Looking for Feminism

In a recent talk given at a North American University, a prominent feminist scholar from the United States observed that the contributions of Black women in mass political movements have been given short shrift in both conventional male-centred narratives of revolutionary movements (such as the Black Power movement in the USA), and mainstream feminist accounts of women’s activism, because interventions by Black women do not always conform to the usual definitions of either revolutionary or feminist action. Drawing her examples from protests launched by Black working-class women – especially mothers – against Pass Laws, and restricted access to housing and educational opportunities in mid-1950s South Africa, the speaker commented that feminists, especially those of colour, need to ‘see feminism in the most unlikely places’. She further stressed that feminists need to ‘acknowledge’ instances of ‘indigenous feminist action’, which remain mostly undocumented or unknown otherwise. While I share this concern over the limitations of dominant representations in principle, the speaker’s comments regarding the need to look for feminism in ‘unlikely’ places, as well as questions that followed from the predominantly North American audience (such as ‘how do we know it is feminism when we see it’, again, presumably in such ‘unlikely’ contexts as the working-class struggle against apartheid in South Africa), threw up a set of questions that resonate with my current preoccupations with the problems of writing histories of difference in general, and feminist history in particular. What, for instance, is the definition of ‘feminism’ being deployed here as apparently transparent, but in fact remains remarkably unspecified in such usage? Who or what determines what ‘unlikely’ and, by logical extension, ‘likely’ contexts for ‘feminist’ politics might be? Does resistance by women to any (or multiple) form(s) of oppression and injustice – regardless of its myriad sites and modalities of enunciation – necessarily have to be baptised ‘feminist’ in order for it to be appreciated, indeed visible, within academic