Feeling political: Approaching the archives in the spirit of their times

A brief response to Rosa's paper (in our previous blog post), asking how we might approach the archives through the political feeling of the times we study.

Rosa’s paper raises an interesting methodological question about how to encounter and read the archives so that the story of feminism isn’t one that is merely reacting to and emergent from men’s violence and failures – men as brothershits, in the words of one of her interlocutors – but also as a possibility for feminist conversations that are not routed through male violence. How does one begin to carve out these feminist connections in the archives? A method that does that, as Rosa’s does, takes the zeitgeist of a particular period of feminist activism in the 70s and 80s that was deeply committed to the power of women relating to women. We’ve heard about the Red Stockings and Consciousness Raising and another, allied group, The RadicalLesbians’ Woman Identified Woman manifesto kept coming to my mind as I read Rosa’s account of how Australian and East Asian feminists encountered each other. Its memorable first line “What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion” is an indication of the figure of the lesbian not as a figure of sexual identity alone but as a way of knowing and encountering the world through selves that are not forged through male violence. Our energies must flow towards our sisters not backward toward our oppressors, they wrote and if that vision had a method it might be one that sought out connections between disparate groups of feminists, attempting to find a way for them to talk to each other rather than through their oppressors, whether they be Marxist Australian men or members of the Chinese Maoist party. And so I would love to hear how one might approach the archive politically, attuning to sensibilities that seek to tell the story of these feminists encountering each other without reading their motivations and words as mediated through male powerbrokers. What work does that take in the archive? What is the method and what new objects must it seek out?

Rosa’s paper offers some provocations around what kind of feminist theory she is producing as well. Is it a story of Third World feminism which, as I understand it, is a feminism of transnational connectedness, power relations, and historical linkages and continuities? Third World feminism is not just a feminism generated by feminists based in what was formerly called the Third World. This term has since been reclaimed as a space of internationalism and political commitment to theorizing connections through conditions of coloniality and racialization. It is a feminism that is insistent on locating events and processes across contexts and linking them across time to shared conditions of oppression. Can the awkward laughs, faltering attempts at solidarity and productive confusions come together to show a Third World feminism that thinks across and with difference not only as definitive but also as feminism in a perhaps decolonial mode: tentative and unfinished, always in the making? Can this too be a Third World feminism?

It would be too predictable to end my response with Audre Lorde’s words on difference, vital as they are. I’m thinking of her lines from Sister Outsider, “The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference” where she insists on needing to work through and with difference. Although of course that too. Instead, let me end by gesturing to the possibility of tentative and speculative feminist connection as not only the result of archival work but as a way into the archive itself; to think of how the feminists here might recharge our sense of the lingering possibilities of a Third World feminism, and finally, on International Women’s Day to understand transnational feminist projects as unfinished and painful, but always mutually produced and constituted.