Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies: Gender, Race, and Sexuality ed. by Ania Loomba and Melissa Sanchez (review)

It has been a good long while since scholars have tried to tackle head on the "feminism" question in our field. Much is at stake, and for many the risks outweigh potential gains. Editors Ania Loomba and Melissa Sanchez and the scholars they have drawn together in this volume tackle those risks and in large part succeed. Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies offers readers, both advanced and undergraduate, useful and productive avenues not only to resuscitate feminist aims in early modern study but also to reimagine their possibilities in light of the very concerns (e.g., affect, globalism, race, and sexuality) that threatened to undermine the early modern feminist project in the first place. United in their commitment to an "intersectional" feminist approach to early modern studies, the essays in this volume advocate theorizing feminism in constant and dynamic contact with ongoing debates in gender, race, and sexuality studies. Calling their approach "divergentist," they suggest that "theories of oppression must be diverse and autonomous to account for the specificity of each form of oppression…because there may be irresolvable conflicts between different identities and loyalties" (7). For those of us who have been lamenting the loss of a cogent methodological articulation of feminist aims, this book goes a long way to ameliorate that absence.

Most useful in this very rich resource are its two bookends: Loomba and Sanchez's "Introduction: Why feminism? Why now?" and Valerie Traub's "Afterword: Early Modern (Feminist) Methods." Both offer informative overviews that map the state of feminist thinking. Traub's afterword offers an especially germane mapping of our methodological predispositions. Not only does she do a laudable job synthesizing the material content of the essays, and thereby perfectly illustrating the edition's "theory in practice," but she also engages those various sites of "intersectionality" in moments of coherence—areas of connection between authors on the subject of methodological self-awareness, as with Coppélia Kahn's and Diana E. Henderson's contributions—and dissonance—where one writer, for instance, poses the importance of social constraints (Crystal Bartolovich), while another advocates for a notion of "individuated personhood" (Kathryn Schwarz). The presence of these dialogic experiments in one volume stands as a model for the multi-vocal and productive environment that defines contemporary feminist thought in our field.

Rethinking Feminism is broken into four sections of three essays each. Section 1, "Histories," offers readers three critical field overviews of the feminist movement writ large. In the first, Loomba and Sanchez ("Feminism and the Burdens of History") suggest that feminism is alive and well, having survived as something of a pack animal, adopting along the way a host of new and significant riders, among them, "postcolonial, critical race, queer, and affect studies" (17). They also note, as a result of these acquisitions, a winnowing of meta-theoretical possibilities and a lack of focus on methodological analysis as an explicit site of debate in its own right. A reprise of the editors' thesis, this essay argues again for an "intersectional" approach and a more expansive lens. We need to engage all of the many aspects of the feminist enterprise together, they note, "not because they seamlessly intersect or merge, nor because they are mutually supportive or analogous. Rather, it is precisely because analytics of race, gender … [and] sexuality … resist the ideals of universality and coherence celebrated by multiculturalism that they must not be studied in isolation from one another nor marginalized as special interest topics relevant only to limited constituencies" (20).

Diana E. Henderson's "Tempestuous Transitions and Double Vision: From Early to Later Modern Gendered Performances in Higher Education" moves back and forth over four decades from 1984 to 2014. It provides a historical sense of the feminist enterprise as a fluid and shifting pursuit. It also turns from early modern scholarship within the feminist community to consider...