Passing on Feminism

From Consciousness to Reﬂexivity?

Lisa Adkins UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

ABSTRACT As has been widely observed, histories of feminism have often been conceived via notions of generation where feminism is positioned as a kind of familial property, a form of inheritance and legacy which is transmitted through generations. Thus feminism and its history have been imagined as following a familial mode of social reproduction. Despite the dominance of this model, it has nonetheless been subject to critique, not least because of its reliance on teleologi- cal and progressive notions of history. Judith Roof, for example, has called for new conceptualizations of temporality in an attempt to decouple histories of feminism from a generational model. This need to move away from a generational model is also underscored by what commentators such as Angela McRobbie have identified as a dispersal of feminism – a broad-scale circulation of feminist values in popular culture – as well as by the emergence of a certain kind of reflexivity whereby past and current feminist practices are increasingly subject to critique. For McRobbie such developments are understood as part of the articulation of a post-feminism in which feminism can no longer be passed on as it is positioned as having already passed away. However, in this article via an exploration of recent accounts of the passing of feminism it is suggested that what allows for a declaration of this passing is an attachment to feminism as a particular way of knowing as well as to a particular arrangement of the social. Indeed, it will be suggested that recent histories of feminism and commentaries on the state of contemporary feminism are driven not only by generational logics but also by these attachments – attachments which lose and fix both feminism and women in time.

KEY WORDS feminism ◆ gender ◆ history ◆ knowledge ◆ the social

INTRODUCTION

In addressing the issue of the passing on of feminism one is immediately confronted by issues of temporality and historicity – both of which are increasingly contested, more open and contingent. So while say 20 years

European Journal of Women’s Studies Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), 1350-5068 Vol. 11(4): 427–444; DOI: 10.1177/1350506804046813 428 European Journal of Women’s Studies 11(4) ago it would not have been inconceivable for feminists to confidently map a history of the women’s movement or a history of feminist thought, more recently such projects have come under scrutiny for their reliance on a range of problematic narratives, including those of enlightenment, truth and progress. Histories of feminism have, for example, been called into question for their reliance on reproductive narratives whereby a linear chronological time is assumed. Here feminist consciousness is imagined as passed on through time, a sequencing of events which is made possible via a cause and effect logic whereby elements which come first are positioned as causing the elements that come later. As Judith Roof (1995, 1997) has argued, this results in a very reproductive and almost auto- matically familial understanding of change through time, whereby the past reproduces the future and the present and the future are positioned as being in constant debt to the past. Indeed this logic casts the past as legacy – almost a form of familial property – which may (or may not) be endowed on the next generation. A look at recent accounts of and commentaries on the state of contemporary feminism serves to shore up the salience of Roof’s observations regarding the reliance on such a reproductive model in the writing of the histories of feminism. What have been loosely termed post-feminist writings are, for instance, currently being disciplined by their feminist foremothers for a variety of sins, including misunderstandings and mis- appropriations of the feminist/familial legacy, dubious political credentials, political and historical amnesia, and worse still, making available feminist ideas to the service of neoliberal imperatives. Such accusations have, for example, been voiced by Lynne Segal in a series of recent publications assessing the condition of contemporary feminism (Segal, 2000, 2003a, 2003b).1 Here Segal declares that by the 1990s the radical spirit of feminist politics had long since waned. According to Segal, the 1990s were marked by the rise of a new breed of feminists who ‘were able to launch themselves and court media attention via scathing attacks on other feminists’ (Segal, 2003a: 152). Segal also argues that the 1990s witnessed the rise of what she terms a type of bland ‘new feminism’ exemplified (as she sees it) by Natasha Walter’s (1999) The New Feminism. This new feminism, Segal claims, is characterized by, on the one hand, confident aspirational striving and, on the other, a chastisement of feminism for failing to eliminate inequality in women’s lives. It is this kind of feminism which Segal argues works in the service of neoliberal values. It is ‘appropriated by a managerial elite, eager to roll back welfare for workfare, holding every individual accountable for their own fate’ (Segal, 2003a: 152). Tellingly, Segal comments that what characterizes these new feminisms even further is a kind of historical amnesia vis-a-vis earlier forms, a kind of cultural forgetting of the intellectual legacies of feminism even as ‘its more radical residue lingers for those who wish to find it’ (Segal, 2003a: 152; emphasis added). Adkins: Passing on Feminism 429

