GENERATIONAL ANXIETIES

Generational paradigms have become increasingly prevalent within narratives of feminist history over the past forty years, as tracing feminist genealogies has itself become an orderly and continuous historical tradition (Scott 1996:1).115 Feminists have constructed generational histories and continuities not only to build intellectual and emotional connections between women of different ages and eras, but also to counter the persistent ‘erasure of women’s political and historical past, which makes each new generation of feminists appear as an abnormal excrescence on the face of time’ (Rich 1995:9-10). Yet, whilst the intention of such generational and matrilineal symbolism is to build constructive connections between feminists across time, feminists have become increasingly concerned that these paradigms are in fact having divisive effects.

Criticisms of the generational paradigm tend to focus upon the related tropes of anxiety and conflict. In the first instance, envisaging feminism as a singular journey, whereby each generation builds on the gains of the previous, can lead to anxieties over one’s own contribution and an unease about contingency. Judith Roof describes this as the ‘parent’s angst’, premised upon the ‘fear of a barren history’, i.e. a fear that the next ‘generation’ will refuse to follow in the footsteps of their foremothers and continue in the projected direction, or will ‘[reject] their mother’s model entirely and [commence] a new and different battle’ (Roof 1997:70). Such ‘parental’ anxiety is not unfounded, as the model of linear generational succession can indeed provoke a desire in younger feminists to break out of the chain, negate older feminisms, and begin anew, as they experience the burden of legacy in negative terms

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The idea of feminist generations became particularly entrenched through influential feminist texts in the 1970s such as Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex (1971) and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), both of which begin by offering an account of feminist history reaching back at least one century. Roof also gives the example of Alice Rossi’s The Feminist Papers (1973) —‘fully devoted to the project of describing a feminist history’—and Jane Rule’s Lesbian Images (1975) - ‘primarily about foremothers’ (Roof 1999:70).

(Henry 2004; Looser 1999). The matrix of generational legacy and precedent can thus instill a sense of generational anxiety among both older and younger feminists, giving rise to a conception of feminist history as a struggle between competing generations (Roof 1997:69- 70; Howie 2010b:4). This is not to say that without generational paradigms, feminism would be an entirely harmonious field. The point, rather, is that symbolic familial or mother- daughter tropes have exacerbated tensions, and can prevent feminists from exploring the complex intellectual reasons for conflicts within fields of feminist praxis and discourse, and from looking to larger institutional and cultural forces that ‘perpetuate sexism, foster rivalry and undervalue women's work’ (Roof 1997:85).

The critical ‘generations’ debate within recent feminist theory has been crucial in highlighting the problematic effects that generational and matrilineal paradigms can have upon how feminist discourse is conducted and perceived. Moreover, the debate has provoked a penetrating theoretical investigation into the very concept of ‘generations’ itself. For some, such as Roof, the concept of historical generations is inextricably linked to patriarchal, traditionalist models of history and linear models of historical time, which means that feminists must abandon generational and matrilineal paradigms altogether. In an influential essay on ‘Generational Difficulties’ (1997), Roof argues that the concept of generations is intrinsically connected to familial structures and images, which tend towards ‘Oedipal’ modes of relating and communicating. Although the central theme of the Oedipal drama is the father-son relationship, in more general terms it depicts intergenerational relationships through the lens of rivalry, prohibition, frustration, repression, deferral, rebellion, and entitlement. Roof’s claim is that the familial paradigm of ‘feminist generations’ inevitably imports the ‘full force of Oedipal rivalry, recrimination, and debt’ into relations between feminists, which means that tensions and conflicts between feminists are over-interpreted in terms of unavoidable tension between ‘overbearing mothers’ or ‘undutiful daughters’ (1997:71). Even when the familial symbolism is not apparent, she contends, the concept of generations is implicitly dependent upon a biologistic ‘reproductive logic’ of historical change, which presumes that ‘the past produces the future as parents produce children’. This

reproductive logic is made most explicit in cases where the mother-daughter metaphor is in use, because it literally takes us to reproduction as the site of historical change (ibid).

