In academia we often speak approvingly of the advantages of interdisciplinarity and the benefits of collaborative projects. Only rarely, however, do scholars and researchers put their money where their mouth is. For this reason Public Feminism in Times of Crisis is a rara avis, in the most positive sense of the term; it is a collaborative work written by two authors, without any noticeable differences in style or approach. What is more, the case studies cover a surprisingly wide chronology starting 30,000 years ago with the Venus of Willendorf (pp. 29-36), and reaching our days with an analysis of the #MeToo Movement and its aftermath (pp. 77-80). Needless to say, to analyse such a wide range of examples, an interdisciplinary approach is not a choice, but a prerequisite. Therefore, one might think that the authors have made a virtue of necessity; from the very beginning of the book, however, it is clear this was a conscious decision, since for them “the barriers of disciplinarity pose a threat to feminism” (p. 7). And in fact, from the point of view of interdisciplinarity, the work is a great success. The authors are to be congratulated on a collection of essays which is out of the ordinary, and which offers readers considerable food for thought.
The wide chronological range includes case studies taken from Classical Antiquity, such as the Odyssey (chapter 3) or Sappho’s texts (chapter 4), taken here to discuss the implications of their translations from an intersectional approach. In doing so, Leila Easa and Jennifer Stager consider how features such as gender and class (of both authors of the text and translators) impact the tradition of reception of these texts and their translations into modern languages. The intersectional approach to Classical authors, texts and translations might be inspiring for scholars specialising in them. However, classicists might not expect to find in this book thorough analysis of any of them: this is not its goal. The authors of this essay provide precise and detailed elements for each case study, but devote a limited space to each of them. Their main aim is to put on the table several case studies, not to analyse them in depth. For this reason, in this review, I do not offer a report on these case studies, but on the approach of the authors to several topics, arising from their choice of the case studies.
The authors define “public feminism” as “feminist interventions carried out in some form in the public sphere” (p. 2). This is the key term of the book, acting as the glue that binds together the diversity of themes, examples and chronologies presented. The book’s six chapters revolve around this term and explore a variety of examples. In doing so, the authors show that although the term “public feminism” is relatively recent, its seed was planted long ago. In what follows, I briefly present the rationale behind each chapter and highlight some of the topics discussed. In some cases I also refer to echoes of secondary literature and trends or scholars that came to my mind while reading the book but the authors do not explicitly mention. My aim in doing so is not to highlight any shortcomings; in fact it is the exact opposite, as I intend to show the potential of this collection of essays to stimulate thought and reflection. Note that I also do this from the point of view of someone working in Ancient History and Reception Studies. Making explicit one’s own standpoint is always good practice, with a long tradition in feminist scholarship. In this case, given the wide range of chronologies, approaches and case studies covered in this book, I think that declaring my provenance is both necessary and useful, and I hope that this review will be complemented by future ones, written from other standpoints.
The book contains six chapters, preceded by the acknowledgements and an introduction, and followed by an epilogue, the bibliography and an index. Given the idiosyncrasy of the book, the decision to include a comprehensive index containing more than just a list of proper names (as is often the custom) is much appreciated. The first three chapters discuss public feminism in the context of patriarchal structures, while chapters four to six discuss “options that push beyond patriarchal, colonialist and capitalist systems” (p. 127). Chapter 1 examines “how stories are created about, around, and on the bodies of women as well as onto representations of women throughout history” (p. 25). Chapter 2 explores the tensions between the public and the private and the imbalance of the attention that the personal lives of women receive when their public work is displayed and analysed. Far from essentialising the public/private dichotomy, the authors problematise it and apply it for strategic reasons, following the path of the “strategic essentialism” discussed primarily by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (although she later changed her mind). Moreover, the use of a key term of this chapter, “mapping”, can also be linked to certain proposals coined from feminist research in the branch of Human Geography, such as the “relief maps” put forward by Maria Rodó-de-Zárate (as presented for instance in her paper “Developing geographies of intersectionality with Relief Maps: reflections from youth research in Manresa, Catalonia”, published in 2014 in the journal Gender, Place & Culture). The last chapter of this first block, chapter 3, focuses on translation. It analyses how feminist translation, with clear echoes of the “feminist epistemologies” developed by Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding and Nancy Hartsock, problematizes the translator’s alleged neutrality, objectivity, and invisibility. In doing so, the aim is that of “positioning each translation as a new text” (pp. 100-101).
