Lilith

Lilith 17: 2008

Writing the Past as Politics: Some reflections on Historiography and Margaret Henderson

Ann Genovese

'The category of experience has always assumed the irrelevance of opposing living and writing, art and life, in feminist cultural activity.’ Meaghan Morris 1

Margaret Henderson’s work is important. In both the essay included in this edition of Lilith, and in her broader body of writing, importantly, in her book Marking Feminist Times: Remembering the Longest Revolution in Australia, Henderson challenges her readers to move beyond the tired complacencies of static arguments about what she calls ‘accountancy’ 2 : narrative closures about what Australian feminism meant, or didn’t; what it did or didn’t do, and what it could have done better. She reminds us, gently but firmly, to return to thinking about our theoretical vantage points when we engage in these conversations, both within and outside our political and intellectual communities. In so doing, Henderson chides us, we will see more, we will see differently; and that has the potential not just for better scholarship, but for feminist politics more generally.

In Wonders Taken for Signs, the keynote paper at the 2007 Lilith symposium, Henderson’s immediate argument is that we need to think about the sites and means of production of Australia’s feminist past, and its memories about that past, in different ways. Her paper is a broad implicit critique of much feminist scholarship that tries to formulate a specific, or localised, ‘Australian women’s movement’, through the preoccupation with the political, the oft-cited and much vaunted sui generis experience of feminism with the state. Henderson, as a cultural theorist, with insights gained from sustained engagement with psychoanalytic theory, thinks differently. She exhorts us to understand that there was a cultural disruption, an engaged and energised form of activism, that both informed, enabled and transcended the ledger sheets of Australian feminism that do focus predominantly on the politico-social sphere. 3 Her argument is that this cultural disruption, or rebirth, is both impetus for broader activist practices based on collective experience, and also both reflection and refraction of the avant garde itself, with similar reverberations into dominant culture. She also firmly places the empirical histories of the cultural production and reading of the Australian women’s movement as central to both of these stories. The reformation, and continuation, of the avant garde through the Australian women’s movement forces us to remember, as she puts it, ‘that there was something else going on’. She argues that what was produced as cultural artefact, and how, has a meaning that goes beyond that important story. The argument and narrative she offers in this essay becomes then part of a broader challenge to history, as the cultural activism of the Women’s Movement, as Henderson shows clearly, has kept going, albeit not always in predictable or linear ways. Henderson argues that one of the most important is that it changed ‘how we think about and undertake writing (film, performance, posters, and so on), and whose effects are neither predictable nor easy to measure.’4 It is this legacy of production, specifically for historians, and of the act of writing text, as a specific site of genuine social disruption that I want to concentrate on, and what that legacy means for Australian feminist historiography now.

Theoria

There are two interrelated aspects to Henderson’s work that I think are very important in this respect. The first is how the work itself not only analyses, but also demonstrates what she calls ‘theoria’: ‘(from Greek: a sight) because, as its etymology makes clear, texts that write the history of Australian feminism by using theory as a historical category of explanation offer an important sight/site of feminism’s development. …theory functions as an allegory of Australian feminist history’. 5

To illustrate: in Marking Feminist Time, Henderson devotes a chapter to textual and discursive analysis of the histories of Australian feminism that emerged, in a bloc, in the mid to late 1990s.6 This was the precise moment when those who had been involved as subjects in the activism and academic staking out of Australian feminism began to think about its impact. Henderson argues that in taking stock many suffered a sense of loss; a longing for an ‘authentic’ utopian liberation, or at least its promise, perceived now vanished or vanquished. The texts that were produced by some of these activists, most noticeably Helen Garner’s The First Stone (1995) and Anne Summers’ editorial in the Fairfax Good Weekend supplement called ‘Letter to the next generation’ (1995), were, as Judith Ion notes, crucial as an impetus for the increased urgency in writing Australian feminist history since the 1970s.7 This is because, I would argue, books like The First Stone were fundamental to allowing a space for the multifarious voices not of feminism (especially in the media, but also in law, and expressed through the state) to voice long held suspicions that feminism was variously wrong, overrated, disproportionately acknowledged, outmoded, irrelevant or just plain bad. This was the moment when feminism as a reverse discourse ended, and it became part of the discourse.

