Mitsuye Yamada is a Japanese American writer, educator, and activist. Her works expose the discrimination faced by Japanese Americans during and after World War II, while tackling issues of representation and gender violence.
Davis has since become the figurehead for the prison abolition movement, a movement that calls into question what it means to be a criminal within a white-supremacist capitalist society.
Patricia Hill Collins is an acclaimed social theorist known for her intersectional approach to the sociologies of feminism, Black liberation, and nationalism.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar who continues to add to many academic disciplines. She is known mainly for her work in post-colonial studies, but has also influenced Marxist, feminist, postmodern, and globalization studies.
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” This provocative assertion from Simone de Beauvoir’s acclaimed book, “The Second Sex,” helped destroy the notion that women are born feminine.
In her letter to the NEA chair, Rich stated: “There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art—in my own case the art of poetry — means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.”
Throughout her lifetime of writing, Anzaldúa consistently contributed to theories countering social oppression, spanning topics that encompassed her intersectional identities. She let her spirituality and emotions weave through her prose and poetry in meaningful and enlightening ways. Her work is a strong and captivating addition to postcolonial and intersectional feminism, proving that theories and social critique can be amplified by passion and rage.
A teacher, healer, freedom fighter, and aunt to hip hop legend Tupac, Assata Shakur has organized against the prison-industrial complex, police brutality, discriminatory education, poverty, addiction, and hunger in Black and Brown neighborhoods.
Adichie, a Nigerian novelist, is one of the latest women to join the lineage of iconic feminist writers like Maya Angelou, Adrienne Rich and Toni Morrison in their literary portrayal of women’s voices.
In her 1988 essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” Judith Butler—philosopher, gender theorist, and professor at UC Berkeley—proposed the theory that gender is behavior, rather than a biological fact.