Special issue article

Feminist Theory
0(0) 1–14
Feminism’s there: On ! The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1464700115604127
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Kate Eichhorn
The New School University, New York, USA

Abstract
Over the past decade, feminists born during and after the rise of women’s liberation
have become increasingly preoccupied with the movement’s past – its documents and
artefacts. This is evident in publications such as Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds
and Victoria Hesford’s Feeling Women’s Liberation, as well as artistic interventions by
artists such as Sharon Hayes and Allyson Mitchell. In different ways, these theorists’ and
artists’ projects each enact a longing for and reassessment of 1970s feminisms. At the
same time, a younger generation of feminists comprising women born since 1980 has
begun to look back to 1990s feminism as a site of longing and an object of critique.
While both generations continue to distance themselves and their projects from nos-
talgia, this article suggests that rather than reject nostalgia entirely, these projects in fact
bring feminist nostalgia into relief, pointing to both its dangers and possibilities.

Keywords
Clare Hemmings, Elizabeth Freeman, feminism, nostalgia, post-ness, Victoria Hesford

A colleague recently asked me to read the introduction to her forthcoming collec-

tion of essays – a series of refereed and non-refereed articles written over the course
of more than forty years of feminist activism.1 The task felt daunting. By the time
I was born in the early 1970s, she had already helped to found feminist organisa-
tions, facilitated consciousness-raising meetings, reported on the movement, and
lent her voice and energy to myriad radical causes. Reading the introduction to her
collection, which spans several decades of feminist activism – including those
I missed – confirmed what I already knew to be true. She was there – when fem-
inism was really happening, when it was not simply an event but the event – and
I was not. I also knew and appreciated that I had been asked to read her intro-
duction (along with several notable scholars and activists of her own generation)

Corresponding author:
Kate Eichhorn, Culture and Media Studies, Eugene Lang College, The New School University, 65 W. 11th St.,
Room 255, New York, NY 10101, USA.
Email: eichhorc@newschool.edu

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2 Feminist Theory 0(0)

precisely because I hadn’t been there. Absence, it turns out, is also a valued
standpoint.
A few weeks after reading the introduction to my colleague’s collection of essays
and confronting, yet again, my absence from feminism’s mythical there, I pur-
chased a copy of International Girl Gang Underground, a zine edited by Kate
Wadkins and Stacy Konkiel.2 Although compiled in the midst of what the editors
describe as the ‘Riot Grrrl revival of 2010’, bound by neither copyright restrictions
nor the constraints of a limited print run, the zine continues to be reproduced and
to circulate. Not surprisingly, the editors share my feeling of having been absent
from feminism when it was really happening, but with one notable difference –
from their standpoint, I was there. In this case, however, the there in question is not
1970s or 1980s feminism, but 1990s feminism. On the surface, the zine is a veritable
archive of belatedness. Most of the contributors recount discovering Riot Grrrl
and the feminist cultural production and activism with which it became synonym-
ous only after the fact either through its music or ‘in the stacks’ (Wadkins and
Konkiel, 2011: 53). Yet, cutting across nearly all of the essays and reflections in
Wadkins and Konkiel’s zine is a consensus that Riot Grrrl and the type of femin-
ism it fostered did not disappear in the late 1990s but rather continued to percolate
in diverse sites of cultural production and activism, often in new and notably more
diverse formations. Reading International Girl Gang Underground, I am struck by
the ease with which the editors and contributors are able to historicise a moment in
feminist cultural production and activism (at times, also offering astute criticisms of
its limits) while simultaneously casting it adrift in time. The there referred to across
the zine’s reflections and essays is both precise and open to appropriation and
reinterpretation.
These textual encounters confirmed for me that feminism’s there now points to
at least two different eras in feminist thought, cultural production and activism.
What is less clear is the extent to which the there alluded to in Wadkins and
Konkiel’s zine and the there that has structured my own scholarship on feminism
for the past two decades are connected, despite their pointing to different historical
periods, and this raises a series of broader questions. What is this there that haunts
contemporary feminist thought? What does it mean to have been there, or to have
never been there, if this place and time can simultaneously point to specific
moments in feminist history and be endlessly redeployed as a floating signifier in
the service of an unfinished social transformation with no clear expiration date? To
what extent has the status of feminism’s there undergone its own transformation in
the wake of recent attempts by feminist scholars and artists to grapple with feminist
history from an openly absent, even belated, standpoint? Is this post-ness, which
now appears to be defining feminism, not just another form of nostalgia?
As I maintain throughout this article, the spectre of feminism’s there reminds us
that absence – or more precisely, the repeated sense of having been absent from an
event that was feminism – now appears to be as integral as presence to feminism’s
persistence in the twenty-first century. This is not to suggest that feminism’s there
can be easily cast against a more immediate experience of feminism. Rather, not

