Leslie Kern’s Featured Book
Feminist City: A Field Guide
“Feminist City is the next-generation urbanism book I’ve been waiting for! Leslie lays out a comprehensive guide to feminist world-building that our cities so desperately need. A must-read for all city officials and budding urbanists alike as we move into the female future of our urban environments.” – Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman, MUS, urban anthropologist and adjunct professor, Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation, Drexel University; co-founder of The Women Led Cities Initiative
Leslie Kern wants your city to be feminist. An intrepid feminist geographer, Kern combines memoir, theory, pop culture, and geography in this collection of essays that invites the reader to think differently about city spaces and city life.
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.
Buy the Book:
Owl’s Nest Books | Shelf Life Books
Borrow the Book from the Library:
Calgary Public Library
Leslie Kern’s Other Book
Sex and the Revitalized City: Gender, Condominium Development, and Urban Citizenship
When a recent wave of condominium development overtook Toronto, women emerged as powerful consumers, and reports claimed that home ownership was offering young, single women freedom, financial independence, and personal security. Sex and the Revitalized City examines the truth of these claims by exploring the phenomenon from the perspective of women condo owners and planners and developers. This fresh perspective on urban revitalization reveals that condo ownership is not freeing women from constraints – neoliberal ideologies are remaking women’s relationship with the city in the image of fast capital and consumer citizenship. Women’s emancipation through condominium ownership is a marketing ploy rather than a major shift in gender relations.
Buy the Book:
Owl’s Nest Books | Shelf Life Books
Leslie Kern’s Recommended Book
Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power By Lola Olufemi
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.
Buy the Book:
Owl’s Nest Books | Shelf Life Books