If feminism, as the dominant discourse would have us understand it, still looks like unfinished business, it is perhaps, as Rafia Zakaria writes in the opening chapter of Against White Feminism, because “the women who are paid to write about feminism, lead feminist organizations, and make feminist policy in the Western world are white and upper-middle-class.”
Meanwhile, in the “Global South,” climate change and Western wars have trashed the notion of women’s lives as improving toward a point of equality. It is true that the freedom to vote and the right to equal pay have been enjoyed by more than the class of women closest to men in the racial-capitalist order, yet the creaking of neoliberal infrastructure under the weight of the COVID-19 crisis has sounded of how women at the intersection of poverty and racialization are progressively trampled by austerity, privatization, and the degradation of labor. While feminism thus described is imagined as a story of linear progress, most women’s lives in the last 50 years have only been getting worse. Among the pandemic’s exposures and amplifications had been the limits of Anglo-America’s mainstream “feminist” project. As such, the show itself remained “unfinished,” yet the irony was more a function of the “business” implied. The exhibition had been due to run until February 2021 but was extended in light of COVID-19 to run until August. IN JUNE 2021, cycling for the first time to my London workplace in the tailwind of two national lockdowns, I indulged in noting the irony in a banner outside the British Library, advertising its exhibition Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women’s Empowerment.
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