Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds

Feminist Theory established bell hooks as one of international feminism’s most challenging and influential voices. This edition includes a preface by the author, reflecting on the book’s impact and the development of her ideas since it was first published. 

In this beautifully written and carefully argued work, hooks maintains that mainstream feminism’s reliance on white, middle-class, and professional spokeswomen obscures the involvement, leadership, and centrality of women of colour and poor women in the movement for women’s liberation. Hooks argues that feminism’s goal of seeking credibility and acceptance on already existing ground – rather than demanding the lasting and more fundamental transformation of society – has short-changed the movement.

A sweeping examination of the core issues of sexual politics, Feminist Theory argues that contemporary feminists must acknowledge the full complexity and diversity of women’s experience to create a mass movement to end women’s oppression.

An impassioned discussion about the alternative ways to form relationships and resist capitalism.

Capitalist ideology wants us to believe that there is an optimal way to live. 'Making connections' means networking for work. Our emotional needs are to be fulfilled by a single romantic partner, and self-care equates to taking personal responsibility for our suffering. We must be productive and heterosexual, we must have babies and buy a house. But the kicker is most people cannot and do not want to achieve all, or any of these life goals. Instead we are left feeling atomised, exhausted and disempowered.

Radical Intimacy shows that it doesn't need to be this way. A punchy and impassioned account of inspiring ideas about alternative ways to live, Sophie K Rosa demands we use our radical imagination to discover a new form of intimacy and to transform our personal lives and in turn society as a whole.

Including critiques of the 'wellness' industry that ignores rising poverty rates, the mental health crisis and racist and misogynist state violence; transcending love and sex under capitalism to move towards feminist, decolonial and queer thinking; asking whether we should abolish the family; interrogating the framing of ageing and death and much more, Radical Intimacy is the compassionate antidote to a callous society.

Injecting the disruptive potential of collective action into the body of the poem, Nat Raha's invigorating experiment resuscitates Anglophone poetry.

Amidst the violence of capitalism and state and imperial power, there is Nat Raha's apparitions (nines) in its "charred golden minidress," ushering us into a space of grief and resistance, the embodiment and intimacy of queer, trans, and diasporic Black and brown people. Written as a series of "niners," a poetic form consisting of nine nine-syllable lines, apparitions (nines) is at once a brash and subversive rejoinder to the Anglophone sonnet, as well as an ode to beauty, collectivity, and tenderness which emerges from—and far surpasses—constraint.

"These poems are eccentric in the most literal sense, Raha’s writing pushing at the edges of the mainstream of poetry, presenting a punk, transfeminist revision of poetic norms. . . apparitions (nines) deserves to be read—for its insights and newness, and the studs of pleasure it doles out." - Lou Selfridge, Frieze

“Welcome the poems that split us open, ‘frequencies/ to be removed from the air.’ Nat Raha has sharpened the lines, their serrated letters leaving us marked, poems to touch again on the skin, feel our doom undo its direction for enduring solidarity; the best love.” - CAConrad

Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar whose previous books of poetry include of sirens, body & faultlines (2018), countersonnets (2013), and Octet (2010). Her work has appeared in 100 Queer Poems (2022), We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020), Liberating the Canon: An Anthology of Innovative Literature (2018), on Poem-a-Day, and in South Atlantic Quarterly, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Transgender Marxism,and Wasafiri Magazin. With Mijke Van der Drift, she co-edits the Radical Transfeminism zine and has co-authored articles for Social Text, The New Feminist Literary Studies, and the book Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds. Nat completed her PhD in queer Marxism at the University of Sussex, and is Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art.

Tendrils threads through grief, joy and solidarity toward futures shaped by collaboration and care. Reaching through ecological crises, these poems seek new ways of living kinship in the more-than-human world.

This anthology gathers international voices that entangle, illuminate and resist: a collective turn to the future with renewal and possibility.

Edited and introduced by fieldnotes collective: Pratyusha, Jessica J. Lee, Alycia Pirmohamed and Nina Mingya Powles.

