12 - Late Modern Feminist Subversions: Sex, Subjectivity, and Embodiment

Summary

The story of late modern feminist thought is not a story of waves or turns that succeed one another. Feminist thought does not follow a simple linear temporality, even if we often tend to tell the story that way. Building on intellectual feminist traditions as well as engaging with their historical moment, feminist thinkers follow a more complicated periodization. As the incarnation of a long feminist tradition, post-1968 feminism holds an especially important place in the story of late modern Europe and its intellectual and political revolutions, though that place is often seen to be historically past, even antiquated. It has been conventionally named as belonging to the “second wave,” making claims to demands beyond the right to vote. A more fruitful framework, however, would be to think of late-twentieth-century feminist thought emerging out of overlaps, echoes, and legacies that often coexisted in the same moment. It both reflected and subverted the conventions and norms of its time, while maintaining its transgressive and utopian orientation. At the heart of feminist projects lay the imperative to theorize and wrestle with the category of “woman” and how it had been given meaning through time and in culture.