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The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability

by Kristen Hogan

Duke University Press, 2016
eISBN: 978-0-8223-7433-6 | Cloth: 978-0-8223-6110-7 | Paper: 978-0-8223-6129-9
Library of Congress Classification HQ75.6.U5H64 2016

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

ABOUT THIS BOOK

From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story—mostly lesbians and including women of color—measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability. At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, and Old Wives’ Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people’s lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Kristen Hogan, who worked at BookWoman in Austin and at the Toronto Women's Bookstore, is Education Program Coordinator for the University of Texas Gender and Sexuality Center at the University of Texas, Austin.

REVIEWS

"An oft-forgotten chapter in the women's lib movement of the 1970s was the rise of independent, women-owned bookstores, many of which created safe spaces for conversations that spurred second-wave feminism. Hogan has written a history of those thought-leading small businesses and the lesbians and women of color behind them, in which she celebrates the power of the feminist printed word."

-- Ms.

"It’s difficult to write the history of women’s bookstores without romanticizing a complex world of books, ideas, feelings, and feminist community that many of us miss. Hogan describes the pleasures of these communities, as well as the anger and factionalism that their commitments provoked. A literary history that opens and closes with Hogan’s own experience working at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, The Feminist Bookstore Movement leads us through the rise and fall of this network, which, at its peak, included 130 businesses in North America."

-- Claire Bond Potter Chronicle Review

"Hogan gives us a more complicated narrative; she focuses on a broad base of women from different backgrounds working together as activists, rather than on a few commercially successful writers. It is a history from the bottom-up rather than a female-adjusted Great Man style of history. . . .Hogan’s story should make us think about how we can build the communities that will give us the next books that will change our lives."

-- Laura Tanenbaum The New Republic

"[A]n eminently readable text that traces the history of feminist bookstores from their rise in the 1970s through the 1990s. . . . This work will appeal to scholars and everyday readers who enjoy microhistories. Highly recommended. All levels/libraries."

-- M. Martinez Choice

"In some ways, The Feminist Bookstore Movement is a classic Second Wave recovery project, casting a loving glance backward as it seeks to uncover a series of lost moments obscured by the financial fate (and fight) of feminist bookstores in the ’90s. But Hogan’s account also spills beyond generational borders."

-- Stephanie Young Los Angeles Review of Books

"The Feminist Bookstore Movement offers more than a chronicle of the rise and fall of feminist bookstores from 1970 to 2003. Drawing from archival documents, interviews, and scholarship, Hogan delineates the infrastructure that housed a lesbian, antiracist, anticapitalist, community-oriented culture, and she textures her account with thick descriptions of lived experience."

-- Ellen Messer-Davidow American Historical Review

"Hogan's richly researched text is resplendent with photos that commemorate the 1970s-1980s era of feminism....Indeed, the engaging narrative prompted winsome memories of my brief, mid-1980s stint as an employee at Womanbooks in New York City while in journalism school. The passage of three decades has not dimmed my affection for the colourful posters, shelves of dazzling books and smiling co-workers that greeted me when I began my shift. I'm honoured to have been a part of the tradition that Kristen Hogan recounts, to sublime effect, in her outstanding contribution to lesbian and feminist letters."

-- Evelyn C. White Herizons

"Carefully researched and highly engaging. . . . The Feminist Bookstore Movement is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of feminist writing and publishing, as well as anyone seeking to understand how feminist alternative economies and communities took shape and survived in the late twentieth century."

-- Kate Eichhorn Journal of American History

“A radical contribution to contemporary feminist dialogue. . . . This book will be of potential relevance to feminist, queer and antiracist readers both within and beyond the North American context.”

-- Chiara Xausa Women's Studies International Forum

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Preface. Reading the Map of Our Bodies xiii

1. Dykes with a Vision 1970–1976 1

2. Revolutionaries in a Capitalist System 1976–1980 33

3. Accountable to Each Other 1980–1983 69

4. The Feminist Shelf, A Transnational Project 1984–1993 107

5. Economics and Antiracist Alliances 1993–2003 145

Epilogue. Feminist Remembering 179

Notes 195

Bibliography 241

Index 261

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