Leo | FemRes

I’m Leo, an editor at FemRes, a growing collection of feminist books, films, research and other resources. I’m interested in who gets heard, whose work gets taken for granted, and what a good book or film can make us notice. Feminism runs through all of that. Here you’ll find things worth reading and watching, thoughts on what’s happening, and conversations with people who see something I’ve missed. Have a recommendation? Tell me what makes it worth spending time with. Small presses, overlooked films and less familiar voices are especially welcome. Browse the collection: femres.org/en/

A reading group can welcome mothers and still meet only at bedtime. Before asking why certain women never turn up, it’s worth asking what attending would cost them, and who would have to cover for them.

Calling a thinker “ahead of her time” sounds like praise. Sometimes it quietly makes someone else’s work the measure of hers. In a 2024 essay, Cuban researcher Yarlenis M. Malfrán questions the tendency to describe Lélia Gonzalez as having formulated intersectionality before Kimberlé Crenshaw named and developed it. Her objection concerns what this comparison can obscure: the questions Gonzalez was asking in her own political context, rather than the ways she anticipated a framework that became influential in the United States. A familiar concept can help readers approach an unfamiliar writer. But it can also become a filter. Whatever resembles the concept receives attention; whatever does not may disappear from the introduction. A writer finally makes it onto the reading list, only to have her argument rearranged around someone else’s intellectual history. Malfrán proposes closer attention to genealogy: where ideas develop, the struggles they emerge from, and the conversations through which they change. This does not require a competition over who said something first. It asks us to explain what connects two thinkers without treating their differences as details to be tidied away. Her essay turns to Black transfeminist thought in Brazil, where Black travestis and trans women appear as thinkers and organizers. Drawing on Silvana de Souza Nascimento, it raises a question about who gets recognized as a producer of knowledge. Nascimento’s 2022 article connects that knowledge with organizing around health care, education, work and state violence, alongside networks of affection, care and support. These struggles generate interpretations of how institutions work. People helping one another navigate exclusion are also identifying its mechanisms and arguing about what should change. That matters in feminist spaces. Someone may be invited to describe discrimination while somebody else is invited to explain it. The testimony is welcomed, but intellectual authority remains elsewhere. There is another danger in celebrating the support networks people build: admiration can become an excuse to leave the conditions requiring them untouched. Care networks do not make exclusion from public services acceptable. At the same time, an account consisting entirely of suffering tells us little about what people think, organize or want. Malfrán’s reading of Gonzalez and Crenshaw remains an argument, open to disagreement. Its value lies in making us examine the terms of recognition. Have we made room for another thinker’s work, or only for the part we already know how to recognize? femres.org/en/articles/black…

