Abstract
This article is designed to stimulate debate over the possibilities for thinking feminist futures. It argues for moving away from a linear understanding of feminism which assumes that past feminism produces present and future feminism as a response to its previous waves. Instead, we argue for embracing the multiplicity and simultaneity of contemporary feminisms, taking inspiration from Elizabeth Grosz’s writings on futurity and Cindi Katz’s work on resistance, resilience and reworking. Drawing on Katz’s framing, we review three analytically distinct ways of conceptualising feminist politics and consider how feminist geographers are asking new questions of familiar domains, as well as finding gender formations and political possibilities in unexpected empirical sites. In doing so, we point to the contemporary relevance of feminist scholarship and politics, and affirm feminism's ongoing importance.
Highlights
In the wake of recent debates over the future of feminism in academia (Fannin et al, 2014; Larner et al, 2013; MacLeavy et al, 2016; Peake, 2015, 2016), this article explores the possibilities for thinking feminist futures
It responds to Louise Amoore’s (2020) observation that despite the uptake of feminist vocabularies, experiences and practices within the discipline, there is a continued annexing of feminist and gender-sensitive scholarship in mainstream human geography, which risks foreclosing the inherently political possibilities to know, act and inhabit space and social networks differently
We begin from the observation that in Anglophone geography, feminism is too often seen as the politics of another place and time
Summary
In the wake of recent debates over the future of feminism in academia (Fannin et al, 2014; Larner et al, 2013; MacLeavy et al, 2016; Peake, 2015, 2016), this article explores the possibilities for thinking feminist futures. In seeking to highlight the diversity of feminist consciousness, methods and activism that is obscured by the presentation of a singular feminist trajectory, we consider in turn the spatial– temporal dynamics of resistance, resilience and reworking These three ‘Rs’ allow us to grasp the complex relationship between different social movements as well as the theoretical significance of an alternative and more generative way of interpreting the many pasts, presents and futures of feminism. No longer bound to find what is already ‘known’ about the existence and capacities of (at least) two sexes, feminist scholarship attempts to apprehend ongoing, undeveloped situations as a means of taking us beyond current understandings of the past and of imagining and creating futures beyond those represented and opposed in the present; it offers up ‘a politics of indeterminacy, or a politics without guarantees’ (Nagar, 2014: 13) This has significance for conceptualising feminist geography’s political undertakings and allows us to point to the potential for different forms of encounter within feminist geography’s anticipatory politics. It is in these future-oriented politics that we observe temporal imaginings of the ‘otherwise’
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