you can only read Florence Given or the most arcane passages of Gender Trouble, there are no books in between

I don't think we can think about this without thinking about a) the cooption of feminism and what has been mainstreamed from feminist movements b) the loss of collective reading spaces c) the rise of influencer culture over social movements

and d) the publishing industry and the specific and changing dynamics present there

perhaps it does feel like the only option available to young women is to read these books as introductions because everyone is constantly bombarded by adverts for them which proclaim them as radical (when they’re not). The big question is what they actually *introduce*

having read the Florence Given book, it’s clear that there’s some stuff in there that could be soothing in a world still shaped by sexism, shame, and violence against women but the political upshot of this is “ehh do you whatever you want, really” which is far from radical

so what’s being introduced is not feminism as a movement, as a set of political commitments, as a perspective, but instead an ‘empowering’ individual attitude

there are substantive differences between feminist thinkers. Something labelled as feminist isn’t necessarily a good introduction to *feminism* even if it’s easy to read. Guarding against cooption by massive intl publishers and brands isn’t gatekeeping

or is only gatekeeping in the sense of a justifiable struggle over what rightly counts as feminism

I’m not unsympathetic to the suggestion that these books might be helpful to some young women. Being a teenage girl is generally awful and someone telling you not be ashamed is important, but this misses the big questions of what feminism is, should be, can be & so on