A system can get nine out of ten answers right and still be a bad system for the people it keeps getting wrong. Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru’s 2018 paper Gender Shades makes that problem unusually clear. They tested three commercial systems, from Microsoft, IBM and Face++, that classified gender from facial images. Overall accuracy ranged from 87.9% to 93.7%. A company could put those numbers in a presentation and move on. The researchers didn’t move on. They broke the results down by skin type and gender together. For darker-skinned female subjects, error rates ranged from 20.8% to 34.7%. For lighter-skinned male subjects, the highest error rate was 0.8%. In the worst-performing system for the former group, roughly one in three classifications was wrong. The average had made very different experiences look like a shared level of reliability. Looking at gender alone would not have been enough. A result for “women” could conceal the much higher error rate for darker-skinned women. Looking at skin type alone would also miss the difference between women and men within that group. This is what an intersectional analysis does here: it changes what becomes visible in the results, rather than adding a paragraph about inclusion after the testing is finished. It also changes how the test is built. The researchers assembled photographs of 1,270 parliamentarians from South Africa, Senegal, Rwanda, Sweden, Finland and Iceland. Two existing facial-analysis benchmarks they examined contained far more lighter-skinned than darker-skinned subjects. Their new benchmark brought those proportions closer together, giving the comparison a better chance of detecting a disparity. They checked a possible objection, too. Perhaps photographs from different parliaments differed enough in quality to account for the results. A separate analysis of the South African images, which included a range of skin types with more comparable image resolution, still showed the general pattern. That did not establish one simple cause for the errors. It did make the gap harder to dismiss as a matter of European photographs versus African photographs. None of this means those percentages describe every system in use today. The paper tested particular versions of three gender classifiers on parliamentary portraits in 2018. Gender classification is also a different task from identifying a person. The finding is precise enough to be useful without being stretched into a claim about every facial technology. There is a further problem that better scores cannot resolve. The services returned female or male labels. The researchers acknowledged that those categories did not capture the complexity of gender or transgender identities. A system becoming more consistent at assigning a label does not make a face a reliable account of someone’s gender. That leaves an institution with two jobs, not one. It needs to examine whether its performance claims survive scrutiny across groups. It also needs to justify why it is classifying people this way at all. Imagine being told that a system works well, when you are the person repeatedly sent to another queue, asked to try again, or left explaining why its answer is wrong. Those are illustrative consequences, not outcomes measured in this study. They show why an institution cannot stop at the vendor’s accuracy score. Someone has to deal with the errors, and that work can fall on the person with the least power to change the system. Before buying or deploying a classifier, ask for the breakdown. Ask whether the test resembles the setting where it will be used. Ask what happens to a person when it fails. And ask whether declining the classification is a real option. Gender Shades gives us a concrete way to find unequal errors. Deciding what to do about them still requires a decision about whose time, dignity and choices an institution is willing to put at risk. Our guide, with the original paper: femres.org/en/papers/gender-…

Beauvoir gets quoted for comfort, but this line is harder than that. I read it as discovering you can survive without the things women are told they can't live without, and finding that survival can feel closer to freedom than to defeat.

The line is from "An Unwritten Novel," and the feeling turns up again and again in Woolf: women watched, and measured by other people's ideas of them. A Room of One's Own reads partly as her answer: a door that locks, and money of your own.

In a poor, rural district of West Bengal, survey teams asked parents a simple question about their children aged 11 to 15: what job would you like this child to have at 25? For many daughters, the honest answer was that it wasn't up to them. In villages that had never been reserved for a woman council head, 76% of parents said a daughter's occupation, but not a son's, should be decided by her in-laws. In villages that had been led by a woman for two terms, the figure was 65%. That number comes from a 2012 study in Science by Lori Beaman, Esther Duflo, Rohini Pande and Petia Topalova. What makes it unusual is how those women got into office. Since 1993, Indian law has reserved village council leadership for women in a share of councils. In West Bengal, one-third of councils are picked at random before each election, and only women can run for the top job there. Because the draw is random, villages with a woman in charge are otherwise comparable to villages without one. And because of how the rotation worked, by 2007 a council could have had a woman leader never, once or twice. The team surveyed 495 villages in Birbhum district in 2006 and 2007, collecting 8,453 questionnaires from adolescents and their parents. After two terms with a woman leader, the gap between what parents hoped for their sons and for their daughters had shrunk by 25%. The gap in what teenagers hoped for themselves shrank by 32%. All of that came from girls' hopes rising. Boys' did not fall. It showed up in more than answers to a survey. In villages that had never been reserved for a woman leader, boys were more likely than girls to have been to school and to read and write. After two terms, the gender gap in educational outcomes was erased—and even reversed. Girls in never-reserved villages spent 79 minutes a day more than boys fetching water, cooking, cleaning, minding children, collecting fuel and washing clothes. With two terms of a woman leader, that gap was 18 minutes smaller. The timing matters. One term made little difference. The changes appeared in the second. That fits earlier work by much the same team. In a woman's first term, villagers tended to hold a comparatively low opinion of her. By the second, people in twice-reserved villages rated their woman leader as highly as people elsewhere rated their mostly male leaders. The new water infrastructure women leaders built came in the first term. The shift in what parents expected for their daughters came later, once a woman in charge had stopped looking like an exception. So the authors went looking for a material explanation and didn't find one that fits. Young women aged 16 to 30 in the same villages were no more likely to have jobs requiring high education and no less likely to be housewives. The young women and the other women in those households were not doing any less housework either. That is why the authors describe what they found mainly as a role model effect. Read one way, that is the hopeful part: a woman simply holding power, for long enough, changed what a family thought a daughter was for. Read the other way, it is the uncomfortable part. Girls' hopes and schooling caught up while the jobs available to the young women just ahead of them stayed where they were. The authors suggest those 18 minutes may have been parents giving girls time to study. Studying for what is a question the village could not yet answer. It's easy to sum this study up as "representation inspires girls." What it shows is slower and more demanding than that. It took a law, a random draw and two full terms. And what changed was what parents expected and how girls spent their hours, not the work waiting for them. A quota can change what a family thinks a daughter's future is. It cannot, on its own, create the job she will look for at 25. Those girls are in their thirties now. The study could not follow them there. That is the result worth wanting.

