Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

IntroductionIn 2007, with two other associates, we created ‘Valta Göra’ a non-govern mentalorganization providing training, research and consultancy in gender equalityfor French private and public organizations. 1 We chose ‘Valta Göra’ from theFinnish ‘valta’ (power) and the Swedish ‘göra’ (to do), because the word byword translation ‘the power to do/change’ echoed our desire to contributeto social change moving towards a gender fair society. In this article we willstart from personal experiences and perform a bottom-up analysis of teachinggender outside academia.Why is one willing to engage in teaching gender outside the academy?How can one transfer academic knowledge into professional know-how withoutlosing the essence of feminist critical knowledge? How can one cope with thequestion of internal coherence whilst standing at the crossroads of ‘market’needs and one’s own personal motivations for social change? These were someof the problems we had to face when setting up our project. Although we stilllack several responses, we claim that pragmatism is, at least for the moment,the best answer we found.This pragmatism, founded on strong political feminist engagement,is probably one way, or at least our way of defining the today’s feminism.However, we would like to argue that, for us, this pragmatism is not a specificcharacteristic of the Third Wave – or any other of the feminist waves either –at least as long as the fieldwork activism and practices (including the feministgender consulting) are concerned. Moreover, the theoretical and very relevantquestion of the specific nature of the Third Wave feminism within the field ofWomen’s/Gender studies does not make that much sense when we speak aboutour personal feminist practices that take place outside academia. From theconsultants’ perspective, we therefore argue that what counts is the translationof feminist knowledge (partly produced within the field of Women’s/Genderstudies) into practical know-how for people standing outside this field.For us, this practice is a continuing part of the collective feminist projectfrom The First to The Third Wave although it might have taken different formsfrom one historical period to another. Furthermore, we agree with Micheline1‘Valta Göra’ is a joint venture of four people (www.valtagora.org). We all had common higher educational backgroundand we had become friends during our training years. However, this paper is written only by two associateswho are still working within academia. In this text the word ‘we’ refers mainly to the whole group, except forthe parts discussing the difficulties of positioning oneself within and outside academia. The word ‘both’ refers toauthors.110