Long before the Women's March of 2017, before the second wave feminist movement of the 20th century, before even the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, people have been thinking about the rights

granted and denied to roughly half the population by virtue of sex or gender.

Brilliant and passionate writers have named and resisted the burdens of being female in

a patriarchal power structure and their words are worth reading, but it can be hard to know where to start.

From KERA in Dallas, this is think. I'm Chris Boyd. Kimberly Crenshaw, Betty Friedan, Charlotte

Perkins-Gilman, Audra Lord, all have produced insightful, important explorations of what it

means to inhabit a woman's role and a woman's body. But not a single one of them

has written the final seminal perspective on feminism because as feminist writer Roxanne Gay aptly

demonstrates in the new anthology she edited, our society and the feminist movement within it are

still evolving. The new book is titled The Portable Feminist Reader. Roxanne, welcome back to

think. Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. So you've collected this

list of works that anybody who cares about feminism might want to be familiar with. Why does the

idea of a canon make some feminists uncomfortable? Well, historically, a canon has generally been framed as the best of the best, the most

Ariadite works, the most scholarly and culturally impactful works.

And that's well and good.

But who has created those works has typically been white men, white, cisgender, heterosexual men.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

But when that's the only kind of intellectual that is considered canonical, we start to see a real problem because really there are all kinds of

public intellectuals across the range of identities.

And it's really important that we understand canon in a way that can accommodate that reality.

It's so perspective that white Western male perspective, it's so pervasive that many people

don't even notice

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