Dior gives Ada another idea of what a woman’s life could be. That friendship deserves attention alongside the romance in Mati Diop’s Atlantics. Freedom is easier to imagine when someone you know is living differently. femres.org/en/films/atlantic…

If your picture of fishing ends when the boat docks, a lot of women disappear. Women repair gear, sort and process the catch, sell fish and keep the accounts. Women also fish, from boats and from shore. Yet official records can focus on onboard employment, leaving much of the work that keeps a fishing business going outside the frame. A 2024 FAO study of Mediterranean and Black Sea fisheries estimated that women held 38% of jobs in the post-harvest stage. It also warned that the available figures probably undercounted women’s work, especially in small-scale fisheries. Describing someone as a family helper can make a working person vanish surprisingly efficiently. One revealing detail concerns a professional card. In its discussion of Tunisia, the study describes a fishing professional card that provides access to social protection and credit. Obtaining it requires following a training schedule. That sounds straightforward until you ask who can attend. If a course clashes with selling the catch, requires a journey someone cannot afford, or assumes another person will look after the children, the invitation offers much less than it appears to. Attendance starts measuring who can rearrange their life around the course. Information has a similar problem. A Tunisian interviewee described how men working onboard vessels had more contact with fisheries officials through data collection. Women doing shore-based fishing, marketing or processing could struggle to reach those same officials for training or administrative support. There is a nasty loop here. Work that gets counted creates contact with institutions. That contact brings information and opportunities. Work outside the count leaves its workers having to find another way in. The study’s interviews involved 24 people across five countries. Their experiences cannot stand for every coastal community, but they show how much can go wrong between announcing an opportunity and making it usable. A training programme can be open to everyone on paper and still mostly reach people who already have transport, spare time and contact with officials. The women who cannot attend may then appear in the next report as a group that needs more encouragement. Changing that takes practical work: different schedules, affordable travel, direct contact with women’s organizations. It also means letting those women help decide what the programme is for. They may have priorities that never made it onto the course outline. Our guide to the study: femres.org/en/articles/women…

I'm not sure making her sacred solves the problem of turning her into a symbol. Can she stand for the nation and still be allowed a life that isn't defined by sacrifice?

The review mentions four returning characters, all men. What happens to women’s lives in Wu’s technological utopia?

Wendy is already travelling to Alaska to find work when her car breaks down. So much for “just get a job.” Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy follows what happens when one repair is more than you can afford. femres.org/en/films/wendy-an…