What interests me here is not so much the issue of how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ such new forms of feminism are but rather the framing and diagnosis of them. For clearly, and following Roof’s assessment of the narratives at play in histories of feminism, Segal’s account is one in which a generational logic is at issue. Specifically, such new forms of feminism are found wanting precisely because it is assumed that current and future forms of feminism must somehow be connected to past forms, indeed must fully acknowledge and be structured by such legacies. Thus, as in Roof’s exegesis of the reproductive narrative, in Segal’s account there is an assumption of causality: that the past should both determine the present and the future and that this causality gives feminism and feminist history a dynamic and force. What is interesting about Segal’s account, however, is that it is not one of the passing on of feminism, but one of a failed reproduction whereby a new generation of self-proclaimed feminists are forgetting their feminist legacies, and in effect not allowing feminist political consciousness to be passed on. Segal therefore implicitly declares a kind of passing of feminism, witnessed in her (empirical) claim that there is a ‘frank rejection of feminism by many young women’ (Segal, 2000: 19). Yet while this passing of feminism is said to have an empirical ‘out there’ validity, this claim is in fact a product of a generational logic – because the present and the future are not being shaped by the past, feminism must (and can only) be declared as passed away. However, Segal is by no means the only commentator who is declaring a passing of feminism. In a recent analysis of popular culture, Angela McRobbie (2003) has discussed the emergence of what she terms post- feminist popular cultural narratives, which ironically and reflexively cast feminism into a ‘spectral, shadowy, almost hated existence’ (McRobbie, 2003: 135). To explore the specificity of these contemporary narratives, McRobbie remembers her own early work, and especially her work carried out in the 1970s on girls’ magazines and how a teenage girl in such magazines was ‘imagined week in and week out as . . . in search of a boy [who] could never relax until she had trapped a “fella” and had a ring on her finger’ (McRobbie, 2003: 134). McRobbie comments that these stories and especially a femininity characterized by a desperate always on the look out search for Mr Right ‘were so much the subject of feminist critique that they came to sum up pre-feminist femininity’ (McRobbie, 2003: 134; emphasis added). While the 1980s witnessed the decline of this form of femininity, nonetheless McRobbie argues that the 1990s saw its return – but with a twist. Specifically, unlike her ‘pre-feminist’ counterpart the femininity at issue in post-feminist popular culture ironically and self-consciously references feminist critiques of such forms of femininity. But such referencing is far from celebratory – on the contrary in post- feminist popular culture feminism is cast as a ‘psychic policewoman’ (McRobbie, 2003: 135) whereby the fantasies and pleasures of women and 430 European Journal of Women’s Studies 11(4) girls are cast as curtailed and thwarted by feminism. In the film Bridget Jones, for example (which McRobbie views as exemplifying post-feminist popular culture), the central character ends up getting her man, but excessive narrative references to feminism mean this is no traditional romance. To get her man woman must now overcome not social or other kinds of barriers, but feminism itself. Indeed, McRobbie claims that what characterizes post-feminist popular culture is a taking into account of feminism, a taking into account which can only take place if feminism is already understood to have passed away (McRobbie, 2003: 136). Thus, in the Bridget Jones film, feminism is figured as a historical figure, whose time has now passed. It seems then that it is not only new histories of feminism that are declaring a passing of feminism, but the field of popular culture more generally. However, a closer look at McRobbie’s diagnosis of post-feminist popular culture reveals that again a reproductive familial narrative is at issue. In her closing comments regarding the Bridget Jones film, McRobbie notes that while Bridget Jones now stands as a representative of contemporary femininity ‘only the hard-hearted, the too-serious, the earnest, humourless and generationally specific “feminist” could object . . . to its (ironic) celebration of marriage and the assumption of conventional kinship as the solution to the fears and anxieties of being a single girl’ (McRobbie, 2003: 136; emphasis added). And she goes on, that in this sense, the original newspaper column on which both the book and film were based written by a young female journalist ‘can be seen as a response by a younger woman . . . to her feminist forebearers. It seems to be written as a counter to feminism’ (McRobbie, 2003: 136). In these few brief comments, and as with Segal’s declaration of the passing of feminism, McRobbie immediately casts the history of feminism, as well as that of the history of specific forms of popular culture, in generational, familial and reproductive terms. Specifically, the passing of feminism and the dynamics and characteristics of post-feminist popular culture are cast as an issue of a failed reproduction of feminist consciousness, a failure of generational reproduction, with younger women refusing to inherit their feminist legacies. Of course, it is now commonplace not just within feminism, but across the humanities and social sciences to uncover the narratives and logics at play within particular histories and analyses which allow particular stories to be told (and others to remain untold). In her exemplary analysis of this kind and in uncovering the generational, reproductive, familial narrative operating within histories of feminism, Roof among others has proposed that both history and time be thought afresh within feminism. She asks, ‘What if we perceived time not as linear or . . . generational but as multidirectional? What if we understood narrative as repetition, alter- nation, oscillation . . .? What if cause and effect can go both ways? What if Adkins: Passing on Feminism 431 action and thought are a gift that expect no return and create no debt?’ (Roof, 1997: 87). Following such suggestions we might also ask what if time, history and the history of consciousness were thought differently? Would it then be so easy for assessments of the state of contemporary feminism to declare a passing of feminism?

