Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

that the relations between generations-as-classes are per definition structuredby conflict or competition. The ‘post-’ of post-feminism should be read as a‘beyond.’I agree with Roof who understands the traditional conceptualization of(feminist) generationality as a detrimental classificatory generationality thatlures women back into Oedipality, that is, predetermined gender roles. Thisis unfortunate since Oedipal relations are not exhaustive of relations betweenwomen, and more importantly even, referential Oedipality itself needs to belooked at very carefully. Contrary to Roof, however, I intend to acknowledgethat feminist theory itself, beginning with the feminist theories coming out ofthe second wave, not only works with such a conceptualization, but has alsolaid bare its problems. 5 Second-wave feminist theory, as I will show below, hascharacterized the classificatory notion of generationality as patriarchal. Thuswhen third-wave feminist theory criticizes the concept of generationality, itworks with rather than against second-wave feminist theory in a continuous,yet partial, that is cartographical way. Before I go into this, let me explain howsecond-wave feminist theory began to shift Oedipal generationality as early asin the 1970s.Gayle Rubin and Adrienne Rich are among the founding mothers of thetheory of patriarchy. The former’s ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘PoliticalEconomy’ of Sex’ from 1975 discusses the parameters of patriarchy by employingClaude Lévi-Strauss’ notion of the exchange of women in the feministcause. In doing so, she construes an early feminist theory of patriarchy, andof the patriarchal interest in securing Oedipal relations. Rubin claimed: “Ifit is women who are being transacted, then it is the men who give and takethem who are linked, the woman being a conduit of a relationship rather thana partner to it. (…) The relations of such a system are such that women arein no position to realize the benefits of their own circulation. As long as therelations specify that men exchange women, it is men who are beneficiaries ofthe product of such exchanges (…).” 6 As Rubin makes clear, feminist scrutinyexposes the circulation of women through the hands of men as patriarchaland unbeneficial for women. Women are as it were fenced in by the kinshipsystem; they have no affirmative relations to other women (only competitive5A similar evaluation of the work of Roof is presented in Astrid Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflictand Third-Wave Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 183.6Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology ofWomen, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 174.21