Intersectionality Readings and Resources

Over the years as an academic, I have read and watched almost everything I could about intersectionality.

To help you find the most rich and illuminating information, I have compiled this (growing!) list of the best books, essays, videos, and podcasts on intersectional feminist thought, education, and activism.

If there’s anything you think I should read, watch, or hear and add to this intersectionality readings list, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Related: What is Intersectional Feminism? A Definitive Guide

Beginners Guides to Intersectional Feminism

Emei Burell (2020) We Served the People: My Mother’s Stories

bell hooks (1984) Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

bell hooks (2000) Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

Mikki Kendall (2020) Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

Janet Mock (2014) Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love So Much More

Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa ([1981]2015) This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (4th ed.)

Siobhan Neela-Stock (2020, August 18). The bold suffragists you likely didn’t learn about in school. Mashable. https://mashable.com/article/suffragettes-19th-amendment-100th-anniversary

Ijeoma Oluo (2019) So You Want to Talk About Race

Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross (2020) A Black Women’s History of the United States

Layla F. Saad (2020) Me and White Supremacy: How to Recognise Your Privilege, Combat Racism and Change the World

Alice Wong (2020) Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

Related: 5 Must-Read Intersectional Feminist Books for Beginners

Intermediate Intersectional Feminism

Sara Ahmed (2014) Willful Subjects

Sara Ahmed (2017) Living a Feminist Life

Gloria Anzaldúa (1990) Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color

Leah Bassel and Akwugo Emejulu (2018) Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain

Maylei Blackwell (2016) ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement

Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge (2016) Intersectionality

Angela Y. Davis (1971) If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance

Angela Y. Davis (1981) Women, Race and Class

Lynn Fujiwara and Shireen Roshanaravan (2018) Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics

Ange-Marie Hancock (2016) Intersectionality: An Intellectual History

Azeezat Johnson, Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Beth Kamunge (2018) The Fire Now: Anti-Racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence

Laila Lalami (2020) Conditional Citizens

Julia Serano (2016) Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2nd ed.)

Barbara Tomlinson (2018) Undermining Intersectionality: The Perils of Powerblind Feminism

Advanced Intersectional Feminism

M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1997) Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures

M. Jacqui Alexander (2006) Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred

Patricia Hill Collins (2019) Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory

W.E.B. DuBois (1903) The Souls of Black Folk

Lan P. Duong (2012) Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism

Saidiya Hartman (1997) Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America

Ernesto Javier Martínez (2012) On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility

Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003) Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity

Jennifer C. Nash (2019) Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality

Cedric J. Robinson (1983) Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

Edward Said (1978) Orientalism

Christina Sharpe (2016) In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (2007) Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance

Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989) Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism

Children’s Books

Marianne Celano, Marietta Collins and Ann Hazzard (2018) Something Happened in Our Town: A Child’s Story About Racial Injustice (illustrated by Jennifer Zivoin)

Matthew A. Cherry (2019) Hair Love (illustrated by Vashti Harrison)

bell hooks (1999) Happy to Be Nappy (illustrated by Chris Raschka)

Ibram X. Kendi (2020) Antiracist Baby (illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky)

Innosanto Nagara (2016) A is for Activist

Lupita Nyong’o (2019) Sulwe (illustrated by Vashti Harrison)

Ilyasah Shabazz (2014) Malcolm Little: The Boy Who Grew Up to Become Malcolm X (illustrated by AG Ford)

Jacqueline Woodson (2018) The Day You Begin (illustrated by Rafael López)

For more children’s and young adult books, see the Coretta Scott King Book Award Winners

For Educators and Academics

Aisha S. Ahmad (2020, July 6). A survival guide for Black, Indigenous, and other women of color in academe. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-survival-guide-for-black-indigenous-and-other-women-of-color-in-academe

Jason Arday and Heidi Safia Mirza (2018) Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy

Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nişancıoğlu (2018) Decolonising the University

Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González and Angela P. Harris (2012) Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia

Namandjé Bumpus (2020). Too many senior white academics still resist recognizing racism. Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02203-w

Noelle Chaddock and Beth Hinderliter (2020) Antagonizing White Feminism: Intersectionality’s Critique of Women’s Studies and the Academy

Paulo Freire (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed (English translation by Myra Bergman Ramos)

Deborah Gabriel and Shirley Anne Tate (2017) Inside the Ivory Tower: Narratives of Women of Colour Surviving and Thriving in British Academia

Deborah Gabriel (2020) Transforming the Ivory Tower: Models for Gender Equality and Social Justice

Bettina L. Love (2019) We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

Meghana Mysore (2018, October 5). Imagining ourselves: Women of color in academia. Yale Daily News. https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2018/10/05/imagining-ourselves-women-of-color-in-academia/

Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (2nd ed.)

Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang (2019) Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View

Brett C. Stockdill and Mary Yu Danico (2012) Transforming the Ivory Tower: Challenging Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia in the Academy

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2018) Toward What Justice? Describe Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education

Trans* Studies in Higher Education Syllabus

From White Power to White Allyship and Co-Conspiracy

Barbara Applebaum (2010) Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy

Kalwant Bhopal (2018) White Privilege, The Myth of a Post-Racial Society

Robin DiAngelo (2018) White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

Richard Dyer (1997) White

Ruby Hamad (2019) White Tears/Brown Scars: How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers (2019) They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

Aileen Morton-Robinson (2020) Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism (20th Anniversary Edition)

Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1997) Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (2nd ed.)

