Eco-feminism
Books by Women
Inspiring work by inspiring women
Growing up as a teenager who loved to read the books outside my school curriculum, it was really important for me to find inspiring books written by women that I could identify with their narratives, visions and personal stories. Because most of the books that I read in my life were written by men.
Many of those books written by men changed my life in many ways but I must say that some books that I read written by women, touched me at a much deeper level. And only in the latest years, I understood that many of these female authors like Clarice Lispector, Simone de Beauvoir, Clarissa Pinkloa Estés, became important female role models to me, in many aspects of my life, dealing with struggles that often are not named or mentioned by men.
These women, sharing their writings, helped me to find words to name dynamics in our society that are lived differently by women. Their work supported me to be more precise with words to name abusive and toxic relationships, to find words to be more assertive with myself, to find words to name my feelings and experiences in a more accurate way and, share it with others.
Here there are some of these books written by women, that for sure are key elements in my own life story:
Uma aprendizagem ou O livro dos prazeres (An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures)
By Clarice Lispector
I remember reading this book for the first time in my mid-twenties. I cried in so many pages of it. This storytelling of Clarice, so delicate and intense at the same time, intimate and transcendent, tells a story of Lori, a woman in an introspective journey in a crisis moment of her life within a society in crisis.
When I first read this book, I already knew that I wanted to have a different relationship with my work, and I had the feeling that my life was waiting for me outside of my home country, but nobody knew that yet. That crisis of the character talked so much with the crisis that I was going through … once again, Clarice spoke straight to my heart. She talked to a part of me that I was trying to hide from so many around me. Just writing about this book makes me feel like reading it again!
Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
By Clarissa Pinkola Estés
This book opened my eyes to so many psychological and social dynamics that we as women go through in our life and are not aware of.
I really enjoyed the structure that Clarissa gave to the book, giving an introduction about the tale that she was about to share, then sharing that tale and them discuss the many symbolisms of it afterward. Giving context, her relationship with that tale in her own journey. So, beautiful.
And thinking about the time that I read this book, I just remembered it took me a really long time to read it all because I would read a tale for the first time that would speak straight to my guts, and I would cry rivers. Then after recovering my self from that first wave of tears, I would read it again to try to understand which part(s) was(were) relating to my story, and see my own story with those new lenses. Then I would cry some more. Then I would take some time out and read it again to see the tale and the parallel that I made with that story with some perspective after many tears.
This book for me was an intense healing process.
O que é lugar de fala? (What is the standpoint of speech?)
By Djamila Ribeiro
This book helped me to identify so many abusive situations that I went through in my life in which they were “normalized” by the patriarchal and racist point of few.
This book helped me to understand better the complexity of Brazil history that I didn’t learn in school at all, helping me to make more parallels to social dynamics that I faced later in life and felt so impotent to do anything about them. This book gave me some tools to see these dynamics from a different perspective and communicate better about them. Djamila work is very inspiring.
Djamila is a contemporary Brazilian black feminist, philosopher, journalist and politician who brings up to the discussion table many taboo subjects in Brazilian society nowadays, like racism, gender issues, patriarchal dynamics and social injustice in Brazil’s scenario.
Quando me descobri negra (When I discovered myself as a black woman)
By Bianca Santana
“Tenho 30 anos, mas sou negra há dez. Antes, era morena.” (I am 30 years old, but I have only been black for 10. Before that I was dark skinned.)
Bianca reveals with a beautiful way of writing the racism “between the lines” kind of dynamics that in Brazil is so hard to talk about it. She writes her personal stories without entering the trap of pointing fingers, us versus them kind of speech.
In her way of writing about her own story, Bianca shows us a transformative way of naming and experiencing these difficult situations, welcoming all the complex feelings that come within during these situations. With her writing that it is light and at the same time visceral, Bianca shares 16 short stories, most of her own life and some other stories from people around her in the black community in Brazil nowadays.
Bianca a contemporary Brazilian black feminist, journalist, a dear friend who inspires authentic conversations in a very healing way in every word that she writes and says.
The feminist porn book: The politics of producing pleasure
Edited by Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Constance Penley, Mireille Miller-Young
Written by Many women
A book that shows how pornography was (and many times still is) used to reproduce a patriarchal narrative, and how women started to redefine it to empower other women in relationship with their own body, their own pleasure, their own sexual relationships from various points of views.
“As both an established and emerging genre of pornography, feminist porn uses sexually explicit imagery to contest and complicate dominant representations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability, age, body type, and other identity markers. It explores concepts of desire, agency, power, beauty, and pleasure at their most confounding and difficult, including pleasure within and across inequality, in the face of injustice, and against the limits of gender hierarchy and both heteronormativity and homonormativity. It seeks to unsettle conventional definitions of sex, and expand the language of sex as an erotic activity, an expansion of identity, a power exchange, a cultural commodity, and even a new politics.”
In my own personal journey in redefining my own relationship with my sexuality, this book was just mindblowing.
