The Urgent Need for Radical Feminism Today

Radical feminism remains one of the most fraught, maligned, and misunderstood segments of the feminist movement, yet it has left deep imprints on ideas about feminist activism and thought. Though certainly not without its limitations, second-wave radical feminism opened up new understandings of gender and power, reimagined solidarity between movements, made space for angry and impatient agitators, and embodied notions of feminist praxis. This essay lays out an argument for the urgent need to embrace radical feminism today, mapping out not only some of the pitfalls and strengths of radical feminism but the stakes of turning away from radical feminist thought at such a tumultuous and regressive moment. Most centrally, I argue that radical feminism opens up, rather than forecloses, space, and that its core politics are expansive and revolutionary rather than reductionistic and limited. I specifically analyze the contentious figure of the TERF, a reactionary figure that I argue is both conceptually fuzzy and neither feminist nor radical, followed by a specific analysis of abortion rights as a case study of liberal versus radical feminist ideologies. I conclude the essay with a consideration of the value of working from the margins, calling for feminist academics to envision their role as the academic wing of a larger feminist activist movement rather than buying into the logics and practices of institutional power within the academy. Ultimately, I explore in this essay how radical feminism seeks to embrace the jagged edges of feminism while making space for the abject, downtrodden, forgotten, and discarded figures so often ignored or neglected in liberal feminist thought, scholarship, and politics.