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Eichhorn 3

being there is a standpoint that has gained legitimacy and currency in feminist
thought and cultural production over the past decade, because it offers an open
platform from which to build a feminism in the present and for the future. Yet, this
temporal shift also opens up the possibility for a radical politic that appears as
committed to longing for both real and imagined versions of the past as it is to
futurity and for one that is no longer premised on their opposition. All this, I argue,
demands at the very least a reassessment of nostalgia and its status in contempor-
ary feminist thought and cultural production.3

Feminism – An event that was

Since the publication of Astrid Henry’s somewhat cynical lament, Not My Mother’s
Sister: Generational Conflict and Third Wave Feminism, in 2004, feminist scholars
born in the late 1960s and beyond have published an increasing number of articles
and books that actively seek to rethink an earlier generation’s feminism. In contrast
to Henry’s publication, which provided an important framework for thinking
through some of the ugly feelings that structure inter-generational feminist rela-
tionships and politics, much of the more recent scholarship in question here has
focused on rescuing 1970s feminism from the margins, even reclaiming it as a
vehicle for a feminist politic in the present. Here, among other publications,
I include Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories
(2010), Clare Hemmings’ Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist
Theory (2011), and most recently, Victoria Hesford’s Feeling Women’s Liberation
(2013). In many respects, these books are most notable for their differences.
Freeman’s study focuses primarily on queer history while Hemmings’ and
Hesford’s studies focus specifically on feminist histories, though all three books
pay considerable attention to the often-reviled figure of the 1970s radical lesbian
feminist. Moreover, although all three authors are products of Anglo-feminist
traditions, Freeman writes as an American scholar while both Hemmings and
Hesford came to feminism while growing up in the United Kingdom under the
shadow of Thatcher-era politics. Without glossing over the notable differences in
focus and perspective that mark these studies, they are nevertheless connected by
several recurring preoccupations and claims that reflect more widespread currents
in contemporary feminist thought and cultural production.
First, in different ways, cutting across these books is a consensus that feminism,
especially radical feminism and lesbian feminism, was misread not only by the
critics who wished to place its claims and gains under erasure (e.g., Republicans,
fundamentalist Christians, gun-toting misogynists and not-to-be-fully-trusted pro-
feminist men) but also by a younger generation of feminists – women who dis-
covered feminism in the late 1980s to early 1990s, just as it was imploding under the
persuasive critiques levelled by the identity politics wars on the one hand and
poststructuralist theorising on the other. Each of these books also makes a
strong case for the fact that this rejection of 1970s feminism is something that
younger feminists were taught in the context of feminist institutions that ironically

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4 Feminist Theory 0(0)

owe their very existence to 1970s feminist activists and scholars. As Hemmings
emphasises, the assumption that ‘We have moved from a time when we knew no
better, a time when we thought ‘‘woman’’ could be the subject and object of lib-
eration, to a more knowing time in which we attend to the complexity of local and
transnational formations of gender and its intersections with other vectors of
power’ (2011: 34) is an assumption based on a story of feminism that we (here,
‘we’ refers to feminists now in their late thirties to forties) repeatedly encountered
as students of Women’s Studies in the mid 1990s. It is also a story that continues to
be reproduced in the contemporary gender studies curriculum: ‘In one way or
another, through curriculum design, through what is included in an ‘‘advanced’’
or ‘‘introductory’’ academic feminist class, or through the narratives we produce in
lectures or in our readings and corrections of student work, we reproduce this
understanding of Western feminist theory as having progressed, in a particular
manner’ (Hemmings, 2011: 34).
Albeit along somewhat different trajectories, Freeman and Hesford both offer
readers new strategies for interpreting the texts, images and artefacts of the second
wave feminist movement. As Freeman eloquently argues, however reviled the
refuse of second wave feminism may be – perhaps especially the accumulated arch-
ive of texts, images and artefacts associated with lesbian feminism – the past may
not be what we imagined.4 ‘Post-ness’, after all, is not without aesthetic and pol-
itical efficacy. Indeed, as she demonstrates, the subjects of Time Binds – contem-
porary women artists born during and in the wake of second wave feminism’s rise
in the late 1960s to early 1970s – are effectively ‘mining the present for signs of
undetonated energy from past revolutions’ (Freeman, 2010: xvi). Referencing the
work of artists, such as Sharon Hayes and Allyson Mitchell, Freeman demon-
strates how we might begin to understand second wave feminism, even the aban-
doned utopian project of radical feminism, not as a failed project but rather as the
grounds for a feminist project not yet realised.
While Hesford cautions against what she perceives as an at times too loving
reclamation of forgotten histories (a tendency she attributes specifically to queer
historical projects), she openly acknowledges her debt to queer theorists, such as
Freeman, and engages in her cautious yet decisive reassessment of 1970s feminism.
Again, Hesford’s project is not simply to draw attention to a movement that was
misread but to examine the forgotten archive of second wave feminism as part of a
larger project to see the movement ‘as having effects that exceeded its immediate
context’ (2013: 14). In both Freeman’s and Hesford’s studies, the experience of
having not been there – the experience of having missed the event that was femin-
ism – emerges as a potentially powerful standpoint from which to both re-evaluate
and rebuild a feminist movement in the present and for the future.
Appropriately, the cover of Hesford’s Feeling Women’s Liberation features a
photograph from Sharon Hayes’ series, In the Near Future, New York (2005).
Here, we encounter a woman (the artist herself) standing on the street holding a
sign that reads, ‘I AM A MAN’.5 The sign ‘re-speaks’, to borrow Hayes’ own term,
a slogan from the past and in essence, effectively re-activates the there that

