Jessica Yee, ed. Ottawa, ON: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2011; 176 pp; ISBN: 978-1-92688-849-1, paper $15 CAD.

When feminism itself becomes its own form of oppression, what do we have to say about it? Western notions of polite discourse are not the norm for all of us, and just because we’ve got some new and hot language lately in equity-seeking movements like feminism — such as “intersectionality” — to use in our talk, it doesn’t necessarily make things change in our walk (i.e. actually being anti-racist). Confronting the sometimes uncomfortable questions feminism has made us ask about what’s going on for real paved the many paths that brought the contributors of this book together to share their sometimes uncomfortable truths, not just about feminism, but about who they are and where they are coming from. Against a backdrop exposing a legacy of over 500 years of colonization and oppression, Feminism for Real explores what has led us to the existence of “feminism,” who gets to decide what it is, and why. With stories that make the walls of academia come tumbling down, it deals head-on with the conflicts of what feminism means in theory as opposed to real life, the frustrations of trying to relate to definitions of feminism that never fit no matter how much you try to change yourself to fit them, and the anger of changing a system while being in the system yourself.

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Text provided by publisher.