Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

Here, thinking difference does not involve thinking hierarchical/asymmetricaldifference, in a manner that re-affirms it by exchanging the negativefor the positive sign. It produces the need to map (rather than referentiallyassume) subjectivity according to a new constellation. 24 Rich can be said toexemplify this mode of theorizing, and as such, she should be seen as a maverickwithin the Anglo-American feminist theory landscape. However support forthis is clearly to be found in Virginia Woolf’s famous statement in A Room ofOne’s Own: “For we think through our mothers if we are women.” 25 Thus Richtraverses the two traditions of thinking difference by not allowing her work tobe assimilated by feminist standpoint theory.Feminist standpoint theory, on the other hand, treats women as differentfrom men (Braidotti’s first layer of sexual difference), but does not necessarilywork with differences between women (intersectionality or ‘the black feministstandpoint’ 26 was needed for this move) or with differences within individualwomen (by letting them speak, feminist standpoint theory assumed a clear andunified voice).I want to continue by arguing that although canonizations of thirdwavefeminist theory suffer from a U.S.-bias, 27 Braidotti’s worrisome remarkabout the low impact of the work of radical second-wave feminists of sexualdifference needs no longer be made. Third-wave feminist academics (studentsand former students of a first generation of gender studies scholars) and activistshave begun to work in the anti-representationalist, affirmative tradition ofgenerational thinking, which was introduced by French feminists as well assome Anglo-American eccentric subjects who are all part of the first generationI just mentioned. What does the third-wave feminist work look like?Third-wave feminism, in theory (Ahmed, Colebrook) as well as inpractice (Le Tigre, Profesora), is neither a second-wave feminism nor a post-feminism.This is to say that it traverses the classifications of second-wave feminismthat are so prominently present in mainstream gender studies teaching practicesas well as the post-feminism that was featured in the academy and popularculture in the 1990s. ‘Traversing’ should be read here as ‘extending across.’24Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance, 248.25Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Vintage, [1929] 2001), 65.26Cf. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment(London: Routledge, 1991).27Cf. Anna Feigenbaum, “Review of Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women’s Movement byJo Reger,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 9 (May 2008): 326–9.27