Caitlin Doherty in Sidecar:
What is the problem described today by feminism? A decade ago, a generation of women – now in our late twenties and early thirties – claimed it as a primary political identity, but no longer. Among young radicals in the Anglophone world, embarrassment at our proximity to something so easily co-opted by liberalism and neoliberalism alike issued in two concurrent desertions of the resurgent ‘women’s movement’ of the 2010s: one group jumped ship for an activist project motivated by the critique of capitalism, with which feminism quasi-geometrically ‘intersected’, the other went overboard for a distilled ironic nihilism. In both cases, podcasts ensued.
Where an identifiable form of feminism has clung on most tenaciously is in the commissioning and branding of cultural products. When it comes to the packaging of films and books by, about, or ‘for’ women, marketers’ lexicons have shrunk to two words: ‘timely’ and ‘urgent’. Feminism, in this register, designates any text or tale in which a woman might occupy a central position, or any project in which a role historically occupied by a man has been taken by a woman. Retellings of 1984 from Julia’s perspective, histories of art that apophatically emphasise the centrality of men in the field, films with titles that, taken together, sound like the garbled punchline of a mother-in-law joke: She Said, Don’t Worry Darling, Women Talking.
More here.