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Eichhorn 5

apparently was feminism in a contemporary public space.6 Hayes’ visual response

to 1970s activism asks viewers to question why it is that feminism – its causes,
slogans and iconography – is so deeply defined by post-ness, even when put into
circulation in the present. Here, feminisms’ there becomes a signpost in the present,
and in this sense, something we might experience or experience again. A similar
impulse guides artist Allyson Mitchell’s work and perhaps most notably, her 2013
installation, Kill Joy’s Kastle: A Lesbian Feminist Haunted House. On the installa-
tion’s opening night, hundreds of women of all ages lined up for hours to experi-
ence Mitchell’s creation first hand. It promised participants an opportunity to have
a series of close encounters with lesbian feminists of past eras, including such
familiar typecast figures as the surly ball-busting butch, didactic Women’s
Studies professor and crochet-clad lesbian separatist activist. In keeping with the
impulse of many contemporary feminist theorists, Mitchell’s haunted house
pointed to a present political landscape haunted by the ghostly remains of the
feminist-as-lesbian figure that dominated the political landscape of 1970s feminism.
For at least a couple of weeks, Kill Joy’s Kastle enabled participants to be there or
to be there again in that place and time they either missed or simply miss.7
That post-ness appears to have become a defining feature of contemporary
feminist thought and cultural production – at least for women born during and
after the rise of the Women’s Liberation movement – is not altogether surprising.
After poststructuralism, where else was there to go but back to history and its
material artefacts and documents? The current preoccupation with history, its
material residue and archives, then, represents less a discovery than an acknow-
ledgement of concerns that were always already at the centre of feminist scholar-
ship and cultural production. Yet, in the 1990s, few of my peers could have
predicted that by 2014 so many of us would be engaged in theoretical and artistic
projects definitively focused on feminism’s past, how it was misread and mistreated,
and how it might be reclaimed or redeployed. Even fewer of us would have ima-
gined our comparatively minor feminist histories becoming the object of similar
investigations by women born in the 1980s to early 1990s whose version of Kill
Joy’s Kastle would no doubt look different than Mitchell’s version but be struc-
tured by similar critiques and similar desires.
But if feminism is now readily constructed – by several generations of feminists –
as an event that was, does this not imply that feminism is now experienced first and
foremost as nostalgia or at least through its distorting lens? If so, why does nos-
talgia remain a fraught and, to date, largely unaccounted for aspect of recent
developments in contemporary feminist thought and cultural production?

Feminist nostalgia
Despite the growing body of theorising on post-ness, forgotten feminist histories,
archives and temporality, nostalgia remains a taboo subject amongst feminists,
even those engaged in theoretical or artistic projects that otherwise appear
openly nostalgic. Indeed, even in the context of theoretical and artistic projects

