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.

Affirming Feminism
Phantastic Communities and Dangerous Thinking
Feminist Political Imagination
Suffering
Thinking Politics with Simone de Beauvoir and Richard Wright
Appearance
Thinking Difference in the Political Realm with Hannah Arendt
Mimesis as Cultural Survival
Judith Butler and Anti-Semitism
Essentialism and Embodiment
The Politics Behind the Paranoia
Conclusion
Trauma and Temporality in Genealogical Feminist Critique

Vikki Bell lectures in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, university of London.