The Loneliness of the Feminist Historian

Abstract

Feminist historians in Australia have achieved the critical mass that means that they no longer need to be the sole woman's voice pleading to get women into the history corridors and inside the books. By looking back at recent history reflexively, this article celebrates the achievement of feminist historians over the past four decades in making profound impacts on mainstream historical writing and understanding. Engaging in particular with the work of feminist historians Joan Scott and Joy Damousi, ‘The Loneliness of the Feminist Historian’ considers whether feminist history has a future. It also reflects upon the author's memories of the feminist history movement from the 1970s and 1980s—its aims, its achievements and its significant successes, especially compared with other social science disciplines. It explains how certain ‘great (female) historians’ made courageous efforts to internationalise and pluralise feminist history. It also probes the meaning and relevance of ‘professional masculinities’, pointing out that feminist historians were supported by key male historians, who backed them in gaining career and publishing opportunities. Additionally, the challenges of Indigenous scholars led to a sharpening of critical approaches to colonialism. This article argues, however, that feminist historians cannot afford to cling to the excitement of the early conferences of the 1970s and 1980s, for if they expect their practice to thrive, they must constantly critique it, using the most innovative and best tools of our era, including the empirical, the reflexive, the whimsical and the theoretical.     

Theorising the Women's Liberation Movement as Cultural Heritage

ABSTRACT

Recent interest in documenting and re-evaluating histories of the UK Women's Liberation Movement has produced varied appraisals of the movement. These have emerged from feminist communities wishing to preserve, organise and collect their histories. Such recovery and dissemination, I argue, is cultural heritage rather than ‘history’, as heritage offers different tools for re-presentation as well as creating alternative socio-cultural relationships with the legacies of the WLM. This article draws upon my practice as a curator of feminist histories, and argues for the articulation of a politics of transmission, essential for the longevity and sustainability of feminist cultural heritage and histories.     

A Quest for Feminist Space and Time

Abstract

This article offers an investigation of practical and political aspects of new materialism on the basis of texts accepted for publication in Women: A Cultural Review. The authors emphasize various political strategies that appear in the collected essays; above all they stress the practical aspects of theory itself. Theory as praxis is a concept inspired by contemporary philosophers such as Georges Canguilhem, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Donna Haraway. It can also be the basis for a politics of location and it highlights the importance of being situated in specific sociocultural, historical, local and geographical contexts. The authors raised the question of the potential alliances between their specific, Polish context and the possibility of participating in and creating a broader feminist movement, which proves to be possible thanks to a variety of perspectives that are considered important and worth considering in new materialism. In the article, the Polish Kongres Kobiet (‘Women's Congress’) initiative is presented as a platform for feminist activity which combines various kinds of political, social and cultural interests, concerns and goals. Along with the importance of space for feminist politics, the authors consider time as a crucial constituent of feminist activism. Both rethinking the past—tradition, heritage, history—and directing reflection towards the future hopes, possibilities, politics and theories, constitute important characteristics of the new materialism approach. The authors conclude by introducing the notion of the ‘politics of squatting’, which serves as a metaphor for a feminist quest for space and time.     

activist-mothers maybe,sisters surely? Black British feminism,absence and transformation

This article, drawing on selected feminist magazines of the 1980s, particularly Feminist Arts News (FAN) and GEN, offers a textual ‘braiding’ of narratives to re-present a history of Black British feminism. I attempt to chart a history of Black British feminist inheritance while proposing the politics of (other)mothering as a politics of potential, pluralistic and democratic community building, where Black thought and everyday living carry a primary and participant role. The personal—mothering our children—is the political, affording a nurturing of alterity through a politics of care that is fundamentally antiracist and antisexist. I attempt to show how Black feminist thought can significantly contribute to democracy in the present and how Black British history and thought, as fundamentally antiracist and anticolonial, can generate a reinvention much needed in the present of a shared British history. I argue for feminist intervention premised upon a politics of care, addressing through activist mothering the urgency of Black absence from prestigious institutions. Such debilitating absence in Britain inhibits the development of scholarship, distorts feminist history and seriously concerns potential Black feminists. From diverse texts, I develop a genealogical narrative supplemented through memory work. This ‘gathering and re-using’ privileges Black women’s theorising as a crucial component of the methodological métissage, which includes auto-theorising to develop ideas of resemblance in relation to Black British feminism and feminist kinship. The resultant ‘braiding’, I suggest after Lionnet, questions the absence of intersubjective spaces for reflection on Black British feminist praxis, indicating a direction for British feminists of all complexions. Attentive to the 1980s as historical context while invoking the maternal, I consider what is required to engage generationally, counterwrite the academy and pursue a dynamic process of transformation within a transnational feminism that challenges Black British absence from academic knowledge production, while nurturing its presence.     

