Feminist ‘Radicality’ and ‘Moderation’ in Times of Crises and Change

Abstract

The article considers different registers of moderation in contemporary discourses around feminism particularly in the context of postfeminism, neoliberalism and faith. It explores what work ‘moderation’, together with (but not reducible to) that of a ‘moderate feminism’, does in these distinct but not unrelated contexts. A distinction is made between moderation – as performance, process and practice –against various invocations of ‘moderate feminism’ that serve to dismiss, co-opt, diminish or even domesticate feminist practice (even as their mutually constitutive nature is acknowledged at times). I am less interested in what the politics of moderation has to offer feminism or what a moderate feminism might look like than what the term signifies in various discursive and political contexts. Why, on the one hand, has a supposedly ‘domesticated’ feminism found more public patronage via the media as opposed to a ‘radical’ one? Why, on the other hand, has this domestication been read as a sign of feminism's co-option and attendant depoliticization in critiques of postfeminism and neoliberal development? And finally, why are the virtues of a moderate feminism being exalted and even more problematically, legitimized in complicated local terrains of politicized faith and secularism? These different discursive incarnations and effects serve to demonstrate the instability of the term ‘moderation’, its blurring with a ‘moderate feminism’ found in discussions of postfeminism, neoliberalism and religion, and how its rhetoric and politics serve to bridge some of the polarities that pervade contemporary feminist thought and activism while, at times, reinforcing these.