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6 Feminist Theory 0(0)

structured by what appears to be a nostalgic longing for feminism’s past, nostalgia

arguably remains the feeling that dare not speak its name.
Freeman, for example, carefully pre-empts the nostalgia question in the Preface
to Time Binds by emphasising that, for the queer feminist artists featured in her
book, ‘Pure nostalgia for another revolutionary moment [. . .] will not do. But nor
will its opposite’ (2010: xvi). She goes on to offer ‘temporal drag’, which points to
the pull of the past on the present and to the queerness and campiness of mining the
past for images and artefacts to redeploy and recycle in the present, as a concept
that is neither nostalgia’s offspring nor its opposite but a strategic stand-in never-
theless. This intervention appears intent on ensuring that neither Freeman nor the
subjects of her study will become subject to accusations of nostalgia. By contrast, in
Hemmings’ book, nostalgia is attributed to older rather than younger feminists – to
the generation of women who were there rather than to the generation or two of
feminists who found feminism through its archival traces. In a passage focused on
the generational logics that have structured and continue to structure feminist
theory, she observes, ‘Feminism is thus locked into a psychoanalytic dynamic of
vigorous supersession (by the younger) and melancholic nostalgia (by the older)’
(Hemmings, 2011: 148). Notably, Hemmings also appears to subscribe to a broader
tendency amongst feminist scholars to carefully distance the renewed attention to
materialism in feminist thought from anything that might be mistakenly cate-
gorised as nostalgia. The return to materialism, she observes, is a ‘knowing
return, full of futurity rather than nostalgia’ (Hemmings, 2011: 97). Hesford’s
study, perhaps the most nostalgic of the three books in question here, is also the
one that makes the greatest effort to distance itself from nostalgia. When nostalgia
is mentioned at all – only three times throughout the book – it is presented as
something to be denounced at all cost. In her Preface, Hesford argues that ‘To stay
stuck in nostalgic longing for the thereness of [women’s liberation’s] imagined
promise is precisely what I have tried to resist in this book’ (2013: viii). Later,
while re-articulating the scope and intent of her book, she writes, ‘My intentions in
this book have been to render problematic accounts of women’s liberation that pay
little or no attention to its eventfulness. These accounts narrate the history of the
movement as a story of either political failure or fulfillment and call for a disiden-
tification from, or nostalgia for, the movement in the present’ (Hesford, 2013: 157).
Hesford goes on to explain that her project seeks to ‘offer instead accountability to
the movement’s multiplicity and unknowability as an event that is not over’ (2013:
158, emphasis in original).
Implied in Hesford’s statement of intentions is an assumption that nostalgia
necessarily can only be experienced in relation to something that is over, and
therefore entirely unobtainable. Nostalgia in this respect is understood as ‘felt
lack’, or a longing for an absence (Stewart, 1984: 23). More notably, Hesford’s
strategic distancing from nostalgia appears to be rooted in a series of well rehearsed
postmodern critiques of nostalgia, which Hemmings and Freeman also evidently
share. Nostalgia abuses individual and collective memory. It sets objects, figures
and even entire eras adrift in new economies. Nostalgia distorts reality while

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Eichhorn 7

claiming a historical real. And, as Hesford emphasises, with nostalgia, there is

always the risk of getting stuck – of being held back in the past. For all these
reasons, it follows that nostalgia has no place whatsoever in a radical political
project and this undoubtedly also accounts for why these theorists, each in her
own way, make a considerable effort to either avoid the nostalgia question (indeed,
the words ‘nostalgia’ and ‘nostalgic’ appear no more than a few times in any of
these books and are notably absent from the indexes of both Hemmings’ and
Hesford’s books altogether), or openly distance themselves from nostalgia by expli-
citly stating that their projects are driven by other intentions. But if this is the case,
how do we account for passages such as the following in which Hesford offers a
reading of Kate Millett’s Flying (1974) and its potential to be redeployed in the
present:

I read Flying as a remnant from the past of women’s liberation that provides a route
back to the historical context of the feminist-as-lesbian’s emergence as a figure of and
for women’s liberation [. . .]. Rather than simply judge Flying as a textual remainder of
women’s liberation’s whiteness [. . .] I attempt to read it in its ‘moment of invention’
[. . .]. By reading Flying in its moment of invention, being attentive to its mediation of
the historical in relation to the subjective, I want to keep the moment – 1970 – open
and bring ‘its ghosts and specters [. . .] flaring into the present.’ (Hesford, 2013:
158–159)

