Currently today and tomorrow. Over the book "The Time for the Second Shift Has Come."
Kapitál
How do critical feminist essays reveal hidden social issues, with their personal stories and theoretical approaches prompting reflection on patriarchy, racism, and gender identities? What will this collection uncover about contemporary society and its challenges?
In the publication The Time Has Come for the Second : Shift by the publisher UTOPIA LIBRI, a selection of 21 essays, nine poems, and accompanying illustrations from the first three years of the critical feminist web magazine Druhá : směna has just been released. An ideal book for performative reading in a liberal café or local cultural center – or at least it might seem so.
In the magazine Druhá : směna, four essays are published monthly on a specific topic, with a poem and author illustrations. These are topics that most traditional media shy away from, but are quite familiar to long-time readers of Capital. From unpaid women's work to the rights of sex workers, from the challenges of gender transition in the Czech Republic to Israeli homonationalism, from the liberation of crip bodies to the liberation of children, from restorative justice to Black anger, from toxic masculinity constructs to trans athletes, from Croatian tourism to complex identities in the Middle East.
The theoretical approach of the essays can be most accurately classified as intersectional feminism, which focuses on the intersections of various forms of social oppression based on gender, sexual orientation, race, class, or disability. As the editors write in the introduction to the book, in creating Druhá : směna they want to avoid writing about mainstream “women’s” topics and focus the feminist perspective on various social issues in texts “that are just as relevant today as they will be tomorrow.” Instead of “girlboss feminism,” the magazine (and now also the book) features sharp criticism of patriarchy, capitalism, racism, and imperialism, applied to specific social problems.
Another common factor of the essays is the connection between personal, political, and theoretical. For example, Hana AJ begins her text on Palestinian resistance with a memory of her first trip to Beirut with her father when she was eight years old. It was then that her political consciousness began to awaken, specifically when her father explained at a gas station that the holes in the wall were from regular shelling. On subsequent visits, the author's understanding deepened; she learned that her family was forced to leave Palestine during the Nakba and experienced firsthand how part of her community lives in Beirut as second-class citizens. She also became interested in the complex relationships between different ethnic groups and political regimes in the SWANA region (Southwest Asia and North Africa), as well as in forms of Palestinian resistance and resilience (sumud). Thanks to the connection between her own experience and family history with geopolitics and resistance practices, the text is not only informative but also very personal and human.
If I consider the broader efforts of younger generations to return to analog technologies and the fact that Druhá : směna as a free online magazine mainly operates on donations from readers, I find the collection of essays to be a great choice that could also inspire similar online newspapers. It is not entirely clear what criteria were used to select the 21 essays for the collection, but even if the selection was random, each of them has the potential to stay with you for some time after reading.
Critically thinking readers will definitely encounter perspectives in the collection that do not fully align with their own. Of course, this is to be expected; the book will make you think about difficult topics, confront your own prejudices, reinforce your own counter-positions, and often sympathize with personal stories of the authors. One thing is certain – you would be reading The Second : Shift performatively in vain.
Eliška Koldová, Michaela Švandová, Maja Vusilović (eds.): The Time Has Come for the Second : Shift. UTOPIA LIBRI, 2026, 328 pages.
The text is part of the PERSPECTIVES project – a new brand for independent, constructive, and multiperspective journalism. The project is funded by the European Union. The expressed opinions and positions are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). The European Union or EACEA do not assume any responsibility for them.