Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

Second-Wave Feminist Generationality:Patriarchal and Anti-Patriarchal ConceptualizationsThe conceptualization of generationality that is featured in most (feminist)socio-political and theoretical imaginaries has two characteristics. First of all,generationality in analyses and understandings, such as Roof’s, involvessequential negation. This is the well-known phenomenon that a newer generationis always already dualistically opposed to a previous one. Post- feminists suchas Katie Roiphe from the U.S., and Malou van Hintum and Sanderijn Cels,who are from the Netherlands, as I am, famously argued in the 1990s againstsecond-wave feminism in a manner that sets up a dualism between the twogenerations. This dualism allows for reductionist thought only; second-wavefeminist theory becomes limited to sex-negativity, for instance, whereas theactual ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s entailed a battle between sex-negative and sexpositivefeminist theories.Secondly, the generationality involved is set up as narrative of progress.According to a generationality that is teleologically structured, a newer generationis always already positioned as better than a previous one. This teleologicalelement is to be found in post-feminist argumentation (when sex-positivenessis said to have been ‘finally’ discovered in the late 1990s), but it is also a featureof the second wave. Second-wave feminism positioned itself vis-à-vis the ‘morerudimentary’ first wave and claimed theoretical sophistication by constructingdifference feminism as well as deconstructive feminism as moves beyond theequality feminism ascribed to the first wave. In other words, the conceptualizationof generation implies a classificatory practice. Generations are therefor us to classify, that is, to select and list. The fact that generalizations areinvolved goes unrecognized; even the first wave was more complex than hereconstructed.This classificatory practice as implied by the methodology of secondwavefeminist and post-feminist generationality is a practice that is predicatedon referentiality as well as negativity. Referentiality means that generationalityis conceptualized in accordance with a notion of age groups. Generations arecohorts of persons, or, in this case, women born in a predetermined period oftime. This is to say that I can never be a second-wave feminist, because I donot belong to the generation of baby boomers. I was born in 1978, and consequently,I am a member of the post-feminist generation. Negativity means20