FEMINIST KNOWLEDGE: THE PASSING OF THE SOCIAL

To attempt to address this question, I want to draw attention to how in recent declarations of the passing of feminism there is a great deal more than a generational narrative at issue. For also operative in these accounts are hidden claims and assumptions regarding what the proper objects of feminism are, and should be, and the relationship of these objects to feminist subjectivity and feminist consciousness. What I want to suggest is that recent histories of feminism which proclaim a passing of feminism rest themselves not only on generational narratives, but also on a narrative of change through time based upon a purported shift in the relations between the objects of feminism and feminist subjectivity, a shift which I think can be best described as a change from feminist consciousness to feminist reﬂexivity. To illuminate exactly what this shift entails, let me return to accounts of the passing of feminism, speciﬁcally to Segal’s account. Although Segal names a near epidemic of political forgetting from the 1990s onwards, nonetheless she does see hope for political re-engagement.2 Importantly, this involves the kind of passing on of the sort which Roof is so critical, a kind of reproduction through time of a certain kind of political consciousness. She writes:

While political elites mouth post-feminist and neo-liberal feminist rhetoric to further their goals . . . the spectre of a more politically authentic feminism lives on, always threatening to expose the erasure of those earlier feminist struggles – whether around the workplace, domesticity or access to democ- ratically run, shared community resources. (Segal, 2003a: 155)

What interests me here is Segal’s version of what politics, political subjectivity and political agency actually are, or perhaps more precisely how Segal herself makes political claims and hence claims a political consciousness. For what is so striking regarding these hopes for political re-enchantment is that not only will this necessarily involve a return to earlier forms of more authentic feminism, but also the assumption that this more authentic feminism involves a focus on empirically ‘out there’, in-the-world phenomena, including struggles around the workplace, domestic arrangements and so on. Indeed, Segal’s notion of politics and the political concerns a very specific vision of feminist knowledge 432 European Journal of Women’s Studies 11(4) involving a clear-cut distinction between the knower and the known, subject and object. Specifically, for Segal what constitutes ‘authentic feminism’ is a subject reflecting upon socioempirical objects and especially upon socioempirical ‘women’. For Segal, this relationship does not only constitute politics, but political and specifically feminist political consciousness in and of itself. Those who do not engage in this kind of project – including new feminists – who, for instance, engage in critiques of earlier forms of feminism, or who have been engaged in abstract theoretical projects focusing on the inclusions and exclusions of identity, are castigated for their lack of politics and their failure to pass on. Of such feminism Segal claims that it is characterized by a tendency to fail to engage with issues pertaining to the social and historical, especially issues of social inequality and social justice. It ‘has been far less engaged with tackling questions of redistributive justice and social restructuring, which were once central to socialist feminism’ (Segal, 2000: 27). She goes on that while such recent feminist theory may help us to see the complexities of subjectivity and illuminate various reality constructions, nonetheless ‘they cannot provide the theoretical resources most useful for women hoping for a stake in the future while positioned at the sharpest edge of struggles for justice and survival. . . . That requires more, rather than less, attention to actually existing social relations and their discursive bound- aries’ (Segal, 2000: 31). Indeed, Segal claims that if feminists are to gain renewed political purchase ‘we will need to turn outwards more often: observing the centrality of some women in the new professional and managerial world, even as others are pushed more securely to the margins’ (Segal, 2000: 28, emphasis added).3

