men as women, women as men, he as she, dissent as heresy, science as sham, and critics as fascists. Meanwhile, trans mobs are treated as gender patriots whose main enemy is feminists and their dissent from gender orthodoxies.
The medicalization of gender dissatisfaction depicted by Raymond in her early visionary book, The Transsexual Empire, has today expanded exponentially into the transgender industrial complex built on big medicine, big pharma, big banks, big foundations, big research centers, some attached to big universities. And the current rise of treating young children with puberty blockers and hormones is a widespread scandal that has been named a medical experiment on children.
Whereas transsexualism was mainly a male phenomenon in the past with males undertaking cross-sex hormones and surgery, today it is notably young women who are self-declaring as men in large numbers. The good news is that these young women who formerly identified as ‘trans men’ or gender non-binary, are now de-transitioning. In this book, they speak movingly about their severances from themselves and other women, their escape from compulsive femininity, their sexual assaults, the misogyny they experienced growing up, and their journeys in recovering their womanhood.
Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism makes us aware of the consequences of a runaway ideology and its costs — among them what is at stake when males are allowed to compete in female sports and when parents are not aware of school curricula that confuse sex with gender and that can facilitate a child’s hormone treatments without parental consent.
OCTOBER 2021 | ISBN 9781925950380 | Paperback | 300 pages | 228 x 152 mm
I experienced my transition as a form of resistance, but in reality it only affirmed the same stereotypes that had done me harm to begin with. Trying to prevent myself from committing suicide by becoming less recognizably female was an attempt at resistance that, politically, functioned in many ways as a form of capitulation.
Many feminists are concerned about the way transgender ideology naturalizes patriarchal views of sex stereotypes, and encourages transition as a way of attempting to escape misogyny.
In this brave and thoughtful book, Max Robinson goes beyond the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of the transition she underwent and takes us through the processes that led her, first, to transition in an attempt to get relief from her distress, and then to detransition as she discovered feminist thought and community.
The author makes a case for a world in which all medical interventions for the purpose of assimilation are open to criticism. This book is a far-reaching discussion of women’s struggles to survive under patriarchy, which draws upon a legacy of radical and lesbian feminist ideas to arrive at conclusions. Robinson’s bold discussion of both transition and detransition is meant to provoke a much-needed conversation about who benefits from transgender medicine and who has to bear the hidden cost of these interventions.
Transition is not an unconstrained choice when we are fast-tracked to medical intervention as if being female was a tumor that required immediate removal to save our lives.
SEPTEMBER 2021 | ISBN 9781925950403 | Paperback | 135 x 180 mm | 200 pages
Renate Klein and Susan Hawthorne (eds)
What was it like to participate in the Women’s Liberation Movement? What made millions of women step forward from the 1960s onwards and join it in different ways? Many of the 56 women in this book were there. They describe how they have contributed in multitudinous ways across politics, the arts, health, education, environmentalism, economics and science and created wonderfully rebellious activism. And how they continue this activism today with determined grittiness. Here are women – all over 70 years of age – still railing against the patriarchal systemic oppression of women, still fighting back. “Don’t Call Me Sweetie,” “Never Waste a Good Crisis” and “Still Here, Still Clear and Still Lesbian” is some of what they want us to know.
The contributors to Not Dead Yet have created new analyses with new language and new kinds of organisations always aware of the ways in which the system is stacked against us, particularly against radical feminists. But we persist. We share the revolutionary zest we have carried with us over many decades. There is history, there is subversion and there are many extraordinary acts of courage. The language is full of irony and wit – as well as deadly serious.
The Women’s Liberation Movement has had a profound effect on the lives of millions of women and in turn those women have changed our world. But the struggle continues. May these riveting tales by the foremothers of the movement inspire young women readers. #NotDeadYet
6 JULY 2021 | ISBN 9781925950328 | Paperback | 233 x 150 mm | 464 pages
Do we want to live in a world without birdsong? The pesticides, the coal mines, the clear-felling forestry industry, the industrial farmers are destroying the earth with their insistence on profit. But what point is profit on a dead and silent planet?
In this enlightening yet devastating book, Susan Hawthorne writes with clarity and incisiveness on how patriarchy is wreaking destruction on the planet and on communities. The twin mantras of globalisation and growth expounded by the neoliberalism that has hijacked the planet are revealed in all their shabby deception.
Backed by meticulous research, the author shows how so-called advances in technology are, like a Trojan horse, used to mask sinister political agendas that sacrifice the common good for the shallow profiteering of corporations and mega-rich individuals.
The biotechnologists see the lure of cure, rising share prices and profits.
She details how women, lesbians, people with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, the poor, refugees and the very earth itself are being damaged by the crisis of patriarchy that is sucking everyone into its vortex. Importantly, this precise and insightful volume also shows what is needed to get ourselves out of this spiral of destruction: a radical feminist approach with compassion and empathy at its core.
Shame is an emotion of the powerless because they cannot change the rules.
The book shows a way out of the vortex: it is now up to the collective imagination and action of people everywhere to take up the challenges Susan Hawthorne shows are needed.
This is a vital book for a world in crisis and should be read by everyone who cares about our future.
NOVEMBER 2020 | ISBN 9781925950168 | Paperback | 152 mm x 228 mm | 196 pages
In Defence of Separatism is a timely book. When it was first written in 1976, although it was an important subject of conversation among many feminists it was not welcomed by academics or publishers.
When a political group wants to strategise so that its members can arrive at agreed-on political tactics and ideas, they call for, and create, separate spaces. These might be in coffee shops, in community centres, in one another's homes or in semi-public spaces such as workers clubs, even cinemas. When the proletariat was rebelling, they did not ask the capitalists and aristocracy to join them (even if a few did); when the civil rights movement started it was not thanks to the ideas and politics of white people (even though some whites joined to support the cause); when the women's liberation movement sprang into life, it was women joining together to fight against their oppression.
The difference is that women are supposed to love men.
Through careful argument, Susan Hawthorne takes us through the ideas which are central to her argument. She analyses the nature of power, oppression, domination and institutions and applies these to heterosexuality, rape and romantic love. She concludes with a call for women, all women no matter their sexuality, to have separate spaces so they can work together to change the world and end patriarchy.
This 2019 edition includes a Preface, Afterword and additional commentary in italicised footnotes that bring the reader up to date on changes, developments and controversies in feminist theory.
2019 | ISBN 9781925950045 | Paperback | 112 pages
Betty McLellan
Feminists speak about important political issues because the lives of women are complex. Recognising how power works and in whose favour underlies many of these discussions.
In this compelling and clear account of political structures, Betty McLellan asks important questions. What is truth and how do we understand it, especially when some say, that’s not my truth. Are there competing truths?
Modern and postmodern approaches to democracy impinge on issues of power and truth, especially with increasingly individualistic as opposed to collective approaches to politics. Populism has been used by politicians to shore up votes and sway entire sections of the voting public while identity politics has fractured that same voting public.
Is democracy dead or are there ways of fruitfully salvaging democracy? Could feminism be the answer?
8 OCTOBER 2024 | ISBN 9781922964168 | Paperback | 216 pages | 152 x 228 mm