Third-Wave Feminism
Third-wave feminism – sometimes associated with the term neofeminism – is a direction of feminism that began in the early 1990s and remains influential in contemporary feminist thought and activism. The term is usually associated with the American writer Rebecca Walker, daughter of the second-wave feminist activist Alice Walker.
In 1992, Rebecca Walker published the article “Becoming the Third Wave” in Ms. magazine. This text came to be regarded as a kind of manifesto of the new direction. In it, Walker described what it meant to be a feminist in her historical moment: to fill every part of one’s life with an ideology of equality and women’s power; to seek personal clarity amid systemic destruction; to unite in sisterhood with other women, even when women are divided; and to understand structures of power in order to question and transform them.
The article also contained an appeal to women, especially to women of Walker’s generation, which was later interpreted as expressing the essence of the new feminist wave. Walker emphasized that the struggle was far from over; that the disregard for women’s experience should provoke anger; and that this anger should be transformed into political force. She rejected the idea of postfeminism and declared herself a feminist of the third wave. Walker’s later work To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (1995) became another important declaration of this direction in the United States.
A distinctive feature of third-wave feminism is that it did not simply replace the previous feminist wave, but developed alongside it and in critical dialogue with it. Its emergence is often interpreted as a critical response by a younger generation of women to some assumptions of radical and second-wave feminism. Third-wave feminism does not primarily seek to define what the contemporary woman is; rather, it emphasizes what she may become. A woman may be whoever she chooses to be, provided that this is her own conscious and self-determined choice.
Third-wave feminism was strongly influenced by academic work in queer theory, especially by the writings of the American philosopher Judith Butler, including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). Queer theory argues that gender and sexuality are fluid categories and cannot easily be reduced to binary ideas of “male” and “female.” A deeper understanding of bisexual, transgender, and queer identities is one of the characteristic features of third-wave feminism. At the same time, the growing visibility of transgender people in feminist activism has also revealed tensions and exclusions within feminism itself, especially in strands of feminism that define womanhood in strictly biological or exclusionary terms (Munro, 2015).
In a broader sense, third-wave feminism has been criticized for its orientation toward individual emancipation, in contrast to the more explicitly collective political debates of the second wave.
Third-wave feminism seeks to bring together the experiences accumulated by white feminists, feminist organizations of women of color, lesbians, bisexual women, and representatives of other communities. It does not insist on absolute unity or internal consistency among its supporters. Third-wave feminists may advocate sexual freedom and at the same time demand fidelity in intimate relationships; they may oppose pornography, be indifferent to it, or even defend it.
Contradiction and diversity are distinctive features of third-wave feminism. This direction is often described as colorful, sometimes with a noticeable predominance of pink. It is also characterized by a marked self-irony in relation to everything associated with feminism. From the perspective of third-wave feminists, the gendered character of social life has become evident; therefore, the urgent task is to create opportunities for the free expression and realization of individual understandings of femininity.
Within third-wave feminism, the following goals may be identified. First, it seeks to struggle against all possible causes of social injustice, not only those affecting women. Second, it aims to develop the education of young women so that they may be free, happy, and proud of their femininity, and so that they will not be afraid to pursue the goals they have chosen for themselves. Such education should include knowledge of the history of feminism.
Compared with representatives of the previous wave, third-wave feminists devote less attention to relations between women and men as such and to the problem of women’s discrimination understood in a narrow sense. Instead, they focus on the distribution of power and resources necessary for social transformation, so that every woman may realize her femininity fully and in any way she chooses, whether in work, family life, public activity, sexuality, creativity, or other spheres. It is significant that organizations identifying themselves with third-wave feminism include not only women, but also men and representatives of various minorities.
The main representatives and figures associated with third-wave feminism include Rebecca Walker, Judith Butler, Naomi Wolf, bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Riot Grrrl movement, Jennifer Baumgardner, Amy Richards, and others. Some authors also connect this direction with wider debates in queer theory, intersectional feminism, popular feminism, and feminist activism of the 1990s and 2000s.
References:
Munro, E. (2015, September 5). Feminism: A fourth wave? Political Studies Association.
Romaniuk, A. S. (2011). Istoriia zakhidnykh politychnykh vchen: Politychni doktryny XX — pochatku XXI st. [History of Western political thought: Political doctrines of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries]. Kyiv: Znannia. [in Ukrainian].
Walker, R. (1992). Becoming the third wave. Ms.
Walker, R. (Ed.). (1995). To be real: Telling the truth and changing the face of feminism. New York: Anchor Books.
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