Caren Irr: Pink Pirates: Contemporary American Women Writers and Copyright (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · copyright, feminism, history of literature, literary criticism, literary theory, literature, piracy

“Readings of contemporary American women writers, controversies over copyright, and feminist theory
Today, copyright is everywhere, surrounded by a thicket of no trespassing signs that mark creative work as private property. Caren Irr’s Pink Pirates asks how contemporary novelists—represented by Ursula Le Guin, Andrea Barrett, Kathy Acker, and Leslie Marmon Silko—have read those signs, arguing that for feminist writers in particular copyright often conjures up the persistent exclusion of women from ownership. Bringing together voices from law schools, courtrooms, and the writer’s desk, Irr shows how some of the most inventive contemporary feminist novelists have reacted to this history.
Explaining the complex, three-century lineage of Anglo-American copyright law in clear, accessible terms and wrestling with some of copyright law’s most deeply rooted assumptions, Irr sets the stage for a feminist reappraisal of the figure of the literary pirate in the late twentieth century—a figure outside the restrictive bounds of U.S. copyright statutes.
Going beyond her readings of contemporary women authors, Irr’s exhaustive history of how women have fared under intellectual property regimes speaks to broader political, social, and economic implications and engages digital-era excitement about the commons with the most utopian and materialist strains in feminist criticism.”
Publisher University of Iowa Press, 2010
ISBN 1587299127, 9781587299124
220 pages
via wX
Reviews: Madeleine Monson-Rosen (Mediations, 2010), Sean Latham (Modern Language Quarterly, 2012).
Comments (2)Trinh T. Minh-ha: Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, borders, feminism, home, immigration, language, migration, postcolonialism, refugees

“Elsewhere, Within Here is an engaging look at travel across national borders–as a foreigner, a tourist, an immigrant, a refugee—in a pre- and post-9/11 world. Who is welcome where? What does it mean to feel out of place in the country you call home? When does the stranger appear in these times of dark metamorphoses? These are some of the issues addressed by the author as she examines the cultural meaning and complexities of travel, immigration, home and exile. The boundary, seen both as a material and immaterial event, is where endings pass into beginnings. Building upon themes present in her earlier work on hybridity and displacement in the median passage, and illuminating the ways in which ‘every voyage can be said to involve a re-siting of boundaries,’ Trinh T. Minh-ha leads her readers through an investigation of what it means to be an insider and an outsider in this ‘epoch of global fear.'”
Publisher Routledge, 2010
ISBN 0415880211, 9780415880213
vii+139 pages
via Neda
Author’s talk on Said’s work (audio, 18 min)
Reviews: Shinhyung Choi (Dark Matter 2011), Delila Omerbašić (Journal of Refugee Studies 2013).
PDF (21 MB, no OCR, updated on 2021-5-3)
Comment (0)Laboria Cuboniks: Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation (2015) [EN, DE, ES, RO, IT, RU, SK, SL, SW, FR, PT, FA, PL, DK]
Filed under manifesto | Tags: · alienation, capitalism, feminism, gender, manifesto, politics, technology

“Ours is a world in vertigo. It is a world that swarms with technological mediation, interlacing our daily lives with abstraction, virtuality, and complexity. XF constructs a feminism adapted to these realities: a feminism of unprecedented cunning, scale, and vision; a future in which the realization of gender justice and feminist emancipation contribute to a universalist politics assembled from the needs of every human, cutting across race, ability, economic standing, and geographical position. No more futureless repetition on the treadmill of capital, no more submission to the drudgery of labour, productive and reproductive alike, no more reification of the given masked as critique. Our future requires depetrification. XF is not a bid for revolution, but a wager on the long game of history, demanding imagination, dexterity and persistence.” (opening paragraph)
First published June 2015
GNU Public License
Commentary: Isabel de Sena (2019).
Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation: HTML, TXT, PDF (English)
Xenofeminismus. Eine Politik für die Entfremdung: HTML, TXT, PDF (German)
Xenofeminismo. Una política por la alienación: HTML, TXT, PDF (Spanish)
More translations (Romanian, Italian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Persian, Polish, Danish; added on 2019-3-6)