Content area
Abstract
This dissertation aims to rethink how contemporary feminism might grapple with complicity, cooptation, and the concomitant failure of feminist successes through a frame other than paradox. Arguing that the paradox frame locks us into a set of “dead ends,” I shift to an orientation toward spaces between. Through sustained engagement with the work of Patricia Williams, Hannah Arendt, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Gayatri Spivak, and Gloria Anzaldúa, I elaborate a series of related but distinct between spaces that open up new ways to think about the problem of feminist success. I then use that frame to draw out practices of telling, storytelling, and writing from these authors’ work as political practices that bridge and transform the spaces between. Finally, I take up this theoretical apparatus to analyze the case of violence against women and hashtag activism, ultimately gesturing toward what sorts of transformation might be possible in this particular space.