Ignorance,Injustice and the Politics of Knowledge

Abstract

Since the early 1980s, feminist epistemology has developed into a vibrant area of inquiry which challenges many of the taken-for-granted assumptions of traditional, mainstream theories of knowledge to work towards developing theories and practices that close a persistent gap between theories of knowledge and knowledge that matters to people in real situations. Here I will examine some of the more startling recent developments in feminist epistemology, where—perhaps improbably—epistemologies of ignorance and questions about epistemic injustice have made significant contributions to feminist knowledge projects. Together and separately, they expose the extent to which knowing is a political activity, while maintaining that it can avow its political involvement without dissolving into facile assertions that ‘might is right’.     

‘A Job That Should Be Respected’: contested visions of motherhood and English Canada's second wave women's movements, 1970–1990

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the forgotten voices of marginalized feminist mothers—those active in welfare rights groups. These activists were primarily poor single mothers who understood motherhood differently from more mainstream feminists. Whilst they echoed mainstream feminist demands for childcare, they also supported women's right to stay at home with their children, emphasizing the role of the state. This presented a serious class-based critique in a society that increasingly saw stay-at-home motherhood as a middle-class option. This article focuses upon working-class mothers' groups, thus problematizing dominant feminist discourses and developing a more diverse history of second wave feminism in Canada.     

Housework,Wages and Money

Abstract

According to a range of authors and popular commentators, the post-Fordist socioeconomic order has produced a new category of female labourer, the ‘female principal breadwinner’. This article opens out this category of worker to critical scrutiny. We suggest that while the very idea of the female principal breadwinner is open to all manner of existing lines of feminist critique, beyond this it forces a confrontation with a number of issues vital to feminist analyses of transformations to women's labour—both waged and unwaged—in contemporary financialised post-Fordism. We pursue two issues in particular. First, transformations to the labour of social reproduction—including transformations to the measurement and valuation of domestic labour—and second, the financialisation (and shifting capacities) of wages specifically and money more generally. We suggest that if transformations to women's labour are to be fully grasped and understood feminist theory must renew and rethink its analyses of domestic labour, wages and money.     

Etchings from the Attic: looking back at feminist print-making from the 1980s

ABSTRACT

Drawing on autobiographical memories of the influence of the Women's Liberation Movement, this article discusses feminist etchings made for my final undergraduate show. Etching, historically related to satire, was deliberately chosen to mock the disparaging treatment of the female artist. The article offers both an experiential and a contextual discussion of the atmosphere of social activism, political activity and consciousness-raising of the WLM as well as the journalism and feminist art history scholarship which informed my practice. Further, the article evaluates the potential naivety of my feminist strategy of ‘body art', as it risked being misunderstood as conventional sexually explicit imagery of female sexuality.     

Feminism in the Social Sciences of Health and Illness

Abstract

When feminism informs and shapes social scientific thinking, it often yields strongly applied perspectives. The business of engaging in the application, however, presents challenges to both feminist practice and the academic disciplines. These issues are further complicated when they are played out in an interdisciplinary setting. I offer a personal reflection on the highly ambiguous situation in a part of what has been called the ‘diaspora’ of social sciences practiced not within any particular ‘home’ discipline, but in a particular sub-field or inter-discipline such as urban studies, criminology or—in this case—population health. The emphasis in this discussion is on the mutual influences of the academic and the applied.     