As well as being wedded to a reproductive logic and an Oedipal familial model, claims Roof, the concept of ‘generations’ instils an onerous concept of legacy, because it is bound up in ‘the metaphor of the patriarchal family in the throes of its illusory battle with mortality’ (ibid: 86). Propagating generational paradigms, she states, is a way of staking a claim in history, making one’s mark and ensuring one’s contribution is not forgotten, trying to direct the future to fulfill the goals and dreams of the past (ibid: 75). From this perspective, the generational trope functions as a totemic guarantee of historical continuity, representing a patrilineal figure of control ‘that prevents unruly 'Others' escaping the law of legacy and debt’ (ibid). As such, the establishment of a generational order ‘connotes a certain fear about a failure of cohesion, the dissolution of heritage, and the loss or defection of heirs that might dispel the myths of impossible continuity’ (ibid: 85). Generational logic, according to Roof, also imports patrimonial understandings of exchange, based upon ideologies of property and ownership, whereby ideas and practices are regarded as property that is not shared but ‘handed down’ and endowed on the next generation (ibid:75)

Consequently, Roof argues, the concept of ‘generations’ both presumes and reinforces a unilinear, unidirectional understanding of historical time, which in turn fosters hierarchical, patriarchal models of communication and relationality. She concludes, therefore, that if we challenge ‘the very notions of time and history that ground these ideas, generation becomes an insignificant term in the creation, re-creation, sharing and proliferation of feminist knowledges' (ibid: 86). Her argument, however, warrants closer scrutiny. Is the concept of ‘generations’ necessarily bound up in a reductive biologistic ‘reproductive’ understanding of historical change? Is familial symbolism necessarily ‘Oedipal’ or patriarchal? Is there only one generational temporality?

One of the most useful aspects of Roof’s critique is its provocation of a thorough de- naturalisation of ‘generations’ as a historiographical concept. In some respects, ‘generations’ is of course bound up in ‘reproductive’ systems, given that the idea of generations refers, in

its most basic sense, to several ‘brute facts’ about human biology and the life of the species: birth, aging and death. There is reproduction: parents produce children, and those children produce children and so on. And this process is indeed unidirectional in the sense that my children cannot give birth to me. However, whilst it connects the idea of history to the ‘life of the species’, the concept of ‘generations’ does not belong to the biological as a given. It is a sociocultural formulation, or a ‘sociological projection’, of the biological process of reproduction (Ricoeur 1988:109). As such, Roof is right to contend that there is nothing inevitable about interpreting or organising historical change around the concept of ‘generations’ or a generational succession, as there are various ways we could conceptualise the processes of birth, ageing and death at a cultural level.

Yet, whilst de-naturalisation underscores the contestability and contingency of ‘generations’ as a cultural, discursive concept, Roof’s claim that it is inherently wedded to a patriarchal, linear model of historical time is more problematic. Indeed, a deeper analysis of ‘generations’ at a cultural and conceptual level entreats us to explore its variety of significations and its ambiguities. On the one hand, it is certainly possible to argue that the concept of generations has propped up a traditionalist linear ideal of history. According to the traditionalist model, the ‘continuity’ of species reproduction is supposedly reflected within community and kinship structures, as ‘generations’ provide the conduit for transmission of the past and thus the straight line of history from past to present to future (Osborne 1996:127). Yet, to focus solely on these aspects of linear continuity is to overlook the fact that the concept of ‘generations’ implicitly carries both continuity and discontinuity as core components of its meaning. Relations between overlapping ‘generations’ can be the medium of historical continuity, but also of rupture and discontinuity, due to the disruptive potential of demarcating a new ‘generation’ and the fact that ‘new generations’ do not always do what they are told or are expected to do, as Roof herself observes (ibid: 135). In this sense, I suggest there is a fundamental ambiguity at the core of generational time, as its temporalisation depends upon the dynamic interplay between continuity and discontinuity, as generational links and/or ruptures can be enacted and emphasised to varying extents, within

different situations. My initial proposal, therefore, is that taking a broader, more extensive perspective on the ‘generations’ concept will enable us to explore this temporal ambiguity in greater depth.

