Feminist Dissonance: The Logic of Late Feminism

Abstract

Since Julia Kristeva penned ‘Women’s Time,’ the metaphor of waves has become a trope for understanding and describing what seem to be breaks in the history of feminist thought. These breaks, if breaks at all, are, for Kristeva, three different and successively held attitudes to linear temporality, or historical progression. It has become common-place to refer to ‘first,’ ‘second,’ and, more recently, ‘third’ attitudes or generations as if they were waves in the feminist critical tradition, denoting historically bracketed phases of thought — from the suffragist movement of the late nineteenth century, through the Women’s Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and into the newest recognisable phase of feminist thought, commonly understood as poststructuralist and/or postmodernist. Yet the metaphor of the wave is more suggestive than its common use implies and, paradoxically, runs the risk of simplifying the tradition it is called upon to describe. For instance, whether or not the first wave was ‘[u]niversalist in its approach’ and ‘globalise[d] the problems of women of different milieux, ages, civilisations’ and ‘varying psychic structures’ (Kristeva 197; emphasis added), it also followed on from (and continued) a long history of critical thinking, writing, and political activism by and on behalf of women. This history is formed through the voices of women as diverse as Elizabeth Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Mary Astell, and Mary Wollstonecraft, among many others.