Overview

Public Feminism in Times of Crisis examines the public practice of feminism in the age of social media. While their concept of public feminism emerges from a moment of acute crisis (the Trump years and the Covid-19 pandemic), Leila Easa and Jennifer Stager locate its foundations in history, journeying through broad swatches of time looking for connections between the centuries through art and literature and culture. Each chapter focuses on what public feminists do in the world: Public feminists gain control over an archive that otherwise contains or excludes them; they recover their own stories and subjective experiences, sometimes for activist use; they examine images and language that construct women in patriarchal texts; they situate the individual within a collective and the collective within an individual; they confront the limitations of such situating due to the containment of patriarchy and reclaim new systems of power in response; and they resurface a deep history for the alternative strategies of memorializing they employ. In navigating these practices, the authors also attend to the material conditions of writing histories as well as those shaping and enabling public feminist acts and protests more broadly.

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9781793648129

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Reviews

A pleasure to read! Born of pandemic and shaped by hard histories - from Artemisia to Sappho and Maya Lin, #MeToo to Black Lives Matter, Antigone to Ferguson - the pains, joys, freedoms, and sorrows of an emergent public feminism, are explored, crafted, sculpted, weaved, translated, grieved, and danced into existence by co-authors Easa and Stager. Do yourself a favor and read this book by two knowledgeable women whose collaboration stages an antiracist and counter-misogynistic tradition out of the archives committed to their impossibility. --Bonnie Honig, Brown University Easa and Stager use an interdisciplinary lens to explore how contemporary feminist interventions in both physical and virtual spaces are rooted in earlier moments of feminist activism. Their work makes past efforts visible while encouraging evolving practices that leverage digital spaces for progressive action. Easa and Stager offer wide-ranging analyses of literary texts, works of art, performances, monuments, viral hashtags, and other cultural artifacts to trace the vexed ways women write and rewrite, with much attention paid to the body, trauma, material conditions, and the interconnection of individual and collective identities. The analyses are complex and thoughtful, and the writing is clear and impassioned. The power of each chapter's final paragraph alone makes the book worth reading. Highly recommended. General readers through faculty. -- ""Choice Reviews"" In Public Feminism in Times of Crisis: From Sappho's Fragments to Viral Hashtags, the power of community and collaboration to amplify women's voices is on full display. Using poetic prose, Easa and Stager seamlessly traverse disciplinary boundaries to draw connections between artistic and textual examples past and present, highlighting the important role of public feminism within the context of patriarchy, while also imagining possibilities beyond. --Cynthia Colburn, Pepperdine University Leila Easa and Jennifer Stager, do not merely offer diagnoses of structural problems and a catalogue of the actions of public feminism already taken to overcome them. If the volume were no more than this it would still be well worth reading, but in fact the authors offer something else: proposals that might inspire future actions of public feminism at various levels. -- ""Bryn Mawr Classical Review"" Public Feminism in Times of Crisis: From Sappho's Fragments to Viral Hashtags offers an engaging and unique take on the contours, implications, and manifestations of public feminism in our current historical moment. One of the strengths of this book is how it speaks to our contemporary moment while also acknowledging the centuries-old roots of public feminism. Providing a genealogy of public feminism is especially important in light of attempts to ahistoricize resistance movements. While there have been many scholarly articles and public-facing pieces that address similar topics, this book offers a unique contribution to the conversation because it brings together under one roof different strands of the dialogue about public feminism. --Sarita Cannon, San Francisco State University

Author Information

Leila Easa is professor in the English department at City College of San Francisco. Jennifer Stager is assistant professor of history of art at Johns Hopkins University and author of Seeing Color in Classical Art: Theories, Practice, and Reception from Antiquity to the Present.

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