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Abstract
It has become as common to say that feminism has been resurgent as it is to say it is finished, even impossible. Neither the sense of its new urgency nor the claim that it has (finally) extinguished itself is new. For the last 50 years, there has been a metonymy for the vexed relationship we have to feminism, and through it, to gender, and that metonymy is the “Second Wave.” It floats up into our debates where it is not wanted, we have reached for it as an origin we might recuperate, it is what we banish to the past when we want to purge from ourselves those qualities we take to be metonymic of it – qualities, for example, that my title names. Being too abstract, too simple or literal-minded, making incredibly reductive, over- exaggerated claims: what these terms describe are what we take to be wrong with how nascent contemporary feminism, the “Second Wave,” thought; these judgments name what was mistaken about that feminism, feminists’ incapacity for sophisticated, nuanced, properly skeptical analysis, their immanent failure to see properly. Abstract, Literal, Reductive pries these terms from the cognitive critiques they imply and the meanings they therefore implicitly attribute to feminism, in order to hear them differently: as descriptions that name and respond to qualities of feminist style. It analyzes how that style works, arguing that feminist style is objective, formal: it can be practiced, and to practice it is to practice a mode of thought. In doing so, it identifies style as what is conceptually and theoretically shared across midcentury feminisms that were otherwise overtly ideologically different, even opposed, as well as a vector of shared thinking about problems across different categories of politicized identity, in order to reframe our sense what feminism was, how it conceptualized gender in relation to sexuality, class, and race, and how we might think with it now.