FEMINISM BESIDE ITSELF: SELF-REFLEXIVITY AND THE END OF POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

In this account becoming political therefore requires turning outwards towards a socioempirical world, the implication being that recent feminism has been far too inwardly focused, a practice which is assumed to secure neither political engagement nor political consciousness. Other commentators have also noted this tendency towards an inward lookingness or self-reflexivity on the part of contemporary feminists. In the mid- 1990s, Diane Elam and Robyn Weigman (Elam, 1997; Elam and Weigman, 1995) named this phenomenon as ‘feminism beside itself’, which for them referred to the fact that (and using a generational metaphor once again) feminism was going through a sort of mid-life crisis, whereby feminism had ‘reached a point where it [was] not clear what it [understood] itself to be’ (Elam, 1997: 6). Elam and Weigman noted that feminists were increasingly asking themselves: ‘What exactly is feminism? What are its aims? Its Adkins: Passing on Feminism 433 goals? How can and should its history be told?’ (Elam, 1997: 6). Putting feminism beside itself therefore referenced an emerging self- consciousness, self-reflexivity or self-referentiality on the part of feminists, a reflection by feminists on feminism itself, a point attested to in the outpouring of books, journal articles and special issues in which feminists critically assessed, debated and reflected on the successes and failures of feminism, its inclusions and exclusions, its political and philo- sophical assumptions, its admissions and omissions, its futures and its pasts. While Elam and Weigman certainly did not see the emergence of feminist self-reflexivity as the end of the political,4 nonetheless my point here is that what appears to be driving recent accounts of the passing of feminism is not only a generational logic but also a narrative of change which references a shift from a form of political consciousness constituted by subjects reflecting on socioempirical objects – a political consciousness constituted by an external reflexivity – to a self-consciousness characterized by a self or internal reflexivity. Moreover, within this narrative self- reflexivity is marked by a political failure, a failure which we can surmise is said to exist in a movement away from a subject–object problematic (reflection on and critiques of the world) towards a subject–subject dynamic (internal reflection and critique). Interestingly, McRobbie’s account of post-feminist popular culture also indexes this historical shift. Specifically her account of popular culture describes a shift from a historical moment in which feminists engaged in critiques of out there, in-the-world phenomena (such as pre-feminist femininity), to one where feminism becomes an issue of reflexivity. But in this case it is not only the subjects of feminism – feminists – who now adopt a self-reflexive stance, but the previous objects of feminism – in this instance, femininity. Hence contemporary popular cultural invocations of femininity now reflexively reference and incorporate previous forms of feminist critique of that very object. McRobbie’s history of feminism is therefore a history of shifting relations between subjects and objects – or more precisely an erasure of a subject/object distinction, where ‘in- the-world’ objects previously subject to forms of critique are increasingly taking on the characteristics of the subject, that is, of feminist critique itself. Moreover, and again as with Segal, it is the erasure of a subject/object distinction which is seen to involve the passing of feminism. Thus, for McRobbie, post-feminist femininity casts feminism as a historical figure and hence as passed away. Indeed, in McRobbie’s account, as in Segal’s, the rise of reflexivity vis-a-vis feminism, or what I am describing here as the end of a clear distinction between feminist subjects and feminist objects, is marked by a lack (and even the end of) feminist consciousness. In short, in both of these accounts of the passing of feminism there is an assumption that a rise of reflexivity, or more precisely the loss of a subject/object distinction, leads to an erasure of feminism. 434 European Journal of Women’s Studies 11(4)

In these accounts of the history of feminism there is then an assumption that feminism has lost its object,5 a loss which runs the risk of repudiating feminism itself. And to avoid this repudiation, there is a call particularly from Segal to return to tried and tested objects of feminism: social relations and historical formations. Yet why should only these objects be the matter of feminism? Why should reflection on the sociohistorical be the only source of feminist consciousness? And why should feminist self- reflexivity be read as apolitical?6 After all, and as Sara Ahmed (2000) has recently reminded us, in the 1980s, Teresa de Lauretis argued that feminist work only becomes recognizably theoretical when it begins to contest and dispute not just gendered norms ‘out there’, that is, in everyday life, but also the very categories of analysis that are used by feminists to understand these norms. Feminism therefore becomes theoretical when categories such as ‘gender’, ‘the sex/gender system’ or ‘sexual difference’ are contested and disputed. Even more confusing is the opposition which Segal in particular seems to assume between reflexivity on the one hand, and social relations on the other. For instance, she rejects reflexivity as being of relevance to feminism – reflexivity is assumed to repudiate feminist politics – while a focus on social relations is assumed to reactivate such a politics. However, even a cursory glance at recent social and cultural theory casts this opposition into doubt. Everyday life, far from being free from the troubling world of reflexivity, is now saturated by it – whether this be the organization of production or the organization of axes of difference (Adkins, 2002; Boyne, 2002; Lash, 1994). As Roy Boyne has noted ‘structural contexts such as class, ethnicity, gender, age, medical status, are now routinely and reflexively incorporated into conceptions of self-identity’ (Boyne, 2002: 119). Class cultures are, for example, now marked by reflexive attitudes: ‘rueful, ironic, envious, reflectively proud’ (Boyne, 2002: 119). And as McRobbie’s analysis of post-feminist popular culture attests towards, femininity is now characterized by such reflexivity. My point here is that the political consciousness and agency which Segal seeks to gain from (external) reflection on and engagement with everyday worlds may not be as accessible or straightforward as she seems to maintain since the everyday world, like the theoretical world, is characterized by reflexivity.7

LOST OBJECTS: THE PASSING OF FEMINISM?

