Abstract
Chamberlain addresses the way in which the wave narrative is established and how it has been historically understood. Looking to the problems and difficulties associated with the narrative, the chapter explores why feminists might choose to reject the wave. This is countered with a positive understanding of the narrative, which could be a much more open and fluid means of approaching feminism than the mother-daughter trope. The chapter finishes with a positive understanding of how the wave is necessary for feminism, emphasising shared feeling and collective cohesiveness.
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Notes
- 1.
Works such as ‘Is It Time to Jump Ship? Historians Rethink the Waves Metaphor’ (Laughlin et al. 2010), ‘Charting the Currents of the Third Wave’ (Orr 1997), ‘Surfing Feminism’s Online Wave: The Internet and the Future of Feminism’ (Schulte 2011) rethink how the wave narrative might express our relationship with activism and the wave motif. Theorists such as Nancy Hewitt have questioned how the wave can relate to radios or frequencies (2012), while Cobble has positioned it as a waving in greeting or parting (2010). These examples go some way to demonstrate the wave’s flexibility: it can engage with oceanic metaphors, or it can be translated into quite different contexts.
- 2.
In Walker’s later works, she distances herself from her mother in both a political and personal sense. Baby Love (2008) discusses choosing to have children and to prioritise maternity above what she understands as a feminist preoccupation with being in the work place. Black, White & Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2001) also examines emotional distance from Walker’s mother.
- 3.
In 1991, Clarence Thomas was nominated to succeed a retiring judge on the Supreme Court. After his nomination was announced, a previous co-worker, Anita Hill, accused Thomas of having sexually harassed her at work. Hill had not gone public with her accusations, but was forced to when a tape of her discussion with the FBI were leaked to the press. Hill was then required to publicly testify against Thomas, as her admissions brought his clean character and honesty into question, things which would ultimately damage his nomination. Thomas was found not guilty, and used the trail as a means by which to accuse white America of attempting to sabotage a black man who had ascended beyond expectation. A number of books have been written on the topic, including Speaking Truth to Power (1998) by Hill, while Thomas addressed the case in his memoir My Grandfather’s Son (2008).
- 4.
Intersectionality was first coined by Kimberle Crenshaw (1991) and was a term used to describe the need for a multifaceted feminism that focused on intersecting oppressions as opposed to just gender. Often associated with the difficulty of racial representation within feminism, ‘intersectionality’ is not purely a third wave concept, even if it rose to prominence as a term then. Thinkers such as Audre Lorde and bell hooks had been exploring ideas of a more representative feminism well in advance of the dates suggested for the third wave, while books such as The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Colour were published as early as 1981. Other critical works, including Hewitt and Thompson’s Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave Feminism (2008), have challenged the way we understand intersectional politics in relation to a feminist timeline.
- 5.
I explore this concept further in my chapter on feminist temporalities. There, I consider forms of current activism that relate to pornography, a feminist preoccupation that was seen to end within the second-wave moment. I also consider Radical Feminism, similarly associated with the second wave, and the fact that it has continued throughout the history of feminism, and as such, is not tethered to a specific time period.
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Chamberlain, P. (2017). The Wave Narrative. In: The Feminist Fourth Wave. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53682-8_2
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