Abstract
This chapter considers how hope operates in the stories of Aaliyah and Jenny. Aaliyah tells a story of the conflicts she experienced as a young Muslim Swedish African girl. For Aaliyah, feminism offers a means of negotiating these conflicts, as she increasingly comes to see them as political concerns. As a child, Jenny hoped for a gender-equal future, but this was not realised in her adult life. Feminism offers Aaliyah a way of articulating concerns with the world around her and is full of hope. For Jenny, feminism feels, at times, hopeless, as she sees a reproduction of the gender inequalities she witnessed as a child. She nevertheless continues to invest in the generational transmission of feminism by ‘passing it on’ to her own daughter. This chapter considers the different ways hope operates in women’s relationship to feminist pasts, presents and futures.
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Notes
- 1.
The participant’s pseudonym has been omitted here because she shares a surname with Church Terrell. This ensures that she cannot be connected to any discussion of her interview elsewhere. This approach has been adopted in discussion and agreement with the participant.
- 2.
Borrowing Castle’s (1995) use of the term to mean not only erasure, but also the lost possibilities that are the consequence of this erasure. In this instance, the lost possibilities of non-white feminist histories.
- 3.
As Aaliyah comments, divorce is not uncommon in Zanzibar; however, whilst women can seek divorce through the legal system, the majority of divorces take place outside of the court, initiated by men who can make a written or spoken divorce statement. Divorce proceedings through the court are often initiated by women, following this divorce statement (Stiles, 2005). It is more unusual, as Aaliyah suggests, that divorce was sought by Aaliyah’s grandmother and great-grandmother.
- 4.
Using Dana Luciano’s (2007) concept of chronobiopolitics—the temporal organisation of entire populations through the connection of individuals to social narratives of progress and change (e.g. marriage, childbearing and death)—chrononormativity manages the tempos of individual lives to synchronise them with the temporality of entire populations.
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Guest, C. (2016). Aaliyah and Jenny: Feminist Hope. In: Becoming Feminist. Citizenship, Gender and Diversity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53181-0_4
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