Five titles to challenge your thinking on work, food, beauty & sex

Reni Eddo-Lodge is the London based, award winning author of the Jhalak Prize winning, bestselling Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race.

At the Guardian, she tagged five "books to challenge your thinking on work, food, beauty and sex," including:

I enjoy writing that affords women agency. Work, food, gender presentation and beauty habits have been tools to control our behaviour for centuries. So has sex. I read Melissa Gira Grant’s Playing the Whore in 2014 when I was working in a pub. It was a job in which I experienced intermittent sexual harassment and rude behaviour from customers. The job hurt my feet sometimes and I was often chastised by the bosses. But most importantly, I was doing it to pay my rent. This was the perfect place in which to read Gira Grant’s analysis of work, consent and performance. She takes campaigners to task for getting in the way of labour rights for sex workers. She shifted my idea of sex workers from victims to people who deserve to live free from harassment, persuading me away from a position that dismissed any violence towards them as an occupational hazard. Crucially, she emphasised that this stance was an example of the vile kind of victim blaming we feminists usually seek to oppose.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue