Feminist anger and feminist respair

How bad things have become. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say: how bad things have always been. But it is only now that some people with particular kinds of class and race privilege are beginning to grasp just how awful things are: how very deeply racism and misogyny are entrenched in our culture; how devastating neoliberalism has been to social bonds and human lives; how impending ecological disaster is increasingly not a possibility but a sure-fire certainty. We seem to be in a moment of intense despair, hopelessness and powerlessness; politics and public institutions as we know them are unravelling --- and not in a good way. We are living in what Pankaj Mishra (2017) calls the “age of anger”, in which modernity has singularly failed to live up to its promises of democracy, equality and freedom, and has thus given rise to the spread of a deep ressentiment that manifests as the normalisation of nationalisms, racisms, and misogynies.