Public Feminism in Times of Crisis: From Sapphos Fragments to Viral Hashtags [Paperback]

Public Feminism in Times of Crisisexamines the public practice of feminism in the age of social media. While their concept of public feminism emerges from a moment of acute crisis (the Trump years and the Covid-19 pandemic), Leila Easa and Jennifer Stager locate its foundations in history, journeying through broad swatches of time looking for connections between the centuries through art and literature and culture. Each chapter focuses on what public feminists do in the world: Public feminists gain control over an archive that otherwise contains or excludes them; they recover their own stories and subjective experiences, sometimes for activist use; they examine images and language that construct women in patriarchal texts; they situate the individual within a collective and the collective within an individual; they confront the limitations of such situating due to the containment of patriarchy and reclaim new systems of power in response; and they resurface a deep history for the alternative strategies of memorializing they employ. In navigating these practices, the authors also attend to the material conditions of writing histories as well as those shaping and enabling public feminist acts and protests more broadly.

Leila Easais professor in the English department at City College of San Francisco.
Jennifer Stageris assistant professor of history of art at Johns Hopkins University and author ofSeeing Color in Classical Art: Theories, Practice, and Reception from Antiquity to the Present.

Easa and Stager use an interdisciplinary lens to explore how contemporary feminist interventions in both physical and virtual spaces are rooted in earlier moments of feminist activism. Their work makes past efforts visible while encouraging evolving practices that leverage digital spaces for progressive action. Easa and Stager offer wide-ranging analyses of literary texts, works of art, performances, monuments, viral hashtags, and other culturl=