Psychoanalysis, politics and the future of feminism: A conversation

Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, who in 1982 together edited the highly influential collection, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne (Macmillan), met with Jean Radford in September 2009 to talk about how their views of feminism, psychoanalysis and the political world have evolved since Women: a cultural review was first published in 1990. In the 1960s Juliet Mitchell was associated with New Left Review, where in 1966 she published her ground-breaking essay, ‘Women: the Longest Revolution’, one of the founding texts of second wave feminism. Among her books are The Rights and Wrongs of Women (edited with Ann Oakley, Penguin 1976), Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Penguin 1974), Mad Men and Medusas (Penguin 2000) and Siblings, Sex and Violence (Polity 2003). Jacqueline Rose's books include Sexuality in the Field of Vision (Virago 1986), The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (Virago 1991), The Question of Zion (Princeton University Press 2005), The Last Resistance (Verso 2007) and a novel, Albertine (Chatto & Windus 2001). Jean Radford was a member of the Marxist–Feminist Literary Collective in the 1970s, and her publications include Norman Mailer: A Critical Study (Macmillan 1975), the edited collection, The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1986), Dorothy Richardson (Harvester Wheatsheaf 1991) and essays on a range of modernist women writers.