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A groundbreaking feminist critique of the dawn of capitalism, Caliban and the Witch, and hannah baer's debut trans girl suicide museum will finally be published in Czech. Only until the end of the week can you purchase these two new books in advance via Donio at an exceptionally low price.

From witch hunts to the patriarchy: Caliban and the Witch
Why do feminists like witches? Why have witch hunts—meaning, in a figurative sense, attacks on women’s autonomy and freedom—transpired over and over again throughout history? In her seminal book Caliban and the Witch, Italian feminist Silvia Federici claims that capitalism needs obedient women—the kind who bear children and do as much unpaid labor as possible. And while we cannot exist without this labor, no one recognizes it as work because it does not directly result in anything that can be sold. It is work that women do “out of love”—household chores, care, raising children. According to Federici, capitalism—a system that has lasted for several hundred years already—could only have come into being thanks to a series of unprecedented attacks on women in Europe and America at the dawn of the modern era, between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. These women were the ones who were leading uprisings against the seizure of communal land, and they were also the ones who knew how to regulate their fertility in an era when the birth rate was falling sharply. Written by one of the most influential feminist thinkers of our day, the book is a tribute to witches as women who refused to submit, who were poor and rebellious, who no longer bore children or who helped younger women to have abortions. The witch hunts, in which many of the elites of the time participated, were later swept aside as obscurantism and backwardness that was best forgotten. But witches still haunt us today, be it in pop culture or politics. Whenever women achieve greater rights or want control over their own bodies, a new round of witch hunts begins.

“The core of social debate today is who determines—and how—what is ‘natural,’ what is normal, and what can be legitimately discussed and changed. Both of these books show that the role of women, the concept of gender, the shape of the family, and the boundaries between the private and public spheres are not set in stone but have always been subject to change, to negotiation, and often to fierce political struggle. Emancipation is therefore not only about freedom of choice but also about the courage to take control of one’s own story and work together to transform the world,” says Tereza Stejskalová, director of tranzit.cz and editor of the Czech translation of Caliban and the Witch.