It's been a decade since Beyoncé publicly embraced feminism, changing pop culture forever. Not only she chose to perform “Flawless” at the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards, featuring Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's call for gender equality, she also sang in front of a screen screaming "FEMINIST" in giant letters. It was the first time a celebrity of her stature reclaimed a word that was controversial at the time. Beyoncé's performance confirmed that feminism has a place of its own in the mainstream.

As any other cultural sector, the book industry in Spain has not been a stranger to this trend. Avid readers may have noticed an increase in books on feminism when they check the new arrivals at their favorite bookshop. But have the catalogues of publishing houses truly evolved?

Let's have a look at what Penguin Random House, the largest publishing house in Spanish language, has to offer:

Penguin publishes around 1,800 new titles annually in Spanish, out of a global total of approximately 15,000 new titles released by the company each year. Among these, 118 titles in their online catalogue are classified as feminist books. Have they always been part of the catalogue, or do they reflect more recent trends?

Except covid years, the trend has been going up since 2016. Is it already declining? So far in 2024, Penguin has published 12 feminist books. We will have to wait to the end of the year to have a clearer picture.

Another surprising aspect is the related genres. Most books classified as feminist also fall under one or several more categories, “Science, History, and Society” being the most common one. But there are many others. For example, a book might be labeled as “Feminist” but also “Recommended on TikTok” in Penguin Random House's classification. Some categories catch your eye, like “Grey hair up,” books that someone decided they deserved a cooler name than “reading material for the third age.”

To test which categories are overrepresented and which are overlooked, I took two samples of twenty books each. In the first sample, I found 16 books under the “Influencers' Books” category, but only one “LGBTIQ Literature”. In the second sample, 11 feminist books were classified as “Self-Knowledge & Wellness Books” compared to 9 under “Activism”.

"Don't judge a book by its cover," the saying goes. Perhaps literature genres should be abolished altogether. However, the names a leading publishing house chooses for their collections and the books they decide to publish reveal more about the publishers, their values, and their business than about the book you eventually hold in your hands. I'm sure Beyoncé would agree.