Can we safely and definitively conclude that there is nothing nostalgic about
Hesford’s reading? Similarly, can we safely and definitively conclude that there is
nothing nostalgic about Freeman’s project when she unapologetically writes, ‘Now
I think the point may be to trail behind actually existing social possibilities: to be
interested in the tail end of things, willing to be bathed in the fading light of
whatever has been declared useless’ (2010: xiii)? Likewise, how do we read the
work of visual artists, such as Sharon Hayes or Allyson Mitchell, whose artistic
practices entail the careful collection and recirculation of 1970s feminist slogans
and iconography, as entirely divorced from nostalgia? Finally, can we conclude
that there was nothing nostalgic about the so-called Riot Grrrl revival of 2010?
Reading further into the texts and interventions in question here, however, there
appears to be an acknowledgement that nostalgia may be at least present, if not
fully realised, in the post-ness that now marks so many aspects of feminist thought
and cultural production. A contributor to International Girl Gang Underground
emphasises that the 2010 Riot Grrrl revival was ‘more than a celebration of 90s
nostalgia’ (Wadkins and Konkiel, 2011: 62). Similarly, when discussing the 1990s
appropriation of the 1970s culture, Freeman emphasises that it was ‘more than
mere nostalgia on the part of a cohort born after 1965’ (2010: 83). As already
noted, even in her book’s Preface she admits that for the queer feminist artists
featured in her book, ‘Pure nostalgia for another revolutionary moment [. . .] will
not do. But nor will its opposite’ (Freeman, 2010: xvi). While these comments
appear intended to function as a distancing tactic or repudiation of nostalgia,

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8 Feminist Theory 0(0)

read another way, more than nostalgia may also suggest that what we are now
encountering is nostalgia but in a form that effectively exceeds the limits of nos-
talgia as we have previously experienced it. The question, then, becomes what is
this nostalgia that exceeds its limits? What is this nostalgia that feminist theorists
and cultural workers at once appear so deeply drawn to and so compelled to avoid?
And is nostalgia necessarily a threat?
Not surprisingly, to date, feminists have by and large avoided the question of
nostalgia, but there are a few exceptions. Lynne Huffer’s Maternal Pasts, Feminist
Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics, and the Question of Difference (1998) provides a rare
sustained discussion of nostalgia. Huffer’s assessment of nostalgia is predictably
scathing. Feminist theory, she argues, has shown ‘how a nostalgic structure works
to perpetuate patriarchal oppression’ (Huffer, 1998: 16). After all, according to
Huffer nostalgia is hardwired into the Oedipal fantasies that structure patriarchy
and its central domain (the heterosexual family). She does, however, acknowledge
the fact that nostalgia may sometimes structure liberatory movements – for exam-
ple, the African diaspora’s longing for Africa or lesbians’ shared preoccupation
with Sappho’s writing, which appears to gesture to the possible existence of
a les\bian utopia in the otherwise patriarchal world of ancient Greece. Yet,
Huffer goes on to caution that even if ‘nostalgia can be harnessed for liberatory
or oppressive aims’, it ultimately holds no possibility for recuperation because ‘the
structure underlying nostalgic thinking reinforces a conservative social system’
(1998: 19).
Notwithstanding its legitimate critiques, I would like to suggest that nostalgia
may be more complex than once imagined and that its presence in contemporary
feminist thought and cultural production brings this into relief. Indeed, I would like
to suggest that rather than being a singular feeling of longing for the past, nostalgia
may be a feeling that crosses many registers and, in this sense, does not signal
a ‘reactionary desire for the past’ after all (Lutz, 2004: 112). Following Svetlana
Boym, I maintain that ‘Nostalgia is not always about the past; it can be retrospective
but also prospective’ (2001: xvi). In fact, we might even think of nostalgia as some-
thing that ‘enables the future’ (Lutz, 2004: 112). As Kathleen Stewart reminds us,
nostalgia

depends on where you stand: from one place in the cultural landscape nostalgia is a
schizophrenic exhilaration of a pure present that reads images for their own sake;
from an other place it is a pained, watchful desire to frame the cultural present in
relation to an ‘other’ world – to make of the present cultural objects that can be seen,
appropriated, refused, disrupted. (1988: 228)

When it comes to nostalgia what matters, then, is context – where we stand in the
‘landscape of the present’. So the question is not whether or not the recent turn in
feminist thought and cultural production to projects focused on the past is nostal-
gic but rather what is unique or different about the context in which we are now
experiencing nostalgia?

