Anticipations, afterlives

On the temporal and affective reorientations of sexual difference

Dados Bibliográficos

ID4367187
AutoresYanbing Er (0000-0002-5285-1021, National University of Singapore, Singapore, autor correspondente)
Ano2018
Volume19
Fascículo3
Páginas369-386
Data de publicação2018-12-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoFeminist Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1464-7001 • E-ISSN: 1741-2773
EditoraSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1464700118754731
OpenAlexW2786886423
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas29

This article focuses on the affective potential of anticipation, in its ready endorsement of the unknown, as a formative lens for theorising feminist temporalities. I draw from earlier readings of Luce Irigaray's conceptual paradigm of sexual difference to examine how its articulation of a feminist future that is inherently unknowable might contribute to recent debates on the temporalities of feminist thought. The article presents two broadly intersecting lines of argument. I first emphasise the continued centrality of sexual difference in its anticipatory imperative for thinking feminism but - or perhaps, especially - through a contradictory retrieval of the term that re-narrates its contemporary significance. In other words, it is precisely the retroactive position that sexual difference occupies that exacts a critical reorientation of existing modes of feminist temporalities; it moreover does so as a theoretical construct that altogether circumvents our understanding of feminism as a progress narrative. Secondly, I build upon Drucilla Cornell's contentions in Beyond Accommodation that the unknown futurity inaugurated by the trajectories of sexual difference demands a dimension of inquiry that is inevitably aesthetic (1991). I identify a possibility of literature's reinvigoration in emergence narratives of feminist theorising, particularly in a certain ethical capacity precipitated by its affective experience of enchantment, which mirrors the 'wonder' that sexual difference incites. If we are to continue to use literature as a conducive space of feminist analysis, then it is the forward-looking perpetuation of feminist narratives that must also be rethought for their investment in the multiple contingencies of anticipation

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Feminism · Narrative · Sociology · Temporalities · Wonder · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre · Social Psychology