gills_et_all-third_wave_feminism_a_critical_exploration

My internal contest for third wave feminist meaning
Ednie Kaeh Garrison 33
As a young feminist who has been researching and writing about the emergence
of third wave feminism in the US since the early 1990s, I am especially
concerned about what feminism means and how different cohorts and
individuals contest for the power to determine its meaning. I have been
both delighted and distressed by what I have seen, and both reactions are
the strongest when I have examined the intersections between feminist
knowledge production and popular knowledge of feminism in the efforts of
those invested in creating a constituency that can be called the third wave.
One of the greatest challenges for third wave feminists engaging with the
media, moving into media institutions and/or producing alternate media
cultures that register outside the mainstream may be to reconstruct the ways
the popular consciousness of feminism is conceived and articulated. Coming
to feminist political consciousness today involves weeding through disjointed,
conflicting, and apparently contradictory conversations. This includes
contending with the tension between what gets to be establishment feminism
in the eyes of the media, subsequent popular consciousness of feminism,
and more complex articulations, comprehensions, and practices (often
expressed as ‘academic’ – that is, intellectual – and therefore suspect and
unrealistic). Such a project entails new historiographies of the second wave
that do not reinscribe good feminist/bad feminist, activist feminism/selfindulgent
feminism splits, but also ones that take seriously the criticisms of
racism, classism, heterosexism and homophobia, and so on, not only of the
women’s movement and of variously privileged feminists, but also of other
movements and constituencies that comprised the mythical time ‘the sixties’
(which really spans three decades) most importantly, and of American culture
more generally. And today it also means seriously working through the
implications of a globalized (and transnational) feminist consciousness.
What has come to count as ‘third wave feminism’ in the American popular
imaginary, and in much of what counts as third wave feminist writing/
cultural production, tends to be problematically and insufficiently localized.
One of the lessons to be learned is the difference between the self-referential
and the self-reflexive.
What made the emergence of a notion of a third wave of feminism in the
1990s so meaningful – when the second wave really was not over, when
second wave feminists continue to be very much engaged in the political
and cultural life of the country, and when the term ‘feminism’ (however
problematically defined) was a strong force in the popular lexicon – was not
that it should signal the willingness of a specific age-cohort to take up the
name ‘feminist,’ but that it ought to signal a far more important shift in the
strategic consciousness of feminist ideology/praxis. Although it is by no
means guaranteed, and although I am increasingly pessimistic and disgruntled
with the term’s usage, I do still want to believe the name-object ‘third wave