Derald Wing Sue (2016) Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race

Shannon Sullivan (2006) Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege

Shannon Sullivan (2014) Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism

George Yancy (2004) What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question

George Yancy (2008) Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race

George Yancy (2012) Look, a White! Philosophical Essays on Whiteness

George Yancy (2018) Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America

Poetry and Prose

Maya Angelou (2004) The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou

Toni Cade Bambara (1980) The Salt Eaters

Joy Kogawa (1981) Obasan

Dorothy Hewett (1968) Windmill Country

Audre Lorde (1978) The Black Unicorn: Poems

Audre Lorde (1984) Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Audre Lorde (1988) A Burst of Light

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan (2019) Postcolonial Banter

Kimberly Nguyen (2019) ghosts in the stalks

Oodgeroo of the Noonuccal (1966) The Dawn Is At Hand

Claudia Rankine (2014) Citizen: An American Lyric

Ocean Vuong (2016) Night Sky with Exit Wounds

Ocean Vuong (2019) On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Nayyirah Waheed (2013) Salt

Podcasts and Vodcasts

Decoded is a video series on YouTube produced by MTV News and hosted by Franchesca Ramsey. It discusses race and popular culture primarily for a teen audience. It ran for seven seasons from 2015 to 2019.

Empires of Dirt is a video series on YouTube produced by Vice and hosted by Zing Tsjeng. It explores the violences of the British Empire around the world.

Politically Re-Active, produced by First Look Media and Panoply, is hosted by comedians W. Kamau Bell and Hari Kondabolu, who discuss politics and democracy in the United States. It ran for two seasons from 2016 to 2017. An interview with bell hooks is featured in Season 2 in the episode ‘Speaking with bell hooks & talking DACA’.

Popaganda produced by Bitch Media discusses pop culture news, film and television as well as issues relating to organizations and work such as freelancing, sexual harassment and the imposter syndrome through an intersectional feminist perspective.

Seeing White produced by Scene On Radio is a 14-part Peabody-nominated podcast, which explores what it means to be white in the United States.

Teaching To Thrive hosted by Bettina Love & Chelsey Culley-Love explore ways to empower Black and Brown students within schools and communities.

Unladylike produced by Unladylike Media discusses contemporary issues from an intersectional feminist perspective. Check out episode 90, ‘How to reckon with Refinery29’ on racism in so-called progressive media.

One-Off Episodes

‘An intro to Afrofuturism: There’s more than Black Panther… with Adrienne Ayers of Afrofuture Youth’ (2020, August 2) on Ur Internet Friends Podcast.

‘Black dandyism: A cultural history, an interview with Monica L. Miller, Part I’ and ‘Part II’ (2018, December 18) on Dressed: The History of Fashion, iHeartRadio.

‘White power movement in US: Rise of racist right in Europe’ (2018, December 10) on Thinking Allowed, BBC Radio 4.

’Laverne Cox Presents: “The T Word”’ (2016, August 9) on MTV.

Lecture and Seminar Recordings

Intersectional Activism in the Age of Trump: Kimberlé Crenshaw and Eve Ensler (2020, June 13) at Hammer Museum

Imani Perry in Conversation with Kiese Laymon: On the Uprising since George Floyd’s Murder (2020, June 11) at Free Library of Philadelphia Author Events

Intersectionality Matters: A Conversation with Kimberlé Crenshaw (2020, May 6) at Haymarket Books

Moving at the Speed of Trust: Disability Justice and Transformative Justice (2020, April 10) at the Barnard Center for Research on Women

The Urgency of Intersectionality | Kimberlé Crenshaw (2016, December 8) at TED

Dangerous Work: An Evening with Toni Morrison (2016, October 29) at The New School

Kimberlé Crenshaw — On Intersectionality — Keynote (2016, March 15) at the Women of the World Festival

bell hooks and Hari Kondabolu Dialogue (2016, April 27) at St. Norbert College

bell hooks: Moving from Pain to Power (2015, October 13) at The New School

bell hooks: “This ain’t no pussy shit” (2015, October 13) at The New School

bell hooks and Kevin Powell: Black Masculinity, Threat or Threatened (2015, October 8) at The New School

bell hooks & john a. powell: Belonging Through Connection (2015, May 1) at The Othering & Belonging Conference

bell hooks and Laverne Cox in a Public Dialogue (2014, October 14) at The New School

bell hooks in an Open Dialogue with New School Students — Whose Booty Is This? (2014, October 11) at The New School

A Public Dialogue Between bell hooks and Cornel West (2014, October 11) at The New School

Teaching to Transgress Today: Theory and Practice In and Outside the Classroom (2014, October 9) at The New School

Black Female Voices: Who is Listening — A Public Dialogue between bell hooks + Melissa Harris-Perry (2013, November 12) at The New School

My Book

Helena Liu (2020) Redeeming Leadership: An Anti-Racist Feminist Intervention

Subscribers of my newsletter receive access to a digital library where they can download and read the full first chapter of my book, Redeeming Leadership.

Add Your Intersectionality Readings

So what did you think of the resources here on my intersectional readings list?

What did you enjoy?

What did you disagree with?

Please let me know if there are any books, essays, videos, podcasts, or anything else you think I should peruse and add to this list!