On-site & online IPW Lecture - Left Feminisms: Legacies and Reinvention in a Time of Crisis

When: Tuesday, 8 November 2022, 18:30 CET. Where: Hörsaal 2 (H2), Neues Institutsgebäude (NIG), Universitätsstr. 7/2nd floor, 1010 Vienna and online via Zoom.

When: Tuesday, 8 November 2022, 18:30 CET
Where: On-site at Hörsaal 2 (H2), Department of Politicial Science, Neues Institutsgebäude (NIG), Universitätsstr. 7/2nd floor, 1010 Vienna and online via Zoom

Lecturer: Jo Littler (City, University of London)
Moderation: Ayse Dursun (IPW | University of Vienna)

Abstract

‘Left feminism’ has multiple and contested histories. In recent decades, these include its movement from being a key driver of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s, through its profound unfashionability in the 1990s, to becoming resurgent and divergent in the present. Over the past decade I have been interviewing feminist academics on very different parts of ‘the left’. They range from their twenties to their eighties, from political scientists to psychologists, from Bristol to Buenos Aires. Fourteen of these dialogues have now been collected into a forthcoming book called Left Feminisms: Conversations on the Personal and the Political. In this paper I outline the evolution of the project: drawing on material from the interviews to illustrate the plurality of feminist positions on the left; to consider what unites and divides them; and to discuss what alternatives they propose to the crisis-strewn landscape of contemporary ‘disaster capitalism’.