Bad Subjects: The Other(s) of Feminist Theory and Mobilizations

Abstract

When Monique Wittig stated in 1980 that lesbians were not women, not only did she raise the question of the paradoxical relation between feminism and lesbianism, she also interrogated the nature, if not the possibility, of a subject of feminism. In other words, she did not only asked “what are lesbians?” but “what is feminism?” and “who is a feminist?” A couple of years predating Wittig’s theoretical insights, Black feminists within the US Women’s Liberation Movement had also critiqued feminism’s relations to its own minorities, redefining strategies of collective resistance and epistemologies of domination. Through these multiple theoretical and political elaborations, a converging point of critique was addressed: that of the reproduction of social, political and cultural norms within feminism. This is the question that we wish to invigorate in the light of contemporary feminist social movements, while adding to such analysis a reflexion on the historicity of “bad” or “unfitting” feminist figures. How do feminists construct figures of women to “emancipate” and what subjects are excluded from such emancipatory project? What is the historicity of feminism’s “bad” and “good” subjects? Who can speak for feminism today? What happens when “bad” subjects are co-opted and transformed into good subjects by State institutions? Who is the “good” subject of contemporary feminist public policies? In discussing the actual “excluded domains” (Butler, 1992) of feminist theory and mobilizations we wish to intervene into feminist debates on agency and empowerment from both an empirical and theoretical perspective. We argue that empirical examples of “good” and “bad” feminist subjects will provide insights into the processes of regulation of feminism’s own subjects, as well as highlight the historicity of these processes, unveiling the haunting question of trans-generational conflicts within feminism.

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