The theoretical debates that have animated the field of gender and sexuality studies are haunted by the specter of the feminist 1970s and its alter-ego, “the Second Wave.” Sometimes, this haunting is explicit, as when the #metoo moment was framed as an echo of  “the sex wars,” reviving old schisms between sex positive and sex negative approaches in queer and feminist politics; or when the legacy of its cultural, separatist feminism is used to mark the beginning of today’s reactionary politics of trans-exclusion, a politics that pretends to claim the name of feminism as its own. Sometimes it is implicit as when the “Second Wave” is metonymic for a set of qualities we either want to purge from or recuperate for our politics. It thus figures a history that was naïvely realist about the ur-subject of feminism, “woman”; aggressively essentialist and universalizing; and myopically white or bourgeois, or both, while also offering a memory scape for political successes as productive, pragmatic, utopian, radical, and unapologetically militant. 

This seminar aims to take up “the 70s” as an inquiry into  the way historiography animates theory, and vice versa. It follows a range of scholars---Clare Hemmings, Victoria Hesford, and Jennifer Nash---who have pointed to the potent psychic figure of “the 70s” to consider the periodization of 20th century identity politics and the institutional forms they produced by emphasizing the contradictory feelings that now accompany it. Critics have looked back at “the 70s” to nostalgically recuperate what they (we) feel we’ve lost, or to critique and name the mistakes of the past as past, to purge them from our own politics. Sometimes, both of these affective relations---love or admiration on one hand and repudiation on the other---happen in the same critical gesture. Collectively, we don’t know how best to position the field in relation to the Second Wave; we also don’t know how to stop defining ourselves in relation to it. These issues have taken on new urgency in the contemporary illiberal moment: “the 70s” has become a touchpoint for both the global new right and our analysis of it, serving as both a mirror to our contemporary moment and a way to identify the historical beginning to it. 

This seminar explores what it would mean to look back to “the 70s” differently. We invite papers that think in historical or historiographic terms with  the  repetition compulsion that returns feminist and queer theory to  the 70s time and again; papers that use the archives of “the 70s” to offer new perspectives on contemporary theoretical debates; papers that consider the conceptual terrains shared or divided between “race,” “gender” and analogous categories in relationship to the histories of movements and activism; and papers that bring new analytic tools to bear on our reading of existing archives, especially from perspectives that emphasize the critical priorities of literary and media studies.