| Abstract: | This conference confirms the loss of a singular, unified women's movement under the pressures of race, sexuality and class and asks for new directions. The need to rethink collectivity suggests that identification is a priority for feminism rather than desire , which has been the dominant discourse of the psychoanalytical wing of the movement. There are psychoanalytical accounts of the group, but they will have to withstand New Labour's punitive address to the superego by its conservative personalizing of social issues. Thus the relation between psychoanalysis and politics is now a major issue, revealing as it does the problems of coercion in an environment where collective accountability has ceased to exist. Our models of the feminine can be neither Thatcher nor Diana both of whom occlude social accountability. Though the question of sexual difference has not gone away, we need to reformulate the problems, finding new forms of language and of public speech to address a wider constituency, and a radical politics that will reach beyond the academic world. Finally, arising from this, two questions need to be asked. What does feminism want a subject to be? Does feminism want something to serve in the place of some kind of truth? |
