Conclusion: The Consequences of Optimism

Abstract

The preceding chapters presented a broadly favourable account of current developments in feminist politics. I suggested that, despite having undergone a number of potentially troubling post-1970s transformations, feminism in the UK has maintained a certain vibrancy and radicalism which is underplayed by accounts framed by notions such as deradicalisation, depoliticisation, fragmentation and institutionalisation. I acknowledge that the account of the ‘New Feminist Politics’ presented in the preceding chapters might strike some as naively optimistic and/or celebratory, but in this concluding section I want to explore in more detail the theoretical underpinnings and consequences of the cautious political optimism I am advancing. In more general terms, I want to suggest that the account of the ‘New Feminist Politics’ presented here occasions not a nave political optimism, but a scepticism towards the diverse forms of what Wendy Brown — after Walter Benjamin — has termed left melancholia that one often finds in contemporary theoretical accounts of oppositional politics. Therefore, in this concluding section, I want to explore how aspects of contemporary feminist politics analysed in this book might impact upon a theorisation of political optimism or, rather, how to weave an engaged and not complacent optimism into our political theorising. I do this, first, by briefly reiterating some of the empirical dimensions of the ‘resurgent’ feminist politics described in earlier chapters. I use this as an occasion for a critical reflection on certain strands of post-structuralist and post-Marxist political theory and their relation to notions of political optimism and/or pessimism.