Theory in Its Feminist Travels: Conversations in U.S. Women's Movements by Katie King
Katie King examines the development of U.S. feminist theory, tracing its inception, rocky development, and internecine struggles. In the process of dissecting other feminist theories, she creates a new feminist methodology, suggesting that a multidefinitional approach would lead to more productivity and action. King challenges a unitary history of the women's movement and focuses on the production and reception of feminist theory, which has been colored by race and racial privilege, fixed by sexual identity, defined by class and hierarchy, and consumed within politicized systems of publication and distribution. Local discourse, she argues, is constantly rewritten and reinscribed with new meanings as feminist constituencies shift and travel. This book should definitively alter the map of contemporary feminist theory in the U.S. and abroad, making it next to impossible to impose either tired taxonomies of feminism or straight, white, middle-class preoccupations upon the insurgent ground of new forms of subjectivity and political identification marking this moment of transnational culture(s). - Donna Landry.