Retrotopian feminism

The feminist 1970s, the literary utopia and Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4367255
AutoresJoe P L Davidson (0000-0003-1800-3771, University of Cambridge, autor de correspondencia)
Año2023
Volumen24
Número2
Páginas243-261
Fecha de publicación2023-04-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaFeminist Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1464-7001 • E-ISSN: 1741-2773
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1464700121994076
OpenAlexW3129549191
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas23

In recent years, there has been increasing discontent with feminism's understanding of its own history and, more specifically, the place of the feminist 1970s. Feminist scholars - most prominently, Elizabeth Freeman, Victoria Hesford, Kate Eichhorn and Kathi Weeks - have sought to move beyond the feelings of progress and nostalgia that the feminist 1970s often inspires. There is a need to mediate between the urge to leave the past behind and the desire to return to it, with feminists adopting positions that ricochet between progress and nostalgia. In this article, I argue that the feminist literary utopia offers a particularly productive means by which to represent this ambivalent, paradoxical temporal understanding. The classic feminist utopias of the 1970s have become the object of critical contention in more recent speculative texts, which destabilise both progress and nostalgia in their evocation of second-wave separatism. To elaborate this claim, I turn to Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army, which critically assesses the feminist 1970s via an account of a separatist feminist enclave in a near-future Britain. The community of women is a homage to the feminist 1970s, displaying both the potentialities of the movements of this time as well as their sometimes violent limitations. The dreams of the 1970s emerge in the text as an unsettling presence in the world, a force that can neither be left behind nor fully embraced

Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Art history · Epistemology · Evocation · Feeling · Feminism · Feminist movement · Feminist philosophy · Feminist theory · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Utopia · Anthropology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Gender Studies · History · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Philosophy · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Psychology