Women organizing across Belfast’s divisions didn’t have to agree about everything. In Cynthia Cockburn’s account, limiting what they tried to agree on was part of how the work became possible. Members of the Women’s Support Network brought different religious affiliations, national loyalties and political hopes. They didn’t have to settle all of those questions before doing something together. They did have to stop treating a label as a complete account of a person. “Protestant,” for instance, might describe religious practice, community background or an identity someone felt stuck with. You had to listen long enough to find out. The network worked to establish shared values and an agenda its members could actually support. That involved acknowledging wrongs without making every woman answer for everyone assigned to her side. Cockburn also records that the group did not always achieve the cohesion its members wanted. Getting along took deliberate political work. Demanding agreement on everything can stop useful work before it starts. Yet “putting differences aside” can protect whoever benefits from the present arrangement. The difficult part is deciding which disagreements can remain open while people act, and which injustices the action itself has to confront. In a separate essay, Cockburn recalls women’s centres in Belfast helping women experiencing violence at home while also working across the conflict’s divisions. A woman told her: “Don’t talk to me about war. My life’s a battlefield.” A peace movement that counts safety only in the streets leaves that woman’s situation outside its main story. The centres had to deal with both. Then Cockburn went back. Her 2012 interviews, discussed in a 2013 article, found continuing poverty, discrimination, violence and trauma. She also described women’s centres becoming state-funded service providers and losing some of their political drive. Providing a service can be desperately necessary. It can also leave an organization paid to manage problems it once organized to challenge. Keeping the doors open and retaining the freedom to confront the people who fund them may pull in different directions. That later account makes the earlier organizing harder to turn into a comforting story about women bringing everyone together. They had built something across real divisions. They still needed money, political independence and somewhere to take demands that a peace agreement hadn’t answered. Our guide to Cockburn’s The Space Between Us: femres.org/en/books/space-be…

What I love about this line is that Morrison frames freedom as a duty, not a reward. If you've got some of it, the point is to pass it on.

Book 2 is where Lila and Lenù's friendship gets truly knotted: love, rivalry, and the cost of being a clever girl in a neighborhood that doesn't want one. Enjoy the ride.

A reading list can name twenty women and still give you no idea why their books belong together. Give me a disagreement, a shared question, something to follow from one book into the next.

When V. Geetha translated A. Revathi’s The Truth About Me from Tamil into English, she had to preserve a voice that was often restrained and matter-of-fact. In an interview, Geetha describes the difficulty of keeping that tone without making the English flat. There’s a lot at stake in that small distinction. An account of violence doesn’t need to sound devastated in every sentence. But readers can come looking for exactly that: the passage that will break their hearts, the suffering they can immediately recognise. A translator could make a book more emotionally familiar while moving it further from its author. Revathi had another boundary in mind. She had collected other hijras’ accounts, but felt it would be unethical to disclose everything they had shared. Those were their lives. Writing her own story gave her a way to explore things she could not simply take from someone else’s confidences. Our guide to the book: femres.org/en/books/truth-ab… That’s worth remembering when we talk about giving marginalised people a platform. A platform can come with an appetite. Tell us the worst thing. Explain the intimate detail. Make the pain legible. Choosing not to tell us something is also part of being an author, even when the reader asking is sympathetic. Geetha also discusses the difficulty of choosing between Tamil terms and English ones for gendered and sexual lives. Keeping a word may leave readers unfamiliar with it. Replacing it may lose something that no amount of fluent English can recover. Sometimes the reader has to learn, rather than have every unfamiliar experience translated into a category they already possess. Bama ran into a different demand for familiarity. In a 2018 interview, she recalled critics asking why an educated woman wrote in dialect. She defended the language of her people and kept using it. Mini Krishnan, who published Karukku in English, recalls a prospective translator turning it down because, in their view, Bama did not know her grammar. Think about the practical consequence of that judgment. A person deciding whether a book could travel into another language was treating its own language as a defect. Lakshmi Holmström eventually translated it. Our Karukku guide: femres.org/en/books/karukku/ These books don’t tell interchangeable stories. Revathi’s hijra autobiography and Bama’s account of caste and Christian institutions deserve their own histories. But both make me question the supposedly neutral reader waiting at the other end of a translation. We often praise a book for making a life accessible. Accessible to whom, and after which alterations? Was a voice made smoother? Was a term replaced? Did an editor think the narrator needed to sound more wounded, more educated, more like the kind of person their audience would believe? I’d like more reading recommendations to name those choices, and the translators making them. A book can reach new readers without promising that nothing in it will require them to change how they listen.

