Contests for the Meaning of Third Wave Feminism: Feminism and Popular Consciousness

Abstract

In the US, consciousness of feminism is tightly woven into the cultural-historical consciousness — or lack thereof — of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and it has been since its introduction into our cultural lexicon in the early twentieth century. This is not the same as saying we live in a feminist culture; rather, it is a claim about the object ‘feminism’ (with already constituted and contested meanings) among the repertoire of discursive tools by which we categorize, 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, heteronorm ativity, classism, and cultural and political imperialism. This accounts for how feminism as ideology/praxis is simplified and how feminist cohorts and formations are constantly constructed. This chapter begins with a claim that some will find discomforting: that this thing we call third wave feminism is neither new, nor does it escape the historical-cultural context 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/praxis, feminist movement, or feminist identity have meant across time and place.