So if a distinction between self-reﬂexivity and the social is difﬁcult to maintain, how is one to make sense of this narrative of the passing away of feminist consciousness? What is the story behind the story here? Part of the answer to this I think can be gleaned from commentaries on the social Adkins: Passing on Feminism 435 itself within these accounts of the passing of feminism, or better put, commentaries on particular arrangements of the social. For example, Segal opens her discussion of academic trends in the 1990s with the following comments, which for the purposes of my argument are worth quoting at length:

The era of widespread union mobilisation and expanding social movements during the 1970s gave way to increasingly sporadic and fragmented political struggles in the following decade. By the close of the 1980s, little seemed to remain but the insatiable profit-seeking force of global capitalism, following the pacification of class struggle, tireless ideological assault on Keynesian social democracy and its belief in public planning, all rendered emblematic with the final collapse of the USSR and its satellites. The only new worlds to be discovered in the 1990s . . . lay in the past. In place of political ideals and collective action, mourning and melancholia have never been more popular than they have in the 1990s. . . . This was certainly the increasingly consolidated outlook of many Left intellectuals facing the new millennium, backs resolutely turned on the wreckage of their passions and pursuits of yesteryear. (Segal, 2003a: 143)

So while (according to Segal) a new generation of feminists and other academics in the 1990s suffered political and historical amnesia, left intellectuals experienced mourning and melancholia. But what was the object of this mourning? What was the object that has been loved and lost? After all, mourning requires an object. In Segal’s narrative this is made abun- dantly clear: it is a social world made up of a Keynesian social democracy, social movements and union mobilization, in short, a kind of idealized postwar social contract, characterized by compacts between state, unions and employers; mass production and consumption, a strong welfare state and a sociostructural mode of social organization. But while this account appears to neutrally describe a mourning on the part of left intellectuals for such social arrangements, it must be recognized that Segal’s account is actively figuring it as such. Put differently, this account of political decline (including the passing or decline of feminism) itself displays a certain attachment to these kinds of social arrangements. This is made clear not only in Segal’s reflections on the 1990s but also in her comments on the potential futures of feminism. Discussing the transformation of the notion of universal entitlements within the British context, she remarks such a shift ‘serves to undermine the whole heritage and rationale of the British welfare state: one which relied upon progressive taxation attempting to deliver social services to all its members’ (Segal, 2000: 26). In drawing attention to this attachment to a certain organization of society, I am certainly not trying to suggest that there is not a debate to be had about the restructuring of state regimes. Rather my point is that it is an attachment to a certain kind of social formation which appears to be driving Segal’s narrative of political decline. This is evidenced in the way 436 European Journal of Women’s Studies 11(4) that it is this kind of social and specifically an engagement with this kind of sociostructural formation which Segal defines as constitutive of radical political consciousness. So, and to return to some of my earlier comments, the socioempirical objects and theoretical concerns which Segal names as political projects are ones which pertain to this kind of sociostructural formation and emerged in relation to these kinds of social arrangements. Specifically, struggles around the workplace, domesticity and/or access to shared community resources; concerns with specifically social inequalities, and the redistribution of resources were clearly ones which emerged historically in relation to a particular social formation, one where, for example, fairly clear and incisive links could be made between mass production and mass consumption, the organization of paid and unpaid labour and one where a redistribution of economic resources could be and was imagined as addressing social ills. This of course was a social which during the 1980s many feminists illuminated as being organized quite centrally by gender. Nancy Fraser (1989) among others illuminated how the relations between the private sphere and the economy took place by the medium of gender identity; Michele Barrett (1980) further noted how these relations were crucially mediated by a heterosexual familial ideology and Sylvia Walby (1986, 1990) demonstrated that these arrangements were primarily sociostructural in character. In defining her socioempirical political objects in this way, that is, in the way of feminist accounts of women in the postwar industrial world, Segal’s account therefore references a social organized centrally – in fact structurally – around gender. Indeed Segal comments on the centrality of gender ‘in structuring wider social relations’ and that this ‘remains at the heart of gender politics around the globe: past, present and future’ (Segal, 2000: 32; emphasis added). Many contemporary analyses of the social would, however, suggest that the world can no longer be straightforwardly characterized as one organized by sociostructural imperatives. In her Cyborg Manifesto of now nearly 20 years ago, Donna Haraway (1985, 1991), for example, described:

... an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism; we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous information system – from all work to all play, a deadly game. (Haraway, 1991: 161)