Between 1983 and 2011, men and women in France became less separated by the jobs they did. Part of that improvement came from jobs disappearing. It's an uncomfortable point in a December 2013 study by Julie Argouarc'h and Oana Calavrezo for Dares, the statistics office of France's labour ministry. Using the national Labour Force Survey, they tracked how women and men in metropolitan France were spread across 86 occupational families over almost three decades. Their main measure is a dissimilarity index. In 2011 it stood at 52. That means at least 52% of employed women, or alternatively 52% of employed men, would have had to change occupation for the two groups to be spread across jobs in the same way. In 1983 it was 56. The authors warn that the index should not be read as a measure of discrimination. It describes where people work, not why. Four points in nearly thirty years, while the employment rate of women aged 15 to 64 rose from 51.4% to 59.7%. Where did the decline come from? Some of it came from the kind of change most people would call progress. Women moved into skilled jobs that men used to hold. Administrative, accounting and finance managers went from 24.2% women to 49%. Men moved into some jobs women had dominated: the share of women among cleaners fell from 77.9% to 70.5%, and among salespeople from 82.5% to 73.5%. But the report also credits something else: very female jobs shrinking. Unskilled textile and leather workers numbered about 277,000 in 1983 and about 20,000 in 2011, as the industry declined. Secretaries fell from about 593,000 to 434,000, a drop the report mainly puts down to office computing. When a heavily female job shrinks, the index can improve without any job becoming more mixed. Much of the work was simply gone. Then the opposite. Home helps and childminders, counted together in the data, grew from about 333,000 to 992,000. Nursing assistants went from about 265,000 to 575,000. The report links this to longer lives, fewer generations living under one roof, more public support for people who need care, more births since the early 2000s, more women in the workforce and family benefits that encouraged hiring childminders. That growth in care and health jobs pushed segregation up. Taken on its own, the changing size of occupations added 2 points to the index on balance: shrinking female jobs pulled it down, growing care jobs pushed it up harder. Changes in who did each job took 3.2 points off. Another 3 points came off through jobs that changed in both size and mix at once. And in care, the mix barely moved. Home helps and childminders were 99.5% women in 1983 and 97.7% in 2011. Nursing assistants were 90.3% women, then 90.4%. Nurses and midwives were 87.9%, then 87.7%. Read as a scoreboard, then, the index can point the wrong way twice. A textile mill closing shows up as progress. A country hiring hundreds of thousands of people to look after its old and its young shows up as backsliding. None of this makes the index useless, and its authors are careful about what it can and can't say. The trouble starts when a number about sameness gets read as a number about fairness. Shrinking women's jobs is not the same as opening men's jobs to women, and a care sector that grows with few men in it is not a failure of the women working there. A falling index can mean women got in, or that women's jobs died out. Only the first is what most people mean by equality. The better test is harder to meet: whether men move into the jobs that are growing. In French care work between 1983 and 2011, men's share barely moved.

