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Today many feminists believe we are in a third wave of feminism, one that challenges the idea of dualism itself while recognizing diversity, particularity, and embodiment. By theorizing from the notion of embodiment, recent iterations of feminism are beginning to reweave the specific duality between culture and nature, an especially important endeavor in these environmentally disturbing times. These feminisms, rather than working from established and usually abstract foundational theories, begin from the situated perspectives of different(ing) women. Beyond this general congruence, however, there are several different foci in the feminisms seen as third wave today. In this work, I address the uneven movement from second-wave to third-wave feminism. I discuss three feminisms: youth feminism, postcolonial feminism, and ecofeminism, and the importance of each, in their current expression, to the present form of third-wave feminism. I suggest that while all these feminisms begin to reweave the nature/culture duality by theorizing from the notion of embodiment, ecofeminism is able to make a significant additional contribution in this regard. Besides reclaiming the female body, ecofeminism specifically includes nonhuman nature in its theorizing, an inclusion that enables it to engage in a more thoroughgoing analysis of the nature/culture dualism than other feminisms.
Keywords: Third-wave feminism / ecofeminism / postcolonial feminism / generational/youth feminism / embodiment / nature/culture dualism
Ecofeminists see the nature/culture dualism and the dominant male model of humanity as leading not only to oppression of women, but also to the destruction of nature and to racism and social inequality. Plumwood (1992, 12)
Feminists of the second wave adopted as their motto "the personal is political." In so doing, they challenged women's exclusion from the public world of politics and economics, while reintroducing the personal experience of being female into the political discourse of the day (Evans 1997, 290). They worked to extend the meaning of 'the political' to include areas of social life previously treated as 'personal' and positioned in the private realm of the household (Brenner 1993, 120). These feminists, in effect, disrupted the public/private dichotomy, a long-held notion in Western political thought that politics is the purview of a public male sphere (Arneil 1999).
While "the personal is political" may have been the best known adage of second-wave feminism, it was not the only...