Passing on Feminism

Abstract

As has been widely observed, histories of feminism have often been conceived via notions of generation where feminism is positioned as a kind of familial property, a form of inheritance and legacy which is transmitted through generations. Thus feminism and its history have been imagined as following a familial mode of social reproduction. Despite the dominance of this model, it has nonetheless been subject to critique, not least because of its reliance on teleological and progressive notions of history. Judith Roof, for example, has called for new conceptualizations of temporality in an attempt to decouple histories of feminism from a generational model. This need to move away from a generational model is also underscored by what commentators such as Angela McRobbie have identified as a dispersal of feminism – a broad-scale circulation of feminist values in popular culture – as well as by the emergence of a certain kind of reflexivity whereby past and current feminist practices are increasingly subject to critique. For McRobbie such developments are understood as part of the articulation of a post-feminism in which feminism can no longer be passed on as it is positioned as having already passed away. However, in this article via an exploration of recent accounts of the passing of feminism it is suggested that what allows for a declaration of this passing is an attachment to feminism as a particular way of knowing as well as to a particular arrangement of the social. Indeed, it will be suggested that recent histories of feminism and commentaries on the state of contemporary feminism are driven not only by generational logics but also by these attachments – attachments which lose and fix both feminism and women in time.