AustLit

'Situated in the context of renewed efforts to examine and expand the historical scholarship on 1970s American feminism, this article argues for the centrality of black feminism to the story of 1970s feminism, the importance of intersectional friendship for feminist work, and the critical role of intersectional awareness and consciousness about one's own identity position for feminist scholarship. Through its three-part structure, the article seeks to demonstrate and illuminate the relationship between historical scholarship, scholarly identity, and methodological choices. First, it examines the U.S. media construction of Germaine Greer as an idealised white, heterosexual feminist subject and considers the dialectical relationship between media output, scholarship that draws on it, feminist group politics, and the making of a singular hegemonic white feminist past. Second, in order to tease out the role of the historian's identity in scholarly production, I discuss my own experience of fluid, intersectional identity as a racially ambiguous woman in Australia and the United States, and the influence of this experience on my research and methodological choices. Third, through an analysis of previously unexamined letters between Germaine Greer and Florynce Kennedy, the article explores their influential and mutually supportive friendship. Allied across lines of race and nation, their intersectional friendship is a powerful example for working across difference and reconceptualising our feminist pasts and futures.' (Publication abstract)