ABSTRACT
Preciado makes some striking assertions about feminist history in ‘Amnesiac Feminism’ chapter of their book An Apartment on Uranus. Like all other forms of subaltern struggles and minority resistance movements, writes Preciado, Feminism suffers from a chronic lack of knowledge about its own genealogy. It doesn’t know its vocabulary, forgets its sounds, erases its voices, loses its texts, and doesn’t have key to its own archives. That is because ‘history is written from viewpoint of the conquerors’. Preciado invokes Walter Benjamin, and calls on ‘the conquered’, or authors might say, the losers in history, to rewrite history from their own point of view. That, Preciado continues, would be only way ‘to interrupt the time of oppression’. Ahmed shares much with Preciado’s manifesto, in terms of rewriting experience on behalf of those excluded, ignored or put down, but unlike Preciado she does not necessarily set herself up against a set figure of an antagonist with whom can be no reconciliation.