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Eichhorn 9

Perhaps the fact that women born since the mid 1960s can claim to be nostalgic
at all should be celebrated as an unanticipated achievement. To be nostalgic one
must at least be able to imagine some idealised past; evidently, this is now more
possible than it was before. In contrast to those of previous generations, women of
my generation, and those much younger, are young enough to have missed some of
the most radical moments in feminist and queer politics and theory, art and activ-
ism. We missed the events of women’s liberation and gay liberation in the late
1960s to early 1970s. We missed the opportunity to try and fail to create utopian
communities in the 1970s. We missed the opportunity to experience sex radical
cultures and the initial rise of queer theory in the 1980s. With the exception of a few
years in the early 1990s when the influence of these existing currents was still
present, we are arguably young enough to have had our political ‘cathexis’ alto-
gether interrupted (Henry, 2004: 145). But this also means that by accident of birth,
the landscape of the present we occupy is no longer one that remains inherently
unmoored. I write this apparent defence of nostalgia from a terrain that is etched
by histories, lineages, inheritances and even, dare I say, an anxiety of influence with
distinctly matriarchal tinges. However, even if the standpoint from which we now
speak is not one entirely unmoored from the past, it is important to consider what
it is we are connecting to in this admittedly over-determined past.
Nostalgia is most often equated with objects – tin lunch boxes, vintage cars, the
ephemera of eBay and auctions. It gathers around certain kinds of surfaces and
materials – leatherette, vinyl and chrome. It is apparently analogue not digital.
Nostalgia, albeit falsely, is most often associated with the quaint, the kitsch, the
declining and most importantly, the consumable. These objects, however, are not
necessarily what nostalgia is. These trinkets, souvenirs, surfaces and formats are
merely what mediate our relation between a past and present moment. And this,
I maintain, is where feminist nostalgia takes a strange, even perverse, turn.
The nostalgia in question here, after all, is not for a particular object or set of
objects nor even a fixed time and place. If feminist nostalgia is unique, it is because
it is only for a set of conditions under which a repudiation of nostalgia was still
possible and indeed, necessary. In short, the preoccupation with the past in con-
temporary feminist thought and cultural production, with its post-ness, may point
to a type of nostalgia that does not necessarily exhibit nostalgia’s typical markers.
Feminist nostalgia is not about longing for some thing, time or place but rather
about longing for the very possibility of living in a landscape where the past held
little promise, little revolutionary potential, and the future was the only place where
possibility dwelled. What makes feminist nostalgia unique, then, is that it is not
nostalgia for something tangible but rather for the conditions under which there
was nothing for a feminist to be nostalgic about. What is desired in the case of
feminist nostalgia, then, is the sheer potentiality of being on the cusp of something
revolutionary. But did this moment exist?
In the Introduction to the first edition of the Feminist Memoir Project (2007),
Rachel Blau Duplessis and Ann Snitow liken the moment of discovering feminism
at the height of women’s liberation, somewhat shockingly, to a conversion

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experience. They also warn that, however powerful the moment of discovering
feminism may have been, it also quickly came to be structured by a myth that
effectively cast women either inside or outside its experience:

Indeed, the joy of feminism, for those who felt it, often had spiritual proportions. Like
a conversion experience – ‘the scales dropped from my eyes; I saw all things new.’
One’s inabilities and blockages, resentments, hidden griefs, all the paraphernalia and
picturesque qualities of ‘girlhood’ and ‘womanhood’ suddenly were ripped open, sud-
denly fell apart. And ‘all things’ – from the most mundane and habitual to the
most enormous – seemed changed. The repetition of this moment of conversion sug-
gests that there was a shared meaning and experience, and, at the same time, that a
myth came to structure the moment of origin. Those who felt outside this mythic
oneness saw it increasingly as a myth that excluded them. (Duplessis and Snitow,
2007: 7–8)

For all the gains my generation and subsequent generations of feminists inher-
ited, the one thing we could not inherit – the one thing from which we were always
already excluded – is the moment of potentiality described by Duplessis and Snitow
in the above passage. Even if we knowingly recognise the mythic quality of such
accounts, even if we appreciate the dangers of the conversion analogy and cringe at
the hyperbole, even if we remain suspicious of the passage’s claims, the pull of such
accounts on the present is palpable. After all, such accounts suggest that being
there was not only eventful but also transformational in ways that appear to exceed
representation. Nostalgia serves as a substitute, in this sense, for a potentiality that
can be neither easily represented nor simply bequeathed.8
To be clear my desire here is not so much to salvage nostalgia, perhaps, but
rather to directly face the surprising and uncomfortable circumstances under which
nostalgia has descended upon us in the twenty-first century. After all, to move from
a location in which nostalgia was, without question, unimaginable and hence,
entirely antithetical to one’s liberatory project to a location in which one might
experience the possibility of nostalgic longing is at the very least something worthy
of our attention. In this respect, it is worth returning briefly to Mary Jacobus’s
‘Freud’s Mnemonic: Women, Screen Memories, and Feminist Nostalgia’, pub-
lished in 1987. In her article, Jacobus writes of a ‘yearning for a lost past’ and
even dares to suggest that ‘feminist nostalgia’ may be ‘worth investigation’.
However, in 1987, the lost past in question for Jacobus was still a mythical one
(goddess myths dredged up from the cultural cellar and attempts to recover women
omitted from the literary canons) (1987: 135). In short, when nostalgia is men-
tioned by Jacobus, it is for something quite intangible. By contrast, the longing for
feminism’s there that is the subject of this article, written less than three decades
after Jacobus’s publication, points to a remarkably different type of feminist nos-
talgia – one that simply did not exist when Jacobus was writing her essay. While
there is no doubt that feminism has always entailed gesturing back to earlier gen-
erations’ struggles and ideas (indeed, by the mid to late 1930s, feminists were

