This article describes the political practices of a part of the Italian women’s movement that, as of the 1980s, gave way to the sexual difference thought. Through a political analysis of their own experience, which removed any humanist identity assumptions, the women’s movement generated new practices and discourses. With these, women were able to exert self-criticism, and simultaneously to produce new subjectivities articulated around the sexual difference concept. The difference thought helped highlight the limits of institutional policy, renewing the premises (...) of political analysis and redefining the borders of what was deemed to be ‘political’. Intended to foster dialogue with other feminist proposals, the article underlines the situated nature of this political experience and focuses on the method, the political praxis and the process rather than the outcome, the conclusions or the theory. (shrink)

Mourning, especially melancholic mourning, has recently emerged as a significant site of expressing and addressing loss in feminism. While feminism’s hard-won successes in achieving institutional power globally have brought exuberance over achievement, they have also come with an acute sense of despondency and loss; one that is not easily mourned or relinquished. The institutionalization of feminism in governmental, non-governmental and academic sites has precipitated this sense of loss in India, wherein the discussion of this article is located. In exploring the (...) politics of loss in contemporary feminist discourse in India, feminist melancholia is seen to condition a fetishized attachment to the past, and to past modes of knowledge, action and consciousness in ways that demand the generational reproduction of feminism rather than its renewal in times of perceived crisis. Present-day anxieties over the ‘co-option’ and resultant depoliticization of the Indian women’s movement constitute a narrative of loss in which a politically more ‘authentic’ past functions as a normative standard for feminist politics in the present, and as a prescriptive model of feminism’s future. Advancements in Women’s Studies and activist (now ‘NGOized’) practice that are seen to be deviating from the redemption of such an idealized past are thus deemed apolitical. In interrogating contemporary anxieties about feminism’s present and impending future (that resonate beyond the bounds of India), the article demonstrates how melancholic loss can inform a potentially conservative politics that seeks to contain feminism in a once loved but now lost ‘home’. (shrink)

This article analyses Mary Kelly’s Love Songs, 2005—07, which was exhibited in 2007 at Documenta 12. The series of artworks addresses the political and ideological legacies of early Anglo-US feminism through the perspectives of two generations of women. Drawing on oral and photographic archives, as well as historical re-enactments, Kelly indicates how her work does not simply record a feminist legacy but, rather, keenly intervenes in the process. I propose that this intervention is an ethical one. Drawing on Luce Irigaray’s (...) writings on the maternal gift, I demonstrate how Kelly’s project may be understood to enact an ethical relationality that I find is fundamental for thinking about the vexing issue of feminist intergenerationality. I conclude that while Love Songs maps no specific course of action, nor indicates exactly why or how a current generation of feminists should proceed, it nonetheless generates a space in which to imagine the radical futurity of the maternal gift. (shrink)

Although nostalgia is a much-maligned orientation to the world, feminist scholars including Heather Hillsburg (2013) and Kate Eichhorn (2015) have argued that it might be recuperated for feminist ends. This article mobilises the call to rethink nostalgia through an analysis of the feminist stories and storytelling in Joan Braderman’s 2009 film, The Heretics. A documentary about a feminist collective founded in New York City in the 1970s, The Heretics sets up a way of thinking about feminism’s past that is steeped (...) in nostalgia. Throughout the film, Braderman maintains that the 1970s were ‘a time when everything seemed possible’. By contrast, she assesses the moment in which she makes the film as a time in which ‘fear corrodes even the young’. As feminist viewers of the film who did not (indeed by virtue of age could not) experience feminism in the 1970s, we initially read the nostalgic narrative of loss framing the film with suspicion. By drawing on feminist scholarship on nostalgia and feminist storytelling, however, we argue that nostalgia can function in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) would call a reparative mode that enriches the relationships that feminist scholars, activists and cultural workers bear to feminisms’ pasts. (shrink)

In the UK, many have argued that the past five years or so have seen an increase in the radicalism and visibility of feminist activism, jarring somewhat with the strong emphasis on loss in much recent scholarship – as well as media commentary – on feminist politics. Against this backdrop, this article asks how, and to what extent, this resurgence of feminist activism has unsettled the centrality of loss within the affective economies of contemporary British feminism, by examining a range (...) of recent texts produced within academic, activist, publishing and media spheres. After arguing that attachments to loss remain remarkably intransigent, the latter part of the article draws on Sara Ahmed’s account of ‘sticky affects’ to provide a theoretical account of why notions such as ‘young women are not feminist’ and ‘feminist activism is a thing of the past’ continue to yield such force despite empirical evidence to the contrary. (shrink)

This article considers the question of feminist futurity through Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). While dominant readings of this novel have focused on its relationship to the feminist Utopian genre and feminist theory from the 1970s, this essay aims to critically reframe the novel through contemporary feminist theorising on time and futurity. Drawing on recent feminist and queer theory that suggests that the future might most productively be figured through more nuanced and renewed engagements with the (...) past, I argue that readings of Piercy's novel that frame it only through its contemporary moment obscure the novel's critique of singular, linear models of time. The novel represents the future through the themes of loss, mourning and haunting, which I argue resist a model of time that moves linearly from past to future and instead bring the past and future into complex relation with each other. In this regard, Piercy's novel is read as representing a form of feminist futurity that engages with progress in time as necessarily uneven, discontinuous and fractured, speaking to contemporary demands for a feminist futurity that might require more nuanced accounts of the past. (shrink)

A historically feminized profession, education in North America remains remarkably unaffected by feminism, with the notable exception of pedagogy and its impact on curriculum. The purpose of this paper is to describe characteristics of feminism that render it particularly useful and appropriate for developing potentialities in education and music education. As a set of flexible methodological tools informed by Gilles Deleuze's notions of philosophy and art, I argue feminism may contribute to education's becoming more efficacious, reflexive, and reflective of the (...) values of its participants. Its impetus involves ‘feminist imperative(s)’ to help in the sense articulated by Elizabeth Grosz: to provoke thought, challenge, and problematize. (shrink)

Despite ongoing feminist debates about the past, present and future of feminism, the multidimensionality of time in activist work has largely remained under-examined. This article develops the partial timeframes of trajectories, encounters and timings to explore the practices of women organizing in Czech NGOs after 1989. Empirically the study draws on individual and group interviews conducted with NGO activists in 2003/2004 and 2009/2010 as well as organizational websites. The article argues that a timescape perspective provides a useful heuristic lens for (...) tracing trajectories of organizing shaped by different funding mechanisms; activist encounters that open up social and political alternatives of acting and being; and the effects of timing activist engagements with the lifetimes of activists. The conclusion reflects on the implications of an investigation through time for reconfiguring pervasive deficit accounts of NGO-based activism and its futures. (shrink)

This article takes up references to breasts as a key case study to examine white Western feminist debate around embodiment and objectification. Tracking shifting understandings of ‘the gaze’ in these accounts, we find that objectification is often rendered singular, ahistorical and, increasingly, individually internalised. The history of these approaches to objectification helps to explain why during the early 2000s, theorisations of feminist politics-lost were often rhetorically located alongside discussions of surgically modified breasts as a symbol of a new era of (...) ‘fake’ feminism. In contrast, the 2010s saw several feminist movements premised on exposure of flesh and claims to individual recuperation of bodily autonomy. This article contends that both of these perspectives rely on a notion, built over successive eras of white Western feminist thought, that political work can and ought to be done through the body as a site of representational politics. This article subsequently offers a brief insight into how we might queer our approach to breasts to better account for the messiness of experiences of the flesh, considering the personal as political, while not investing in the body as the site where politics must be enacted. (shrink)