Sally Haslanger wrote in Resisting Reality, “There are many things in the world I cannot see without my glasses, and there are many things I cannot recognize without my concepts.”

What We Talk About When We Talk About Feminisms? sets academic theory down beside all the doubts, musings, and philosophies of the women who live by it. Taking you through interviews and writings by 17 women, this book explores how academic theory mirrors or diverges from everyday feminist approaches. It asks: What happens when the lived, breathing, and emotional merge with theory? Could it translate into new ways of theorizing?

Using design to piece together interviews, academic texts, memes, objects, and images in a collage of reflections, the book explores topics of reclamation, freedom as action, objectivity, epistemic injustice, the equality versus difference debate, family abolition, and more. This is an investigation not just of how feminist theories shape our lives, but how we shape feminisms.

Laura Segalà Ortoll is a designer and visual researcher from Catalonia based in Amsterdam, who works with books and objects as material spaces for dialogue. Through editorial design, typography, and everyday objects, she explores how theory and lived experience can meet on the page.

Luiza Yuan, from Taipei, is a PhD researcher based in Amsterdam, working between psychology and philosophy of science at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation. Her research asks how psychological knowledge comes to be made—by whom, through what methods, and for which aims.

Petra Parčetić is a cultural organizer and researcher based between Belgrade and Amsterdam, with a background in Comparative Cultural Analysis (MA) and Political Communication (MSc). Her work focuses on radical cultural accessibility, decoloniality, and intersectional feminism.

Zuzanna Ściborska is a PhD researcher in the project “The Social Life of Sexuality” at the University of Amsterdam. Originally from Poland, she focuses her research on her home country and the post-socialist landscape at large.