Spatiotemporal Politics of Postwar U.S. "Feminist History": Manifestos, Histories, and Post-Feminisms

Abstract

This dissertation examines postwar U.S. feminist narrative practices of "making," writing, and sustaining "feminist history" and their spatiotemporal figuration of the subject of "women of color." In so doing, I attend to three discursive genres of postwar U.S. "feminist history": manifestos of postwar U.S. women's movements, histories of postwar U.S. women's movements, and the discourse of "post-feminism." The term "feminist history," in this sense, relates to the various ways that postwar U.S. feminists theorized women's liberation (manifestos), historicized the past of postwar U.S. women's movements (histories), and countered the putative "end" of postwar U.S. feminism (post-feminism). First, I argue that manifestos and histories of postwar U.S. women's movements as well as the discourse of "post-feminism" commonly utilized narrative form of discourse within which spatiotemporal imagination of "feminist history" articulate. Second, I point to the spatiotemporal figuration of racial others within these postwar U.S. feminist narratives of "feminist history." Third, I question the political implication of the spatial mobility of "women of color" which is increasingly seized by the late-modern spatiotemporal politics of multiculturalism.