Reading feminist theory as a complex imaginative achievement, Feminist Imagination considers feminist commitment through the interrogation of its philosophical, political and affective connections with the past, and especially with the `race′ trials of the twentieth century. The book looks at: the ′directionlessness′ of contemporary feminist thought; the question of essentialism and embodiment; the racial tensions in the work of Simone de Beauvoir; the totalitarian character in Hannah Arendt; the ′mimetic Jew′ and the concept of mimesis in the work of Judith Butler.
Vikki Bell provides a compelling rethinking of feminist theory as bound up with attempts to understand oppression outside a focus on ′women′. She affirms feminism as a site and mode of making these connections.