To read, to see: works to extend our special edition “Women, the fight continues”

Daughters of the Nile Documentary film by Nada Riyadh and Ayman El Amir (2025)

The two filmmakers of this documentary spent four years following a group of friends who put on street performances in their small Coptic town in central Egypt. As they emerge from adolescence and begin to face social pressure to marry, they act out their dreams and fears and challenge the conventions of this poor, conservative region.

There's Still Tomorrow Film by Paola Cortellesi (2023)

It's "the story of an ordinary woman" and that of "the birth of a conscience that spontaneously sprouts in [her] life," describes the director, who plays this mother of three children, married to a violent man, and who emancipates herself in post-war Rome. In Italy, carried by the mobilization against femicides, this black and white feature film has become a phenomenon, the biggest success of 2023, ahead of Barbie and Oppenheimer.

In My Skin Series by Kayleigh Llewellyn (2018-2021)

A moving Welsh series about adolescence and emerging adulthood. Bethan is 16, with a bipolar mother and an alcoholic father. But she tells her friends a different story. A “double” life and a constant feeling of a very fragile balance.

The Seeds of the Wild Fig Tree Film by Mohammad Rasoulof (2024)

Sentenced to five years in prison for "collusion against national security," Mohammad Rasoulof shot this film clandestinely before fleeing Iran. In the midst of the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement, in a Tehran where police violence reigns, strong women fight against patriarchy even within their families. A sensitive and powerful film.

Black Box Diaries Documentary film by Shiori Ito (2025)

In this film, journalist Shiori Ito recounts the investigation she conducted into her own case after accusing an influential journalist of rape and seeing the charges dropped by the courts—she ultimately won her civil case. This hard-hitting documentary, nominated for the 2025 Oscars, makes no bones about the hostile reactions her decision not to remain silent triggered.

Arctic Chronicle Series by Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril (2025)

How do you become independent, leave your husband, and build a new life when you live in a small town in Nunavut, Canada's Arctic territory, where everyone knows each other? Netflix and its co-producers, CBC and APTN, have already announced a second season of this series, which flirts with romantic comedy while shedding new light on Inuit culture.

Her Story Film by Yihui Shao (2025)

Touted as China's answer to the blockbuster Barbie, the film focuses on the bonds that develop between its three protagonists: a single mother, her 12-year-old daughter, and their neighbor, who is trying to make a career in music. Its success in China has been seen as a reflection of the "aspirations of the female community," notes the website Duan Chuanmei .

The Nevenka Affair Film by Icíar Bollaín (2024)

In the late 1990s, 25-year-old Nevenka Fernández was elected city councilor and became the protégé of her town's charismatic mayor. Manipulated for months by the fifty-year-old, she managed to escape his influence and have him convicted of sexual harassment in 2001. Director Icíar Bollaín painstakingly recreates this true story, which marked a turning point in Spain's treatment of sexual violence.

Unbelievable Miniseries by Michael Chabon, Susannah Grant and Ayelet Waldman (2019)

Based on a true story, this eight-part series with an impeccable cast (Kaitlyn Dever, Merritt Wever, Toni Collette) traces the ordeal of an American teenager accused of reporting an imaginary crime after being raped in her home by a stranger. An edifying fiction that sheds light on the dysfunctions of many rape investigations.

The Maestro's Blues Series by Christoforos Papakaliatis (Greece, 2022-2024)

The third and final season of this hit Greek series premiered on Netflix last December. Despite a strong male gaze , the series features strong female characters and brings the issue of domestic violence and, more generally, violence against women to the forefront.

Everyone can be a feminist bell hooks (Divergences, 2020)

The books of Bell Hooks, who passed away in 2021 at the age of 69, became a bookstore phenomenon—notably , "Everyone Can Be a Feminist. " A theorist of Black feminism, this American intellectual and activist explored the links between feminism, class struggle, and racism.

It is published in France by Divergences, which offers in its catalog other important feminist texts such as La Parole aux négresses by Awa Thiam, Par-delà les frontières du corps by Silvia Federici, La Puissance féministe​ by Verónica Gago​ or even A history of menstrual products​ by Jeanne Guien​, Des femmes et du style by Azélie Fayolle ​and Voyageur feminist theories​ by Mara Montanaro.

Our Body, Ourselves NCNM Collective (Out of Reach, 2020)

The updating, after more than forty years, of one of the greatest international classics of feminism.

Puberty, sexuality, contraception, abortion, childbirth, aging... This manual, built from testimonies and interviews, offers tools for knowledge and empowerment. A veritable bible written by women for women.

In the Hall of Mirrors Liv Strömquist (Rackham, 2021)

In this comic strip dedicated to our relationship with beauty, as in I'm Every Woman (2018) or The Feelings of Prince Charles (2016), the Swedish author humorously recreates feminist reflections on the place of women in society, the control of their bodies and their image, the heterosexual couple, history... The illustrated guide to patriarchy.

A marvelous arithmetic of distance Audre Lorde (Gallimard, 2025)

In this collection of poems written since 1987, the African-American poet Audre Lorde, who died in 1992, “unvarnishedly expresses the different facets of a woman on the move, in search of liberation and sisterhood,” according to the publisher. It is published in a bilingual edition, with a translation by Providence Garçon and Noémie Grunenwald and prefaces by Alice Diop, Fatou S., Kiyémis, and Mélissa Laveaux.

I Who Have Not Known Men Jacqueline Harpman (Stock, 2025)

The narrator grew up locked in a cellar with 39 other women. When the captives free themselves, they find themselves on an unknown and deserted plain, and set out in search of other humans. It was word of mouth on social media that led to the reissue of this dystopian novel by Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman, published in 1995. “Gen Z has found its Handmaid's Tale ,” exclaims The Cut , referring to Margaret Atwood's cult book.

The Argonauts Maggie Nelson (Basement Ed., 2018)

In this hybrid book, part diary, part poem, part philosophical reflection, and part essay on gender, the American poet and intellectual recounts her daily family life: she, a self-identified queer woman, is pregnant by her husband, who is in the midst of gender transition and already has a 3-year-old child. A revolution in intimacy that has become a bestseller.

Spent Alison Bechdel (Denoël, to be published on October 22)

The author of Fun Home and Lesbians to Follow features in this autobiographical work a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel who lives with her partner and a multitude of goats in Vermont. While she dreams of “delivering the final blow to late capitalism” with her next book, one of her works is being adapted into a successful series. “An exercise in truth as delicious as it is disenchanting,” praises the Los Angeles Times .

What is your torment? Sigrid Nunez (Stock, 2023)

In this magnificent novel (adapted for the screen by Pedro Almodóvar, under the title The Room Next Door ), a woman suffering from cancer and knowing she is doomed, asks the narrator, who was close to her years ago, to help her commit suicide. A poignant story and a reflection on the bond that unites us: friendship, but also literature and grief.

The Place (Motifs, 2025 for no. 3)

Maya Ouabadi and Saadia Gacem launched the journal La Place in 2021. Respectively founders of Motifs publishing and doctoral students in legal anthropology, they place this unique journal in the tradition of the struggles of Algerian women, of which they see themselves as the heirs. But the journal also sees itself as the bearer of a feminism that is both universal and intimate, theoretical and grounded.