Feminism and the Radical Democratic Imaginary: Futures Past

In Part I of this course we explore how conceptualizations of the past shape imaginative visions of possible futures. How we understand the past has a direct bearing on what can count as a “realistic” course of social, political, and economic action. Our conception of the past is itself shaped by a projected future and different societies have different ways of imagining the relations between their own future and past. Originating in the revolutionary 18th century, Western feminism’s conceptualization of this relation, its own “futures past” (to speak with Reinhart Koselleck), is characterized by an anticipatory and distinctively modern temporality that assumes the novelty and openness of the future. If the history of feminism calls at times for rewriting, that is less because new facts are discovered than that the ever-changing present opens new perspectives on the past and makes new demands on what it can mean. The past is figured more in terms of projected futures than fidelity to how things really were. For this reason, feminist historiography is rife with debates about whose story is told, and the idea of a “wave” itself has with good reason been criticized as overly generalizing in ways that blind us to the far more fraught and complex histories not captured in its conceptual net.
PLSC 44905 | CCCT 44905