Feminism, Interrupted

Cliterature, the Vagina Museum’s book club, offers you a generous and satisfying fingering through the feminist pages. We’ll include a mixture of fiction, non-fiction, essays and poetry. Everyone is welcome and we’re open to book club suggestions. Our book club is led by trustee Niharika Jain.

Our June reading is Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power by Lola Olufemi.

Having explored two fiction books, we’ll venture back into non-fiction with Lola Olufemi whose book was chosen as one of the best books of 2020 by booksellers.

More than just a slogan on a t-shirt, feminism is a radical tool for fighting back against structural violence and injustice. Feminism, Interrupted is a bold call to seize feminism back from the cultural gatekeepers and return it to its radical roots.

Lola Olufemi explores state violence against women, the fight for reproductive justice, transmisogyny, gendered Islamophobia and solidarity with global struggles, showing that the fight for gendered liberation can change the world for everybody when we refuse to think of it solely as women’s work. Including testimonials from Sisters Uncut, migrant groups working for reproductive justice, prison abolitionists and activists involved in the international fight for Kurdish and Palestinian rights, Olufemi emphasises the link between feminism and grassroots organising.

Reclaiming feminism from the clutches of the consumerist, neoliberal model, Feminism, Interrupted shows that when ‘feminist’ is more than a label, it holds the potential for radical transformative work.

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and organiser from London. She facilitates workshops on feminism and histories of political organising in schools, universities and local communities. She is the co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University: Being a Woman of Colour at Cambridge and Other Institutions of Power and Elitism (Verve Poetry Press, 2019).