The Gothic,the Death Drive and Angela Carter

Abstract

This essay situates Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979) in a 1970s era in which a feminist reclaiming of various things—the streets, the night, as well as fairy tales—is the order of the day. It examines the complex nature of Carter's status, in this context, as a controversial writer. Is Carter a writer who contests or colludes with the forms of reality presented in and by her fiction? This question may be seen as framing the main debate about Carter as a ‘problematic’ or ‘polarizing’ figure. The different sides of this argument are assessed in this essay. From reading ‘The Bloody Chamber’ as an exemplary reworking of the Gothic, and itself one of Carter's fictions of the death drive, the essay reaches a clear conclusion of its own regarding the vexed contest/collude dimension of Carter's storytelling.     

Money after Blockchain: Gold,Decentralised Politics and the New Libertarianism

ABSTRACT

Blockchain technologies are central to what has been described as a new ‘smart social contract’. With blockchain, individual cryptographic identity becomes the basis for new forms of money and for a whole suite of restructured social, political and financial transactions. But what do these developments signal for feminist engagements with the money economy? The transparency and pseudonymity that the blockchain provides has been welcomed as a ‘feminist weapon’. But the decentralised technology also legitimises many longstanding assumptions of libertarianism, especially competitive individualism, naturalised social inequality and the stability of value associated with the gold standard. Drawing on popular culture texts, Goldfinger and The Mandibles, this article considers this history, examining the gendered, racialised and sexualised discursive practices that attend representations of gold along with the ‘metallism’ surrounding blockchain-based cryptocurrencies in the contemporary conjuncture. By claiming to represent non-negotiable certainty derived from technology/nature rather than social convention, the fantasy of fundamental value returns, together with related associations of essentialism and authenticity, but anchored in this new context in the technocratic authoritarianism of FinTech. This is part of the background for the ‘new libertarianism’ whose ascendency now overshadows the neoliberalism that has been the focus of critical attention for some decades.     

Postmaternal,Postwork and the Maternal Death Drive

ABSTRACT

The term ‘postmaternal’ has recently emerged as a way to articulate the effects of neoliberalism on the public devaluing of caring labour [Stephens, Julie. 2011. Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care. New York: Columbia University Press]. This term suggests a valorisation of values associated with care and mothering that have traditionally been gendered and rely on a heterosexist matrix for their intelligibility. Marxist feminist writers during the 1970s struggled with the question of the particular form of care that reproduction entails, and this feminist archive has been recently extended to a discussion of ‘post-work’ [Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke], in which calls for the valuing of unpaid work as a viable form of labour have been reanimated. In this article I examine the relation between these two analytic categories – ‘postmaternal’ and ‘postwork’. Both categories require that we re-think some of the most trenchant issues in feminist thought – the sexual division of labour, the place of ‘reproduction’ in psychic and social life, and the possibilities for a new feminist commons.     

Dame unise,feminist maiden who fares well with the patriarchy: Jessica Amanda Salmonson's ‘the prodigal daughter’ and the emerging tradition in feminist speculative fiction

In her discussion of recent feminist utopias, Joanna Russ notes that the authors have likely read one another and that their ‘works form a remarkably coherent group in their presentation of feminist concerns and the feminist analyses which are central to these concerns’ (Russ, 1981: 71). My essay further explores the emerging tradition in feminist speculative fiction. It notes the common elements connecting three novels—Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsong (1976), Suzy McKee Charnas' Motherlines (1978), and Elizabeth A. Lynn's The Northern Girl (1980)—and analyses Jessica Amanda Salmonson's ‘The prodigal daughter’ (1981) in terms of its relationship to these connections. References to Louise Bernikow's Among Women (1980) link these feminist imaginative works to feminist reality, reality which is more closely adhered to by Salmonson than by the authors of the novels. While the novels' feminist protagonists succeed in isolation from the patriarchy, Salmonson's feminist hero, Dame Unise, succeeds because she is able to cooperate with a patriarch. Positive images of patriarchy are absent from the novels; Salmonson's story emphasizes such positive images.     

