Editor’s introduction: toward feminist modernisms

Abstract

When in 2012 we first began seeking a publisher for our proposed journal, we were told by a major press that Feminist Modernist Studies was "not needed" and librarians would not "know how to classify it" (?) We wondered how scholarship on modernism and feminism/ gender/sexuality could be simultaneously unnecessary (e.g. already done, fully integrated into modernist studies) and not recognizable as a category of academic study. Yet, even modernist feminist critics confess that feminism/gender appears oddly "everywhere and nowhere" 1 in nearly two decades of conference papers and publications emerging from the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) and its affiliated journal Modernism/Modernity (M/M). Upon closer scrutiny of these and other "new modernist" venues, feminist critics note that gender issues are either largely omitted, summarily added on, 2 orwithin feminist scholarshipsubsumed under modernism's broader intellectual expansions into globalization, cultural studies, and interdisciplinarity. Feminism/gender rarely serves as a point of entry into the new modernisms, yet critics continue to do important feminist work. Indeed, ironically, as Jessica Berman observes in this issue, feminist inquiry actually "helped to make possible the transnational, along with other recent 'turns' … in modernist studies" and "it [tacitly] undergirds much of the best work." Perhaps as Urmila Seshagiri suggests of the new modernism "one disciplinary process of expansion … overwhelm[ed] another." 3 Yet many feminist critics wary of being labeled old fashioned have felt pressured to authenticate their scholarship on women, gender, or feminist issues by establishing upfront its primary intent to illuminate other political, global, cultural, and interdisciplinary agendas. Accordingly, the gendered readings embedded ("everywhere") in these modernist studies leave unspoken ("nowhere") their often complexly interwoven implications, variously: for the sex/gendered constitutions of modernism; women's roles in shaping modernity; the suppression and recovery of lost modernist women writers; or the ways in which taking gender/the body/women as a point of entry might expand and/or completely alter current definitions of modernism. Setting aside the truth that feminist recovery work is never fully exhausted or "already done," we have not yet witnessed an intensive, large-scale exploration of gender and modernism in literature, art, and cultural studies. With notable exceptions, the 1980s and 1990s' surge of feminist inquiry during the self-described "post-modernist" era by definition evaded the modern period for the preferred study of Victorian, (queer) Decadent, and contemporary literature/culture/theory. 4 Modernism was then out of fashion, equated with T.S. Eliot and the New Critics' reactionary politics, elitism, and ahistoricism. Literary

From an aviatrix to a eugenicist: walking with Manchester’s Modernist Heroines

“…In Manchester, as in other cities, the role of the tour guide is multi-faceted. Tour guides act (among other things) as gatekeepers of place-based knowledge, representatives of their environment and a tourist spectacle (Pond 1993, Holloway 2010). An informal survey looking at Manchester tours prior to developing this project found they largely ignored women's role in history of the city (Rose 2013).…”

Modernisms: Aotearoa New Zealand–Australia–Fiji, 1926–1986

“…One such contribution concerns gender. As Cassandra Laity notes in the introduction to the first issue of Feminist Modernist Studies in 2018, 'we have not yet witnessed an intensive, large-scale exploration of gender and modernism' in literature and art, 11 and a distinctive, if not defining, aspect of modernism in this region is the central and prominent role played by women, from its first stirrings to its full flourishing. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the authors Mansfield, Robin Hyde, and Ursula Bethell were well known and influential, and, among painters, Frances Hodgkins and Rita Angus were leading innovators.…”