Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory

Abstract

This book is on how feminists tell stories about Western feminist theory's recent past, why these stories matter, and what we can do to transform them.It explores their narrative form and charts their interaction with other stories about feminism and social change.It asks what might be at stake in feminist storytelling, and most importantly it seeks to intervene in these stories, to realign their political grammar to allow a different vision of a feminist past, present, and future.∞ The work starts from the assumption that how feminists tell stories matters in part because of the ways in which they intersect with wider institutionalizations of gendered meanings.For example, stories that frame gender equality as a uniquely Western export, as a way to measure or enforce economic and democratic development, resonate disconcertingly well with feminist stories that place ''feminism'' as a radical knowledge project firmly in the Western past.When feminists celebrate the move beyond unity or identity,