Closing Reflections

Abstract

It is challenging to deliver an account of third wave feminism that adequately establishes its objectives, accurately captures its strengths and weaknesses, and satisfactorily assesses its potential. Dean (2009: 335) explains that, insofar as the phrase ‘third wave feminism’ lacks a clear, substantive referent, the discussions of ‘third wave feminism’ have tended to deploy this phrase as a ‘discursive resource’. The aims pursued throughout the present book are consistent with this observation: the point of the analysis undertaken here is not to identify the clear boundaries of a discrete, empirical entity that can be said to fully and completely represent ‘third wave feminism’. Instead, the aim has been to outline a set of general tendencies or features that, taken together, express an approach to thinking through the complex interaction of feminist principles, anti-feminist sentiments, individualizing forces, and neoliberal persuasions that constitute the gender order in the early twenty-first century. Approaching the study of third wave feminism in this way has relevance for how we might analyse the nature of gendered subjectivity, the practice of feminist politics, the production of feminist knowledge, and the performance of feminist critique at this historical juncture.