The second installment of The Judith Center Book Club focuses on Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), a foundational feminist text that questioned the idea of gender as natural or fixed and reimagined it as a political and material system shaped by social arrangements. Writing decades ahead of much contemporary theory, Firestone traced gender hierarchy to reproductive labor and the structure of family life, showing how biological difference becomes oppressive through how it is organized and enforced. Her forward-looking engagement with technology as a possible site of feminist intervention—particularly in relation to reproduction—anticipated later anti-naturalist and technomaterialist approaches to gender, including strands of contemporary thought such as xenofeminism. Lana Dee Povitz, the Assistant Professor of History at Middlebury College currently authoring a biography of Firestone, joins the book club as a special guest.

The first installment of The Judith Center Book Club focuses on Barbara T. Smith’s memoir The Way to Be (2023), an autobiographical chronicle of the artist’s pioneering practice. The book also recounts her dialogues with other artists in her generation in Los Angeles and abroad, as well as her inroads into the 20th century’s male-dominated canon. For more context, participants discuss “Being Eaten: Barbara T. Smith’s Ritual Meal” in Emily Elizabeth Goodman's Food, Feminism, and Women’s Art in 1970s Southern California (2022). The event concludes with an in-person Q&A between Smith, Mara McCarthy, Founder of the Los Angeles gallery The Box, and Michael Ned Holte, the curator of how we are in time and space: Nancy Buchanan, Marcia Hafif, Barbara T. Smith (2022) at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena.