Capitalism CritiqueBooks

A sharp deconstruction of contemporary white feminism, revealing how the performance of 'sass' and 'girl squads' serves to consolidate privilege rather than dismantle oppression.

One of Ms. Magazine's Most Anticipated Books of 2023. Continuing the trajectory of the Combahee River Collective, this collection brings together scholars, activists, and writers to examine how carceral liberalism masquerades as freedom while perpetuating oppression, critiquing the confluence of neoliberalism, incarceration, and patriarchy.

UnHerd columnist Mary Harrington introduces 'reactionary feminism,' critiquing modern feminism as serving only elite professional women. She argues technological progress commodifies women's bodies and reproductive abilities, calling for a fundamental reassessment of what 'progress' means for most women.

This anthology joins transgender studies with Marxist theory to analyze capitalism, social reproduction, labor, embodiment, and liberation.

Critiques elite feminism and proposes an anti-capitalist feminist vision, linking women's liberation to economic justice, racial equality, and environmental sustainability.

A critical examination of how neoliberalism has co-opted feminist discourse, transforming it from a collective movement for social justice into an individualized pursuit of personal empowerment that serves corporate interests while abandoning the vast majority of women.

Vandana Shiva connects industrial agriculture, fossil fuel dependence, and climate crisis, centering small farms, seed diversity, and food sovereignty.

Anna Tsing follows matsutake supply chains to study survival, cooperation, and non-linear ecological relations in capitalist ruins.

Naomi Klein argues that climate crisis is not a single environmental issue but a challenge to market ideology, fossil capital, and extractivism.

Anne Allison’s ethnography follows post-bubble stagnation, irregular work, lonely death, and post-Fukushima life to examine what happens when stable family and male-breadwinner institutions unravel.

Joan C. Tronto recasts care as a central public concern of democracy, asking who sustains life, who is permitted to evade care, and how markets produce a democratic care deficit.

Vandana Shiva links land, water, forest, seed, and food wars, arguing for an earth-centered political economy.

Halberstam challenges success standards in heteronormative capitalist society, exploring the productive potential of failure as a form of resistance. Through analysis of popular culture and queer theory, the author proposes 'low theory' as a mode of thinking and writing, redefining failure not as deficiency but as a strategy for subverting mainstream values.

A foundational interdisciplinary collection defining feminicide as structural gendered violence sustained not only by perpetrators but by state impunity, racial capitalism, and transnational economies.

Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California connects punishment, gender, race, and community safety, strengthening FemRes coverage of abolition feminism and transformative justice.

A groundbreaking feminist re-examination of capitalist primitive accumulation that reveals how violent control over women's bodies became foundational to capitalist development.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty moves from a critique of the Western gaze to anticapitalist solidarity, grounding transnational feminism in history, labor relations, and shared struggle.

Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover to investigate the impact of the 1996 welfare reform act on the working poor in the United States, revealing the brutal reality of low-wage labor and the struggle for survival.

A foundational transnational feminist anthology tracing colonial legacies through labor, state power, erotic autonomy, Indigenous sovereignty, and grassroots democratic organizing.

Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva place patriarchal capitalism, colonial development, women’s unpaid labor, and ecological destruction in one political economy, proposing a life-centered subsistence perspective.

This foundational work of ecofeminism reveals how the development paradigm threatens survival itself through violence against nature and women. Through the experiences and perspectives of rural Indian women, Shiva demonstrates how patriarchal development models simultaneously destroy ecosystems and marginalize women, arguing for women's central role as biodiversity custodians in ecological regeneration.

This groundbreaking book introduces the concept of 'emotional labor' through an examination of how service workers, particularly flight attendants, are required to manage their emotions as part of their job. Hochschild explores how capitalism commercializes human feelings and the gendered implications of emotional work in the modern economy.

A groundbreaking work of ecofeminist scholarship that examines how the Scientific Revolution transformed Western culture's understanding of nature from a living, nurturing organism to a dead, mechanical object to be exploited. Merchant reveals the intimate connection between the domination of women and the domination of nature.