Before Jill Nicholls joined Spare Rib, she drove a van delivering architectural plans around southwest London. Women earned £17.94 a week; men earned £21.50. She challenged the difference, and by the time she left, the company had equal pay. In her later account, she adds something important: making a fuss was less risky for her because she was only passing through. Then she joined a feminist magazine. Spare Rib had equal pay too. It was lower than the driving job. Nicholls recalls full-time workers earning about £14 a week a couple of years after she arrived in 1974. The contradiction bothered them. They were campaigning against women’s low pay while struggling to pay themselves. Equal rates matter. So does whether anyone can live on them. Spare Rib began in 1972 and became a collective at the end of 1973. Its early commitment to pay contributors £1 per hundred words was dropped in 1974 because of debt. The magazine kept going through sales, subscriptions, donations, grants and advertising, with merchandise bringing in money too. Some collective members had other jobs or family money. That last part changes how we should think about an open editorial meeting. Everyone might be entitled to speak, but someone has to be able to get there, stay until the discussion ends and come back tomorrow. A woman who needs a better-paid job hasn’t necessarily lost interest in the politics. She may simply have rent due. And the consequences reach the page. If only certain people can afford the work, their experience becomes easier to draw on. Their contacts are nearby. Their questions come up over lunch. Other people’s lives can remain something the magazine covers from a distance. There was a practical change in 1982. Greater London Council funding helped Spare Rib hire Black women workers as part of an effort to strengthen its anti-racist work. Lucy Delap’s research describes two Iranian women, known as Farzaneh and Manny, joining the collective. Funding could change who helped make the magazine, not just how many copies it printed. It didn’t settle the arguments. Farzaneh later recalled being left out of some discussions about racism because she and Manny were not seen as fitting the collective’s racial categories. A paid place in the room didn’t guarantee that others would listen. Still, getting into that room shouldn’t depend on having another source of income. This history makes the usual celebration of women “giving their time” feel incomplete. Plenty of feminist projects would never have existed without that generosity. The problem comes when sacrifice quietly turns into an entrance requirement, and the people who can’t keep making it disappear from the account. For a small magazine, paying more may mean publishing less. It may mean a grant application, a higher cover price or an uncomfortable conversation with readers. Those choices deserve attention alongside the essays and the covers. Who can afford to keep making the publication? That question belongs in its editorial meetings, before someone has to leave.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary ran an abolitionist newspaper while teaching. She wrote, edited, sold ads and chased subscriptions. That’s a lot of work tucked into the phrase “pioneering publisher.”

In 2011, film scholar Terri Francis wanted a better copy of Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground to show her students. She emailed Collins’s daughter, Nina. They met, ate pizza and talked about the film. That’s a useful place to start its “rediscovery” story: someone already teaching it, trying to get her class a copy they could properly see. Collins made Losing Ground in 1982. Seret Scott plays Sara, a philosophy professor researching ecstasy while her marriage to a painter becomes increasingly difficult. Sara eventually acts in a student film. There’s intellectual work here, sexual jealousy, creative ambition, a woman trying something her husband might have assumed was his territory. Even the distributor’s description preserves a welcome detail: Collins called it a comedy about a young woman who takes herself too seriously. There’s room for Sara to be awkward. A Black woman at the centre of a film doesn’t have to spend every minute demonstrating how admirable she is. Losing Ground circulated at festivals but didn’t get a commercial release at the time. Collins died in 1988. The restored film finally began a theatrical release through Milestone in 2015, more than thirty years after she made it. Read that timeline quickly and it sounds as if the film vanished, then a later generation found it. But June Givanni brought it to London’s Third Eye festival in 1983. Collins took it to universities and gave master classes. In 1992, Yvonne Welbon included it in the “Mosaic in Black” programme at Chicago’s Women in the Director’s Chair. These details appear in Nzingha Kendall’s notes for the Yale Film Archive. Kendall specifically asks readers to remember the Black filmmakers, curators and educators who kept the film circulating. They were there before the big reviews. “Rediscovered” can be an awkward word for a film someone has spent years recommending. It tells you when a new audience noticed, but often leaves out who was listening before that. Put all the attention on the eventual breakthrough and the people booking small screenings or bringing a difficult-to-find film into a classroom become background characters. There’s a practical part to this, too. Nina Collins raised money for an earlier restoration and donated the original film materials to Yale. A further restoration in 2022 scanned the original negative in 4K and produced 35mm preservation materials and prints. The cinematographer, Ronald K. Gray, supervised colour correction. Composer Michael Minard supplied original recordings that helped restore the sound. A better copy changes what an audience can encounter. It gives the film a fairer chance than a reputation and a worn-out recording. That work needs money, technical skill and people who keep answering emails. Collins also pushed back against the pressure to make Black lives extraordinary before they could become stories. In a 1984 master class, she asked: “how do we divest ourselves of the need to make ourselves extraordinary?” That question deserves to travel with the film, alongside the account of how it survived. For anyone organising a film club, Losing Ground offers another discussion beyond the marriage on screen: how did this particular copy reach us? Who kept it in circulation? The credits for that story extend well beyond the director.