Letting Go: Feminist and Social Justice Insight and Activism

Donna King · Catherine G. Valentine

Sep. 2015 · Vanderbilt University Press

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At a time when women are being exhorted to "lean in" and work harder to get ahead, Letting Go: Feminist and Social Justice Insight and Activism encourages both women and men to "let go" instead. The book explores alternatives to the belief that individual achievement, accumulation, and attention-seeking are the road to happiness and satisfaction in life. Letting go demands a radical recognition that the values, relationships, and structures of our neoliberal (competitive, striving, accumulating, consuming, exploiting, oppressive) society are harmful both on a personal level and, especially important, on a social and environmental level.

There is a huge difference between letting go and "chilling out." In a lean-in society, self-care is promoted as something women and men should do to learn how to "relax" and find a comfortable work-life balance. By contrast, a feminist letting-go and its attendant self-care have the potential to be a radical act of awakening to social and environmental injustice and a call to activism.

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Catherine (Kay) G. Valentine, Professor Emerita of Sociology and founding director of women's studies at Nazareth College, is coeditor of The Kaleidoscope of Gender: Prisms, Patterns, and Possibilities.

Donna King, Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, is author of Doing Their Share to Save the Planet: Children and Environmental Crisis and coeditor of Men Who Hate Women and Women Who Kick Their Asses: Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy in Feminist Perspective (also published by Vanderbilt).