Who Are We? Feminist Ambivalence in Contemporary Literary Criticism

Feminism exists in a perpetual identity crisis—with a vexed past, an unstable present, and an uncertain future. A scholar interested in this charged identity must manage such existential conditions in order to enable their transformative ambitions. Historicizing Post-Discourses (2017), Bodies of Information (2019), and Selling Women's History (2017) take up this cognitive and corporeal challenge and largely meet it. In these three books, feminism's endemic ambivalence becomes a resource for literary and cultural criticism. Focused on popular, digital, and material cultures in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century US, these volumes dramatize the merits and drawbacks of irresolution and resist a definitive conclusion about what feminism, both past and present, necessarily means for contemporary scholarship. Instead, we get alternative archives and, hopefully, better practices. Analyzing mass media, data visualizations, and consumer products, these studies engage new materials to flesh out the gendered, racialized human body at their common center. They rethink feminist historiography and demonstrate the myriad ways in which the sense of an ending continually renews and unsettles feminism's search for a useable past. These works aim to create strategic alliances: they drive at embodied, material concerns, foreground questions of pedagogy and other modes of public interchange, and embrace a style of advocacy that rejects such extreme position-taking and instead embraces ambivalence.