Pushing Dualisms and Differences: From ‘Equality versus Difference’ to ‘Nonmimetic Sharing’ and ‘Staying with the Trouble’

Abstract

Critically revisiting the ‘equality versus difference’ dualism that is inscribed in the feminist canon of the last decades is an important task for feminist ethico-political discussions today. The theoretico-political tension between claims of equality and difference still troubles feminist discussions and thus needs to be addressed by contemporary research. Yet, moving beyond the persisting antagonism cannot be done by either moving outside the problematic relation or by choosing one term over the other. It is, as Joan W. Scott noted, impossible to choose between equality and difference, so that other ways of tackling the problem are needed. This article suggests a new line of flight for feminist politics in respect to this founding paradox from a feminist new materialist/posthuman(ist) perspective. Via an affirmative reading of Irigaray's cosmopolitical concern of Sharing the World (2008) and a critical investigation into the structuring ‘anthropological limit’ (Derrida) of her sexual difference thinking, the author pushes the dualistic framework of equality versus difference towards a thought of ‘nonmimetic sharing’ and ‘staying with the trouble’. In her argument, she turns to the differential worldings of Grosz's ‘differing’, Barad's ‘quantum’ and Haraway's ‘terran’ in order to open up ethico-political alternatives to engage difference(s) differently. The article ultimately argues that by affirming all multifaceted (im)material worlding entanglements, significant new insights can be gained for both theorizing differentiality as ethico-onto-epistemological ‘becoming-with’ and for practising this world of/as difference(s) in a more ‘response-able’ manner.     

Politics Materialized: Rethinking the Materiality of Feminist Political Action through Epigenetics

The ‘new’ of new materialism should not be read as current feminism's distancing from or disavowal of the legacy of previous feminist movements. This past cannot be left behind as it is enfolded—both conceptually and materially—and reconfigured as feminism's current theorizing and political action. This article argues that this cultural inheritance is at the same time corporeally manifested in the biology of feminist bodies. Such a contention is inspired by Karen Barad's argument that concepts, ideas and other social phenomena are specific physical arrangements materialized through apparatuses. Barad insists that the relationships between the social, political and discursive and physical matter are not relations of externality. Instead, there is a complex entanglement where the differences between the cultural and the physical are matters of making separate rather than there being two radically separate realms. Barad's claims are supported by epigenetic research into the intergenerational health effects of the experience of social stigma. The results of this research suggest that an individual's environment, both physical and social, current and historical, manifests in biology at the molecular level. So politics, then, is a truly material practice which is at the same time constitutive of its practitioners. New materialism's history of feminist action and theorization can never be excluded from current practices of feminism but neither can it determine them in advance. Politics and feminism are particular, contingent, material histories, with each practitioner reconfiguring her or his specific biological and social materialization as their present-day political and feminist actions.     

Rules of thumb: British history and ‘imperial culture’ in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain1

Abstract

This paper examines the traditions of both British imperial and British domestic historiography and calls for a re-mapping of both so that the so-called separate spheres of ‘home’ and ‘away’ may be brought back into the same fields of debate. Its central claim is that imperial ideology and its effects were not phenomena ‘out there’. Empire was not a singular place; nor did ‘home’ exist in isolation from it. In spite of the polarization, which has been characteristic of their historiographies, their relationship was dialectic rather than dichotomous. These insights, while derived in part from new trends inside British history itself, owe both their theoretical rigor and their self-avowedly political concerns to post-colonial and feminist historiographical work, which together insist on the desacralization of ‘Britain’ proper.     

Sisters in a Fashion: Martha Ansara and Elaine Welteroth

ABSTRACT

This article discusses Martha Ansara and Elaine Welteroth, two US born feminists who came to Australia during two key moments in feminist history, as a way of thinking about the relationship between feminists and fashion. Ansara arrived in Sydney in 1969 carrying women’s liberation literature in her suitcase; she became an important generative figure in the Australia’s women’s liberation movement, particularly as an independent filmmaker and proponent of consciousness raising. Welteroth arrived in 2017 to speak at the Sydney Writers’ Festival during a period of international resurgence of feminist activism. She brought with her images of women of colour she had featured in Teen Vogue and she invoked second wave consciousness raising, albeit in a remodelled, corporate-led form when she talked about the title’s plans to bring young girls around kitchen tables to ‘solve’ political problems. The article uses comments both women have made in relation to fashion and beauty, close readings of their works, and a discussion of their respective feminist milieus to suggest a trajectory of feminism’s relationship to the fashion industry that appears to have changed from a position of opposition to one of open embrace. It also complicates this reading by pointing to the resonances between these women of different feminist eras.     

