Here We Are: Feminism for the Real World - Kelly Jensen (Ed.)

Let’s get the feminist party started!

Here We Are is a scrapbook-style teen guide to understanding what it really means to be a feminist. It’s packed with essays, lists, poems, comics, and illustrations from a diverse range of voices, including TV, film, and pop-culture celebrities and public figures such as ballet dancer Michaela DePrince and her sister Mia, politician Wendy Davis, as well as popular YA authors like Nova Ren Suma, Malinda Lo, Brandy Colbert, Courtney Summers, and many more. Altogether, the book features more than forty-four pieces, with an eight-page insert of full-color illustrations.

Here We Are is a response to lively discussions about the true meaning of feminism on social media and across popular culture and is an invitation to one of the most important, life-changing, and exciting parties around.

As someone who recently finished a degree in women's and gender studies, I have come to see the varied and nearly infinite interpretations of feminism, both as a big, broad concept, and also as a part of larger intersectional discussions relating to race, class, gender, geography, etc. Often in books about feminism, one particular interpretation is favoured or examined, and worse, made almost entirely inaccessible to the average human being. What Here We Are does so well is make various intersectional feminist perspectives accessible to a general audience, and even better, to a teen audience.

This collection is a necessary inclusion in libraries, classrooms, and homes everywhere, particularly in this time when women's rights and bodies are under attack in communities around the world, and through government legislation. These authors each tell essential truths about what feminism means in various contexts. Not only is this an essential read for the new year, but it is an anthology that I Highly Recommend!!


AUTHORS:
Kody Keplinger     Courtney Summers     Erika T. Wurth     Brenna Clarke Gray, 
Mikki Kendall     Angie Manfredi      Lily Myers     Becca Sexton     
Allison Peyton Steger     Anne Thériault      Shveta Thakrar     Kayla Whaley     Sarah McCarry     Malinda Lo     Ashley Hope Pérez     Nova Ren Suma      
Daniel José Older      Wendy Davis     Matt Nathanson     Mia DePrince     
Alida Nugent     Constance Zaber     Brandy Colbert     Siobhan Vivian
Rafe Posey     Jessica Luther     Michaela DePrince     Amandla Stenberg
Suzannah Weiss     Zariya Allen     Risa Rodil     Wendy Xu

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