Blackwell Reference Online

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How can we think about the future of feminism? The question of ‘feminist futures’ cannot be asked without reference to the pasts and presents of different feminisms. Already, from reading this book, you will have a sense of the differences between feminisms and the different ways in which feminists have intervened in ‘the world’ as it is constituted by ways of thinking and knowing (epistemology), ways of being and inhabitance (ontology), forms of representation (culture, aesthetics and language) and ways of doing (politics, ethics and work). There is no singular feminist subject that we can address when we ask the question of the future of feminism, nor is there one way of thinking about the relationship between feminism and the world that feminism both inhabits and seeks to transform. Yet we must ask the question of the future with the love and care that such a question demands. In some sense, what feminists share is a concern with the future; that is, a desire that the future should not simply be a repetition of the past, given that feminism comes into being as a critique of, and resistance to, the ways in which the world has already taken shape. Perhaps when we think about the question of feminist futures, we need to attend to the legacies of feminist pasts, in order to think through the very question of what it would mean to have a world where feminism, as a politics of transformation, ... log in or subscribe to read full text