Abstract
Abstract: Feminist theory worldwide is confronting - perhaps as it always has done - a series of deep challenges. On the one hand, awareness of gender and sexual inequalities seems high; on the other, co-optation of feminism for nationalist or other right-wing agendas is rife. On the one hand, feminist social movements are in ascendancy, on the other there is a continued dominance of single issue feminism and a resistance to intersectional, non-binary interventions. If we add in the collapse of the Left in the face of radical movements such as those underpinning Brexit and Trump (and the frequent blaming of feminism for fragmentation of that Left) then it is hard to know what to argue, to whom, and for what ends. In the face of such claims it is tempting to respond with a dogmatic or singular feminism, or to insist that what we need is a shared, clear, certain platform. I want to argue instead - with Emma Goldman (anarchist activist who died in 1940) as my guide - that it can be politically productive to embrace and theorise uncertainty, or even ambivalence, about gender equality and feminism.
Highlights
This project centres late 19th and early 20th century anarchist activist Emma Goldman as the point of attachment through which I explore several related aspects of contemporary feminist and queer historiography and politics
What is gained from embracing a politics of ambivalence is a view of the past and present that centres both psychic and social aspects of inequality, the tenacity of our attachments to the objects that poison our lives, to paraphrase Leticia SABSAY (2016) and an opportunity to engage in the struggle over what inequality is and how best to intervene to transform it
Neither is Goldman an accidental choice,. It is her own fervent ambivalence about issues I hold dear in my own present, her consistent attention to questions of difference, and her failure to resolve the problematics that govern those questions that have drawn me to Goldman
Summary
This project centres late 19th and early 20th century anarchist activist Emma Goldman as the point of attachment through which I explore several related aspects of contemporary feminist and queer historiography and politics. In the attempt to present contemporary feminist theory both as attentive to race and as knowing what that attention should involve, the ongoing ambivalence about the relationship between race, class, gender, and sexuality in the theoretical archive is minimised if not directly repressed.
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