Public Feminism in Times of Crisis: From Sappho’s Fragments to Viral Hashtags

Public Feminism in Times of Crisis examines the public practice of feminism in the age of social media. Rooted in a moment of acute crisis (the Trump years and the Covid-19 pandemic), Leila Easa and Jennifer M. S. Stager locate the foundations of public feminism in history, journeying through broad swatches of time to uncover connections between the centuries through art and literature and culture. Each chapter focuses on what public feminists do in the world: they gain control over an archive that otherwise contains or excludes them; they recover their own stories and subjective experiences, sometimes for activist use; they examine images and language that construct women in patriarchal texts; they situate the individual within a collective and the collective within an individual; they confront the limitations of such situating due to the containment of patriarchy and reclaim new systems of power in response; and they resurface a deep history for the alternative strategies of memorializing they employ. In navigating these practices, the authors also attend to the material conditions of writing histories, both in the past and in the writing of this book, along with those shaping and enabling public feminist acts and protests more broadly.