Introduction: Feminist Afterlives

Abstract

There is a growing academic interest in the intersections between activism, protest and memory. This chapter sets out the basis for a new theory and methodology of analysing social movement legacies and their cultural and social afterlives. Drawing on Deleuzian-inspired assemblage theory, ‘Introduction: Feminist Afterlives’ establishes the book’s main objectives and case studies and introduces the notion of assemblage memory. Orientated by a focus on the ‘everyday archive’ of past feminisms as they circulate across medial, activist, political, commercial and heritage sites, an assemblage approach asks how select images, ideas and feelings of past liberation struggles become freshly available and transmissible in times not of their making, and what cultural and political work these cultural memories set out to achieve in the present.