For Haraway, this new order involved a thoroughgoing rearrangement of the social. Hierarchical dominations are reworked and replaced by flat networks and the informatics of domination, while systems of sociostructural reproduction are replaced by experimentation, play and reflexivity. This general thesis regarding the undercutting of a sociostructural order finds support from many quarters. In recent social theory it finds support Adkins: Passing on Feminism 437 in the idea that in late modern societies there is a progressive freeing of agency from structure. It also finds support in the notion of network society (Castells, 1996), as well as from the notion of information society, where, for example, the means of production are replaced by the means of communication, where a logic of structures is displaced by a logic of flows (Lash, 2002). It also gains backing in how social action (sociality) is often characterized – as already alluded towards – by a playful reflexivity towards those very rules, traditions and hierarchies which governed action within modernity, for instance the traditions of class and gender (Adkins, 2000, 2002). Finally, it finds support (as Haraway herself has underscored) in the ways in which the relations between nature and culture – relations which modernity seemed to hold so firmly in place – are being rewritten; indeed, how the differences between the two may even be collapsing. Celia Lury has highlighted this point with reference to the process of human type or kind – such as gender and race – becoming brand. The iconography of the global fashion company Benetton illus- trates this process well. Lury notes how the culturalization of (human) categories of genre, kind or type is central to Benetton’s brand image and marketing strategy. Hence in Benetton iconography ‘“race” is presented not as a matter of skin colour, of physical characteristics, as the expression of biological or natural essence, but rather of style’ (Lury, 2002: 591). Differences previously coded as nature are therefore being rewritten as culture, or as Lury puts it ‘not . . . gender, race and class, but lifeforms™ and lifestyles™’ (Lury, 2002: 599). My own work has also underscored the process of the rewriting of such differences. Specifically, I have explored how in the economy gender is being rewritten from a relatively fixed naturally or socially determined characteristic of people – constituted by sociostructural arrangements such as gender segregation – to a cultural style or genre (Adkins, 2002).8 In referring to this body of work I am aiming to draw attention to a number of points. The first of these is obvious. The social which Segal urges feminists to turn outwards towards seems to be out of time with the present. The lost object of Segal’s account – that is a society organized by sociostructural imperatives – has passed. And this I think is crucial for understanding how Segal’s account declares the passing of feminism. Specifically, what allows the declaration of this passing of feminism is not a hyper-reflexivity which places new/young feminists as not in time or out of synchronization with the social, but rather a nostalgia for a particular social formation. But what is important about the kind of society which Segal’s narrative mourns is that it was one where the distinctions between subject and object seemed fairly obvious and were relatively uncontentious. Indeed, the sociostructural character of the social inscribed this very distinction. So methodologically speaking, feminists reflected upon socioempirical objects such as ‘women’ and ‘femininity’ 438 European Journal of Women’s Studies 11(4) and this reflection inscribed (and allowed claims towards) their own political consciousness, as this reflection on social structure (an exterior ‘out there’ world), and the very distinction between reflection and the everyday, was enabled by the dialectical or recursive character of social structures. This dialectic regarding critical consciousness and the everyday has been elaborated in a variety of ways. In Marx’s famous formulation political consciousness was to be constituted in the dialectical character of history: in the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, accumulation and exchange. In Giddens’s structuration theory a double hermeneutic enabled by the recursive character of social structure allowed not only reflection on social structure but also for the possibilities of social change. And even in Bourdieu – who is widely cited as breaking with the dualist traditions of social theory – political consciousness, or what he terms an awakening of consciousness, is inscribed in agents when they secure a critical reflexivity (reflection) on previously habituated forms of action (Adkins, 2003). In the social formation of classical industrial society (after all Marx, [early] Giddens and Bourdieu were pre- eminently theorists of differentiated industrial societies) there was therefore a space or gap between critical reflection (and hence consciousness) and the everyday. The contemporary social, however, is characterized not by stable distinctions between subject and object, culture and nature, history and consciousness but by a reworking (and even collapse) of these divisions. Hence a distinction between the empirical world and theoretical worlds is far harder to maintain (Lash, 2002). (A point clearly attested to in the emergence of what McRobbie has termed post-feminist femininity.) What is lost and mourned in accounts such as Segal’s are therefore precisely those external objects – however imagined (for example, as structures governed by social, symbolic or linguistic laws) – which allowed radical political consciousness (or interiority) to be inscribed in reflection on those external objects. In short, what is mourned is the dialectic or dualism of exteriority and interiority – a dualism which is eroded in the contemporary social.

FEMINISM: LOST IN TIME?

