Feminism and futurity: Geographies of resistance, resilience and reworking

Abstract

This article is designed to stimulate debate over the possibilities for thinking feminist futures. It argues for moving away from a linear understanding of feminism which assumes that past feminism produces present and future feminism as a response to its previous waves. Instead, we argue for embracing the multiplicity and simultaneity of contemporary feminisms, taking inspiration from Elizabeth Grosz’s writings on futurity and Cindi Katz’s work on resistance, resilience and reworking. Drawing on Katz’s framing, we review three analytically distinct ways of conceptualising feminist politics and consider how feminist geographers are asking new questions of familiar domains, as well as finding gender formations and political possibilities in unexpected empirical sites. In doing so, we point to the contemporary relevance of feminist scholarship and politics, and affirm feminism's ongoing importance.

Solidarity, not charity: Learning the lessons of the COVID‐19 pandemic to reconceptualise the radicality of mutual aid

“…Broadly, this is when people are expected to give up any desire for autonomy and security from the pressures of capitalist life, and instead to become a flexible and adaptable subject: someone (or a group) who is able to cope with exposure to a system that is by its very nature hazardous and exploitative (Reid, 2016 ). This has led to critiques of the very term “resilience” within geography and beyond (Cretney, 2014 ; MacLeavy et al, 2021 ), with a preference for discussing community “resourcefulness” (MacKinnon & Derickson, 2013 ) that recognises the agency needed to be present within a community to resist oppression and marginalisation. Using a “commons as praxis” mantra (which as anarchist geography will suggest is very much related to mutual aid; Springer, 2014 ), mutual aid can challenge individualism and embrace shared resources and co‐operative behaviours (Springer, 2014 ).…”

The gendered geographies of dispossession and social reproduction: Homeworkers in the Global South during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Thus, while resistance draws upon and produces critical consciousness to confront conditions of exploitation, reworking “reorders and sometimes undermines the structural constraints that affect everyday life” to make it more livable (Katz, 2004: 251). Resilience, on the other hand, is a strategy of endurance that people adopt in their daily living that does not change their dire circumstances (MacLeavy et al, 2021). These strategies are not always mutually exclusive, for instance, Katz (2001) describes the strategy of migration among Sudanese youth in the 80s to evade military service during the war as a form of resistance and reworking.…”

Challenging neoliberal sport: Skateboarding as a resilient cultural practice

“…In the public realm however, resilience ‘from above’ (Weichselgartner & Kelman, 2015) has emerged as way to repackage neoliberal discourses of individual durability, calculative practice and self‐responsibility (MacLeavy et al., 2021). As such, resilience itself has been characterised as a mode of governmentality (Joseph, 2013), championing individual ability to ‘bounce back’ against challenges, characterising resilience an ability to succeed in neoliberal society (Gill & Orgad, 2018).…”

“…In this latter understanding, resilience shows how people can work together to transgress the dominant order (MacLeavy et al., 2021). Community thus becomes a critical arena for enacting these generative performances (Wilson, 2012).…”

“…Sites of resilience are thus situated and dynamic, called into being by different imaginaries of the present and future whilst showing the tactics to create them (MacLeavy et al., 2021). Within these sites, we see the reorganising of subjective arrangements that dominant discourses serve to disseminate (Lentzos & Rose, 2009).…”