Feminist afterlives: The defenses and dead ends of revisionist history

Of the many vexing political questions that haunt feminists in the twenty-first century, one of the most difficult is also one of the most persistent: why are feminist theory and activism so susceptible to the appropriative co-optation of its best ideas? The question has undeniably contemporary motivations, given that in the last several years alone, feminist vocabularies have been deployed, very much against their own grain, to defend policing in the face of an abolitionist uprising, to denigrate and delegitimize trans women and their political claims, to explain away careening economic inequality, and to justify the extension of religious freedoms that dramatically undermine fragile gains for sexual freedom. As Lorna Bracewell and Manon Garcia show in a pair of books that return to previous moments in feminist theory and activism, uncertainty about how best to defend feminism against its would-be co-opters has been a perennial problem: from anti-feminist women and midcentury reactionary conservatives during the post-war era to liberal legal scholars in the 1980s, Bracewell and Garcia reveal a wide range of strategies that have threatened to appropriate feminist concerns for their own ends.