Two new books are taking on fascism and offering ways to combat it, and—get this—they’re written by women!

Have you heard this pitch before? Unless you’ve been (smartly) living under a rock for the past three years, you’ve likely been solicited by the absolute plethora of pop feminist and democracy-in-crisis writing that has exploded in the wake of the election of Donald Trump. These two categories, the “this is not normal” treatises on how Trump is perverting the Constitution, and the “righteous women’s anger” books that treat “women” as a kind of liberal monolith, have flooded bookstore shelves since 2016—and yet, here we are. There is a creeping sense of fatigue that these bursts of so-called resistance lit haven’t actually moved the needle on fascism at all.

Enter Astra Taylor and Natasha Lennard, who are, yes, women. “It’s not a lie that I’m a woman,” Lennard said to me cheekily on the phone last week, though she and Taylor are both weary of being touted as such. Both just published their new works—Lennard’s a collection of her essays about activism, organizing, and radical politics called Being Numerous, and Taylor’s a wide-ranging exploration of the origins of democracy and how it operates (or doesn’t) today. Both resist the framing of feminism as somehow removed or siloed from antiracist or class-based organizing philosophy. And they also resist framing any collective desire to change the world within only this current moment.

“We have to trace some of the appalling political circumstances from which this isn’t an aberration but is a really abhorrent continuance,” says Lennard, a journalist and writer who participated in protests at Occupy Wall Street and elsewhere, and has travelled in leftist circles. Her book takes its title from a poem by George Oppen, in which he offers “being numerous” as an alternative to the “shipwrecked” self—in Lennard’s words, we participate in society as enumerated selves, en masse but not collectively united. It’s an especially helpful analytical framework for the 21st century, a world with billions of digital selves interacting in a hypersurveilled universe, within which we are anything but free or empowered.

Taylor’s work started long before Trump (similarly, most of the essays in Lennard’s book also were written before his ascension), most recently with her film What Is Democracy?, a documentary that traces notions of self-governance all the way from ancient Greece to Greece post–financial collapse, and many places and people in between. Her book Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, released five months after the film, includes more of Taylor’s own perspective as an activist and writer (in the doc, Taylor talks to scholars including Sylvia Federici, Cornel West, and many others). “One thing I’m really trying to do with these projects is to decenter the current moment,” Taylor told me. “Democracy has always been in crisis because it has never existed. It’s never existed because it’s been bound up with an economic system that necessarily produces inequalities that undermine the democratic principle of a community of equals.”