“A Natural Order is Being Restored”: Movements of Feeling and the Re-Structuring of the Radical Feminist Imagination

• In Event: Radical Imaginations and the Recursion of 1970s-1990s Feminist and Queer of Color Literary and Visual Cultures in the Present

Abstract

Drawn from my manuscript, Movements of Feeling, this chapter theorizes the dismantlement and restructuring of the radical feminist imagination throughout the 1980s. I read warnings issued by feminists of color about the quashing of Third World revolution—from Grenada to Chile to Nicaragua—and the compromised terrain of feminism as a harbinger of anti- racist, de-colonial, and anti-patriarchal revolution. The chapter is bookmarked by two events that encode this historic arc: a 1975 Poetry reading put on by the group “Gays in Solidarity with the Chilean Resistance” at which Pat Parker and Tede Matthews shared their work, and the 1992 memorial service for Tede Matthews, which was organized by Black and queer of color and anti-imperialist feminist poets.

Reading between these highly symbolic events, I examine how specific poets -- and namely Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Pat Parker, and Chrystos -- offer a powerful window into the workings of the radical feminist imagination in a time of counter-revolutionary assault. As I argue, these writers name the dismantlement and re-structuring, not only of the very fabrics of a burgeoning US empire, but feminism itself. At the same time, their work provides a window into a searing calling “back” to memory, the body, and the senses that marked the moment. This chapter thus traces the neoliberal modalities of institutionalization and ejection, whereby certain “differences” were incorporated into empire, whilst others were spat out. In closing, I offer commentary upon the ways in which the creative legacies of these writers are being taken up in radical Black feminist and queer of color movement building today.

Author

• Tamara Spira, Western Washington University