What a collection!  Using big names and characters such as Queen Latifah and Clair Huxtable to inform their analyses, Cooper, Morris, and Boylorn have created an undeniably important anthology.  Filled with topics such as education, dating, music, and activism, The Crunk Feminist Collection offers countless opinions and experiences to counteract the mainstream message of feminism.  

They take no prisoners, hold nothing back as they push forth older ideas such as intersectionality, and grapple with more recent events, such as Bill Cosby's trial.  For them, nothing is off limits, and that's what makes this collection truly stand out.  

Review cross-listed here!

My kinda feminism

This collection of essays was everything. I found myself in quite a few of them. Was forced to face truths and challenge my own line of thinking in others. I know I will be coming back to revisit many of the essays in this read and discussing topics with friends later.

Excellent. I only wish some of the essays were a bit longer, but the shorter format makes sense as some of these pieces previously appeared in blog form. (It also feels kind of weird to rate this one, as it was very much a "listen to others' lived experiences" kind of book for me.)

Read Harder Challenge Task 24: Read a book wherein all point-of-view characters are people of color.

Thoughts? Just that I love this book and it’s become my survival guide. There’s so much in here to dissect and reflect with. It felt both like a hug and a firm hand from an older sister.

Highly recommend! Added this text to my hip hop course, and the students really responded well to the essays!

Absolutely worth reading. This book is dense (it took me over 2 months to read!), sometimes difficult, and always very smart, but also sometimes very funny and sweet. It felt like talking to friends, but super smart feminist friends with very strong opinions who are kicking ass in academia.

My only complaints are: I don't have a problem with them essentially publishing a collection of previously-written blog posts as a book -- they never claimed it was anything else than a collection of the work they did for free for years. And they did a good job sorting the posts by theme and wrote new intros to each chapter that tied them together very nicely. I do wish they had listed dates for the original posts, though? Maybe just at the bottom, like "originally posted on CFC October 2013." Because they're all in the present tense but then refer to things that happened at very different times (the posts cover from 2010-2015, I believe), so it could get confusing to not have that context. Also, and again I know they were originally blog posts, but they are academics, so I wish they'd added endnotes. It's mostly opinions/feminist analysis, but there are some facts and statistics, which I assume were originally hyperlinked. It's not that I don't trust their claims, but there were some things they mentioned in passing that I'd have loved to read more about, and seeing sources for them would have been helpful.

i loved reading about feminism from an intersectional viewpoint... especially on topics that may be uncharted territory for first and second wave feminists! i completely identify with hip-hop feminism :).

I read this book because Solange talked about it in her BUST magazine cover story and I am very glad I did, thanks for the book rec, Solange!