Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

social, cultural and economical structures. Placed within a Marxist framework,the collective of authors points out how the individual is tied up inthese structures. Simultaneously, and inspired by Althusser’s theorizations ofideology, they emphasize the fact that the individual is not only a victim ofthe social relations, but an active agent in the forming of these social relations.Haug explains that this results in a situation where women, for instance, candefend the idea of life-long monogamous marriages even though the marriageis loveless and very boring. If one does not want to reject the belief in love andif life-long monogamous marriages are the only accepted form of love in thesociety in question, the decision to defend the idea of life-long monogamousmarriages is understood by Haug et al. as one way to find self-fulfilment. 37The view of women as victims, which was predominant during second-wavefeminism, is criticized by the collective of authors, who instead emphasize afocus on “beings who desire and have a capacity to become something theyare not as yet”. 38 Herewith, they distance themselves from structuralism’s fixationwith class, gender and race as different but immutable social and culturalpositions and focus instead on the multiple sites that are involved in the productionof positions/relations such as class, gender and race. 39 Seeing that anumber of dualisms, such as the division of labour between head/hand, thedivision of mind/body, and the division between theoretical/practical, leads toan incapacity to explain the world, the collective of authors breaks with thosedualisms, hoping to “produce articulations of the relations between human beingsand the world that overcome the present relations of class, race and sexualdomination”. 40 In effect, Haug writes, the method results in a “displacement ofthe problem” 41 and a decentering of the (Westernized) self.Feminism and the trope of consciousnessDuring the day of the workshop, we were divided into three small groups whenwe wrote and analysed our memories. In the group who decided to write about“Entering the university for the first time”, the writing phase and analysisdeveloped without any unexpected reactions. In the group, there was a slight37Ibid, 35, 42.38Ibid, 25.39On this point, the collective of authors were inspired by Angela McRobbie’s work on girl culture, which wasunderstood as a culture of femininity which the girls help to reproduce, Carter, 16, 17.40Haug, 28.41Ibid, 55.89