HOGAN, Kristen
The Feminist Bookstore Movement. Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability

An inspirational book, on how, from the 1970s to the 1990s, feminist bookshops throughout the USA and Canada built a network that allowed not only books, but also ideas, tools, ways of working, organizing, and struggling, to circulate. Kristen Hogan focuses on the practices of the “bookwomen”—mostly lesbian, and inluding women of color— who created places like Old Wives’ Tales in San Francisco, New Words in Cambridge, BookWoman in Austin, or  the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, and is eager to tell their stories, through firsthand testimonies as well as documents. The author puts forward figures such as Carol Seajay, founder and editor of the Feminist Bookstores Newsletter, a collective tool powerful enough to urge publishers to reprint Ursula K. LeGuin’s novels; but Hogan also elaborates on how feminist bookstores were community spaces where queer and antiracist attitudes could take shape, through bibliographical efforts and the relentless attention to small presses and alternative publishers. The struggle continues…

Published by Duke University Press, 2016
Essays / Book Culture / Feminism / Politics / Scenes