What’s Political about the New Feminisms?

Abstract

In this article, I examine these to argue that they are not simply part of a backlash against feminism but are instead, in many cases, part of an ongoing contest over the meaning of feminism. Critical commentary on new feminisms has often accused this work of conflating consumerism with political action, personal change with political change, and cultural and cosmetic accommodations with economic and political restructuring.1 While not entirely unfounded, these criticisms undervalue the real contributions some recent feminisms are making to social liberation movements, because these contributions do not easily fit into more familiar models of feminist politics. Rather than dismissing all the new feminisms as media hype or conservative backlash, I prefer to subject them to careful interrogation, not least because in addition to influencing some feminist work in the academy, they have had a far-ranging influence in the political, economic, and cultural spheres. Most of the new feminisms can be grouped under the rubrics of postfeminism, feminism, or both; these describe a loosely related set of beliefs about the contemporary scope and role of feminism as well as the sites and possibilities for the development and deployment of political agency. Because these terms postfeminism and third-wave feminism are often (usually erroneously) used interchangeably, I want to explicate the different meanings of the terms and show how they are related (a shared girl power ideal), as well as how they are not (in nearly all other ways). While both are responses to dissatisfactions with liberal, socialist, and radical forms of second-wave feminist theory, they express these dissatisfactions for somewhat different reasons and in different ways, as I will show in the next