Carly Guest

Knowing feminism: the significance of higher education to women’s narratives of ‘becoming feminist’

ABSTRACT Educational spaces have long provided opportunities for politicisation and activism. However, research into the processes through which students become politicised can often focus on participation in recognised forms of political action, thereby ignoring the multiple factors active in developing a political consciousness. This paper draws on narrative interviews with feminist women to consider the importance of education to their experience of becoming feminist. It considers how, for a particular group of women who were all students or recent graduates of non-STEM disciplines, academic feminism formed an important part of their narrative of becoming feminist. Each of the women referred to having a long-standing feminist inclination, instinct or feeling and indicated that studying academic feminism offered them the tools for reflecting on and articulating this.

Extraordinary normalcy: Home, relationships and identities in narratives of unpaid care

ABSTRACT Based on audio diaries and narrative interviews with family carers, this paper suggests care can be understood as an experience of ‘extraordinary normalcy’, meaning that profound shifts in home, relationships and identities take place whilst caring, yet these become part of the normalcy of family life. To maintain and understand a sense of normalcy, our participants utilise professional and technological interventions in the home and draw on notions of responsibility, reciprocity and role‐reversal as frameworks for explaining why they continue to care, despite the challenges it brings. The paper considers how domestic activities performed in the home can both highlight the extraordinary aspects of care and help maintain the normalcy of the everyday. Extraordinary normalcy is a concept that problematises definitions of care that remove it from the relational and everyday, yet acknowledges the challenges people face when performing care. This paper contributes to a call for a narrative based development of social policy and makes recommendations for policy and practice based on the in‐depth accounts of family carers. HIGHLIGHTSCaring precipitates profound shifts in home, relationships and identities that are incorporated into the everyday.Caring for a family member with additional needs can result in a changing experience of home, relationships and identities.Successful professional or technological interventions in the home are those that facilitate routine and familiarity.Changes or interruption to domestic routines can highlight the challenges of caring and the progression of illness.Notions of responsibility, reciprocity and role‐reversal provide explanatory frameworks for caring for a family member.

The Memory-Work Group: Feminist Belonging

Using the work of Nira Yuval-Davis, this chapter considers how four women who took part in a memory-work group negotiate a sense of feminist belonging across three sites. Firstly, two memories written by Alexandra illustrate how belonging is negotiated across social positionings. Alexandra was able to establish a sense of belonging on a SlutWalk march as a white middle-class woman. Secondly, the women’s discussion of arguing demonstrates how establishing belonging can secure a feminism that feels under threat. Finally, the women’s discussion of strategies they employ to ensure they are listened to exposes shifting boundaries of belonging. Across these sites, the ‘proper feminist’ is an illusionary figure that regulates feminist belonging. The women measure themselves against this figure, despite an awareness of exclusions she enacts.

Cultivating reflexive research practice when using participants’ photographs as research data

This chapter reflects on a study exploring the development of a feminist consciousness. During the interviews participants were invited to share photographs that were significant to their feminist becoming. Various ethical and methodological challenges arose in analysing these visual data in relation to the ethics of interpretation and dissemination of participants’ personal photographs. Both issues were highlighted and addressed through reflexive research practice, which exposed how the researcher’s reaction to and feelings about the photographs impacted upon how they were interpreted and shared. Reflexivity demands that researchers interrogate their research choices and is essential for ethical and rigorous research. This chapter argues that visual methods, whilst posing new ethical challenges, can enhance the reflexive research practice necessary for responding to and navigating them.

Narratives and Memories of Feminism

This chapter considers how the familiar language of waves and generations has been deployed in dominant retellings of Western feminist histories, and the critical work that has sought to challenge and disrupt it. It argues for a focus on the particularities and intricacies of personal narratives and memories as a means of destabilising and intervening into these hegemonic accounts. It considers the landscape of UK and US contemporary feminism over the past 15 years, in particular the contrast between declarations of feminism’s ‘death’ and of the proliferation of visible feminist activism. This chapter introduces the cases that follow that explore feminist identities, not by making claims about what feminism is, but about how it is experienced, felt and remembered by some feminist women today.

Aaliyah and Jenny: Feminist Hope

This chapter considers how hope operates in the stories of Aaliyah and Jenny. Aaliyah tells a story of the conflicts she experienced as a young Muslim Swedish African girl. For Aaliyah, feminism offers a means of negotiating these conflicts, as she increasingly comes to see them as political concerns. As a child, Jenny hoped for a gender-equal future, but this was not realised in her adult life. Feminism offers Aaliyah a way of articulating concerns with the world around her and is full of hope. For Jenny, feminism feels, at times, hopeless, as she sees a reproduction of the gender inequalities she witnessed as a child. She nevertheless continues to invest in the generational transmission of feminism by ‘passing it on’ to her own daughter. This chapter considers the different ways hope operates in women’s relationship to feminist pasts, presents and futures.

Rebecca: Class, Politics and Family

In this chapter, Guest introduces Rebecca, whose identification with the sights, sounds and politics of 1980s Britain, in particular the 1984–1985 miners’ strikes, provides the foundation for her story of becoming feminist. In Rebecca’s memories of this period, her mother comes to the fore as the political actor. This chapter considers the various ways Rebecca draws connections between her mother’s feminism and her own and so acknowledges the purchase that generational narratives have for the women interviewed. However, through a close reading of Rebecca’s story, it always challenges the often linear and progressive temporalities generational narratives can rely upon. It offers a new means of thinking about the generational, familial and maternal as opening up rather than foreclosing possibilities for engagement with feminism’s pasts.

Richa, Ruby and Beth: Feeling Feminism

Beginning with a discussion of feminist anger, this chapter considers the risks of being silenced when expressing emotion. Guest then explores how emotion is validated through three stories. Firstly, Richa’s story of living across continents highlights that emotion is social and contextual. Richa legitimises anger by recognising that it is a ‘reasonable’ response to problems in the world. Ruby and Beth validate feminist feelings through protest and activism. Ruby’s admiration for the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham Common and Beth’s visual narrative of protest sites draws upon a history of visceral, theatrical and embodied feminist activism. Through this they award value to their emotional protest in the present. Sara Ahmed’s discussion of emotion is used throughout to consider how these women hold onto feminist feelings.

Fortunes of feminism: from state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis

Nancy Frasers Fortunes of Feminism is a collection of essays spanning 25 years. The first, ‘Whats Critical about Critical Theory?’ was written in 1985 and the last, ‘Between Marketization and Soc...