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This is one of my favorites. I have read it a few times, but it never stops me from reading it again. Colonize This! is a collection of essays by young woman of color writing about their experiences. Identity is much more complicated then male/female when you live in a society in which you are not a part of the dominant culture.Often I feel silenced in Japan for being a woman, and more specifically being a woman of color. Not so much by Japanese people, but by the other foreigners who live in Ja...
The original version was on my “to read” for years, so when I saw the new edition I knew I had to pick it up. Excellent reflections on race and gender from young feminists of color.
Very enlightening but a whole lotta angry. For my taste, this book is best read in small portions. It's also chock full of feminist jargon (lots of "womyn" instead of "women", etc.) and should be read with an open mind, as it'd be easy to take a lot of this personally and dismiss the rage if you are not a POC. I'm still reading this, but it is, quite frankly, exhausting.
Reading this book, reminded me of the women that help raise me, my mom, my aunts, and my sisters and how often feminism in the western world do not include people like the women in family because of their race, religion, social economic situation and culture. This book does a great job of explaining the dynamic of these two worlds and presents the argument that is often portrayed that women in these countries are not as strong as the feminist in the western world. I will recommend this book to a...
I found the essays difficult to get through, perhaps because I was looking for moments to exclaim, "this is how I've always felt and could never put it in words!" yet this never happened. I think the experiences of women of color are too varied due to culture, class, sexual orientation, and so on. I also felt a bit of a generation gap between myself and the writers (I was born 1984; I got the feeling they were all born around 1975). However, Rebecca Walker's Black White & Jewish had me laughing
"After many late night talks, we chose the title of Cristina Tzintzun's essay for this book in order to acknowledge how the stories of women and colonization are intimately tied. But when we first sat down to write this introduction and looked in the dictionary, we found that colonize means "to create a settlement." It sounds so simple and peaceful. We rewrote the definition. To colonize is "to strip a people of their culture, language, land, family structure, who they are as a person and as a p...
So important and enlightening! A must-read for any person who wants to become more informed about the truths of modern feminism and the intersectionality we must fight for.
LJ user pachakuti:Many of the books on feminism or by feminists are white-washed or brush aside the concerns of POC within the movement. This book is BY those POC, women of myriad cultures and backgrounds writing and discussing their lives, on their terms, from their point of view.
I think this collection of essays is an excellent read for someone like me--a feminist looking to better understand the intersection of racism, classism, homophobia, and other factors with feminism. There is a wide representation of women of color experiences in these essays.This book was a hard read at times, because it is unapologetic in its criticisms of feminism, which in general still tends to focus on issues of white middle class women rather than the broader spectrum that includes women o...
“Feminism is comprised of values that are important to you as a woman, not ideals arrived at by forced consensus to which you should adjust your own life.”― Daisy Hernandez, Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism4.5 A wonderful series of essays from various perspectives (LGBT+, Muslim, East Asian, Native American, etc) and covering a wide range of topics (black women and eating disorders, mixed-race/heritage adoption, etc) that I have not been exposed to while on my journey to
Very influential reading it as a 16 yr old curious about the world of "community organizing" and the complicated community, personal, professional, core connections between (queer) womyn of color within that world. I feel like I should read it again, not with some 'older more experienced' eye, but yeah, with a little more under my belt now, I feel I would be more capable of being critical, of maintaining myself and my opinions while also absorbing it. Before I just sucked it all in as truth with...
This book started off slow, but I eventually realized it's worth. In the end, I found great value in reading the stories of all the (mostly young) women who are trying to make sense of their experiences as people whose life experiences are pushed to the margins of the greater social eye. I found the article on sexual harrasment (in the streets, not in the work place) particularly powerful.
this book was predictably awesome. i'd been wanting to read it for quite some time, but it was always checked out at the boston public library. eventually i realized it had been lost or stolen & wasn't listed as such in the system, so i inter-library borrowed it from another branch. it's a few years old (published in 2002), & i would be interested to see what a similar book of young women of color writing about feminism would look like now that the political landscape has changed a bit. but it's...
Despite being published in the early 2000s, this still felt very relevant. I was pleasantly surprised by how much queer content was included, and I liked the many different perspectives, but I do wish the same kind of attention was paid to trans and disability issues. Overall very readable and thought-provoking, definitely one I'd recommend.
Sort of repetitive after a while. It could have benefitted from some comics or poetry. Lots of discussion of religion, but only one really delved into it sufficiently .
I bought this book when the second edition came out last year but only picked it up now because of the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. This book is a fantastic read for those who want to learn more about the importance of intersectionality in feminism. These powerful women of color emphasize that race, gender, and sexuality cannot be separated through short essays with very accessible language. While I would encourage everyone to read this book for themselves, here are a few of my...
4.75 stars! Was hoping to have more East Asian and Native American representation, but the ones highlighted were very moving and eye opening, like the rest of the essays by other women of color! ♥️
The collection of essays by Women of Color definitely helped me check the (still) white feminism I learn in my college course. I connected with most of the essays and appreciated the honesty from the writers. Through the essays, I was able to learn the different lessons of feminism that is not from the set of certain ideals or theories, rather the values that are important to you as a woman. It is about empowerment of yourself, not fitting into some wave of feminism that shape around the status
I have been reading a lot of feminist texts and have struggled with the fact that as an african living in the UK I believe wholeheartedly in the empowerment of women but do not know how to square this with my traditional values. The book enlightened me to the fact that I am not alone in desiring a feminism that encompasses all religions and races rather than the predominant eurocentric view. It was like a call to arms for me in that I now appreciate that as a Zambian I need to strive for feminis...
Along my feminist journey I realized I was missing the perspective of intersectionality. How could I have been so ignorant!? This collection of essays was eye-opening to how feminism should encompass so many more issues than just women’s rights. We need to fight for ALL women and against the discrimination they face.