Solidarity in writing: reading MLF literature as collective practice

Abstract

Abstract

Feminist thought spilling from the French Women’s Movement of the 1970s has had crucial impact on feminist and queer theories today. Still, political texts by Marxist feminists of this moment have routinely been read as testimony of the collective political actions that were lost in the late 1970s when collectivity dissolved into individualism. Contrary to the reception of texts by their poststructuralist peers, the reception of texts by Marxist feminists – not pertaining to the French context alone – gives little attention to how these work in terms of their form and style. Conversely, this essay rereads a key example of one such Marxist feminist text – Anne Tristan’s and Annie de Pisan’s Histoires du M.L.F. (1977) – arguing that it performs the activism and collective work that it relates to and thematises. Furthermore, the essay argues that by creating relation across time, Histoires du M.L.F simultaneously creates a version of feminist solidarity that exceeds the moment of the 1970s and puts under pressure the dominant narrative that collectivity should have been lost to feminist history.