But perhaps what I am describing as nostalgia is better described as melancholia. In her critical engagement with key constitutive cultural and political narratives of modernity, and specifically in a discussion of Walter Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history, Wendy Brown (2001) has recently discussed the phenomenon which Benjamin named Left melancholia. For Benjamin such a phenomenon is rooted in an understanding of history as progress, that is, of a history with aims, and in particular the Adkins: Passing on Feminism 439 aim of progress found, for example, in the view that society may be emancipated through and by history. An attachment to such a notion of history leads however to a refusal to come to terms with the present, or to the condition that Benjamin named as Left melancholia, since an attachment to a notion of progress means that ‘opportunities missed or [social] formations lost are rendered and experienced as permanent and unrecoverable’ (Brown, 2001: 168–9). Moreover, and importantly from the point of view of my concerns here, Brown notes how in Benjamin’s formulation melancholia operates via a logic of things, that is a logic of fetishization, whereby the melancholic is so devoted to his or her beloved that it is converted into a thing. Melancholia therefore imbues social formations and ways of knowing with a thing-like quality. Left melancholia is in short, and in Brown’s words, ‘a mournful, conservative, back-ward looking attachment to feelings, analyses or relations that have become fetishized and frozen in the heart of the critic’ (Brown, 2001: 170). It ‘binds us to the past as a collection of things, as a way of knowing, in such a way that we are complacent about the present’ (Brown, 2001: 171). What interests me here is that this claim – that melancholia operates via a logic of things – clearly has resonances with my argument that accounts declaring a passing of feminism display tendencies towards an attachment to specific objects, and in particular an excessive attachment to a specific sociohistorical formation and a way of knowing about that formation.9 This, taken together with what I have also identified as a refusal to engage with the present, suggests that accounts such as Segal’s which declare such a passing display all the classic symptoms of Left melancholia.10 Indeed, what appears to be driving such narratives of political decline is not only a generational logic – a notion of history as fundamentally reproductive and generationally organized – but also a logic of melancholia fuelled by the idea that history should move towards particular goals. Moreover, it is precisely this notion of history which allows for a declaration of the passing of feminism. For it is this very notion of history which allows things to get lost in time, that is to be declared as passed. Hence in Segal’s narrative the loss of specific social formations is rendered permanent and unrecoverable. And it is the very idea that things can get lost in time that allows for the declaration of the end of feminist politics and feminist history itself.

CONCLUSIONS

In this article I have suggested that recent declarations of the passing away of feminism share a number of characteristics and assumptions. The first of these is the operation of a generational narrative of the sort identified by Roof, where it is assumed that for feminism to be passed on 440 European Journal of Women’s Studies 11(4) and reproduced the present and future must be shaped by (and in constant debt to) the past. Second, I have argued that this narrative takes a very specific form within recent accounts that declare a passing of feminism. Specifically, the diagnosis of the passing or the failed reproduction of feminism is built on a series of assumptions concerning what the proper objects of feminism should be, the relationship of these objects to feminist consciousness and feminist subjectivity, and an assumption of a shift in the relations between such objects and feminist subjectivity. These assumptions are ordered to form the following narrative: that the proper objects of feminism are external, out there, in-the-world socioempirical phenomena such as ‘women’ and/or femininity; these phenomena are ordered via sociostructural imperatives; feminist consciousness and feminist political agency are constituted in the reflection on these objects; and that contemporary forms of feminism are characterized by an inward lookingness which negates reflection on the external socioempirical world. Consequently, according to this narrative, contemporary forms of feminism are not feminist at all as they fail fundamentally to secure feminist consciousness and political agency. I have suggested further that the set of assumptions fuelling this narrative are driven by a melancholic attachment to and mourning for a particular kind of social formation and a particular way of knowing about that social formation. The social formation mourned is one whose very sociostructural organization instantiated a distinction between subjects and objects and where reflection on objects inscribed (and allowed claims towards) political consciousness. Moreover, I have argued that it is a melancholia for this social formation – rather than an excessive form of reflexivity or self-referentiality on the part of contemporary feminists – which is driving not only recent accounts of the state of contemporary feminism but also declarations of the passing of feminism. While in this article, I have focused on specific accounts which implicitly or explicitly declare such a passing, nonetheless the broad tendencies and assumptions I have identified as operative in these accounts should not, I think, be viewed as idiosyncratic features of these specific analyses. Rather they are to be found across and within a range of recent feminist analyses, particularly in those which chastise others for a lack of attention to the sociohistorical and/or to politics. Moreover, they may be found in more general social and cultural theory. It is a well-rehearsed truism that in classical social and cultural theory the experiences of the modern (the worlds of rationality, capitalism, industrialism and the urban) were over- whelmingly associated with masculinity, while the figure of woman stood as antithetical to this world. In contemporary forms of social theory, however, the figure of woman is rapidly emerging as one who is associated not with the premodern or the pre-industrial but with (a now lost) industrial society – as trapped in the sociostructural logics which defined Adkins: Passing on Feminism 441 that society (Adkins, 2004). And it is worth pointing out that in such social theory, masculinity is no longer associated with industrial society but with the transcendence of that society – with a new postindustrial modernity. My point here is that while recent accounts declare a passing of feminism, mourn the loss of industrial society and a socioempirical understanding of ‘woman’, they are (however unwittingly) contributing towards this vision, that is, a vision of woman as lost (and trapped) in industrial time. How then (if at all) might feminism be passed on? How, for example, might the efficacy and force of contemporary feminist accounts of the world be recognized? Certainly this would involve attentiveness in the production of histories of feminism not only to problematic notions of generation but also to versions of history in which social and cultural formations, feminism as a way of knowing, and the categories of gender are fetishized. For such a version of history will always, as we have seen, end up getting both feminism and women lost in time. Even if the subjects and objects of feminism have changed, and even if consciousness can no longer be inscribed in the instantiation between subject and object (and even if historical consciousness can no longer be talked about with any real conviction), it is vital, as Rita Felski (2000) has argued, not to view sociocultural change (such as the change from industrial to postindustrial society) as always harmful to feminism and women, for to do so is to lose and fix both in time. After all, and as so many feminist scholars have pointed out (Felski, 2000; Gerhard, 2004), rather than a spectator, feminism is implicated in and is co-determinous with the rapid transformations of cultural and social life that accompany modernity.

