Living West as Feminists: Conversations about the Where of Us

In the aftermath of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Krista Comer invited fifteen colleagues into a conversation about feminism and the U.S. West. From her travels over some thirteen thousand miles to places chosen by participants comes a remarkable series of dialogues focusing on questions about the where of us--the places that we love or belong, or don’t belong, and who we are in them.

Living West as Feminists moves from travelogue to interviews to critical meditations. It asks who one’s people are, to whom one feels accountable, and how we might make peace with the itinerant, often displaced lives of late-stage capitalist culture. Ultimately, the book understands feminism not as a specific politics or set of theories but as a network of relations. Its coalitional perspective allows for coming together even while distinguishing feminists who write from Black, Indigenous, queer, Chicanx, and materialist perspectives. Feminist rest areas, in which relational securities find footing, can create the most priceless resource in desperate times: well-being and political hope.

Krista Comer is a professor of English at Rice University and director of the Institute for Women Surfers. She is the author of Surfer Girls in the New World Order and Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing.