Recent years have seen a boom of manifesto publishing, feminist examples including Jessa Crispin’s Why I am Not a Feminist (2017), Laboria Cuboniks’ The Xenofeminist Manifesto (2018), Arruzza et al.’s Feminism for the 99 Percent (2019), Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism (2020), and Tricia Hersey’s Rest Is Resistance (2022). We can also witness a renewed scholarly interest in the form and content of feminist manifestos. Texts written in the so-called second wave of feminism (when activists increasingly seized the genre and applied it to the cause of women’s liberation) are currently republished in numerous anthologies, such as Feminist Manifestos (2018), Burn It Down! (2020), and Women’s Liberation! (2021). This panel, located at the intersection of genre and gender studies, builds on the established interest in feminist manifestos to engage critically and theoretically with the archive, especially to consider how affects are formalized and shape the poetics and rhetoric of these manifestos.

This panel draws from a feminist critique of the genre (Lyon 1999) and performs a feminist intervention into the general research on manifestos (e.g., Caws 2001; Somigli 2003; Puchner 2006; Winkiel 2008). In the 2000s, a new stream of feminist criticism challenged neoliberal, mainstream feminism, especially for its investment in individual achievement, respectability politics, and reformist conceptions of social change (Crispin 2017; Lusty 2017). While some scholars interpret the contemporary socio-political moment as a point of return to radical strands of feminism, most active in the 1960s and 1970s and temporarily abeyant in the 1980s and 1990s (Fraser 2013), others, in contrast, accentuate the continuity of feminist radicalism in feminist cyberpublishing of the 1990s and early 2000s (Rhodes 2005), or 1990s Riot Grrrl zine publishing (Lusty 2017). In this panel, we contribute to extending the conversation about the (literary) history of feminism further into the twenty-first century.

While the genealogy of feminist manifesto can be premised on the principle of chronological continuity (Rhodes 2005, Lusty 2017), we consider contemporary feminist manifestos from the perspective of “queer time” understood as “backwards continuity” (Weiman-Kelman 2018) of second-wave manifestos in the first two decades of the 2000s. We also draw on McBean’s ideas on the queer quality of feminist thinking, feeling, and organized action (2016). We adopt this approach to comment on the seemingly cyclic circulation of feminist affects across time and the means by which activist feelings are transformed, as well as to question how historical texts can be read in new ways today.

The panelists’ fifteen-minute contributions build on the assumption that emotions are mobilized in public discourse to construct gendered and racialized bodies in politically significant ways (Ahmed 2004, 2014) and respectively introduce additional theoretical frameworks connected to particular affects discussed in the papers. In order to decenter hegemonic white feminist discourse, our analyses also ask how affect operates across positionalities shaped not only by gender, but also with respect to class, dis/ability, trans, queer, and critical race theory perspectives. The audience discussion will enrich the panel inviting more diverse standpoints on the subject.

Aleksandra Julia Malinowska reads Feminism for the 99 Percent (2019) alongside its predecessor, the Combahee River Collective “Statement” (1977). She discusses the rhetorical parallels between the manifestos; both call for inter-movement mobilization, intersectional analysis, and challenge white feminist complicity. Malinowska’s analysis centers the genealogy of Black women’s anger (Jordan-Zachery 2017) and shows how this stigmatized emotion can be “righteous” (Rosenwein 2020) and in fact, rooted in positive affects (Grasso 2002).

Based on select manifestos of feminist art collectives such as the Permanent Assembly of Women Art Workers’ “We Propose: Declaration of Commitment to Feminist Practices in Art” (2017) and Nosotras Propemos/Feminist Art and Architecture Collective’s “To Manifest” (2018), Carsten Junker’s contribution foregrounds the manifest and latent functions of mobilizing affects in collaborative theorizing and activism, including relating self-empowerment to structural critique and linking a plural “we” to specific objectives. As he suggests, the mobilization of affects becomes legible as a discursive currency that binds together manifestos across distinct agendas.

Laura Handl argues, in light of China Miéville’s recent call for class hate (2022), that feminist manifestos frequently negotiate a concept of ‘justified men hate.’ These texts rage against a male class in a performative, but also sometimes in an all too pragmatic manner. Narrative catharsis is found in generalizing one gender, formalizing a polemic version of masculinity in self-reflected conversation with the stereotype of the men-hating feminist.

Together the contributors’ papers work to show how feminist manifestos consciously deconstruct the gendered politics of anger, misandry, and even self- or collective empowerment to mobilize social change.