Abstract Book of the 7th Global Conference on Women’s Studies
Year: 2025
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Radical Feminism Revisited: 25 Years Later
Dr. Barbara Crow
ABSTRACT:
In the late nineties, and as an assistant professor in Women’s Studies, I spent several years in various women’s and feminist archives in the United States culling for original radical feminist texts. I did so to address and disrupt the homogenous, individuated and negative representations and perceptions of radical feminists and radical feminism. This archival work resulted in the publication Radical Feminism with New York University Press, 2000 – a collection still in print. It included original radical feminist texts by Valerie Solanas, Toni Cade Bambara and the Redstockings. I organized the collection around feminist themes to demonstrate the intersectionality and interconnectedness of radical feminism. Twenty-five years later there are parallels with the transgender movement as it continues to be subject to the same negative representation and strategies. In this paper, I will reflect on the continued conservatism haunting progressive gender tropes, what we can learn from radical feminism twenty-five years later, and draw on Hemmings’ insight about putting sex and gender “back together and insisting on their relation as one of power and authority” (2022, p. 615).
Keywords: radical feminism, women’s studies, conservatism, gender