Description

If feminism has always been characterized by its divisions, it is metafeminism, a term coined by Lori Saint-Martin, that defines and embraces that disorder. As a carefully devised reading practice, metafeminism understands contemporary feminist literature and theory as both recalling and extending the tropes and politics of the past. In Cautiously Hopeful Marie Carri re brings together seemingly disparate writing by Anglo-Canadian, Indigenous, and Qu b cois women authors under the banner of metafeminism. Familiarizing readers with major streams of feminist thought, including intersectionality, affect theory, and care ethics, Carri re shows how literary works by such authors as Dionne Brand, Nicole Brossard, Naomi Fontaine, Larissa Lai, Tracey Lindberg, and Rachel Zolf, among others, tackle the entanglement of gender with race, settler-invader colonialism, heteronormativity, positionality, language, and the posthuman condition. Meanwhile tenable alliances among Indigenous women, women of colour, and settler feminist practitioners emerge. Carri re's tone is personal and accessible throughout - in itself a metafeminist gesture that both encompasses and surpasses a familiar feminist form of writing. Despite the growing anti-feminist backlash across media platforms and in various spheres of political and social life, a hopefulness animates this timely work that, like metafeminism, stands alert to the challenges that feminism faces in its capacity to effect social change in the twenty-first century.