Explorations in feminist historiography: Rhetoric, affect, and 'what really happened' in feminism's recent past

摘要

Why Stories Matter by Clare Hemmings and Feeling Women's Liberation by Victoria Hesford are motivated by the same concern: how to transform the way that feminists construct and relate to feminist histories. At present, histories of western feminism are consistently shaped into developmental narratives and divided into different phases that succeed one another in a neat linear trajectory. The problem with such phasic, developmental narratives is that they block out or distort those feminist trajectories that do not fit into the dominant frame, and rob historical feminisms of their unsettling force by reducing them to neatly bounded positions that have been overcome in the apparently all-knowing and sophisticated feminist present. Moreover, as Hemmings argues, the developmental narratives are highly amenable to anti- or 'post-feminist' agendas, as their basic storylines and structures are easily co-opted by those who seek to portray feminism as outmoded or obsolete. For both authors, feminists need to become critically aware of this kind of 'narrative straight-jacketing' and develop alternative ways of approaching and invoking feminist pasts within the contexts of the present.