Cover by: René Magritte, Memory, (c) Visart 1985.

Feminism Now is like Magritte’s brilliant depiction of blood from the head as rupture and transgression. Memory: that’s the radical promise of feminist critique which is, against the global, cultural amnesia of the modern century, the historical remembrance of temps perdu and of better possibilities not yet achieved. Memory, of both a past yet not written and of a future yet not dreamed, is the truly, and perhaps only, radical political terrain in postmodernism. In this age of culture triumphant, when we have TV screens for heads, Sony Walkmans for ears, and when the real (embodied) world is just a poor and disappointing approximation of the (disembodied) hyper-reality of the processed world of high technology, it’s “blood from the head” as the cut which marks the promise and peril of feminism now.

The essays on feminist theory and practice in this volume are in the nature of the wound that refuses to close against patriarchalism in postmodernist guise. They represent a calling back to feminism as a universal politics, the rupturing of the silence of the suppressed as “we objects object”, and the writing of the text of a new feminist discourse.