Book Therapy Project - Faux Feminism

​Hello, friends. As the year winds down and we settle into the quieter rhythm of the holidays, I’m looking forward to one meaningful way to begin the new year together: our next Book Therapy Project gathering.

​For our January 2026 pick, I’m excited to share Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop by Serene Khader, a book that invites us to slow down, question familiar narratives, and think more expansively about what feminism can and should ask of us.

​About the Book

​Faux Feminism asks a deceptively simple question: what happens when feminism is understood primarily as individual freedom rather than as opposition to group-based hierarchy? Serene Khader examines how “feminisms for the few” take hold: why they’re so appealing, how they show up in culture and movements, and what a more collective, justice-oriented feminism might look like instead. Drawing on philosophy, popular culture, and social movements, the book offers language for tensions many of us feel but struggle to name.

​The feminist movement has had a great deal to contend with in recent years. The questions Khader raises land in a moment shaped by overlapping pressures and reckonings, including:

​– Post-Dobbs feminism and reproductive justice, as activism has shifted from abstract rights to practical access, bringing reproductive justice from academic framing into mainstream organizing.
– Work, care, and burnout as feminist issues, with renewed attention to unpaid labor, childcare and elder-care crises, and the limits of “lean in” culture; quiet quitting, anti-hustle rhetoric, and labor organizing emerging as responses to systemic exhaustion.
– Progress met by backlash, as increased visibility has coincided with attacks on gender-affirming care, DEI efforts, and feminism itself, creating a climate of cultural panic alongside real gains.
– Feminism reframed as unfinished history, with contemporary culture and media revisiting second-wave debates and emphasizing intergenerational tension over linear narratives of progress.
– Money and power brought to the center, as pay transparency, financial literacy, divorce economics, and long-term security become core feminist concerns amid economic precarity, longer lifespans, and caregiving responsibility.

​We’ll use Faux Feminism as a way into these conversations and as an invitation to reflect together on where feminism feels thin, where it feels alive, and what we want it to ask of us now.