"Feminist skepticism of a canon is healthy. To Gay a feminist canon is subjective and always
evolving and represents a long history of feminist scholarship. Ten years after her New York
Times bestselling essay collection Bad Feminist Roxane Gay edits The Portable Feminist Reader
for Penguin Classics an anthology of texts that are diverse in feminist thought strikingly
relevant and dynamic. Sixty-five selections include ancient historic and more recent
feminist voices. Traditional scholarship sits with personal essays and poetry. With insightful
headnotes Gay provides context for writings on multicultural perspectives ecofeminism
feminism and disability feminist labor gender perspectives Black feminism and more. With
this anthology Gay invites readers to examine the state of feminism what feminism looks like
in practice and its successes and failures. Gay invites readers to join in conversation with
the long and growing line of historical and contemporary feminist thought and to talk of canon
which always remains complex and contradictory as expansive rather than definitive"--
