The Screens of Time: Feminist Memories and Hopes

Abstract

At first, it seemed that feminist futures were to be found in feminist pasts. The beginning swells of the second wave deliriously projected images of a feminist past onto the bifurcated screen of time, reimagining matriarchies, amazons and goddesses along with the secret lives, the so-called untold histories of those few women history had managed to recognize. Feminist historians, literary critics, and artists filled pages and stages with these mythical creatures whose lust, power, love and accomplishment stunned and seduced the gray, tired so-called ‘male’ histories. The story telling of the grandmothers and their ghostly performances in the passing flesh, displaced the notion of history with that of cultural memory. However termed, these projections logged images and events on to the screen of time, establishing an account of cultural capital for the present movement. The feminist present and the feminist future were animated by these figures, these actions, these settings deemed as remembered. In one sense, many were imagined utopias, hopes for the future, embedded in the past. The bipolar screen of time, the past and the future was a form of collective dreaming through temporal tropes.