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position sustained by cultural belief, religion and institutional arrangements, linked, among other things, to marriage, taxation and adoption rights. Even the practice of ‘coming out’ as gay assumes that people are straight to beginwith. As such, heteronormativity systematically marginalizes – and ‘invisibilizes’ – gay people. Resistance to this can nevertheless be explained by reference to the concept of gender performativity , particularly as developed by Judith Butler (2006). To say that gender is performative is to say that how we understand gender, and how we position ourselves as gendered or sexual beings in relation to other, is a product of repeatedwords and actions. Gender and sexuality are therefore not an expression of what one is (identity), but of what one does (social action). A final aspect of queer theory is a general tendency to adopt an intersectional approach to analysis that refuses to view sexuality in isolation from other social structures, with a particular emphasis being placed on the interplay between sexuality and race. THE FUTURE OF FEMINISM The image of feminism as constantly beleaguered and in retreat, conjured up by the once- fashionable idea of ‘postfeminism’ is starkly misleading. Rather than being dead – or at least transformed into something else, which is not really feminist – feminism is alive and vibrant and shows every sign of continuing to be so (Walby, 2011). What has happened to feminism is that it has become less visible, or less easily noticed, but this may be more a reflection of feminism’s widening influence than its incipient decline. This can be seen in at least two respects. First, feminism is no longer only (or mainly) an outsider protest movement. Instead, it has increasingly moved into the mainstream. This can, for example, be seen in the fact that initiatives to reduce gender inequality (a traditional concern of feminism, even though the initiatives are not necessarily labelled ‘feminist’) have increasingly become standard practice in the public services and across civil society. Further evidence of this can be found in the prominence feminist perspectives now enjoy in a growing range of fields of academic study. Second, the ideological orientation of feminism has been revised and broadened. Whereas feminism once focused on the relatively narrow goal of advancing the role of women by reducing gender inequality, it has come to address the issue of gender relations in general, reflecting on both how they are shaped and how they can be transformed. This has drawn feminists, together with those influenced by feminism but who do not self-define as feminists, into wider debates about gender and sexuality. Feminism, nevertheless, is confronted by a number of enduring challenges. One of the most significant of these challenges is that feminism’s successes threaten to weaken the women’s movement, undermining its unity and sense of purpose. The achievement of votes for women, accomplished in many Western states in the early twentieth century, was thus followed by decades of decline, during which the women’s movement often barely functioned. Similarly, the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, which witnessed, among other things, the legalization of abortion, the introduction of equal pay and anti- discrimination legislation and wider access for women to education and political and professional life, led to a period of feminist de-radicalization. A further challenge is that the survival of the forces of anti-feminism seems to suggest that feminism will always
exist within a contested political environment. This was evident in the 1980s in a conservative backlash against feminism, which has been revived in the early decades of the twenty-first century, in association with the rise of right-wing populism.
Performativity: Repeated actions or rituals through which a subject (gendered or otherwise) is constructed.
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