"Feminist theory secures rather than challenges, Hemmings shows in one of the book's most compelling arguments, a variety of postfeminist, gender-equality discourses that are central to the reproduction of global power relations." https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1057/fr.2011.41
Narratives of progress, loss, and return aren't just for understanding how people talk about feminism. These narrative themes are also used to describe relationships with the internet and social media.
Hemmings writes eloquently about the limits of empathy and how far we are able to tolerate accepting, or even hearing about, life as seen and told by others.
What is expelled from view in order for the political grammar of the subject to remain intact?
"The experience of horror that causes a temporary break in Western feminist subject/object relations may precipitate a straightforward judgment of the other-subject or practices concerned as unacceptable. In other words, the experience of horror may well mark the stopping point of the deferral of the limit discussed above. This is very clearly the case in some responses to FGC [Female Genital Cutting], in which the horror itself is repeated textually as evidence in several ways."
"Brooks’ somewhat throwaway disgust (the article does not otherwise discuss FGC) marks the limit of Western feminist subjectivity in two ways, in fact. It marks a limit in order to produce clear judgment, and it also frames her more open argument about religious veiling as one that can be taken seriously as nonrelativist. Her affective certainty here allows her reader to consider her less absolute position elsewhere."
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