In the second part of the book, chapters 4 and 5 elaborate on the issue of translation, adding to it extra layers beyond the evident linguistic component. These chapters place the collective and its outputs at the forefront, questioning the centrality of individual creation, authorship, and authority – all traditionally considered pillars of creative activities, including those that make up many academic practices. Chapter 4 focuses on intentional collaborative practices, and chapter 5 on non-intentional ones. Here we find echoes of the concept of “entanglement” as used in Anthropology and in Archaeology in recent years, for instance in Ian Hodder’s monograph Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships Between Humans and Things (2012). Moreover, in chapter 4, special emphasis is put on intersectionality. Focusing on Sappho’s texts as case study, the authors reflect on the avatars of the reception of her works which has been possible because of her class, but which, at the same time, has been discontinuous since the 6th century BCE because of her gender. Therefore, gender and class are here emphasized to analyse a transmission chain reaching our days with different choices made by female translators, such as Anne Carson, and male translators, such as Richmond Lattimore (pp. 138-141). Finally, chapter 6 deals with loss and mourning, a topic cyclically discussed in gender studies and in feminist research. Parts of this chapter recall Judith Butler’s monographs Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence (2004) and Frames of war: when is life grievable? (2009), although these are not included among the works by Butler listed in the bibliography.
The authors suggest that each chapter can be read as an independent essay, or as part of a whole in the order proposed (p. 14). Perhaps it is true that both options are valid, but from my experience of reading the book, I would recommend approaching it as a whole; I think it works best as a fabric that is woven as reading progresses. Each chapter not only adds new case studies and new concepts, but elaborates on terms and ideas put forward in the previous ones as well. Concepts such as “archive”, “public”, “private”, or “translation”, may seem simple and in common use, but in this book they are less straightforward than they appear. Their complexity is best grasped by approaching them from different angles and in dialogue with each other, as the authors do as the book progresses. Indeed, the path suggested by the authors is an open one but there are some signposts to guide the reader, and I think that following this path is the best way to bring out the book’s value. When reading all chapters in the suggested order, some common grounds and diagnoses emerge.
It is interesting that the authors insist on how resources and material circumstances condition creative work. In their introduction they state that “Precarity is an enemy of health and also of creativity” (p. 7). Also along these lines they quote a striking comment by Emily Wilson, whose translation of the Odyssey was published in 2018: “I am a single mother of three with a full-time job and a mortgage to pay on my own. There’s no way I could have taken on this enormously challenging work just as an amateur pursuit, to keep in the desk drawer. I do this work because I love it… but I couldn’t do it without a structure that supports my work” (p. 96). Structural (as opposed to circumstantial) precarity as a factor in creative production (including academic work) is one of the main topics discussed by Remedios Zafra, for instance, in her 2017 essay El entusiasmo. It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that the authors of Public Feminism in Times of Crisis, the translator who made the statement quoted above, and the author of El entusiasmo “move through the world under the sign of woman” (p. 25) – or that Virginia Woolf, also “under the sign of woman”, insisted almost 100 years ago on the need to have A Room of One’s Own (1929).
However, the book’s authors, 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. Considering that a large part of the book’s readership will be academics, here I highlight one of these proposals or remedies: the authors’ call for citational justice, a practice which, in their words, “deliberately highlights the work of women and other underrepresented contributors in a simple feminist framework advocated by academics who note urgency in citational absence” (p. 129). The concept of citational justice thus questions some of the traditional pillars on which knowledge in the academic environment has been built, such as the principle of authority and the canon. Fighting the battle to expand the canon while, at the same time, fighting to overthrow it is one of the countless paradoxes that any action of public feminism, such as feminist research, has to face. We cannot avoid these paradoxes: we just need to map them and negotiate them. In this respect a particularly illuminating perspective is supplied by Judith Lorber, who explored the topic in 1994 with her monograph Paradoxes of Gender, and also more recently in 2021 with The New Gender Paradox. Reading Public Feminism in Times of Crisis, a book that is the result of a genuinely collaborative project, might also provide some tools to examine this and other paradoxes.