Content area
Full Text
Over two decades ago in the January 1992 issue of Ms. magazine, Rebecca Walker called for a Third Wave of feminist consciousness. Walker was incensed by a collocation of events hinging on race, gender, and class ideologies. With Shannon Liss, she mobilized a collective and foundation to promote voting rights, education, wage, and prison reform. They provided those in need with emergency funding for abortions, women-led projects, and reproductive rights activism (Walker and Liss 2012). Although she coins the term, Walker is less interested in developing a coherent, new feminist theory than in building coalitions with other social justice leagues through the Third Wave Foundation. Hers is a feminism of intersectionality, but one that also proffers self-empowerment, lived experience, and the plurality of pleasure. To Be Real, an anthology of stories and testimonials from women and men, reflects the confessional and individualist drive of the Third Wave.
The work of conceptualizing this new feminism continues to be negotiated by feminist academics and practitioners for whom the core of Third Wave feminism is its rejection of Second Wave's seeming essentialist and rigid positioning of women's politics and lives.
But Third Wave feminism is troubled by divisions within its still-forming body of activism and theories, as well as by postfeminist seductions. While Third Wave feminists such as Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards reject the label of "postfeminist," a skein of their Third Wave feminism that advocates embracing the pleasures of "girl culture" coincides with postfeminist tenets. The term "postfeminism" first appears in Susan Bolotin's 1982 article "Voices from the Postfeminism Generation," in which the author contends that the battle for equality has been won, and it is time to stop "harping" on womens oppression (29).1 Naomi Wolf would go so far as to assert that Second Wave feminism victimizes women and exaggerates claims of womens suffering and gender inequalities (1993,135). For Wolf, who is situated in both Third Wave and postfeminist camps, the alternative is "power feminism," which "believes women deserve to feel that the qualities of starlets and queens, of sensuality and beauty, can be theirs ... [and which] knows that making social change does not contradict the principle that girls just want to have fun" (137-38). Wolf's glide from "women" to "girls" resonates with Baumgardner...