With contributions by Shasta Hanif Ali, Hala Alyan, Hana Pera Aoake, Polly Atkin, Kara Barlow, Khairani Barokka, Kat Benedict, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, Corinna Board, Jody Chan, Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal, Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Carlina Duan, Chloe Elliott, Zoë Fay-Stindt, Sophie Hoyle, Petero Kalulé (petals), Bhanu Kapil, Jayant Kashyap, Maija Makela, Lola Olufemi, Carl Phillips, Nat Raha, Shumin Tan, Dženana Vucic and Alice Willitts.

Spells are poems; poetry is spelling.

Spell-poems take us into a realm where words can influence the universe.

Spells brings together over forty contemporary voices exploring the territory where justice, selfhood and the imagination meet the transformative power of the occult. These poems unmake the world around them, so that it might be remade anew.

Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Anthony V. Capildeo, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Paige Emery, Livia Franchini, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Precious Okoyomon, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Sarah Shin, Himali Singh Soin, Tai Shani, Rebecca Tamás, Bones Tan Jones, Dolly Turing, Jane Yeh, Flora Yin Wong

Introduced by So Mayer
Afterword by Sarah Shin

There is no pause without prior exertion, and this issue of the magazine explores rest and all its associated contexts and contradictions. Amidst increasing environmental pollution, a tenuous global political climate, and a performance-oriented society demanding ever greater productivity, the balance between rest and labour becomes skewed. Pausing carries the risk of falling behind, but this risk can be mitigated by knowing when to rest. This issue examines rest as activity and as resistance. It questions how the individual body, in cohesion with a community, can generate weight through relaxation and distribute it. 

Contributors: Asma Ben Slama, Camila Cañeque, Christiane Blattmann, Eileen Myles, Federico Tosi, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Hanne Loreck, Hans-Christian Dany, Hyemin Yang, Ingrid Jäger, Jenni Bohn, Jochen Lempert, Julia Schulze Darup, Mariona Berenguer, Matthias Schubert, Mikołaj Sobczak, Mirene Arsanios, Nat Raha, Nicholas Grafia, Niclas Riepshoff, Omar Hahad, Sarah Drath, Stacy Skolnik, Thomas Laprade, Vir Andres Hera

Within the format of a magazine, each page of Pfeil represents the floor, walls, or ceiling which together create an imagined room displaying a printed exhibition. Each issue is dedicated to a specific word, and artists are invited and given space to work on and with this term, and to construct or deconstruct the architecture around it. Combined, the contributions transform into an organic display surrounding the leitmotif.

of sirens, body & faultlines is a book of prophecy against this Brexit era, rising from a post-2008 London, where crisis and austerity meet the vanity projects of the super-rich. Committed to the immediacy of a present that is precarious and under surveillance, of sirens... attends to queer, transfeminist and people of colour counter-memories and histories. It seeks new expressions of desire and modes of breath, pushing against the gravities that would rather these lives and worlds disappear. 

While arguing with the radio may seem futile, syntax, punctuation, grammar and the page must still all be mobilised to help create new conditions of possibility – for collectivity, for poetry to speak. Raha’s exceptional, experimental, queer lyric mobilises all aspects of language to reveal contradictions of capitalism and defuse populist rhetoric. This is a writing of city life against the flows to capital; labouring bodies speaking back to the demands of work and the fictions of xenophobic politicians. It concerns herstory, transfeminism, collectivity; the everyday of South East London, transformation and decolonisation, through counter-memories, anti-memoir, and a trans poetics.

"Nat Raha has written some of the most exciting poetry of the last decade. Transfeminist, communist, revolutionary – with great quickness and nimble intensity, her syllables and survival codes dash through police-lines as high-level transmissions signalling absolute solidarity, insisting that other lives are still possible. Originally published as a series of home-made pamphlets that seemed to come as much from post-punk zine culture as from avant-garde poetics, it's good to see them gathered here in one place for the first time and as a body of evidence of a culture of struggle. These poems do not merely comment on that struggle, but emerge from within it. They are poems that break open a space in which to think through what has happened, who we have been, and what has been done to us. These are fearsome times. Raha writes poetry that acknowledges that fear and refuses to flinch in the face of it, which is in itself an act of the fiercest solidarity." – Sean Bonney

catflap is the annual publication of new queer writing from Outburst Arts, a hot mix of open call submissions, curated interviews and smart queer writing with a disco heart.