The histories that were produced in this period, and in response to this shift, included Gisela Kaplan’s Meagre Harvest (1996), Marilyn Lake’s Getting Equal (1999), and Jean Curthoys Feminist Amnesia (1997). 8 Henderson argues that they all attempted to become a referent point for, or offer narrative closure on, the recent Australian feminist past. Despite the palpable differences in tone, method, and perception of the past in these texts, Henderson’s analysis reminds us that the books share context: that they are written in that particular moment in Australian feminism, and as such are situated in a similar theoretical frame, characterised by disorientation and strain, and materially affected by the end of modernity. The women’s movement was interpreted in these histories as a subject that the bore ‘the hope for fundamental social transformation in late twentieth century Australia’, and as a result, Henderson argues, it is almost unavoidable that writing about, ‘the women’s liberation movement’ as such a subject at such a time means that it ‘will be intensely marked as a failure’. 9 (Lake’s book, as a counterpoint, doesn’t come to the same conclusion, but Henderson argues that Getting equal attempts to offer a Grand History of Women’s Liberation, which by methodological definition cannot scrutinise the fissures in feminism with any intensity. The result is a book of sustained engagement with ideas, including the use of revisionism as a political tool. Henderson argues, however, that the book glosses over dissonances in those ideas, which renders the text in the same space, the same theoria, as the other books which set out to offer solid referent points to the past, yet strain at the suggestions for feminism offered by postmodernism).10

So a major part of this failure of the women’s movement to transform society, noted both implicitly and explicitly in the histories, is feminism’s flirtation with and move toward post-modern theory. As Henderson puts it, this theoretical context is an unavoidable aspect of later modernity, and as such, ‘the representational and intellectual context of post-modernism and posthistorire complicates [the histories’] attempts to fix the feminist past’.11 The writers of the histories, in shoring up the past, are trying to deal with the implications of the post-modern turn for feminism, but at the same time feel spurred on to blame theory for feminisms’ perceived failure. Henderson argues that philosopher Jean Curthoys, in her book in particular, wants to mark down the shift away from certainty as a cause of feminist failure, a failure embodied by the academic turn in feminism itself. Curthoys’ book, and its reliance on theory to show where the turn to postmodernism made it all go wrong, becomes then an allegory for feminist history itself, it enacts theoria.

This is Henderson’s main point: writing about feminism with a theoretical frame, or attempting to use feminist theory as the subject of history, produces the same result: an allegory of feminism itself, a marking down in time of the concerns, oppositions, constraints and possibilities that give feminism boundaries. She gives Ann Curthoys’ For and Against Feminism, a collection of essays dating from 1970 to 1988, as an exemplar of the form. Ann Curthoys, Henderson reminds us, consciously articulates her subjective engagement with theory over that period, its shifts in emphasis and priorities, which creates through her own work a particular view of the feminist past. But Henderson’s own work operates on this level too. As a product of 1980s feminism, reading the feminist histories produced in the 1990s, Henderson notes that she did not share the sense of loss that they expressed. 12 She is very clear that as a person of her own time, someone who benefited from the activism and struggles of those in fact writing the histories - those who were there, the ‘chroniclers’ (as she says of Lake) 13 - she felt ‘an unexpected distance’ and ‘estrangement’.14 She also notes her perception of what those 1990s histories could have looked like if they in fact took up the challenge of the much maligned bogey person of postmodernisms, including a greater sense of the black humour, irony, and playfulness of the 1970s, especially in regard to the cultural activism of the women’s liberation movement. Henderson calls this ‘history as excess’.15 She shows us, in her own examination of the performance and production of the cultural activism of the 1970s and 1980s, that the Women’s Movement was committed to ‘deep play’, as Clifford Geertz might see it.16 Theoria here is not just reliant on its meaning as ‘sight’, but reflects another etymological foundation, of ‘theatre’.17 Henderson shows, not just tells, that those who wished to systematise, and in the process stigmatise, 1970s feminism into a single meaning (failure/loss/longing), thereby missed its theatricality, its chaos, its irrepressibility. The longing was therefore not just for what was imagined to be gone, but ironically for what was unable to be celebrated. For Henderson, the point of historicising the history, texts as well as the politics, is not to find an authentic past, or even one that explains the past as a linear whole narrative, but to look deeply at the way these texts are produced, their technique and purpose, and how they are read. The point is not to unlock the past, but to take up Hayden White’s suggestion that

‘histories ought never to be read as unambiguous signs of the events they report but rather as symbolic structures, extended metaphors, that ‘liken’ the events reported in them to some form with which we have already become familiar in our literary culture’.18

