SOURCE: Kavka, Misha. “Feminism, Ethics, and History; or, What Is the ‘Post’ in Postfeminism?” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 21, no. 1 (spring 2002): 29-44.

In the following essay, Kavka discusses the term “post-feminism,” linking the study of feminism with ethical history studies in such works as Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory and Christina Hoff Sommers's Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women.

Let us assume for the moment that there is such a thing as feminist history, that is, a history of feminism. This may seem, admittedly, like going backward. In her landmark article “Women's Time,” Julia Kristeva problematized the relation between feminism and temporality by claiming that, as le féminin is traditionally linked with cyclical temporality on the one hand and monumental temporality on the other, it “becomes a problem with respect to a certain conception of time: time as project, teleology, linear and...