Event: FEMINIST GIANT & The Strand Present: Clarkisha Kent
FEMINIST GIANT is teaming up with The Strand Book Store in New York City to launch a feminist book club! The goal is to have monthly events—a combination of in-person and online—that will feature exciting and global feminist books.
I am thrilled to announce that our next event will feature culture critic and author Clarkisha Kent, for a discussion of her new book Fat Off, Fat On: A Big Bitch Manifesto.
Clarkisha will join me at an in-person discussion on April 28, hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.
This event is FREE to attend. All attendees are required to wear a mask.
If you do not have a mask in accordance with CDC guidelines, The Strand will provide proper masks at the door.
Can’t make the event? Purchase a signed copy of Fat Off, Fat On here.
About Fat Off, Fat On:
In this disarming and candid memoir, cultural critic Clarkisha Kent unpacks the kind of compounded problems you face when you’re a fat, Black, queer woman in a society obsessed with heteronormativity.
There was no easy way for Kent to navigate personal discovery and self-love. As a dark-skinned, first-generation American facing a myriad of mental health issues and intergenerational trauma, at times Kent’s body felt like a cosmic punishment. In the face of body dysmorphia, homophobia, anti-Blackness, and respectability politics, the pursuit of “high self-esteem” seemed oxymoronic.
Fat Off, Fat On: A Big Bitch Manifesto is a humorous, at times tragic, memoir that follows Kent on her journey to realizing that her body is a gift to be grown into, that sometimes family doesn’t always mean home, and how even ill-fated bisexual romances could free her from gender essentialism.
Perfect for readers of Keah Brown’s The Pretty One, Alida Nugent’s You Don’t Have to Like Me, and Stephanie Yeboah’s Fattily Ever After, Kent’s debut explores her own lived experiences to illuminate how fatphobia intertwines with other oppressions. It stresses the importance of addressing the violence scored upon our minds and our bodies, and how we might begin the difficult—but joyful—work of setting ourselves free.
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.