Feminism, resistance and the archive

If resistance is perhaps the most familiar understanding of what feminist political engagement has made possible, one might expect to find contemporary feminist scholarship characterised by accounts of resistance: of subjects working against the state and capital, against dominant constructions of masculinity and femininity, and other elaborations of the resistant politics characteristic of the women’s movement. But in large part, very few scholars now position themselves as working on explicitly feminist or indeed gendered projects of resistance. This is a product of both the troubling of the traditional notion of resistance as an exterior force - in Matt Sparke’s (2008: 423) language ‘the basic idea of resistance [as] people “pushing back”’ - and the increased recognition of forms of resistant politics as something immanent to everyday relationships. Resistance is no longer framed as an oppositional dialectic but as something achieved through more mundane forms of practice. Recognising this, in the chapter we trace how feminist activism is internal not external to the forces of power that shape the domains of life and work. At one level, we outline how work on ‘border spaces’ is generating new understandings of how the state and capital are more multifaceted and porous than traditional accounts suggest. It is clear from these accounts that we are no longer imagining or dealing with monolithic structures (such as patriarchy or capitalism) in our enquiries but being required to think hard about complex subjects who operate across multiple politicised domains. At another level, we explore studies of women ‘getting on’ and ‘getting by’ in order to reveal how resistance can be achieved, not by outright rejection or through large-scale transformation, but through everyday acts that allow one to reach individual goals and targets. New formations emerge out of creative ways of being in the world, pushing us to consider the very terms by which subjects are constrained by contemporary political and economic configurations. By detailing how new forms of ‘resistance’ can be still be traced in feminist accounts, our aim is not only to reveal less visible forms of oppositional consciousness, but to expose how these forms of resistance provide for a new way of thinking about political subjectivity given they rely on an understanding of politics that is necessarily complex and messy.