Gynaecological self-help, a well-known and historical feminist practice from the Second Wave movements which aims at embodying a radical alternative to traditional reproductive politics, is resurging today in France, Switzerland and Belgium. Drawing on empirical observations and interviews, this article questions the links between feminist memory of self-help, the shaping of nostalgia and the production of a political feminist ‘we’. Born at the end of the 1960s in the United States, feminist self-help travelled internationally and was appropriated differently depending on national contexts. This ‘glorious’ history of self-help and, more importantly, its narrated memory, is central to contemporary European self-help activism, as observed in the three national contexts. Drawing on this insight, this article reveals the active memory-oriented emotional work of self-help activists. It examines the ways in which nostalgia for an imagined and lost past is actively and practically produced and encouraged in social movement practices, and highlights the specificity of the kind of collective feminist identity that it shapes and promotes in contemporary self-help politics.

妇科自助是第二波运动中著名的历史女权主义实践，旨在体现传统生殖政治的激进替代方案，今天在法国、瑞士和比利时重新兴起。本文利用实证观察和访谈，质疑女权主义对自助的记忆、怀旧的形成与政治女权主义“我们”的产生之间的联系。女权主义自助于 1960 年代末出生于美国，在国际范围内传播，并根据国情不同被挪用。正如在三个国家背景下所观察到的，这种“光荣”的自助历史，更重要的是其被叙述的记忆，是当代欧洲自助行动主义的核心。凭借这一洞察力，这篇文章揭示了自助活动家积极的以记忆为导向的情感工作。它考察了在社会运动实践中积极和实际地产生和鼓励对想象和失去的过去的怀旧的方式，并强调了它在当代自助政治中塑造和促进的那种集体女权主义身份的特殊性。