About us
Our Feminist Book Club is where great books meet bold ideas, with plenty of laughter and shenanigans! Each month, we gather to swap stories, share hot takes, and laugh while we plot the quiet overthrow of the patriarchy. Whether you read every page, skim the back cover, or just came for the snacks, you’re welcome here. We celebrate joy, hold space for the heavy stuff, and believe listening is its own kind of revolution!
Get all the news about events and what to read by subscribing to our newsletter:
https://feministbookclublausanne.substack.com/ and following us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/feminist.bookclub.lausanne/
Upcoming events
11
Book Club 12: Greater than the Sum of our Parts
Books Books Books - Feminist Book Club, Rue du Valentin 1, Lausanne, CHCo-hosted by Janine & Laura + rotating community co-hosts
Our September book club pick is: Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine by Nada Elia.
About this book:
An inspiring and intersectional re-imagining of the path to liberation in Palestine 'An inspiring call to action that deconstructs the many oppressive systems we currently find ourselves struggling against' - Adam Horowitz, Mondoweiss How is the struggle for Palestinian freedom bound up in other freedom struggles, and how are activists coming together globally to achieve justice and liberation for all? In this bold book, Palestinian activist Nada Elia unpacks Zionism, from its hyper militarism to incarceration, its environmental devastation, and gendered violence. She insists that Palestine's fate is linked through bonds of solidarity with other communities crossing racial and gender lines, weaving an intersectional feminist understanding of Israeli apartheid throughout her analysis. She also looks deeper into the interconnectedness of Palestine with Black, migrant, and queer movements, and with other indigenous struggles against settler colonialism, including that of Native Americans. Greater than the Sum of Our Parts is a powerful and hopeful account, highlighting the role of the Palestinian diaspora, youth, and women, and inspired by activists across the world.
-from Goodreads🤷‍♀️ Didn’t finish the book? Haven’t started? Only here for feminist hot takes, collective unlearning, and good vibes? Perfect. We’re a no-pressure, no-expectations book club. Come exactly as you are.
đź“Ť Where: Books Books Books, Lausanne
⏰ When: Thursday, June 25th at 18:30
(about 1.5 hours + optional post-book-club hangout!)You can grab the book through our lovely host BooksBooksBooks, or listen to the audiobook if that feels more accessible right now.
Sign up for our newsletter to know which parts we’re focusing on — or simply show up and wing it. Bring your thoughts, your questions, your complicated feelings about mirrors, magazines, and the male gaze. We can’t wait to unpack this one together 💜📚✨
### What to Expect
- A 90-minute guided conversation led by Laura, Janine, and a rotating community co-host
- A warm, welcoming, non-judgmental space
- Thoughtful discussion, honest sharing, and room for complexity
- A mix of regulars and first-timers — everyone truly is welcome
- Time afterward to browse, chat, and connect
### Who This Is For
Anyone who wants to:
- read more feminist books,
- have meaningful conversations,
- meet new people in Lausanne,
- interrogate beauty, power, capitalism, and self-worth,
- or sit with thoughtful humans for an hour and a half (in English).
### RSVP Etiquette
Space is limited. Please adjust your RSVP if your plans change so someone else can join.
We’re looking forward to reading feminist books with you!
Your co-hosts,
Janine & Laura20 attendees
Book Club 13: Happening
Books Books Books - Feminist Book Club, Rue du Valentin 1, Lausanne, CHCo-hosted by Janine & Laura + rotating community co-hosts
Our October book club pick is Happening by Annie Ernaux.
About this book: In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child.
This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies.
In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.
--from Goodreads🤷‍♀️ Didn’t finish the book? Haven’t started? Only here for feminist hot takes, collective unlearning, and good vibes? Perfect. We’re a no-pressure, no-expectations book club. Come exactly as you are.
⚠️ Content note: This book discusses eating disorders, body image, and misogyny. Please take care of yourself and feel free to step out or skip this session if needed.
đź“Ť Where: Books Books Books, Lausanne
⏰ When: Thursday, June 25th at 18:30
(about 1.5 hours + optional post-book-club hangout!)You can grab the book through our lovely host BooksBooksBooks, or listen to the audiobook if that feels more accessible right now.
Sign up for our newsletter to know which parts we’re focusing on — or simply show up and wing it. Bring your thoughts, your questions, your complicated feelings about mirrors, magazines, and the male gaze. We can’t wait to unpack this one together 💜📚✨
### What to Expect
- A 90-minute guided conversation led by Laura, Janine, and a rotating community co-host
- A warm, welcoming, non-judgmental space
- Thoughtful discussion, honest sharing, and room for complexity
- A mix of regulars and first-timers — everyone truly is welcome
- Time afterward to browse, chat, and connect
### Who This Is For
Anyone who wants to:
- read more feminist books,
- have meaningful conversations,
- meet new people in Lausanne,
- interrogate beauty, power, capitalism, and self-worth,
- or sit with thoughtful humans for an hour and a half (in English).
### RSVP Etiquette
Space is limited. Please adjust your RSVP if your plans change so someone else can join.
We’re looking forward to reading feminist books with you!
Your co-hosts,
Janine & Laura11 attendees
Book Club 14: Radius
Books Books Books - Feminist Book Club, Rue du Valentin 1, Lausanne, CHCo-hosted by Janine & Laura + rotating community co-hosts
Our November book club pick is Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution by Yasmin El-Rafae.
About this book: A haunting, intimate account of the women and men who built a feminist revolution in the middle of the Arab Spring.
