Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

should aspire to create this mutuality. 9 Rich’s work thus allows us criticize boththe referentiality and the negativity of the patriarchal conceptualization ofgeneration.Rich’s standpoint, like Rubin’s ‘The Traffic in Women,’ 10 is thatcontinuity between women will have to be restored, and this can be characterisedas a feminism that is affirmative of sexual difference. Such feminism is nowconsidered to be outdated 11 if we look to the well-known classifications offeminist thought. 12 Looking at this feminism carefully, however, allows me toshow how it not only provides a diagnosis of Oedipal (feminist) generationality(as presented above), but also how it presents an alternative conceptualization ofgenerationality as well as an alternative methodology for academic feminism. Thisdouble move is exemplary for third-wave feminism. As I will explain below, itis in the context of the feminist classroom that I have come to such an understandingof the work of my foremothers. The concept of generationality thatI am talking about as a third-wave feminist academic is both non-linear andnon-hierarchical, and its accompanying methodology consists of cartography.Apart from critiquing referentiality and negativity, Rich critiquessequential negation and progress narrative (the characteristics of a classificatorymethodology). All of this is encompassed in the following statement: “Withoutthe unacclaimed research and scholarship of ‘childless’ women, without CharlotteBrontë (who died in her first pregnancy), Margaret Fuller (whose major workwas done before her child was born), without George Eliot, Emily Brontë,Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir– we would all today be suffering from spiritual malnutrition as women.” 13Rich then affirms the importance of these writers’ work, so as to reinstallcontinuity between women, that is, a conceptualization of generationality thatshifts the patriarchal concept and practice reviewed above. This is also in contrastto the post-feminist habit of critiquing women who have come before us (andas a consequence repeating the patriarchal concept of Oedipal generationality).Rich wishes to think along a female line, which is not necessarily teleological.9In another important publication, Rich has labeled this continuity ‘the lesbian continuum.’ Both Rubin and Richhave gradually moved to working on the intersection between patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality. This shiftlies beyond the scope of this chapter. See Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” inThe Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove et al. (New York: Routledge, [1981] 1993), 227–54).10In her later work Rubin moved away from this standpoint. I will not go into the queer Rubin in this chapter.11Cf. Clare Hemmings, “Telling Feminist Stories,” Feminist Theory 6 (August 2005): 115–39.12See Alison M. Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1983); Sandra Harding,The Science Question in Feminism (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986).13Rich, Of Woman Born, 251–2.23