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 declar- ation 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 contem- porary 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 forget- ting 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 genera- tional 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 repro- duction whereby a new generation of self-proclaimed feminists are forget- ting 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 maga- zines 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 exces- sive 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 character- izes 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 contem- porary femininity ‘only the hard-hearted, the too-serious, the earnest, humourless and generationally specific “feminist” could object .