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!