Rethinking socialist and Marxist legacies in feminist imaginaries of protest from postsocialist perspectives

Bibliographic Data

ID2993860
AuthorsNina Lykke (0000-0002-7946-7185, Unit of Gender Studies, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume24
Issue2
Pages173-188
Publication date2018-03-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial Identities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1350-4630 • E-ISSN: 1363-0296
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13504630.2017.1321714
OpenAlexW2613053138
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited33

The article raises questions about the neoliberal discursive erasures of socialist and Marxist legacies in feminist histories and imaginaries of protest. However, far from promoting an uncritical recycling of feminist Marxisms and socialisms as they unfolded in feminist movements during the 1970s, the article instead reassesses these trends in feminist thought through the analytical lens of the revised notion of ‘postsocialism’ in focus of this special issue, aiming at unmooring it from addressing only the twentieth-century past of a particular geopolitical region, the ‘Second World’. To rethink feminist Marxisms and socialisms from the perspective of this revised notion of postsocialism, the article discusses how the erasure of Marxist and socialist legacies works in contemporary feminist histories with a particular focus on the Nordic countries and my past as a feminist socialist activist there. Moreover, a genealogical analysis of a couple of still centrally performing feminist thought figures – situated knowledges (Haraway) and de/naturalizations of gender/sex binaries (Butler) – is undertaken. The aim is to consider how these thought figures can be understood as postsocialist, when the ‘post’ is defined as marking a combination of resonance and critical transgression, as the ‘post’ in, for example, ‘post-structuralism’. Finally, the article addresses the troubled relationship of Marxism with whiteness, race, racism and Eurocentric understandings of histories of revolutionary transformation. In particular, the flaws of European socialisms and Marxisms, and their resonances with Eurocentric thought more generally, are addressed, while giving attention to their implications for a reassessment of Marxist and socialist legacies in feminism

Feminism · Feminist philosophy · Feminist theory · Marxist philosophy · Political science · Politics · Racism · Situated · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Law

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