NOTES

1. These publications assess both the current state of contemporary feminism and of political radicalism more broadly. 2. It is not just feminists that Segal sees as suffering from amnesia from the 1990s onwards, for she also argues this is the case for those practising the discipline of cultural studies. Of this discipline she writes ‘The crucial work it had fostered for several decades overcoming the historic blindness to much of the terrain of gender, race and other forms of systemic oppression within cultures of modernity . . . was being forgotten in a new form of contemporary amnesia’ (Segal, 2003a: 151). 3. The accusation that recent forms of feminist theorizing fail to engage with the social and historical is widespread. Nancy Fraser (1998), for example, has argued that recent analyses of gender and sexuality, which, following the work of Judith Butler, stress their performative constitution, are unable to account for ‘the actual contradictory character of speciﬁc social relations’ (Fraser, 1998: 149; see also Seidman, 1997). What interests me here is how this failure is also read as a failure to be political. 4. Indeed Weigman and Elam understand such self-reﬂexivity to be in part 442 European Journal of Women’s Studies 11(4)

‘brought on by feminism’s very success and public visibility’ (Elam, 1997: 5). 5. Recent feminist debate has suggested that feminism has lost sex–gender as its main object of enquiry (see, for example, Lloyd, 2003). While this is undoubtedly the case, I am suggesting here that there are other assumptions of loss within accounts of the contemporary condition of feminism. 6. Interestingly, rather than marking a political failure, self-reflexivity has been viewed by some feminists, notably by Dean (1997), as a basis for feminist solidarity post the politics of identity while others have argued that reflexivity is precisely what characterizes modern feminism (see, for example, Adkins, 2002; Gerhard, 2004). 7. It is not only that a distinction between reflexivity and the social world is difficult to sustain empirically – a point which I return to – but also, on a purely methodological basis, a distinction between a form of knowing which is instantiated in the relationship between subject and external object (social world) and another in the relationship between subject and internal subject is dubious. For as writers such as Bruno Latour (1991) have argued, both of these claims to ways of knowing are in semiotic terms at least similar ways of building enunciation, that is of building a speaking position on the part of the knower. 8. I use the term ‘gender’ here tentatively, for clearly this was a concept developed for understanding the organization of a hierarchical system of difference in industrial societies. In addition, my use is tentative given the enormous weight of critique the term now carries. Nonetheless my contention here following the work of writers such as Haraway (1991) and Butler (1993) is that the categories of gender are being rewritten in the context of, for example, shifting relations between nature and culture and that (therefore) there is a ground for rethinking gender. 9. Interestingly, Brown also argues that the left traditionally distinguished itself from liberalism not only via its scope of political vision but also via its object of critique. Thus its focus was the fundamental dynamics of injustice or domination within the totality of social and economic arrangements and typically called for the replacement of this totality with a more egalitarian ordering of economic life. 10. Rather ironically in terms of the argument I am putting forward (and in a move which adds fuel to this argument) in a discussion of Brown’s reading of Benjamin, Segal (2003a) accuses Brown of misappropriating Benjamin, or more precisely misusing Benjamin. Specifically, Segal accuses Brown of using Benjamin to defend a position that his work was coined to attack (broadly cultural analyses devoid of materialist input), that is, of not properly appreciating the intellectual history of the left.

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Lisa Adkins is Reader in Sociology at the University of Manchester. She has published widely in the ﬁelds of the sociology of gender and sexuality, feminist social theory, and the sociology of postindustrial economies. Her books include Gendered Work (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995) and Revisions: Gender and Sexuality in Late Modernity (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002). [email: [email protected]]

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