Continental Thought & Theory A journal of intellectual freedom & C T T http://ctt.canterbury.ac.nz What Does Feminism Want? Alison Horbury Volume 1 | Issue 3: Feminism 567-592 | ISSN: 2463-333X Abstract: Like Freud’s famous inquiry ‘what does a woman want?’, this paper asks a similar question of the signiier ‘feminism’ for if one aims to (re)imagine feminism for the new millennium one must irst ask: what does Feminism want? This (imperfect) reference to Freud’s question hopes to draw attention to the particular and the universal underpinning the signiier feminism, a slipperiness that works idiosyncratically at the threshold of public and private politics which, though it is perhaps the most unifying aspect of feminism, nevertheless undermines it. To politicize the personal one must question the signiier that comes to universalize an indeinite article for, as I argue in this paper, what ‘a’ woman wants is beneath the bar of what Feminism wants when it is mounted in public discourse. To continue to invest publically in a signiier of personal politics—as Jacqueline Rose advocates (2014)—then, one must rephrase the question: of what does this signiier Feminism speak when it is mounted in public discourse? This paper considers some mechanisms by which this signiier generates and mobilizes desire, fantasy, and phobia in public politics where feminism’s knowledge product covers over or, in Rose’s terms, “sanitizes” those “disturbing insight[s]” (2014: x) of experience, “everything that is darkest, most recalcitrant and unsettling” (2014 xii), in the “furthest limits of conscious and unconscious life” (2014: x). Here, where this signiier constitutes an ideal-ego, its efects are inhibiting. In short, this paper argues that before any future of feminism can be imagined, those occupying a feminist position—discourse, politics, or identity—must ask what their unconscious investment in this signiier is. In Lacanian terms, one must relinquish feminism’s discourse of protest and complete the circuit through the analyst’s discourse to ask: what does a woman want in feminism?