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carefully working to preserve the work of those activists who would eventually
come to be known as first wave feminists), these earlier gestures took place under
remarkably different circumstances. They were by and large gestures back to ima-
gined worlds – the idealised world of Greek goddesses or feisty medieval nuns or
defiant inverts cross-dressing their way into male domains (said another way, pos-
sible worlds that might be recovered in lieu of histories). The nostalgia in question
here, I maintain, represents something quite different.

Coda
For all the reasons outlined above, while I continue to appreciate postmodern
critiques of nostalgia, I no longer believe that feminists engaged in projects that
look lovingly back on earlier parts of the feminist movement can or even should
repudiate nostalgia. As much as I hate to admit it, nostalgia has on a very personal
level at times served as an inter-generational bridge for me, bringing me into con-
versations with texts, individuals and ideas I may have otherwise never encoun-
tered, or at least not with the same degree of openness.
Admittedly, it was with at least a bit of nostalgia that several years ago, I found
myself engaged in a series of interviews with a generation of queer feminist writers
whose work I originally encountered in the late 1980s when I was just discovering
feminism. One of these writers was Nicole Brossard – a prolific poet and essayist
who has published more than thirty books since the mid 1960s. Because I already
knew that Brossard often emphatically refers to herself as a ‘woman of the present’,
it was not without reservation that I attempted to ask her a series of questions
focusing on the past. At first, she was polite, answering my admittedly nostalgic
questions with patience, but eventually she turned the tables on me. When I sug-
gested, ‘Since you’ve already given an entire vocabulary to another generation, in a
sense, we [contemporary lesbian feminist writers] don’t have to do that work’, she
interrupted to remind me, ‘It depends on what your questions are . . . what are your
questions in 2008?’ At the time, I was unable to answer her question, although
I knew then, as I do now, that my questions were and remain remarkably different
from the questions that have long preoccupied writers and theorists of her gener-
ation. These questions, of course, are also not exclusively my own but rather ques-
tions and concerns that appear central to the work of feminist scholars, writers and
artists born during and after the rise of the women’s liberation movement in the
late 1960s to early 1970s. Most notably, they are questions that ask in various ways
how to access or tap into the potentiality of a feminism that we evidently missed –
what Freeman aptly describes as the ‘undetonated energy’ of past and even par-
tially failed social transformations. The question that remains is how did we
arrive at these questions? What compelled Hesford to write a book nearly exclu-
sively focused on manifestations of feminist thought from a single year, 1970?
Or compelled Hayes to stand on the street re-speaking slogans from 1960s and
1970s political struggles? Under what circumstances did we arrive in this ‘near
future’?

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12 Feminist Theory 0(0)

