gills_et_all-third_wave_feminism_a_critical_exploration

Stacy Gillis et al. 5
‘third wave’ feminists as well as those, like ourselves, who are excluded by
both of these categories to engage with the notion of a third wave. 6 ‘What is
feminism? Who is a feminist? Contention rather than accord is what we
must explore in answering such questions today’ (Segal 4). This collection is
not asking so much what is the third wave; rather, through an exploration
of the versions of the third wave that are circulating in Anglo-American
feminist discourses, it is asking how and if another wave contributes to the
future of feminism. Bearing in mind Judith Butler’s reminder that laughter,
in the face of serious categories, is indispensable for feminism (viii), we
indicate a crossroads where the past and present meet in order to mark out
trajectories for future feminist praxis.
Notes
1. See Rosalind Delmar for a clear and concise introduction to the question of ‘What
is Feminism?’
2. There are four publications which get referenced repeatedly in third wave feminist
debates: Baumgardner and Richards’ Manifesta, Heywood and Drake’s Third Wave
Agenda, Jacqueline N. Zita’s special issue of Hypatia and, more recently, Dicker and
Piepmeier’s Catching a Wave. The circulation of references and cross-references
around these texts cannot be avoided and the chapters in this collection are replete
with the same.
3. This has been partially aggravated by the fact that over the past twenty years academic
feminism has come to ‘belong’ to departments of philosophy, English and, increasingly,
cultural studies. That many young adults, at least in the humanities, come to
feminism through, for instance, Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977)
or Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) needs to be
analysed.
4. For more on this see Kristin Aune and Louise Livesey.
5. See Stacy Gillis and Rebecca Munford for more on the relationship between backlash
politics and third wave feminism.
6. This uses the same model as Rebecca Walker’s collection To be Real, with its foreword
by Gloria Steinem and afterword by Angela Y. Davis. However, Walker’s collection
repudiates the supposed inflexibility of second wave feminist discourses: ‘For many
of us it seems that to be a feminist in the way that we have seen or understood
feminism is to conform to an identity and way of living that doesn’t allow for
individuality, complexity, or less than perfect personal histories.’ (xxxiii)
Works cited
Aune, Kristin, and Louise Livesey. ‘Reclaiming the F word – Young Women and Feminism.’
Crossing Boundaries: 16th Annual Women’s Studies Network Conference. London. 5
July 2003.
Bailey, Cathryn. ‘Making Waves and Drawing Lines: The Politics of Defining the
Vicissitudes of Feminism.’ Third Wave Feminisms. Ed. Jacquelyn N. Zita. Spec. issue
of Hypatia 12.3 (1997): 17–28.
Baumgardner, Jennifer, and Amy Richards. Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and
the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.