What does it mean to be Feminist today?

What does it mean to be feminist today? This is not a simple question given that the current climate of relativism seems to have deprived feminism of a coherent political position. To be clear, there are many feminisms and many feminists-the question here is, what do they all hold in common apart from the name? The event of feminism takes different forms in different contexts, institutions and cultures. Move over, despite this and particularly in the university, discourses of gender politics have increasingly eclipsed or possibly colonized discussions of feminism. Here feminism has become a question and praxis grappling with its historicisation and it seems to us that feminism today is struggling with a nuanced problem which permeates its very discourse: how to stage a subjectivity which is distinctly feminist? It is in response to this question that this issue of Continental Thought and Theory arose with the intention of providing a space where various possibilities can be articulated and engaged. All too often feminism seems to appear to variously foreground, retreat or convolute within a larger gender politics that is arguably still entangled within postmodern relativism. We consider it crucial to restate that the importance of feminism is its emphasis on ‘life’ as primarily a material question. For instance, questions concerning feminist scholars today focus on economic struggles, class, entrapment within conduits of historicisation, foregrounding women’s experiences and how the experiences of minority and marginalized groups are documented,