Best Books, Next Books
How Other Feminisms shapes my reading
Other Feminisms is back from the holidays! To kick off the new year, I’m talking about the best books I read in 2021, and what I hope to read in 2022 (and I’m soliciting your recommendations, too).
On Thursday, I’ll share excerpts from your discussion of how design intended to be inclusive can wind up emphasizing that the person being included isn’t the kind of person the space was envisioned for.
Every year, I make two lists of books. The best books I read over the course of the past year and the books I’m aiming to read in the coming year. Looking over both, I can see how my reading has been shaped by writing Other Feminisms.
Publishing a new essay each week means I’m always reading a little hungry—looking for something worthy of discussion. And I go through my library shelves with some of the questions you’ve raised in comments in mind.
The first few books on my to-read list are definitely ones I expect to bring up in posts here, but it amuses me a bit to imagine where you all might anticipate I shift from books I consider Other Feminisms fodder to general interest reading.
Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency by Eva Feder Kittay
Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America by Evelyn Nakano Glenn
Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births by Michelle Millar Fisher
Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity by Claudia Goldin
The Virtues of Limits by David McPherson
The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture: The Cadaver, the Memorial Body, and the Recovery of Lived Experience by Brent Dean Robbins
The Mystery of the Kibbutz: Egalitarian Principles in a Capitalist World by Ran Abramitzky
Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late Ancient Church by Michael Philip Penn
The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics by Andrew Willard Jones
Sun Slower, Sun Faster by Meriol Trevor
Brisbane by by Eugene Vodolazkin
Perhaps it would help to know that, at home, I’ve been shelving what I think of as my “Other Feminisms” genre in between a category I think of as "Boundaries of the Human” (which includes books like The Most Human Human, Normal at Any Cost, and The Story of Pain) and the general History of Science/Medicine category.
Three of the books on my Best of 2021 list were definitely Other Feminisms reads:
The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought by Mara H. Benjamin
Perfectly Human: Nine Months with Cerian by Sarah C. Williams
What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics by O. Carter Snead
Snead’s was my favorite book of the year (and I enjoyed getting to interview him). The Obligated Self is the biggest stealth influence, in that I haven’t yet gotten to write about it directly, but it informs a lot of what I have written.
The topic I wish I could find (or write) a book on would be what I think of as “mother media” - where does it come from, who writes it, who funds it, who consumes it, how has it shifted? I’m thinking of everything here from generalist sites like Romper and Scary Mommy to niche-r sites like Working Mother and Screen Free Parenting to mother and mother-adjacent essays in publications like NYT Magazine to mom-related social media.
I'm late to the party, but I'd like to recommend "Blessed" by Kate Bowler – or really, *any* book by Kate Bowler. But particularly "Blessed".
It's a history of America's Prosperity Gospel.
When people grasp for words to describe why American culture seems so prone to shaming the weak, plenty come to mind. "Capitalism!" "Individualism!" "Libertarianism!" "Reducing humanity to Homo oeconomicus!" "Meritocracy!" Of those, "meritocracy" comes closest to describing the actual problem — that of treating suffering not just as some material failure, but a moral one.
America — including secular America — is so steeped in the prosperity gospel that it's no wonder we associate material failure with moral blame in a way that economics, by itself, never could. Academic economists, be they ever so free-market, don't typically go around believing in the just-world fallacy. Honoring individuals and their liberty does not *logically* entail supposing individuals have so much agency that they can transcend any contingency as long as they're "good enough". Conservative voters, though, tend to answer surveys as if the benefits of freedom and prosperity were the *result* of the just-world fallacy, making the fallacy more foundational to their stance than any particular economic arrangement or notion of rights. If their confidence in a just world is shaken, so is their support for economic and individual liberties.
Why is this? I believe it rhymes with "posterity loss bell".
If the prosperity gospel were true, then success *would* flow from confidence that God is on your side. The prosperity gospel, more than any dry economic reasoning or libertarian idealism, shames people for being contingent beings. Kick the libertarianism out of people, but not their prosperity-gospel streak, and you're still left with people who'll shame others for their contingency. Perhaps even shame them worse, from a more authoritarian perspective. The prosperity gospel makes a mockery of Christlike mercy toward contingent beings. And, whether in "sacred" or secular form, it is very, very popular.