gills_et_all-third_wave_feminism_a_critical_exploration

Ednie Kaeh Garrison 27
level of gullibility in their engagement with the media. This gullibility is
connected to the unexamined attachment feminists have for being ‘American,’
which is cultivated by the media as one of the most powerful interpellating
forces producing a sense of shared experience and identity in the US. As
Benedict Anderson has notably remarked, the combination of print technology
and capitalism has been a primary function of the creation of the
‘imagined community’ of the nation. Thus, we imbue the media – our late
twentieth–early twenty-first century site of the merger between print/
communications technology, capitalism, and ‘human linguistic diversity’ 4 –
with an exponential power by accepting as true its representations of concepts
like feminism, women, and issues that are presumed feminist because they
are regarded as ‘women’s issues.’ This particularly salient site of cultural
transmission, production, and articulation in America in the 1990s is at the
same time always already a public market of commodities on parade. The
double function of the media as a culture market leads to the representation
of the object ‘feminism’ and its variants as a label or lifestyle or brand as it
gets reconstituted as a commodity for sale. 5 In this late capitalist, consumer
society, it is worth recalling Jean Baudrillard’s dictum that ‘[i]n order to
become object of consumption, the object must become sign; that is, in
some way it must become external to a relation that it now only signifies’
(22). The logic of consumption – ‘the commercial imperative of popular
media’ (Farrell 644) – extracts from the object its politics, the substance of
its context, so that its representation signifies the satisfaction of needs, but
only as a simulation of satisfaction. The object of consumption – feminism –
stands in for actual political relations, deferring the political in favour of ‘the
idea of the relation’ between lifestyle practice and political commitment.
And, as bell hooks pointed out as early as 1984, ‘[t]he willingness to see
feminism as a lifestyle choice rather than a political commitment reflects
the class nature of the movement’ (27) hooks’ observation that the willingness
of some feminist movement participants to reduce feminism to lifestyle
choices links bourgeois liberal feminism to Farrell’s ‘commercial imperative
of popular media.’ The popular cultural dominance of this version – liberal
feminism – can only ever have limited success because it is too thoroughly
entrenched in the system against which more radical and transformative
feminist movement moves. This is not to reject liberal feminism out of
hand, but it is not a good tactic for countering late-capitalist consumerist
logics which rely on the ‘commodification of resistance [as] a hegemonic
strategy’ (Garrison 143).
Synthesizing from a number of efforts to define the category liberal feminism,
Chela Sandoval re-articulates this ‘mode of consciousness in opposition’
under the title ‘equal rights,’ explaining that ‘[o]n the basis that all individuals
are created equal, subscribers to this particular ideological tactic will
demand that their own humanity be legitimated, recognized as the same
under the law, and assimilated into the most favoured form of the human in