Chapter 19: Foregrounding Friendship: Feminist Pasts, Feminist Futures

Sasha Roseneil

Foregrounding friendship: feminist pasts, feminist futures Friendship is an understudied yet vitally important topic for gender and women's studies. Looking back over the history of feminist writings on women's same-sex friendships, the first section of the chapter explores the importance placed on friendship by earlier generations of feminists across the twentieth century. Focusing on polemical, theoretical and empirical considerations of friendship, I suggest that friendship has been fundamental to feminist politics, identities and communities. The second part of the chapter then sets out an argument for the centrality of friendship - same-sex, male and female, and cross-sex - to feminist research agendas, now and in the future. The lens of friendship facilitates a radical challenge to the heteronormativity of the social sciences, and draws our attention to the ways in which intimate life is being reconfigured at the start of the twenty-first century. Personal and political, private and public, a ...

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