Books to Read After Going to the Daisy Chain Festival
Last Saturday, thousands of young women and girls took to the fields of the Great Park in Irvine, California, for the inaugural Daisy Chain Festival. Founded by Grammy Award-winning pop artist Olivia Rodrigo, Daisy Chain Festival boasted an all female lineup with artists like Chappell Roan, Rachel Chinichouri, Stevie Knicks, Bikini Kill, and more. In a press conference before the festival Rodrigo announced the festival had already raised ten million dollars (later to be doubled by the Melinda Gates Foundation) with funds going to ten organizations including Baby2Baby, Black Mamas Matter Alliance,Center for Reproductive Rights,FreeFrom, Jhpiego, John Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health,National Domestic Workers Alliance, National Institute for Reproductive Health,National Women’s Law Center and Planned Parenthood.
Festivalgoers were greeted by booths where they learned more about feminism, reproductive health, abortion rights and more. Below are books to put on your TBR if you attended the festival (or even if you didn’t) to further your education on these topics!
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert
How did pop culture go from the bombastic radical message of the Riot Grrrls to the more corporate friendly Spice Girls? How did girls like Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson become easy targets for the media and the public alike? How did, as Sophie Gilbert asks, pop culture turn a generation of women against themselves? In her book Girl on Girl, Atlantic culture writer Sophie Gilbert writes extensively about the impact the misogyny that Generation X women grew up under had and its lasting impact.
Backtalker by Kimberlé Crenshaw
Before she shifted public conversations forever on race and feminism by coining the terms intersectionality and critical race theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw was a little girl in Canton, Ohio. In Backtalker, the famed legal scholar goes back to the early days of her life to trace the moments where she began to find her voice and talk back against the things that bothered her on her journey to becoming a lawyer and public figure.
Even the Good Girl Will Cry by Melissa Auf Der Maur
Smashing Pumpkins and Hole bassist Melissa Auf Der Maur recently released her memoir about her life before, during, and after playing in two of Rock’s biggest bands of the 90s. Tracking her time all the way from her unconventional childhood in Montreal to the later years when her band gained the life changing opportunity to open for Smashing Pumpkins, Even the Good Girl Will Cry is described as “part rock memoir, part travel diary, [and] part psychedelic scrapbook.”
Unprecedented Times by Malavika Kannan
Debut novelist Malavika Kannan writes about Rishi, a young Indian American girl, whose plans for college life are jilted when the COVID-19 pandemic hits and she decides to quarantine on a farm collective with her classmates. It doesn’t take long for things to break down on the commune as political disenchantment mixed with raging hormones come into play. A coming of age novel from a brilliant new voice in literature.
Just Pills by Rebecca Kelliher
In Just Pills, Kelliher documents the history of a revolutionary feat in abortion care when drug developers created mifepristone and misoprostol, or the abortion pill as it's come to be known. A cheap and safe means to terminate a pregnancy, abortion pills have come to the spotlight after the repeal of Roe vs. Wade as an alternative to the increasingly inaccessible clinical abortion.
In Liberating Abortion, Renee Bracey Sherman and Regina Mahone use a mix of testimonials, research, and archival material to bring forth the history of people of color getting abortions and the history of their right to do so coming under attack. In a post Roe v. Wade world, this book promises to “uncover the hidden figures who set the foundation that activists and storytellers are building on today.”
We Were Here: A History of Black People and Alternative Music by Stephanie Phillips (Forthcoming)
The description for Stephanie Phillips’ forthcoming book We Were Here: A History of Black People and Alternative Music calls it “a long-overdue corrective to the history of rock ‘n’ roll and alternative music.” White male artists like Elvis Presley, David Bowie, The Ramones, and Nirvana have been credited with shaping the sound and style of rock, punk, and alt music, while Black artists like Chuck Berry, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Bad Brains' have had their contributions erased. Drawing on her own experience as a Black punk artist, Phillips places Black people back into rock music history.
Vocal Break by Lauren Elkin (Forthcoming)
Lauren Elkin, author of Art Monsters and Scaffolding, is back with her latest book Vocal Break. In the description for her forthcoming book, she describes a vocal break as “where the voice shifts from lower to higher registers—from one thing to another.” Leading her to the question: “What can be made in this space of transition?” Focusing on a slate of female singers — which include Kathleen Hanna, Beyoncé, FKA Twigs, Billie Eilish, and more — she writes about how they’ve used their voices to “defy convention, genre, capitalism, racism, sexism, and the forces that attempt to keep them quiet.”
