Riot Grrrl

Since about 2010, Riot Grrrl has re-entered the public consciousness in ways that draw on nostalgia and display a desire to craft feminist histories. From reunion tours to the establishment of an archival presence in the academy, the Riot Grrrl resurgence has helped to establish the movement as an essential moment both in the founding of third-wave feminism and in the history of women in punk rock. In the process of historicization, academics and journalists have at times overemphasized Riot Grrrl’s political force, and at others struggled to address its failings, particularly around race, class, and elitism, that have shaped the movement from its beginnings. Drawing on feminist archive theory and theories of nostalgia, this chapter questions the political nature of remembering Riot Grrrl in the present day and addresses the juncture where the now-popular production of 1990s nostalgia intersects with the feminist historiography of the third wave.

Introduction

The introduction establishes the critical and cultural contexts of the study and makes the case for the value of an archival exploration of Vivien Leigh’s working life and career. It positions the book in relation to existing work on Leigh and on star archives and explains how the book as a whole seeks to reframe her legacy. More broadly, the case is made for a reframing of star studies through feminist historiography, focusing on the laboring life of female stars. The introduction outlines the major claims of the book and how it navigates the fields of feminist film historiography, archival theory, and star studies, and details the main archival collections with which the book engages.

“Whose Emancipatory Politics?” Toward a Postcolonial Technological Subject

With Donna Haraway, a new age of the feminist imaginary was born. This imaginary evocatively constructs new feminist subjectivities that are an amalgam of species, sensibilities and ambiguities. Despite the liberating potential of these imagined cyborgs devoid of normativity, the material digital cultures, and technological cultures, that enabled a social movement to this imagined cyborg was/is at a significantly different place in time without subjectivities. Writing on the “Metaphor and Materiality” of technofeminisms, Judy Wacjman opines, “Haraway is much stronger at providing evocative figurations of a new feminist subjectivity than she is at providing guidelines for a practical emancipatory politics” (101). This paper intends to extend the possibilities of feminist imaginaries for theorisations of technology by first looking at this gap between imagined and material subjectivities. I ask “Whose emancipatory politics?” to point out that despite their insistence on fragmentations of identity and forms of totalisation, western feminist imaginaries of technology do not convey or derive from an inclusive politics of representation or location. Drawing from feminist historiography and transnational feminist frameworks, I insist on the radical potential of feminist imaginaries that are written and rewritten through transnational endeavours and consideration of “nested differences”. The second part of the paper derives from the first – building on the importance of transnational feminist imaginaries – and asks how? How can western feminist imaginaries expand their potential by transgressing their postmodern notions of subjectivity and agency without abandoning them? Here I introduce the “postcolonial technological subject” as a representational figure for a transnational feminist politics of technology by drawing guidelines for transnational feminist theories of technology. My guidelines are informed by Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s conception of transnational feminism, visions for solidarity such as Black Cyberfeminism, Data Feminism and The Xenofeminist Manifesto.

Walking in Women’s Shoes

This article traces feminist affinities across images of shoes as signifiers of women’s precarious mobilities on the screen. Inspired by Catherine Russell’s methodology of parallax historiography, it investigates compelling images of shoes in women’s activist filmmaking from two different time periods and national cinemas. The footwear of Eva from Lois Weber’s Shoes (1916) and Mona from Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, 1985) lends itself to reflection on practices of feminist historiography and a figurative reconfiguration of the flâneuse as a feminist historian who critically revisits knowledge of the past and of the present to set both in motion.

Soviet Rural Family in Foreign Historiography: Lines of Research and Interpretation Approaches

This review article analyses approaches to the study of the rural family of the Soviet period that have taken shape in foreign (mainly Western) historiography between the 1960s and the present. The rural family was in the focus of social and political transformations of the twentieth century, suffered a severe deformation as a result of world and civil wars, as well as the urbanisation process, which took on a forced character under the influence of state policy measures. The article is intended to help bring together the methodological and thematic positions of Russian and foreign researchers in considering the phenomenon of the rural family. The study of the Soviet rural family, usually in a wider thematic context, began in line with the “anthropological” turn at the turn of the 1970s. At the suggestion of T. Shanin, family households entered the focus of the emerging peasant studies. Methodological preferences, as well as the relatively small number of available primary statistics, determined the limited interest of Western authors in the historical and demographic study of the Soviet rural family. In the 1980s and 1990s, within the framework of the revisionist paradigm, the rural family was studied mainly as an object of influence from the authorities (radical projects of the 1920s, collectivisation, and measures to strengthen the family in the 1930s). “Feminist” historiography was especially active in this field. In the second half of the 1990s and early 2000s, time came for balanced characteristics, quite free from politicised assessments. There was an opportunity to consider the Soviet family and family policy in a global context. The post-war period in the development of the rural family is represented in foreign works rather poorly. In general, Western authors managed to capture the directions of evolution and the new quality of the rural family, which have become apparent in the later Soviet decades.

Pioneers and Feminisms

Feminist historiography is rife with debates about the nature and boundaries of women’s movements. Arguments over who to call an activist or a feminist sit at the heart of these definitional debates, which provide the groundwork for how scholars understand contemporary feminisms. Given the heated nature of ongoing disputes over the complicated identity politics of feminism and its archives, it is surprising that scholars have afforded so little attention to the technical infrastructure that defines and provides access to digitized primary source material, which is increasingly the foundation for contemporary historical research. Metadata plays an outsized role in these definitions, especially for photographic material that cannot be made word-searchable but is favored by digitizers because of its popularity. This article uses qualitative content analysis to examine how two digital archives define the Swedish suffrage movement - a historically contested concept, here understood through the theory of Susan Leigh Star as a “boundary object” subject to “interpretive flexibility”. The study uses keywords attached to photographic material from the the National Resource Library for Gender Studies (KvinnSam) and metadata within the related Swedish Women’s Biographical Lexicon platform for women’s biographies. The findings indicate that the hierarchies of archival organization do not disappear with individual document digitization and description. Instead, the silences built into physical archives are redefined in digital collections, obscuring the tensions between individual and movement feminisms, as well as the contested nature of movement boundaries.

A Feminist Still

What can photographic form teach us about feminist historiography? Through close readings of photographs by visual artist and documentary photographer Sheba Chhachhi, who documented the struggle for women’s rights in India from the 1980s onward, this article outlines the political stakes of documentary photography’s formal conventions. First, it analyzes candid snapshots of recent protests for women’s rights in India, focusing on an iconic photograph by Chhachhi of Satyarani Chadha, a community organizer and women’s rights activist, at a rally in New Delhi in 1980. It attends to the way in which such photographs turn personal scenes of mourning into collective memorials to militancy, even as they embalm their subjects in a state of temporal paralysis and strip them of their individual history. It contrasts these snapshots to Chhachhi’s collaborative portrait of Chadha from 1990, a “feminist still” that deploys formal conventions of stillness to stage temporal encounters between potential histories and unrealized futures. Throughout, the article returns to the untimeliness of Chhachhi’s photography, both in the multiple temporalities opened up within the image and in its avant-garde critique of feminist politics through experiments with photographic form.