Go to the magazine shelves, pick up any glossy rag ...



Go to the magazine shelves, pick up any glossy rag -- Redbook, Mademoiselle, Cosmo -- and there you will read one benumbing article after another in reaction to (though rarely insightful about) the hackneyed belief that "You can't have it all"; that Second Wave feminism, with its derogation of marriage and emphasis on social and economic justice, has sold out a whole generation of women, who can't get hitched in the booming marketplace of sexual liberation.

Tamara Strauss “A Manifesto for Third Wave Feminism” , 2004.

The women's liberation movement, as it was called in the sixties and seventies, was the largest social movement in the history of the United States--and probably in the world. Its impact has been felt in every home, school and workplace, in every form of art, entertainment and sport, in all aspects of personal and public life in the United States. Like a river overflowing its banks and seeking a new course, it permanently altered the landscape.

“Second-Wave Soundings,” Rosalyn Baxandall Kamp, Linda Gordon, Nation, 2001.

I started on the path of creating a book because I was interested in what young women were doing with feminism. Finding out about the activism that young women were doing around zines, music, actions films made so much sense to me…. At the same time I was concerned by some of the sentiments that ‘older’ feminists were voicing about young women like me. My experiences contradicted their accusations fo apathy.”

Allyson Mitchell, ”talkin’ bout my generation” herizons magazine, 2002,

“My interest in young feminism came from the shock of discovering that there were generational appreciation gaps between feminists.”

Lisa Rundle. ”talkin’ bout my generation” herizons magazine, 2002,

“If anyone thinks that there’s ever been a single unified feminism, they’re delusional Any criticism that rejects complexity in favour of simplification is the real threat to the real power of feminism. I see the ‘anything goes’ retort as a way to dismiss a generation of feminists who embrace complexity and fight oppressions in multiple, unique and creative ways.”

Lara Karaian, talkin’ bout my generation” herizons magazine, 2002,

…the value of this cross-generational exchange has hardly gone unquestioned and has, in fact, been plagued with “anxieties. These anxieties have manifested themselves in critiques of “third-wave or third generation feminisms as apolitical, postfeminist and inherently incompatible with the issues and political agendas characteristic of second wave or second generation feminisms. Similarly anxieties have resulted in critiques of second-generation feminism as rigid, monolithic, tyrannical and racist.”

Jennifer Purvis, Grrrrrls and Women together in the Third Wave: Embracing the Challenges of Intergenerational Feminism(s), NWSA, 2004.

The third wave of feminism is marked by the rise of a black feminist jurisprudence along with the formation of black women’s health netwrok. The leading black feminist theorists today are also legal scholars.

Ula Y. Taylor, Making Waves: The Theory and Practice of black feminism” The Black Scholar, 1998.

It was important to us (the founders) that Third Wave be, at its very core, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-issue, pan-sexual orientation, with people and issues from all socio-economic backgrounds represented.”

Rebecca Walker, The Satya interview by Sanganithra Iyer, Satya Magazine, 2005

“If anything can be said with certainty about third wave feminism, it is that it is mainly a first-world phenomenon generated by women who, like their second wave counterparts have limited interest in women’s struggles elsewhere on the planet.”

Winnie Woodhull, “Global Feminisms, Transnational Political Economies, and Third World Cultural Production” IJWS, 2003.

“The Canadian (or American) women’s movement of our time is just a ripple in the second wave of feminism, which in turn is best understood as part of the student and other revolts most conspicuous in 1969.”

Naomi Black, “Ripples in the second wave: Comparing the Contemporary Women’s Movement in Canada and the United States”

“I sometimes think that Québec feminism suffers from another kind of double exclusion, both in Canada and Québec. On the one hand, the dates and structures of the history of Québec women do not coincide with the dates and structures of English-Canadian women. Thus they mar the nice charts that could be made.”

Micheline Dumont, ‘The Origins of the Women’s Movement in Québec”

…even without the rip-roaring political culture that characterized the sixties and the seventies, Third wave women are laying the groundwork for a movement of our own.…. Manifesta is an attempt to open people’s eyes to the power of everyday feminism right in front of our noses. We must see its reality if we are to corral that energy into attacking the inequalities that still exist.”

Jennifer Baumgardener and Amy Richards, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, 2000.

Feminism is the full participation of women in the political, economic, social, civil cultural, intellectual, spiritual and sexual spheres of life. Feminism works with race equality, sexual rights, disability rights, economic , social and education equality, age rights and gender equality at its centre.

Joan Grant Cummings “From Natty Dreads to Grey Ponytails: the revolution is multigenerational” TurboChicks, 2001.

Third wave feminism departs from what was the core of second-wave liberal feminism on a key ideological issue. Where second-wave liberal and cultural approaches sought to unify diverse women by appealing to a universal sisterhood, third-wave activists recognize the racist, heterosexist, classist and other implications of the erasure of difference.

Amanda Lotz, “Communicating Third-Wave Feminism and New Social Movements: Challenges for the Next Century of Feminist Endeavor”, Women and Language, 2003.

Today, there is an unfortunate revision of the feminist past secured through a rather slippery historical construction (in both academic and popular culture) of the ‘waves’. With both its oceanic and avant-garde connotations, the waves thesis works to place old feminists on the beach- washed up like fish on the shore. Meanwhile, as in all teleological narratives, the ‘new’ feminist (regardless of her age) is taken to be an immersive body, fully refreshed by sea change and outfitted in new feminist swimsuit styles.

Lynn Spigel, “Theorizing the Bachelorette:’Waves’ of Feminist Media Studies, Signs, 2004.

“Time is marked not only by calendars and clocks, by uniform measurement and abstract calculation (of the kind represented by millennial celebrations!) but also by movement, through an incalculable force of passage that resists counting and numeration. The past, present, and future are composed not only of dates but also, in a more complex and incalculable way of events. How we understand the relations between past and present has direct implications for whatever conceptions of the future, the new, creation, and production we may develop.

The future is the domain of what endures. But what endures, what exists in time and has time as part of its being, is not what remains the same over time, what retains an identity between what it was and what it will be. Time involves the divergence between what was (of what exists virtually) and what is actualized or capable of actualization. The past endures, not in itself, but in its capacity to become something other.”

Elizabeth Grosz, Histories of a Feminist Future, Signs, 2000.

“While third wave feminists were inevitably to some degree situated in a semi-genealogical relationship to third wave feminists, the fourth wave will be distinguished by bringing second and third wave feminists together to confront a new and devastating reality that involves us all, if not equally, then at least at once.”

E. Anne Kaplan, “Feminist Futures: Trauma, the post 9/11 world, and a Fourth Feminism?” Journal of International Women’s Studies, April 2003.

What makes Polish feminism exciting- and paradoxical from the point of view of the movement’s history as it is written in the West- is its peculiar mixture of second wave politics and third wave themes and tactics. Our goals concern basic reproductive rights, domestic violence, equal pay for equal work; our street performances show the drudgery between the domestic ideal. But this content…is dressed in a campy form very much in tune with the third wave of feminism. Either we are “lost between the waves” or what we are building calls for a description that goes beyond the wave metaphor.”

Agnieszka Graff “Lost between the waves?: The Paradoxes of Feminist Chronology and Activism in Contemporary Poland”, JIWS, 2003.

There is something lovely about a wave. Gently swelling, rising and then crashing, waves evoke images of both beauty and power. As feminists we could do much worse than be associated with this phenomenon. The significance of speaking feminism as coming in waves, however, is not entirely clear.

Catherine Bailey, Making Waves and Drawing Lines: The Politics of Defining the Vicissitudes of Feminism”, Hypatia, 1997.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download