In 2012, the joyful hopes of the democratic Egyptian Revolution were tempered by revelations of mass sexual assault in Tahrir Square in Cairo, the revolution’s symbolic birthplace.
This is the story of the women and men who formed Opantish - Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment - who deployed hundreds of volunteers, scouts rescue teams, and getaway drivers to intervene in the spiraling cases of sexual violence against women protesters in the square. Organized and led by women during 2012–2013 - the final, chaotic months of Egypt’s revolution - teams of volunteers fought their way into circles of men to pull the woman at the center to safety. Often, they risked assault themselves.
Journalist Yasmin El-Rifae was one of Opantish’s organizers, and this is her evocative, aching account of their work, as they raced to develop new tactics, struggled with a revolution bleeding into counter-revolution, and dealt with the long aftermath of assault and devastation. Told in a daring, hybrid narrative style drawn from years of interviews and her own, intimate experience, it is a story of overlapping circles: the circles of male attackers activists had to break through, the ways sexual violence can be circled off as “irrelevant” to political struggle, and the endless repetitive loops of living with trauma.
Introducing a powerful new voice, a writer whose searchingly beautiful, spare prose cuts to the core of a story ever more urgent and relevant: of women’s resistance when all else has failed.
-- from Goodreads🤷‍♀️ Didn’t finish the book? Haven’t started? Only here for feminist hot takes, collective unlearning, and good vibes? Perfect. We’re a no-pressure, no-expectations book club. Come exactly as you are.
⚠️ Content note: This book discusses eating disorders, body image, and misogyny. Please take care of yourself and feel free to step out or skip this session if needed.
đź“Ť Where: Books Books Books, Lausanne
⏰ When: Thursday, June 25th at 18:30
(about 1.5 hours + optional post-book-club hangout!)You can grab the book through our lovely host BooksBooksBooks, or listen to the audiobook if that feels more accessible right now.
Sign up for our newsletter to know which parts we’re focusing on — or simply show up and wing it. Bring your thoughts, your questions, your complicated feelings about mirrors, magazines, and the male gaze. We can’t wait to unpack this one together 💜📚✨
### What to Expect
- A 90-minute guided conversation led by Laura, Janine, and a rotating community co-host
- A warm, welcoming, non-judgmental space
- Thoughtful discussion, honest sharing, and room for complexity
- A mix of regulars and first-timers — everyone truly is welcome
- Time afterward to browse, chat, and connect
### Who This Is For
Anyone who wants to:
- read more feminist books,
- have meaningful conversations,
- meet new people in Lausanne,
- interrogate beauty, power, capitalism, and self-worth,
- or sit with thoughtful humans for an hour and a half (in English).
### RSVP Etiquette
Space is limited. Please adjust your RSVP if your plans change so someone else can join.
We’re looking forward to reading feminist books with you!
Your co-hosts,
Janine & Laura5 attendees
Book Club 15: The Creation of Patriarchy
Books Books Books - Feminist Book Club, Rue du Valentin 1, Lausanne, CHCo-hosted by Janine & Laura + rotating community co-hosts
Our January 2027 book club pick is The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner.
About this book: A major new work by a leading historian and pioneer in women's studies, The Creation of Patriarchy is a radical reconceptualization of Western civilization that makes gender central to its analysis. Gerda Lerner argues that male dominance over women is not "natural" or biological, but the product of a historical development begun in the second millennium B.C. in the Ancient Near East. As patriarchy as a system of organizing society was established historically, she contends, it can also be ended by the historical process.
Focusing on the contradiction between women's central role in creating society and their marginality in the meaning-giving process of definition and interpretation, Lerner explores such fascinating questions as: What can account for women's exclusion from the historical process? What could explain the long delay—more than 3,500 years—in women's coming to consciousness of their own subordinate position? She goes back to the cultures of the earliest known civilizations—those of the ancient Near East—to discover the origins of the major gender metaphors of Western civilization. Using historical, literary, archaeological, and artistic evidence, she then traces the development of these ideas, symbols, and metaphors and their incorporation into Western civilization as the basis of patriarchal gender relations.
- from Goodreads🤷‍♀️ Didn’t finish the book? Haven’t started? Only here for feminist hot takes, collective unlearning, and good vibes? Perfect. We’re a no-pressure, no-expectations book club. Come exactly as you are.
đź“Ť Where: Books Books Books, Lausanne
⏰ When: Thursday, June 25th at 18:30
(about 1.5 hours + optional post-book-club hangout!)You can grab the book through our lovely host BooksBooksBooks, or listen to the audiobook if that feels more accessible right now.
Sign up for our newsletter to know which parts we’re focusing on — or simply show up and wing it. Bring your thoughts, your questions, your complicated feelings about mirrors, magazines, and the male gaze. We can’t wait to unpack this one together 💜📚✨
### What to Expect
- A 90-minute guided conversation led by Laura, Janine, and a rotating community co-host
- A warm, welcoming, non-judgmental space
- Thoughtful discussion, honest sharing, and room for complexity
- A mix of regulars and first-timers — everyone truly is welcome
- Time afterward to browse, chat, and connect
### Who This Is For
Anyone who wants to:
- read more feminist books,
- have meaningful conversations,
- meet new people in Lausanne,
- interrogate beauty, power, capitalism, and self-worth,
- or sit with thoughtful humans for an hour and a half (in English).
### RSVP Etiquette
Space is limited. Please adjust your RSVP if your plans change so someone else can join.
We’re looking forward to reading feminist books with you!
Your co-hosts,
Janine & Laura4 attendees
Past events
11
