Special cultural commons section: Roundtable discussion of Catherine Rottenberg’s This Is Not a Feminism Textbook, Goldsmiths University Press (2023)

The following special section is a series of responses to Catherine Rottenberg’s This Is Not a Feminism Textbook (Goldsmiths University Press, 2023). This is the second book in the ‘This is not a.. textbook’ series (the first being on science fiction) which describes itself as not ‘a purely commercial publishing venture’ but also an ‘outreach initiative in support of lifelong learning, and a mode of resistance against the marginalisation of the arts, humanities and social sciences in neoliberal economies’. The book consists of a series of entries on topics including families, bodies, sex/gender, motherhood, trans, disability, class, all pitched at an introductory level and written by academic scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds with a particular concentration in media and cultural studies. It is a book which is experimental in its format. The editor/curator, Catherine Rottenberg, is Professor of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her books include The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (2018) and Black Harlem and the Jewish Lower East Side (2014) and, with the Care Collective, The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (2020). For this section, we start with an introductory conversation with Catherine Rottenberg before inviting a series of scholars to respond to the book – Srila Roy (Wits University, South Africa) Gabriela Méndez Cota (Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico) Zainab Naqvi (Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom). They were asked to consider questions raised by it: their initial response, questions of in/exclusion, its relationship to further feminist issues or how it intersects with the conjuncture they are in as they understand it. To begin with, however, we asked Catherine Rottenberg about the text, its context and production.