gills_et_all-third_wave_feminism_a_critical_exploration

Introduction: Genealogies
Jane Spencer
There is something seductive about the number three. Third time lucky.
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. And we all want progress. Even Julia Kristeva’s
famous 1979 essay ‘Women’s Time,’ which divided feminism into three
‘attitudes’ or ‘generations’ while invoking the possibility of ‘the parallel existence
of all three in the same historical time, or even that they be interwoven
one with the other’ (209; emphasis in original), ended up strongly implying
that third comes last and is the best. First attitude: the pursuit of equality.
Second attitude: the claim of difference. Third attitude: undermining the
kind of fixed identity on which the first two have been based: ‘In this third
attitude, which I strongly advocate – which I imagine? – the very dichotomy
man/woman as an opposition between two rival entities may be understood
as belonging to metaphysics’ (209; emphasis in original). It is this third
attitude which is so provocatively attainable – and yet not, as the chapters
in this section discuss.
Since Kristeva’s essay a new generation of women has grown up, and a
new terminology of feminist waves has emerged. As she predicted, there has
been a focus of struggle ‘in personal and sexual identity itself,’ a concentration
on ‘the multiplicity of every person’s possible identifications’ (Kristeva 210);
but the result has rather been a proliferation of identities than a deconstruction
of identity itself. Class difference, racial diversity, the multiplicities of sexual
orientation and gender identity have been made the bases of different kinds
of identity politics. Feminism has moved towards related forms of oppositional
politics while being itself repeatedly declared dead by the media; and as the
essays collected here demonstrate, there is no clear agreement as to what
third wave feminism is even about. It is necessarily defined as what came
after the second wave (itself understood in retrospect as what came before
the third). ‘[T]here have always been, and will always be, differing versions
of what feminism is about, with the “new” or latest trajectories invariably
keen to mark their distance from the “old”’ (Segal 205). To this extent it is a
generational phenomenon, raising the question of what can or should be
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