Social memory & feminist cultural histories

This issue of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies brings together scholars and graduate students thinking through the intersection of social memory and revisionary narratives of the post-1970s women’s movement as feminist cultural histories. As second-wave feminism begins to mark significant anniversaries of texts and events, it is timely to reflect on the feminist past and how it is installed in social memory. Recent scholarly interest in the ways in which the feminist past has been narrated and the adequacy of capturing the dramatic and complex landscape that comprised perhaps the most important social movement of the last century has drawn attention to form and to feeling (Hemmings 2011; Hesford 2013). This collection of work reflects on the ways in which post-1970s feminism is currently remembered and narrated in and as cultural media.

The essays developed here were initially presented at a symposium on social memory and feminist cultural histories held at the University of Queensland in 2014, as a bilateral research project between the University of Queensland and the University of Western Australia. The powerful connections between the interdisciplinary work warranted publication, so the symposium presentations have been completely reworked and further essays commissioned to present a collection of critical analyses about feminism’s relation to and as cultural media, and the ways in which ‘the past’ is deployed. This collection is therefore linked through ideas of memory, memorialization and the mediasphere, and addresses the temporal reconstitution of the recent feminist past.

The group of essays collected here is distinguished by drawing on various creative media including material objects, memorial, archive, film, social media, television, text and textiles to interrogate modes of display, exhibition, nostalgia, memory, trauma, activism, fantasy and forgetting as significant affective historical narratives. A number of the essays have a specifically Australian focus, allowing parallels and disconnections to emerge between Australian feminist social memory and the other forms explored here. All of the essays interrogate reading and teaching practices through their relation to feminist memory and their media, and also mark feminist ideas ripe for remembering and reinvestigation in post-feminist times. Post-feminism features in many of the essays, often as a set of values or cultural practices but also as a historical period through which the feminist past is able to be constructed. Arranged by media type, the essays begin in the public sphere of online commentary, moving to modes of protest and museum exhibition, onto the mediasphere of television, film and text, then finally into archives and teaching. All of these modes and media suggest that feminism has a material form, as well as offering formal material for the figuring of contemporary culture and the legacies of the past. This volume not only identifies some of the ways in which the feminist past is currently being interpolated as social memory, but also intervenes into some of those narratives to invoke earlier feminist times and thus reminds ourselves of other feminist cultural histories.

Alison Bartlett
The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia
[email protected] Henderson
The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia
[email protected]