The New Radical Feminism: "Brown/Trans/Les," Reviewed

Talia Bhatt's new "Brown/Trans/Les" is a tour de force that reclaims the necessity of radical feminism in our pervasively misogynist age.

There is a legendary Black feminist anthology whose title was both prayer and credo: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. Talia Bhatt’s latest essay collection, Brown/Trans/Les, honours that bravery with more than a little of her own. This is, like her previous book Rad/Trans/Fem, an effort to redeem what is useful about the radical feminist intellectual tradition while being unflinching about where it all went wrong. Bhatt’s gift lies in her example: the way she honours her foremothers while also being unsparing about what some of them got wrong. Come for the elaborately woven explanation of what ‘intersectionality’ really means, stay for the intellectual defenestration of bell hooks.

This text necessarily contains multitudes. Minefields of theory, activism, lived experience, far too much of it written in blood, that Bhatt dances through with elegance. Not only did I have a hard time putting this book down, but I felt an intellectual invigoration I hadn’t known since my first women’s studies classes over fifteen years ago. Bhatt makes you feel like you’re firing on all cylinders with her, and each essay powers into the next…

Continue reading this article by Katherine Alejandra Cross, “The New Radical Feminism: ‘Brown/Trans/Les,’ Reviewed,” here: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-new-radical-feminism-brown-trans-les-reviewed/