About Us

Who we are

Next meeting:

I Am Woman

I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism
Lee Maracle
04 June 2024, 6-7.30 PM,
Salt Spring Wild Cider
To join the book club, please contact info@stingingnettlebooks.com or follow the link below.
I Am Woman by Lee Maracle
"I Am Woman represents my personal struggle with womanhood, culture, traditional spiritual beliefs and political sovereignty, written during a time when that struggle was not over. My original intention was to empower Native women to take to heart their own personal struggle for Native feminist being. The changes made in this second edition of the text do not alter my original intention. It remains my attempt to present a Native woman's sociological perspective on the impacts of colonialism on us, as women, and on my self personally."

Previous meetings:

Sister Outsider

Sister Outsider
Audre Lorde
07 May 2024, 6-7.30 PM,
Location TBD
To join the book club, please contact info@stingingnettlebooks.com or follow the link below.
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
"In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published.

These landmark writings are, in Lorde's own words, a call to “never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is . . . ”"

This Bridge Called My Back

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
Edited by Cherríe Moraga & Gloria Anzaldúa
26 March, 6-7.30 PM,
Location TBD
To join the book club, please contact info@stingingnettlebooks.com or follow the link below.
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Ed. Cherríe Moraga & Gloria Anzaldúa
"Originally released in 1981,This Bridge Called My Backis a testimony to women of color feminism as it emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, “the complex confluence of identities—race, class, gender, and sexuality—systemic to women of color oppression and liberation.”Reissued here, nearly thirty-five years after its inception, the fourth edition contains an extensive new introduction by Moraga, along with a previously unpublished statement by Gloria Anzaldúa. The new edition also includes visual artists whose work was produced during the same period asBridge, including Betye Saar, Ana Mendieta, and Yolanda López, as well as current contributor biographies.Bridgecontinues to reflect an evolving definition of feminism, one that can effectively adapt to, and help inform an understanding of the changing economic and social conditions of women of color in the United States and throughout the world."

The Combahee River Collective

How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective
Edited By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
27 February, 6-7.30 PM,
Location TBD
To join the book club, please contact info@stingingnettlebooks.com or follow the link below.
How We Get Free: Black Feminism and The Combahee River Collective, Ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
"If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free." —Combahee River Collective Statement
Winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction.
The Combahee River Collective, a path-breaking group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to Black feminism and its impact on today’s struggles.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. Her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the 2016 Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book. Her articles have been published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, Jacobin, New Politics, The Guardian, In These Times, Black Agenda Report, Ms., International Socialist Review, and other publications. Taylor is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.

Palestinian Feminism

Minor Detail
By Adania Shibli
25 November, 2-3 PM,
SSI Public Library
Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts
by Nada Elia
2 December, 2-3 PM,
SSI Public Library
“Minor Detail” is available as an audio book through Hoopla via the SSI Library. “Greater Than the Sum Of Our Parts” is available as an e-book on Hoopla via the SSI Library and physical copies are available for purchase from our webstore. To join the book club, please contact info@stingingnettlebooks.com or follow the link below.
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
"Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba - the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people - and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims, they capture a Palestinian teenager, and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand.
Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly 25 years to the day before she was born. Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past."
Greater Than the Sum Of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, & Palestine by Nada Elia
"How is the struggle for Palestinian freedom bound up in other freedom struggles, and how are activists coming together globally to achieve justice and liberation for all?
In this bold book, Palestinian activist Nada Elia unpacks Zionism, from its hyper militarism to incarceration, its environmental devastation, and gendered violence. She insists that Palestine's fate is linked through bonds of solidarity with other communities crossing racial and gender lines, weaving an intersectional feminist understanding of Israeli apartheid throughout her analysis. She also looks deeper into the interconnectedness of Palestine with Black, migrant, and queer movements, and with other indigenous struggles against settler colonialism, including that of Native Americans.
Greater than the Sum of Our Parts is a powerful and hopeful account, highlighting the role of the Palestinian diaspora, youth, and women, and inspired by activists across the world."

Witches of the World Unite!

Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women
By Silvia Federici
21 October, 2-3 PM,
SSI Public Library
Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch
by Rivka Galchen
28 October, 2-3 PM,
SSI Public Library
Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women by Silvia Federici
"We are witnessing a new surge of interpersonal and institutional violence against women, including new witch hunts. This surge of violence has occurred alongside an expansion of capitalist social relations.
In this new work that revisits some of the main themes of Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici examines the root causes of these developments and outlines the consequences for the women affected and their communities. She argues that, no less than the witch hunts in 16th- and 17th-century Europe and the “New World", this new war on women is a structural element of the new forms of capitalist accumulation. These processes are founded on the destruction of people’s most basic means of reproduction. Like at the dawn of capitalism, what we discover behind today’s violence against women are processes of enclosure, land dispossession, and the remolding of women’s reproductive activities and subjectivity.
As well as an investigation into the causes of this new violence, the book is also a feminist call to arms. Federici’s work provides new ways of understanding the methods in which women are resisting victimization and offers a powerful reminder that reconstructing the memory of the past is crucial for the struggles of the present."
Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch by Rivka Galchen
"It is 1618 in the German duchy of Württemberg. Plague is spreading, the Thirty Years’ War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katharina Kepler, an illiterate widow, is accused of being a witch.
Katharina is known for her herbal remedies and the success of her children. Her eldest, Johannes, is the Imperial Mathematician and the renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It’s enough to make anyone envious, and Katharina has done herself no favours by going out and about and being in everyone’s business.
So when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katharina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katharina of making her ill by offering her a bitter, witchy drink, Katharina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture and even execution, Katharina tells her side of the story to her friend and neighbour Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets.
Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humour and intellectual fire for which Rivka Galchen is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch will both provoke and entertain. The story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear is a tale for our time. Galchen’s bold new novel touchingly illuminates a family and a society undone by superstition, the state and the mortal convulsions of history."