Book Launch for Feminism, Interrupted

Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power is a major contribution to contemporary feminist thought. Reclaiming feminism from consumerism, this book explores violence against women, reproductive justice, transmisogyny, sex work, gendered Islamophobia and much more, showing that the struggle for gendered liberation is a struggle for justice — one that can transform the world for everybody.

For this launch, Gail Lewis, Rochelle Meaden, and Shanice Octavia McBean will join Olufemi for a conversation about the power and utility of feminism, both in the present and across generations.

Gail Lewis holds a Visiting Professorship at Yale University (2021 – 25) and is Reader Emerita in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Gender Studies, LSE. She trained as a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic. Her political subjectivity was formed in the intensities of black feminist and anti-racist struggle and through a socialist, anti-imperialist lens. She was a member of the Brixton Black Women’s Group and one of the founder members of the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, Britain’s first national organisation for black and other women of colour. She organises her thinking through the category ‘experience’ which she conceives as a vector of both the felt senses and an analytic in the production of meaning and knowing otherwise. Her current book project is on Black feminism in Britain. She has written on feminism, intersectionality, the welfare state and citizenship, psychoanalysis and Black feminism, and the psychosocial dynamics of racialised-gendered experience. She is an Arsenal fan.

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and CREAM / Stuart Hall Foundation researcher from London. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship to cultural production, political demands and futurity. She is the author of Experiments in Imagining Otherwise and Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power, and a member of bare minimum, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.

Rochelle Meaden is an autistic black feminist from South London. She is an alum of the Advocacy Academy and a co-founder of Fill In The Blanks, a youth-led campaign aiming to mandate the teaching of colonial history in English schools. Rochelle has trained in social justice pedagogy and now works as an activist youth worker, advising other young people how to launch campaigns. Going forward, she hopes to continue organising and working on building communities where disability justice, care and transformative approaches to education are centred.