It is not without consequence that the political landscape younger feminists once
discovered in the future – in the 1990s or in the early 2000s – was one already
structured by a combination of economic and political shifts that left many second
wave feminist institutions and legacies undone or struggling to survive. If feminists
born during and after the rise of the second wave feminist movement have been
especially drawn to the past – most notably, to its documents and artefacts but also
to the promise it represents – it has everything to do with the fact that we dis-
covered feminism just as many second wave feminist institutions were falling into
decline. Despite the fact that 1990s feminism now also circulates as the object of a
younger generation’s nostalgia, it was a period when feminism was both under
attack and waning in energy – a period marked by the closure of feminist book-
stores, collapse of feminist journals and presses, and dispersal of collectives and
organisations, many of which first appeared in the early 1970s. In short, I am
suggesting that if nostalgia became a site of possibility at some point, the
sheer hopelessness of the political landscape in the 1990s needs to be taken into
account.
In conclusion, however, I want to return again to Hesford’s decisive repudiation
of nostalgia – a repudiation that appears to define the very terms of her book (a book
that otherwise seeks to keep a particular moment in women’s liberation, 1970,
‘open’). Once again, Hesford warns that nostalgia is what she attempted to avoid
in her book because it is invariably about getting stuck in the past. I would like to
argue that there may be a way to understand the feelings feminists in their late
thirties to forties have for women’s liberation (and to even understand the feelings
a younger generation of feminists have for a particular moment of feminist cultural
production in the 1990s) that neither repudiates nostalgia nor concedes to its appar-
ent stickiness and ultimately, to its calcifying effects. After all, nostalgia for a time
when nostalgia was an impossibility for feminists is arguably where the possibility of
a book, such as Hesford’s Feeling Women’s Liberation, or an artistic intervention,
such as Hayes’ In the Near Future, began, but it is by no means necessarily where
these projects end. These projects – the standpoints from which they were produced –
are not only about an unrealised desire to have been there but also about realising the
potential of having been absent from an event that apparently was feminism. While it
may be the case, to cite Boym (2001: 355), that ‘As survivors of the twentieth century,
we are all nostalgic for a time when we were not nostalgic’, I believe that there is a
specificity to feminist nostalgia that can’t be ignored. After all, in sharp contrast to
the nostalgia experienced by, let’s say, immigrants or by people who never left home
but who underwent the seismic effects of a regime change in their home (as happened
in East Germany in the early 1990s), feminists are not nostalgic for a home that has
been lost or radically altered. Indeed, feminism has long been premised on the desire
to leave the home – to unmoor ourselves from its shackles and in some case, from
its memories too. The nostalgia in question here, then, is not easily mapped on
to other types of nostalgia but rather is one that denotes a longing for a potentiality
that exceeds a desire to return home and arguably exceeds any simple form of
capture.

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Eichhorn 13

Notes
1. The manuscript in question is Ann Snitow’s The Feminism of Uncertainty: A Gender
Diary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).
2. International Girl Gang Underground is distributed by For the Birds, a feminist collective
and distro: http://www.forthebirdscollective.org
3. Over the past eight years, I have attempted to grapple with the question of feminist
nostalgia on several occasions and in several forms. I originally started to explore the
question of feminist nostalgia in 2008. Since then, I have presented conference papers and
lectures on the subject in various venues – often to less than receptive audiences. Notably,
parts of this article were first written for a talk delivered at the CUNY Graduate Center
in February 2010 as part of the Tendencies: Poetics and Practice series.
4. Hemmings, Freeman and Hesford all directly address the ‘feminist-as-lesbian’ as a figure
who has been and continues to be particularly reviled in accounts of second wave fem-
inism. Typically, the ‘feminist-as-lesbian’ is evoked as a stand-in for anything unattract-
ive, humourless and didactic connected to feminism. All three authors also emphasise
how lesbian feminism itself has become marked as anachronistic – something that can
only exist in the past and has no place in the present or future. Yet, as discussed further
along in this article, it is the figure of the ‘feminist-as-lesbian’ who also appears to have
the most currency in the work of contemporary feminist artists, such as Sharon Hayes
and Allyson Mitchell, who both deploy this figure and her excessive stereotypes to
explore how the present is haunted by 1970s feminisms.
5. The slogan, ‘I am a man’, originated in the context of a 1968 strike at a sanitation plant in
Memphis, Tennessee. Although coined by a male worker seeking to draw attention to the
racial inequalities structuring the lives of the plant’s primarily African American work-
force, the slogan was soon adopted by the plant’s many female workers – a move that
effectively rendered visible the gendered nature of their workplace struggles for justice.
Hayes’ performance and photograph ‘re-speak’ the slogan in the present.
6. See Sharon Hayes’ profile on the Tanya Leighton Gallery site: http://www.tanyaleighton.
com/index.php?pageId=118&l=en
7. See Alison Cooley’s review of Allyson Mitchell’s Kill Joy’s Kastle in Canadian Art: http://
www.canadianart.ca/reviews/2013/10/29/allyson-mitchell-killjoys-kastle/
8. This raises one more question – a question that exceeds the scope of this article: How do
we account for the nostalgia that an even younger generation of thinkers, artists and
activists appear to have for 1990s feminism and its various forms of cultural intervention?
This is not a question for which I have a definitive answer, but it is one for which
I welcome responses, especially from women young enough to have missed 1990s fem-
inism when it apparently was an event.

References
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Cooley, Alison (2013) ‘The Haunting of Allyson Mitchell’s Kill Joy’s Kastle’. Canadian Art
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ell-killjoys-kastle/ (accessed 15 May 2014).
Duplessis, Rachel Blau and Snitow Ann (2007) The Feminist Memoir Project. New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Freeman, Elizabeth (2010) Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham:
Duke University Press.

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14 Feminist Theory 0(0)

Hemmings, Clare (2011) Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory.
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