Prefiguration and Promise-Making: Lesbian Feminism and Social Contract Theory

• In Event: Women In and Out of Power

Abstract

This paper traces lesbian feminist efforts during the 1970s and 1980s to transform the institutions and processes of feminist publication, and it puts these efforts in conversation with contemporary struggles to inaugurate a “New Social Contract.” First, I argue that the widespread effort to establish autonomous feminist publishing networks both inside and outside the academy reveal that lesbian feminists were profoundly concerned with calling forth a radical political audience that was intersectionally diverse from the start – and, just as importantly, one that was committed to negotiating and undoing the hierarchies of legibility that structure women’s authority in public life. I argue that lesbian feminists’ commitment to restructuring publicity and publication should be understood in terms of prefigurative politics, meaning that it was premised on a set of forward-looking promises that set out to construct “alternative or utopian social relations in the present, either in parallel with, or in the course of, adversarial social movement protest” (Yates, 2014). Next, I suggest that such prefigurative frameworks offer a new vocabulary for thinking about the uses of the social contract by calling attention to the kinds of promises we can and do extend, as well as how we might recognize and repair broken social contracts when they occur. Finally, I argue that this reimagination of the terms of the social contract that has long animated social movements like lesbian feminism is crucial for making sense of what I call the “New Social Contract” theories collectively imagined by groups like Black Lives Matter.

Author

• Elena Gambino, Rutgers University, New Brunswick