Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

Dumont who argues that other historical narratives of the feminist movementsare possible. According to this author there are several ways of schematizingfeminist evolution. She refers to Karen Offen who prefers to talk about “geology,successive beds themselves formed by contrasting layers.” 2 Dumont states thatOffen’s geological image allows us to think about “eruptions, cracks, ebbs andflows, diverging and converging movements.” It might thus be misleading touse a chronological perspective to analyse feminist movements and think abouttheir heritages only in terms of ‘pre’ and ‘post’ and/or evoke different waves.We position ourselves within this continuing tradition, independent of waves.Starting up a ‘Feminist’ BusinessWho Framed Feminists into Business?Starting up one’s own business is not an obvious career choice for feministacademics. Our list of motivations was long but not really original, comparedto other female entrepreneurs. 3 However, one more specific motivation maybe highlighted: we defined our business project as a political and militantengagement and one of our purposes was to participate actively in social andpolitical change. We were eager to get our gender equality expertise recognizedoutside the academy and promote a type of knowledge and skills which areoften ignored and overlooked in France.Our objective was also to propose a feminist alternative to the increasingservice offerings emanating from what we called ‘the opportunist structures.’As gender equality has become a potentially expanding market, some moretraditional consulting firms improvise as experts on the matter without anyparticular training on gender issues. The underlying danger here is that someof these self-declared experts teach stereotypical representations of women andmen, and thus do not question the origins and logics of gender inequality. Ouraim was both to defend and disseminate our feminist convictions and to curbpractices which we found counterproductive for the promotion of real genderequality i.e. practices that maintain the idea of compulsory complementarybetween sexes and their respective roles and ‘natural’ qualities. 42Micheline Dumont, “Réfléchir sur le féminisme du troisième millénaire,” in Dialogues sur la troisième vague féministe,ed. Maria Nengeh Mensah (Montréal, Les Editions du remue-ménage, 2005), 59–73.3François Hurel and Perrine Danmanville, “Les femmes et la création d’entreprise,” APCE Collection Focus (2001).4For an illustration see Irène Jonas and Djaouida Séhili, “De l’inégalité à la différence. L’argumentation naturalistedans la féminisation des entreprises.” Sociologies Pratiques 14 (2007): 119 –131.111