Back in 2014, I went with my then-partner to a women’s bookshop in Wigtown, a small town in Scotland. I’ve written a blog post about it (to which the successive owner responded). What fascinated me the most about the bookshop was its collection of feminist books and journals stored in the backroom. There were just so many, mostly collecting dust, and seemingly abandoned. It was like walking into the less perused sections of an old university library and discovering the overwhelming accumulation of knowledge amassed since premodern times.
The ‘too-much-ness’ of these feminist books seemed to have developed within a short period of time by historical standards, which is to say between the 1970s and 1990s. That these books were excluded from the main thoroughfare, not quite discarded but not on the shelves of the main women’s bookshop at the time (although I was informed this has been remedied by the new owner, Jacqui) indicated to me the pushing out of women’s knowledge of past decades as ‘dated’ at best, ‘worthless’ at worst. This is not to say that men’s works never go out of fashion – think of Norman Mailer, John Updike, Erich Fromm, to name random now-unfashionable male authors. It seemed to me more symptomatic of something much more specific.
Clare Hemmings writes in her thought-provoking 2011 book, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory, that there is a recurring trope in the narrativisation of western feminist theory, that one has unquestioningly ‘moved on’ from ‘older’ versions of feminism of the ‘second wave’ in the 1960s. Any exposition of feminism’s trajectory (and that of feminist theory) in women’s and gender studies scholarship usually involves the narrative of ‘progress’ – from the ‘essentialism’ of radical feminism and ‘totality’ of socialist feminism in the 1970s to the recognition of ‘difference’ in the 1980s. You could say that this is the fable of feminism the storyteller would tell her audience.
The problem with this narrativisation of feminist theory – of progress, then loss, followed by return (see Hemming 2011) – is that it presumes the surpassing of feminisms past – deemed as less informed of the complex diversity of women, of intersectionality – by newer brands of interrogative feminisms that are not afraid of internal critique. Around the 1980s, feminist theory would be ‘irreversibly’ reshaped by deconstruction, postmodernism, and post-structuralism, rendering the very foundation of being ‘women’ as the basis of experience unstable. The prioritisation of ‘gender’ over ‘women’ in later theorisations begins with the dictum that lived experiences are never universal and cannot be presumed beforehand. It became ‘correct’ to get with the programme, of ‘moving on’ from the ‘older’ feminisms of yore (i.e. not cite, or cite in order to wave away) – the radfems, the black lesbian feminists, the socialist feminists – to more ‘proper’ feminist theory that begins again in 1990, mainly with the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble.
This ‘moving on’ of feminist theory has huge implications for those of us joining on a belated occasion, i.e. those in the global south for whom postcolonial theory came and went as the preserve of South Asianists (and a handful West Asianists like Edward Said). In the ‘present’ iteration of global feminist theory, we accept the terms set by the agenda that began in the 1990s – of multiplicity and non-essentialism. It is ‘still’ the one in which gender has displaced ‘women’ to make greater conceptual room for those previously ‘not’ women in ‘older’ versions of feminism – such as transgender women, the natural world, built environments, for example. In feminist theory today, ‘feminism’ and ‘gender’ come to stand more impactfully as methodologies, as in ‘feminist ecologies’, ‘feminist infrastructures’, and ‘gendered temporalities.’
This has had two major consequences it seems to me for contemporary feminist knowledge production; One, the expansion of feminist methodologies beyond the departments and centres of women’s and gender studies into other disciplines – history, law, film studies, and maybe some of the hard sciences. Two, and rather paradoxically, the shrinking of departmental gender studies and its isolation from other disciplines and departments.
When I studied for a masters in gender studies back in 2009, I felt like I was at the foothills of a daunting intellectual legacy developed rapidly on the back of women’s activism in decades prior. Back then in the 2000s, full-time, secure academic positions in gender studies were few, but my impression is that they have become fewer now. Aside from the shifts in structural priorities taking place across many institutions of higher education around the world, away from the humanities and social sciences, the dramatic paradigm shifts within feminist theory have created conditions for its own dispersion in the academy. Now, the question is how far that dispersion will continue and to what end.
Alicia Izharuddin 