Henderson’s close genealogical understanding of the point of feminist cultural activism in the recent past means that she herself must see text, including historical text, as a form of representation, and also as a political intervention, or statement. That is both the legacy of the ‘agitprop’ of cultural activism, performance and reception 19; and also the legacy of feminists who entered the academy when the allegedly posthistorie threat was at it height. Henderson, in using and writing through lenses made available by Meaghan Morris, and others, and their interpretation of the psychoanalytic and poststructuralist, implicitly understands that the spectre of theory was not the end of feminist activism. She writes like she means it: she knows it’s a different form of politics; and a form of history that must insist on the parts of discourse about feminism that are excluded or post scripted (like the art movement), that are necessarily partial, that have theoretical reverberations and antecedents. Whether writing about the avant garde, or about 1990s feminist histories, Henderson’s point is that using theoretical positioning about texts neither usurps nor kills the mother, but aims to understand what cultural ruptures mean in their ‘moment’.

Myopia

As a result, Henderson is not solely positioning theory as an allegory of history, but is also contributing to a specific form of political engagement in the present. There is something, another ‘moment’, going on now, as there was in the mid 1990s. Henderson is most definitely of this moment, part of current feminist work that is committed to theorising the present through writing, as political activism, rather than reacting to an idea that theoretical writing projects are a sign of failure to engage on the ground, so to speak. This is the space that I try to work in too, albeit in relation to legal theory and reform, as do Natasha Campo and Zora Simic on feminism itself.20 This is not a determinedly generational ‘moment’ either. The work of Margaret Thornton in law, Carole Ferrier in literary and cultural studies, Marian Sawer in political science, Moira Gatens in philosophy, for just some examples, have for a long time been committed to the understanding the relationships between theory and politics for Australian feminism. The difference is that at this particular juncture, this historical moment, such work bears a particular purpose. The current work of all of these writers, like those 1990s histories, is distinct, but we too share a sensibility, and an approach to audience. Writing as a form of activism, in the present moment must become an engagement with history that asks about the very recent past, in order to overcome political and cultural myopia. This is, as Thornton notes in a slightly different context, ‘the inevitable loss of ability by individuals or communities to focus on what is nearest to them’.21 Such a lack of vision by those individuals or communities often results in glossed or wilful versions of the immediate past for strategic ends.22 Those strategic ends are shaped in part by the collision between neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism that has occurred since 1989. This collision has had a manifestly detrimental impact on collective movements, especially feminism, as it has actively sought out agents for blame for state assistance in a time when individual rights are understood by many to be threatened by group identified need. This writing, then, is about a commitment to a discursive reversal of politics played through feminism, by referencing the immediate past, to understand the effects of cultural and political myopia on feminist ideas and practices.

Theoria as it applies to this present moment, then, does not attempt to speculate or offer closure. This is because it also aims to understand what is possible now that the language of longing and failure that emerged as part of the reckoning of feminism at the end of the last century is part of that broader public discourse. The ideas of generational competition and discouragement, strain and disillusionment, and most of all, failure, that were unavoidable for feminism as ‘modernity ended’ have been appropriated in the public, now shaped by Hayek’s economic theories, and used in certain and specific ways. Feminist writing that attempts to understand the present by reference to the past to work out counter strategic aims is about engaging with that public discourse. It situates questions within the period from 1968 to the present in order to understand and explain them, not to provide definitive answers. It deploys history as a form of antidote.23 It is a project offered shape by Michel Foucault’s genealogies, his insight that ‘historico-critical investigations are quite specific in the sense that they always bear upon a material, an epoch, a body of determined practices and discourses’.24 In that way, it aims to provide a material frame, an anti to anti feminism. And it is also a legacy of the concept of History that Hannah Arendt demanded: a history for the present that rejects both nostalgia, and revisionism.25 Henderson’s work is very much part of this writing the past for the present. We should read her essay, then, not only as a important and engaged understanding of the meaning of Women’s Liberation as cultural memory, nor for its more immediate point about the avant garde. She reminds us that, in positioning history as a cultural manifestation of material politics and culture, we inhabit a space in the present that is shaped by, yet needs to publicly explain, ‘feminism’s past and present utopian dreams and longings’.26

Ann Genovese

Ann Genovese BA (Hons), LLB, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer at the Melbourne Law School.

