Introduction: ‘Remembering Feminist Theory Forward’

Abstract

Fifteen years ago, Clare Hemmings demonstrated both a teleological and binary tendency in the dominant story of ‘Western’ feminist theory: ‘an insistent narrative that sees the development of [‘Western’] feminist thought as a relentless march of progress . . . [that] fixes writers and perspectives within a particular decade’ (2005: 115). This means that ‘the specificity of feminist accounts of difference, power and knowledge at all points in the recent past . . . is elided’ (Hemmings, 2005: 131). Many of us, however, have always used concepts and perspectives from a variety of purportedly bygone eras or contradictory camps. Homogenising eras or reproducing binary oppositional camps of feminisms serves to frame whole bodies of work as ‘problematic’ or outdated, and to relegate a plethora of work as irrelevant, e.g. framing the 1970s as entirely essentialist, or the 1980s as made up of only two positions in the two factions of the ‘sex wars’. Departing with the premises of Hemmings’ challenge to these typologies, then, the articles in this special issue engage with ‘classic’ or previous feminist works in nuanced ways. Sabine Sielke proposes that there is, and has been, a seriality in feminist critique, a ‘recursiveness or insistence’ (2018: 80) that, rather than being a mere return, allows for a ‘transgressive moment of repetition’ (2018: 83). We are interested in recursive use of ideas from other eras that create such transgressive moments and that in doing so may help us to think through the feminist issues of the present. For example, Cynthia Enloe recently called for a return to the concept of patriarchy that, while often framed as unfashionably structuralist, she argues is a