In its broadest sense, generational time can be conceived as a created time that mediates between the realms of people living before, during and beyond one’s own lifetime. In this sense, it makes possible the lived experience of receiving and forming historical memories and anticipating or imagining future historical time (Ricoeur 1988:112-4; Stiegler 2010). For example, the idea of ‘predecessors’ instils a sense of connection to earlier lives and times and transmitted memories, whilst the idea of ‘successors’ stretches out futural horizons, denoting those likely to outlive us and the anonymous ‘future generation’ who have not yet been born (Ricoeur 1988:112-4). Once again, it is helpful to draw a distinction between a quantitative approach and a qualitative approach. The quantitative approach to ‘generations’ charts cycles of birth, aging and death, calculating average intervals of procreation and life-spans to construct a generational model in purely quantitative terms. But to grasp the meaning of symbolic generational orders we must ask qualitative questions about the social dynamics of constituting a diverse group of people as a distinct ‘generation’, interconnecting ‘generations’ with one another, and endowing this process with cultural values and meaning (Mannheim 1952; Ricoeur 1988:110-111). This qualitative approach guards against the reductive presumption that all those who belong to a ‘generation’ of people born within the same dated parameters share a distinct, cohesive perspective or experience, or animate a ‘generational geist’ (Heller 1997:209). Moreover, it enables us to focus on the diachronic aspect of the ‘generations’ concept and the function of generational time as a relational time that enables connections between lives through or across time and a ‘large- scale’ temporal imaginary. Indeed, the etymology of ‘diachrony’—meaning ‘through’ or ‘between’ time—supports the idea that diachronic relations are not a one-way or mono-causal process, but rather, more of a two-way, dialogic process back and forth through time and between people.

If generational time is understood in this broad sense as a fundamentally relational, connective time, it follows that its temporalisation depends upon certain ways of relating and making connections. In other words, the extent to which we emphasise or enact ‘generational’ continuities or discontinuities is dependent upon the way we relate and communicate with one another, which in turn, will depend upon specific contexts and historical trajectories. The same goes for matrilineal paradigms, which are invested with multiple meanings and connotations, have different modes of symbolic expression within different societies and communities, and can be played out and temporalised in various ways.116 Patriarchal and Oedipal models may well dominate cultural and social understandings of familial structure and relationships, yet it is too much of a generalisation to equate any kind of familial or matrilineal symbolism with patriarchal relational models and Oedipality.

Rather than abandoning all generational or matrilineal thinking at the outset, then, the rest of the chapter will seek to explore further the temporal ambiguity of generational time, and consider the variety of ways that generational or genealogical time can be configured and understood. It is necessary to be critically aware of the potentially problematic effects of generational rhetoric and symbolism, to interrogate our assumptions around, and reliance upon, generational paradigms and anxieties. Yet, if we take a broader and more nuanced perspective, we see that historical change need not be linked to ‘generations’ in its crudest quantitative sense, in terms of the division of history into thirty-year intervals (Mannheim 1952), nor need generational time be understood in terms of an Oedipal familial paradigm, or a unilinear order of succession. The crucial question then becomes how to think ‘generational time’ outside the dominant paradigms, and to cultivate a more productive and contextually attentive approach.

116 _{Indeed, generalising claims about ‘familial’ paradigms and their political value and meaning risk}

echoing the universalising claims made by some white American feminists such as Firestone and Millett, for example, that denounce ‘the family’ as the locus of women’s oppression, when the right to live together as a family comes with a very different history for African Americans than for white Americans (Carby 1999:51-2).

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