Dr Jonathan Dean - Out of Apathy: Optimism, Hope and Resurgence Feminist Activism

Date: 12 October 2011, 4.00pm
Location: Beech Grove House

Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies Internal Seminar Series

Title: Out of Apathy: Optimism, Hope and Resurgent Feminist Activism - Dr Jonathan Dean, School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds

Abstract:

The argument that we have moved from a politicised recent past to an apolitical and disappointing feminist present is a recurrent theme in recent feminist scholarship. However, such gloomy diagnoses of the feminist present have not gone uncontested: several strands of feminist research have explicitly sought to generate more hopeful and affirmative orientations towards the feminist present. This paper assesses and compares two such strands. These are, first, “new materialist” accounts of post-human agency and, second, ethnographic and empirical research on resurgent feminist activisms.

Whilst at first glance, these might seem to be two very different sets of discourses, I argue that there are a number of fruitful converges. The paper raises a number of critical questions about new materialist discourses, primarily concerning their engagements with poststructuralism and the linguistic turn. However, I argue that some of these problems are partly overcome in Jane Bennett’s account of what she calls “vital materiality”. Bennett acknowledges the contribution of poststructuralism, and foregrounds how her vital materialism is as much a political project as it is a philosophical/epistemological one, which in turn helps shed light on key convergences between feminist activism and new materialist theoretical claims. Taken together, recent empirical work on feminist activism, combined with a reworking of new materialist accounts of non-human agency, constitute a powerful rebuttal to pessimistic narratives of feminist decline and depoliticisation.