"Feminism Enchanted is motivated by this question: what happens if feminism is untethered from its structuring narrative of progress? There is no doubt that much of what feminism stands for, why its constitutive modes of analysis are mobilized, has been established on the bedrock of progress. Yanbing Er argues that progress has largely foreclosed what feminism is and can do; she introduces the concept of enchantment as a means of freeing feminist theory and praxis from such a delimiting structure. Enchantment functions as a heuristic for telling new and different feminist stories that only become possible when dominant paradigms of knowing and knowledge making are disrupted by another kind of interpretive practice. What these counternarratives present isa feminism that is more accountable to its dissonant genealogies, attentive to uneven lifeworlds that we collectively inhabit and continue to create. In other words, they reveal different feminisms that have been held back by the obligation to progress. The book proposes a critical method of enchantment whose conceptual power allows us to encounter both feminism and the world anew. This urgent undertaking has profound political and ethical stakes; it refuses the reductive logic of progress that has so completely informed our ways of thinking, living, and being"--
Yanbing Er reveals how a literary mode of enchantment fundamentally transforms feminist theory and praxis, imagining new and surprising possibilities that had once been foreclosed by dominant paradigms of progress.
The feminist movement has long been guided by the promise of progress for women: politically, economically, and in personal life. But we live in a time when history appears to be moving backward into a more reactionary past. How might feminist thought make sense of this plight without returning to the liberal, Western framework of progressive reason?
Yanbing Er argues that the key to this predicament lies in the capacity of the literary imagination to invigorate feminist critical practice. She reveals how a literary mode of enchantment fundamentally transforms feminist theory and praxis, imagining new and surprising possibilities that had once been foreclosed by dominant paradigms of progress. Enchantment illuminates forms of existence that have been lost, erased, or obscured, allowing us to encounter both feminism and the world anew. Er finds incantatory power in the works of writers such as Rivers Solomon, Akwaeke Emezi, Ruth Ozeki, and Alexis Wright, who disrupt hegemonic ways of thinking by summoning otherwise unimaginable ways of being. Their works collectively present an immersive and expansive feminist imaginary that makes space for marginalized histories, narratives, and lifeworlds.
Elegantly written and boldly argued, Feminism Enchanted shows how poetic language conjures alternative futures for feminist thought.
