Security unbound: spectres of feminism in Trump-time

Abstract

ABSTRACTWe open with a reflection on the sense of incredulity that marked the election of Donald Trump, encapsulated in the question - how could that have happened? How could hard-fought-for rights thought secured by (global governance) feminism be so quickly lost? What we short-hand as Trump-time, a time of the re-materialisation of an unbridled and globalised re-securing of virulent (white) patriarchy of the type many thought dead and gone, has brought renewed attention to dystopian fictional works, such as Frankenstein and The Handmaid’s Tale, as cautionary tales of the worst of what was, is, and will be. In this destabilizing moment, we turn to theoretical work on the spectral to assist in not rushing to diagnoses that would return us to sureties about secure feminist futures, but instead to trouble notions of ‘past/future/present’ secured lives through thinking about and with the ghosts that always haunt them. We move through examinations of the ghost-bodies of fictional Handmaid Offred, Hillary Clinton, and Trump himself to a consideration of unbound feminisms in the form of ‘killjoy’ spirits and (trans) bodies that unmoor feminism from ‘women’ and direct us to incoherence and fluidity that resist the re-securing of both feminism and resurgent (white) patriarchy.