Endnotes

  1. Meaghan Morris, ‘“Too Soon Too Late”: Reading Claire Johnston, 1970-81’, in Dissonance: Reading Feminism and The Arts, 1970-1990, ed. Catriona Moore, (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin in association with Artspace Ltd, 1993), 135.
  2. The term is used by Henderson in relation specifically to Gisela Kaplan, The Meagre Harvest (1990), but I would argue it has broader application also. See Margaret Henderson , ‘Chapter One: Feminist Histories: Some Legends of the Rise and Fall’ , Marking Feminist Times: Remembering the Longest Revolution in Australia, (Bern: European University Studies, Peter Lang, 2006), 33.
  3. Henderson, ‘Taking Wonders For Signs’, Lilith, 17 (2008), 4, appropriately acknowledges the work of others in thinking through the cultural disruption of the Women’s Liberation Movement, particularly Susan Magarey, ‘Feminism as Cultural Renaissance, Hecate, 30, no. 1, (2004), 231-244; and Ann Curthoys, ‘Doing It For Themselves: The Women’s Movement Since 1970’, in Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, ed. Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans, (Marrickville, NSW: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992), 427.
  4. Henderson ‘Taking Wonders for Signs’ (2007), 15, my emphasis.
  5. Henderson, Marking Feminist Times (2006), 47.
  6. See fn 2.
  7. Judith Ion, ‘Unravelling The Past: Questions of Feminism, History and Memory’, Australian Feminist Studies, 13, no. 27 (1998),107-16. I also wrote about this ‘event’, but as it was unfolding: Ann Genovese ‘Unravelling identities: performance and criticism in Australian feminisms’, Feminist Review, no. 52, (Spring 1996), 135-53. Henderson (2006) also devotes more to this as a ‘media event’ in Chapter 4.
  8. The full references are: Gisela Kaplan, The Meagre Harvest: The Australian Women’s Movement 19506-1990s, (St Leonards, NSW.: Allen and Unwin, 1996); Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism, (St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1999); Jean Curthoys, Feminist Amnesia: The Wake of Women’s Liberation, (London: Routledge, 1997). The chapter also includes in this discussion Chilla Bulbeck, Living Feminism: The Impact of the Women’s Movement on Three Generations of Australian Women, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
  9. Henderson, Marking Feminist Times (2006), 26.
  10. Ibid., 38-42.
  11. Ibid., 12.
  12. Ibid., 28.
  13. Henderson, Marking Feminist Times (2006), 41.
  14. Ibid., 28; and also 13-14.
  15. Ibid., 57.
  16. Clifford Geertz ‘”Deep Play”: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’ in The Interpretation of Cultures, (London: Hutchison, 1975). I thank John Docker for the connection: he also uses the concept in Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History, (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
  17. Martin Jay writes that the word theatre ‘shares the same root as the word theory, theoria, which meant to look at attentively, to behold, in Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993), 23.
  18. Hayden White, ‘The Historical text as Literary Artefact’. In Tropics of Discourse: essays in Cultural criticism, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University press, 1985), 91; quoted in Henderson, Marking Feminist Times (2006), 28.
  19. Henderson, ‘Taking Wonders for Signs (2007), 11.
  20. For examples: Natasha Campo, ‘Rethinking Feminism: A Review Essay’, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, 14 (2005), 10-11; Zora Simic, ‘On Reading The First Stone ten years later: Response’, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, 15 (2006), 18-31; Ann Genovese, ‘Family Histories: John Hirst vs feminism, in the Family Court of Australia’, Australian Feminist Studies 21, no. 50 (2006), 172-196.
  21. Margaret Thornton, ‘Neoliberal melancholia: The case of feminist legal Scholarship’, The Australian Feminist Law Journal, 20 (2004), 7-22, 20. The term Thornton uses is actually ‘presbyopia’, and she uses it in relation to the idea of feminist legal theory’s recent tendency to focus on necessary issues at global or transnational level but at the exclusion of the local. I think the concepts behind the application of either term are shared, and choose myopia as presbyopia is a problem only associated (in medical terms) with the elderly. The problem I am trying to discuss does not necessarily assume generational boundaries.
  22. See discussion in Genovese, ‘Family Histories’ (2006) for an example of how this is deployed.
  23. Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ (1977) in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 90.
  24. Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in Rabinow (ed) (1984), 49.
  25. Hannah Arendt, ‘The Modern Concept of History’, The Review of Politics, 20, no. 4 (1958), 570-590.
  26. Henderson, Marking Feminist Times (2006), 57.

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