Rethinking socialist and Marxist legacies in feminist imaginaries of protest from postsocialist perspectives

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe article raises questions about the neoliberal discursive erasures of socialist and Marxist legacies in feminist histories and imaginaries of protest. However, far from promoting an uncritical recycling of feminist Marxisms and socialisms as they unfolded in feminist movements during the 1970s, the article instead reassesses these trends in feminist thought through the analytical lens of the revised notion of ‘postsocialism’ in focus of this special issue, aiming at unmooring it from addressing only the twentieth-century past of a particular geopolitical region, the ‘Second World’. To rethink feminist Marxisms and socialisms from the perspective of this revised notion of postsocialism, the article discusses how the erasure of Marxist and socialist legacies works in contemporary feminist histories with a particular focus on the Nordic countries and my past as a feminist socialist activist there. Moreover, a genealogical analysis of a couple of still centrally performing feminist thought figures – situated knowledges (Haraway) and de/naturalizations of gender/sex binaries (Butler) – is undertaken. The aim is to consider how these thought figures can be understood as postsocialist, when the ‘post’ is defined as marking a combination of resonance and critical transgression, as the ‘post’ in, for example, ‘post-structuralism’. Finally, the article addresses the troubled relationship of Marxism with whiteness, race, racism and Eurocentric understandings of histories of revolutionary transformation. In particular, the flaws of European socialisms and Marxisms, and their resonances with Eurocentric thought more generally, are addressed, while giving attention to their implications for a reassessment of Marxist and socialist legacies in feminism.