Current Developments in Feminist Politics

Abstract

This chapter assesses academic narratives about the recent history of feminist political practices, and raises a number of critical questions. There are two relevant sets of narratives I wish to call into question. The first is a set of broadly (though by no means entirely) melancholic narratives that describe a burgeoning feminist movement in the 1970s which is then presented as having gone into decline, and/or lost a degree of its vitality and energy due to a series of shifts in feminist political practices. Here, notions such as fragmentation, decline, institutionalisation, depoliticisation and deradicalisation are key recurrent terms. I explore the assumptions that underpin these narratives by asking what kind of attachments and political orientations drive them and in what ways these might lead to a selective reading of contemporary feminist politics. More specifically, I contend that these various narratives suffer from what we might call a ‘political deficit’, in which the complexities of feminist politics are somewhat obfuscated amidst excessively broad accounts of decline, fragmentation and institutionalisation. In particular, I argue that authors tend to reproduce, often inadvertently, versions of what we might usefully call the ‘deradicalisation’ thesis, by virtue of the existence of varying degrees of attachment to a specific modality of ‘seventies’ feminist politics. I outline how many authors, whose portrayals of the contemporary feminist scene are quite balanced, nonetheless often implicitly or explicitly invoke a ‘proper place’ for a (radical) feminist politics, in a way that obscures aspects of continuity and change in recent feminist history and perhaps underestimates the radicalism of certain contemporary feminist practices.