ABSTRACT
“Alive and kicking”: this is Ania Loomba and Melissa Sanchez’s assessment of feminism in early modern studies at the current moment. 2015 seems to be a watershed year for revisiting the relevance of feminism in our field. I write this immediately after having edited the Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment: Gender, Sexuality, Race and as Dympna Callaghan brings her A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, 2nd ed. to press. 1 This convergence of publication suggests not only the felt need to respond to the perception that feminist early modern studies is on the decline, but also that the salience of feminism for the future should not be taken for granted. Loomba and Sanchez make a powerful case that, in order to remain vital, feminism must adapt to new configurations of politics and knowledge. Inspired by previous “critiques and retheorizations of the categories of women and feminism offered by black, woman-of-color, lesbian, postcolonial, and poststructural feminists” within the US, as well as third world feminists living elsewhere, Loomba and Sanchez advocate holding the “aims and assumptions” of feminism “up to continual scrutiny.” “Part of the continued work of feminists,” they aver, “must be a consideration of methodological, ethical, and theoretical assumptions” because feminism is not only an ongoing achievement but—as Bartolovich puts it in her attempt to shift the rhetoric away from that of a “crisis” in feminism—an “incomplete project.” Feminism’s project remains incomplete because, as Bartolovich says, “the quest for social justice has been paved with bones of the myriad oppressed who … never accomplished the goals for which they struggled in their own time,” as well because its preoccupations must shift and change in response to new exigencies and self-reflexive critique. The subtitle of this volume, in particular, announces that feminism can no longer be conceived solely in terms of gender, but must take up a more inclusive, comparative, or “intersectional” method. Indeed, the editors of this volume insist, invoking Robyn Wiegman, that “academic feminism’s encounter with race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and nationality” is “a critical reason [feminism] continues to exist.” 2
