Anything but Reactionary: Exploring the Mechanics of Backlash

Abstract

Feminist conceptualizations of backlash have understandably and appropriately centered on women’s experiences, drawing attention to efforts that would, as Susan Faludi noted in 1991, “retract the handful of small and hard-won victories that the feminist movement did manage to win for women.” In this essay, I reengage the concept to ask what we might learn if our point of departure was informed by the experience of blackness. I suggest that rather than positioning backlash as a reactionary response to any perceived gains, centering race allows us to theorize backlash as a condition of modernity. Instead of conceptualizing backlash as a punitive but potentially rectifiable kink, I suggest that backlash-as-condition is an inherent systemic feature that compels us to reimagine the very system that is itself dependent on backlash for its survival and proper functioning.

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