‘Be Here Now’: feminist futures as present

Abstract

Responding to bell hooks’ call to ‘Be Here Now’, I argue that paying close attention to the present enables us to render visible the ways in which we are implicated in systemic injustices. I explore how refusal is a promising frame through which to enact worlds that feminists want to live in, showing how everyday acts of refusal have the potential to bring alternative worlds into being. To make this argument, I identify four distinct modes of refusal that might serve to positively construct feminist futures in the now: 1) social and affiliative refusal, 2) embodied refusal, 3) slow refusal and 4) imaginative refusal. While these four forms are not an exhaustive account of the different forms of refusal, they are each powerful in the context of feminist futures, drawing on central concepts of feminist thought: care and relationships, situated knowledge and bodies, time as a feminist concern and the importance and value of wonder as central to feminist thought. I argue that in the context of patriarchal, capitalist and colonial systems, systems that serve the interests of few and dominate the majority, these modes of refusal serve to puncture the settled status quo, simultaneously offering a glimpse into feminist futures while enacting them in the present. I conclude by reiterating that feminist futures benefit from being closely attuned to our present, and that a politics of refusal might enable us to penetrate colonial, patriarchal and capitalist systems by reimagining and acting on alternative visions in the now.