Feminist City

A Field Guide

By: Leslie Kern

Narrated by: Nathalie Toriel

Length: 7 hrs and 18 mins

Publisher's Summary

Feminist City: A Field Guide combines memoir, feminist theory, pop culture, and geography to expose what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities built right into our cities, homes, and neighbourhoods. Focusing on gendered experiences of the city, the books grapples with the challenge of claiming urban space amongst barriers designed to keep women “in their place”. From the geography of rape culture to the politics of snow removal, the city is an ongoing site of gendered struggle. Yet the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping new social relations based around care and justice.

Taking on fear, motherhood, friendship, activism, and the joys and perils of being alone, Kern maps the city from new vantage points, laying out a feminist intersectional approach to urban histories and pathways towards different urban futures. Feminist questions about safety and fear, paid and unpaid work, and rights and representation prompt us to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and open space to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and care-full cities together.

©2020 Leslie Kern (P)2020 Between the Lines

Critic Reviews

“The magic of the city works on many different levels. Kern’s book helps reveal them. She rightly proposes that to move beyond the oppressions structured into cities, we need utopian visions.” (Susan Ferguson, Hamilton Review of Books)

“Feminist City exposes the oppressive, heteronormative and colonialist structures which form the layered foundations of most cities. Although Kern writes that there is no blueprint for a feminist city, she has provided us with a field guide to be critical of and protest our cities, which, as put by Jane Darke, are ‘patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete.’” (Allison Smith, rabble.ca)

“Kern’s book and ideas deserve to be read and discussed on the Left. I hope that we can build on Kern’s research and analysis to generate a collective, intersectional approach to urban organizing that is clear-eyed about the system within which we labour and is motivated by the wildest imagining of a decolonial, anticapitalist, feminist future.” (Kate Atkinsoh, spring magazine) 

Very well covered

I feel that this book covered all communities, racial, gendered, sexual orientation, etc.
I felt as though I could connect with this book and the statements being made.

Ruined by 'notes'

I found this impossible to listen to. The flow of the text is interrupted by notes. I'm not sure at this point, but I think that the notes are at the end of the chapter. There was no explanation at the beginning to orient me, there is nothing to tell me we've finished the notes.

What it made me realise above all else is that using lots of notes is a really unsatisfactory way to write (for the reader). his book is not written, in the chapters I have listened to so far, in a particularly academic style, but rather a more first person, persuasive style. When there is information she feels that she must add but that doesn't belong in the core argument it is added as a note. it would be better to integrate the information or consider whether it is really relevant or interesting.

A reader can ignore the notes . Unfortunately, a listener can not.