Zora Simic

The slogan the ‘personal is political’ is now so well-worn that it has congealed into cliché, though the notion itself can still produce a backlash if we take regular diatribes against ‘identity politics’ as a measure. In such rants, it is as though only some of us possess an identity that we mobilise around politically, whether under the LGBTQI+ umbrella, as First Nations peoples, as part of ethnic communities, or as ‘women’, the world’s largest special interest group. Given that critics of ‘identity politics’ tend to be socially conservative, the targets of their reductive invectives are presumed to lean to the left politically.

For over a decade, Naomi Klein – the avowedly left-wing Canadian journalist and activist, best known for her first and third books, No Logo: Taking aim at the brand bullies (1999) and The Shock Doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism (2007) – has been ‘chronically confused’ for ‘the other Naomi’, American writer Naomi Wolf, who first made her name with the feminist best seller The Beauty Myth (1990). Across that period, Klein’s ‘big-haired doppelganger’ has morphed into ‘one of the most effective creators and disseminators of misinformation and disinformation’ of recent times, a development that has led some to remark that Wolf is in fact a ‘doppelganger of her former self’.

'State-of-the-nation’ books are a tricky genre: for every The Lucky Country (1964), Donald Horne’s bestselling indictment of 1960s Australia, there must be at least a dozen more which fall swiftly into obsolescence. Yet this common fate is not necessarily a bad thing: such books are meant to be timely, not timeless. As an intervention into the contemporary moment, such texts’ success or value resides in fresh and useful analysis which is currently lacking elsewhere; and the ability of the author to capture a mood that is, if not ‘national’, at least pervasive enough to be widely recognisable. At the same time, it helps if that mood has not yet been properly articulated. To raise the bar further, the best of them offer both vital historical perspective and a path forward, and are written in a persuasive and accessible style which stops short of polemic but resists hesitant equivocation. 

Grace Tame was sixteen years old, and it was 2011, when the first account of the repeated sexual assault and child abuse she had endured as a victim of her fifty-eight-year-old high school maths teacher, Nicolaas Bester, appeared in her local newspaper, the Hobart Mercury. She was hanging out with two close friends, their parents were at work, and she thinks it was probably the school holidays. The headline (‘Teacher Admits to Affair with Student’) was accompanied by ‘a huge picture of his face’ and a ‘romanticised description’ of the first time her abuser had exposed himself to her.

In 2016, feminist and queer theorist Sara Ahmed resigned from her post as professor at the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, University of London, in protest against the failure to address sexual harassment at her institution. Given that she was at the peak of her career and working in a centre she had helped to create, hers was a bold and surprising move, but also entirely consistent with her feminist politics. In one way or another, Ahmed has been writing about this decision, its causes and effects, ever since: first on her blog feministkilljoys; as an example of a ‘feminist snap’ in Living a Feminist Life (2017); in relation to diversity work in universities in What’s the Use: On the uses of use (2019); and now most directly in Complaint!, her tenth book.

Among historians of sexuality, it is customary to stress that there was never just one sexual revolution, but many. There were the pop-culture versions, the countercultural expressions and perhaps most momentously, but least discussed, the everyday or ‘ordinary’ sexual revolution. Or conversely, as French philosopher Michel Foucault so influentially argued in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The will to knowledge – first published in French in 1976 and in English in 1978, in the very thick of the so-called sexual revolution – there was no liberating sex from the disciplinary and regulatory effects of modern sexuality, already by then at least three centuries old. One of the delusions of the age was that, as we put sexual repression behind us (by saying yes to sex, for instance), ‘tomorrow sex will be good again’.

Lucy Delap, Reader in Modern British and Gender History at the University of Cambridge, is a consummate historian and not one to privilege her own experience. Indeed, one of her chief aims in her innovative new global history of ‘feminisms’ – the plural is important, no matter how inelegant – is to bring to the fore feminists and other activists for women’s rights who are less well known, but hardly less significant, than the usual suspects. In this aim, and from the very first page, Delap succeeds admirably. Feminisms: A global history opens with an ‘incendiary letter’ published in 1886 in a local newspaper in the British-ruled Gold Coast (now Ghana), written by an anonymous author on behalf of ‘We Ladies of Africa’. At once a protest against the sexual violence of colonial incursion, and an assertion of cultural power and defiance, the letter also flags to a present-day audience that this history will not be the standard White Feminist narrative – and hooray for that.