New Books In Critical Theory

Victoria Hesford is an associated professor of Women and Gender Studies at Stony Brook University in New York. Her book Feeling Women’s Liberation (Duke University Press, 2013) examines the pivotal year of 1970 as defining the meaning of “women’s liberation.” Applying a theory of emotions to the rhetoric of mass media and the response of movement participants, Hesford demonstrates how our memory of the movement has been formed by either feelings of attachment, or dis-identification that hide its complexity and heterogeneity. The movement came to represent a radical form of feminism standing against the more staid liberal feminism of Betty Friedan. Instead of ideologically driven, Hesford argues that women’s liberation engaged in the “politics of emotion.” She demonstrates how the visceral media coverage and participant’s experience were mutual constituted in the “feminist-as-lesbian.” The language and multiple images of the feminist as a guerilla fig