Quentin Skinner lecture: ‘In and against the state’: revolutionary feminism during deindustrialisation.

The feminist tradition is known for its critique of the state as an agent and enabler of patriarchal domination. In the decades following the Women’s Liberation Movements, feminists often fused this critique to a Marxist account of the capitalist state. Together, these theories of the state justified a revolutionary antagonism to efforts to wield the state as a tool for reform. Yet in practice, the revolutionary feminist struggles of this period often took a different approach. As this lecture will seek to show, they were struggles that operated ‘in and against the state’.

This lecture will also suggest that we tell the history of radical political thought in this period through sites and forms of struggle—the demand, the strike, the squat, the council, and the city. Each of these struggles represents different degrees of incorporation by the state. They also offer lessons for thinking about the relation of revolution and reform today.

Given by Katrina Forrester, Quentin Skinner Fellow

The full programme is available at: https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/38363/#programme