Contests for the Meaning of Third Wave Feminism

Abstract

In the U.S., consciousness of feminism is tightly woven into the cultural and historical consciousness — or lack thereof — of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.¹ This is not the same as saying we live in a feminist culture; rather, it is a claim about feminism — with already constituted and contested meanings — among the repertoire of discursive tools by which we categorise, position, label and understand those who advocate the rights of women, the oppressiveness of patriarchy and the linking of these tools to the ideological and material dominance of any number of unequal social systems, among them racism, capitalism, hetero-normativity classism and cultural and political imperialism. This accounts for how feminism as ideology and a praxis is simplified and how feminist cohorts and formations are constantly constructed. This thing we call third wave feminism neither is new nor escapes the historical and cultural contexts of its articulation. The very claim to know what third wave feminism means is riddled with contradictions and problems. Few can agree about what and whom it encapsulates — advocates and detractors alike. The only general consensus to have emerged is that it has become a name for young women who identify as feminists (but not the feminists of the sixties and seventies), and, especially among its detractors, it is a name assigned to those who have no real clear sense of what feminist ideology, feminist praxis, feminist movement or feminist identity have meant across time and place.