Books for Thought 

Summer is here. Don’t you love all the green all around us? When was the last time you read a good book? As the COVID-19 outbreak continues and we are not able to travel, we can delve into books to be transported in another time and space. A good book can provide insight, comfort, or an escape from daily challenges. While many of us are also staying home more, reading can offer great entertainment as well.

Reading has a number of benefits. For example, you can learn about new and interesting topics and reduce your stress. We, at the Centre, want to help you get your reading list started. To do that, we asked people around campus to share their suggestions in terms of good readings for the Summer. Here are their suggestions: 

1. “I’m Afraid of Men” by Vivek Shraya 

Vivek Shraya has reason to be afraid. Throughout her life she's endured acts of cruelty and aggression for being too feminine as a boy and not feminine enough as a girl. In order to survive childhood, she had to learn to convincingly perform masculinity. As an adult, she makes daily compromises to steel herself against everything from verbal attacks to heartbreak.

Now, with raw honesty, Shraya delivers an important record of the cumulative damage caused by misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, releasing trauma from a body that has always refused to assimilate. I'm Afraid of Men is a journey from camouflage to a riot of colour and a blueprint for how we might cherish all that makes us different and conquer all that makes us afraid.

~ Suggested by Jarred Sanchez-Cacnio, Sexual and Gender Diversity Advisor  

I suggest this book as essential reading for understanding the racialized experiences of transgender folks, particularly from the perspective of a trans woman. This book poses some very thought-provoking questions about gender, stereotypes, and encourages thoughtful reflection about the gendered experiences and expectations that society places on so many and includes storytelling of navigating the workplace and the world as a racialized trans woman. 

2. “Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure” by Eli Clare

Eli Clare uses memoir, history, and critical analysis to explore cure—the deeply held belief that body-minds considered broken need to be fixed. Cure serves many purposes. It saves lives, manipulates lives, and prioritizes some lives over others. It provides comfort, makes profits, justifies violence, and promises resolution to body-mind loss. Clare grapples with this knot of contradictions, maintaining that neither an anti-cure politics nor a pro-cure worldview can account for the messy, complex relationships we have with our body-minds. The stories he tells range widely, stretching from disability stereotypes to weight loss surgery, gender transition to skin lightening creams. At each turn, Clare weaves race, disability, sexuality, class, and gender together, insisting on the nonnegotiable value of body-mind difference. Into this mix, he adds environmental politics, thinking about ecosystem loss and restoration as a way of delving more deeply into cure

~ Suggested by Valérie Grand'Maison, PhD student, Department of Sociology and Anthropology 

Here's why I love it: This book is a delight to read despite tackling difficult topics such as disability, trauma, oppression, and cure with nuance and empathy. This is because Clare's writing is filled with stories, images, and emotions that brings me to connect with these topics. 

3. “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia” by Sabrina Strings 

There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor black woman are particularly stigmatized as “diseased” and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago.

~ Suggested by Tracy Tidgwell, Research Project Manager, Re•Vision: The Centre for Art & Social Justice 

Strings' historical analysis of art, print media and medicine shows that European ideas about the body shifted significantly during the Renaissance when fat phobia emerged out of colonial, slave trading endeavours to equate fatness with racial inferiority. I've selected this book because Strings carefully uncovers this history and demonstrates for us that contemporary body ideals and medical discourses are still working to validate racial, class, ablest, and gender superiority over Black bodies and over all kinds of bodies that do not fit the white, Eurocentric norms that were created in our recent past. This book offers an otherwise missing piece of the puzzle in understanding how our moral codes, aesthetics, lived experiences, and our bodies themselves are shaped by racism and other power structures that are enmeshed in our social order and our day to day lives. As a fat person, a researcher, activist, and artist, I'm grateful for Strings' sharp insights into the social construction of both fatness and race and for what Fearing the Black Body contributes to our understandings of the workings of power and embodied difference more broadly. 

4. “Freedom is a constant struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the foundations of a movement” by Angela Y. Davis, Frank Barat, and Cornel West

Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today’s struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine.
Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build a movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that “freedom is a constant struggle.”

~ Suggested by Yuriko Cowper-Smith, Ph.D. candidate, Political Science Department

This book left a lasting impression on me because Davis expertly shows how social movements around the world are interrelated and connected. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about contemporary social movements, and what it means to stand in transnational solidarity with each other. Davis provides guidance on building consciousness, collective power, and using an intersectional lens in order to create lasting social change and liberation. 

5. “Endangered Daughters: Discrimination and Development in Asia” by Elisabeth Croll

This unique and groundbreaking book seeks to re-focus gender debate onto the issue of daughter discrimination - a phenomenon still hidden and unacknowledged across the world.
It asks the controversial question of why millions of girls do not appear to be surviving to adulthood in contemporary Asia. In the first major study available of this emotive and sensitive issue, Elisabeth Croll investigates the extent of discrimination against female children in Asia and shifts the focus of attention firmly from son-preference to daughter-discrimination.

~ Suggested by Ashna Jassi, Ph.D. Candidate in Applied Social Psychology

In this book, Elisabeth Croll brings together survey data and anthropological studies to illustrate the various ways that female children are discriminated against in Asia, particularly in India and China. Croll demonstrates why gender should be at the focus of efforts to advance societies worldwide, and why we need to pay attention to ending discrimination against young girls in particular. 
 

6. “Educated” by Tara Westover

A Memoir is by American author Tara Westover, published by Random House. Westover recounts overcoming her survivalist Mormon family in order to go to college, and emphasizes the importance of education to enlarging her world.

~ Suggested by Erin Rodenburg, MSc, PhD Candidate Department of Population Medicine

While I did not know the premise upon picking up this novel (I never read the back), as an advocate for the access to education for all, this story worked to solidify the personal power in continuous learning and un-learning. Though it is a tough story to hear, it is important. I was so impressed with the writer’s ability to mix the discomfort with moments of beauty and joy.