‘Not Simple,Not Pure’: Revisioning of Mythical Wicked Women in the Stories of Sara Maitland

The British novelist, feminist and religious thinker Sara Maitland (b.1950) is renowned for her short stories, many of which involve the rewriting of fairy tale and classical and biblical myth. This article situates Maitland's retellings within the contemporary feminist tradition of literary revisioning, but emphasises that her retelling of old tales is distinguished by a deep—and often discomforting—engagement with questions of morality. This is rooted in Maitland's political commitment and Christian faith, and is particularly evident in her treatment of mythical female evil. Her short stories take a morally ambiguous approach, paying attention to the moral and psychological complexities of the wicked stepmothers in fairy tale, gorgons and child-killers of classical myth, and temptresses of the Hebrew Bible. Maitland's feminist revisioning of mythical wicked women does not flinch from their darkness, or impose simple ethical lessons, but at the same time she is (sometimes horribly) aware of their moral significance. This article examines the portrayal of feminist theology's concept of the ‘female sin’ of passivity in Maitland's revisioning of Delilah (in Daughter of Jerusalem, 1978) and ‘Helen of Troy's Aerobics Class’ (in On Becoming A Fairy Godmother, 2003); how the crimes of mythical wicked women are retold as being motivated by revenge against men in ‘Deborah and Jael’ (Daughter of Jerusalem), ‘Siren Song’ and ‘The Swallow and the Nightingale’ (Far North and Other Dark Tales, 2008). The latter of these raises issues of women's conflicting loyalties, which is also considered in ‘The Swans’ (2008). The taboos of incest and child abuse are explored powerfully and sensitively in ‘Jocasta’ (2003) and ‘The Wicked Stepmother's Lament’ (A Book of Spells, 1987), and resistance to simplistic moralising is encapsulated in the story of a menopausal Eve, in ‘Choosing Paradise’ (2003).     

Cindy Sherman in a New Millennium: Fashion,Feminism, Art and Ageing

ABSTRACT

If feminism and the fashion industry were once seen as adversaries, given how the strictures of Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) permeated so much of second wave feminism, a consideration of ‘fashion’ is now central to contemporary feminist scholarship. But just as the earlier critique of fashion seemed finally to have been supplanted, certain basic arguments around dress and makeup nevertheless resurfaced within contemporary feminism. The current neoliberal climate has led to the ever-increasing consumption of ‘fashionable’ goods, provoking unease and encouraging the contested ‘protectionist discourse’ within feminism to shield young women from just such excesses. Meanwhile, the fashion world itself, arguably more powerful than ever, has across the last twenty years continued a process of legitimising itself through its various modes of alliance with the art world; it has even hijacked elements of feminist practice in the pursuit of publicity. This article suggests that the fashion industry and contemporary feminism are nonetheless alike in one significant respect: neither have properly engaged with the needs of an ageing population. It is an omission that this article will seek to examine through a discussion of the recent ‘portraits‘ of Cindy Sherman, an artist of great interest to feminist scholars, in whose earlier work there was a discernible ‘anti-fashion’ element. Now ‘fashionable’ herself, a leading figure in the global art world, she has collaborated with the fashion industry in rather different ways. Her ‘portraits’ of 2012, in which she reconfigured herself as imaginary Manhattan socialites in or beyond middle age, and a later series, exhibited in 2016, where she appears as a series of ageing, anonymous ‘movie stars’, reveal more general ideological tensions surrounding the representation of women, the ageing process and the fashionable ideal. It is the dissection of these tensions that underpin this article, for while Sherman’s work has been the subject of academic debate across a forty year period, her use and critique of the ‘fashionable ‘ image has not been examined alongside an exploration of the expanding activities of the fashion industry itself; nor have her recent images of ageing women been examined within this more general context.