Moving Past Ressentiment: War and the State of Feminist Freedom

This paper works with Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment because it offers important insights into the implications of anachronistic feminist epistemologies of freedom that are built on, as Wendy Brown argues, attachments to wounded identities. Injured by power, second and third-wave feminism’s response to loss is to assert the right to power and empowerment. As this strategy forecloses loss and human vulnerability, it renders feminism unable to respond adequately to war and contemporary political conflict. Drawing on postcolonial questions of loss and suffering in conversation with ressentiment, I suggest that feminism can begin to unlearn what Stuart Hall has called “our habits of mind.” To elucidate what a new feminism that is “touched by loss” might look like, I turn to Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and post-9/11 responses to advance the politics of grief and mourning.