Third Wave Feminism Research Articles

Isn't It Ironic?: The Intersection of Third-Wave Feminism and Generation X

In this essay, I analyze how gender is constructed and communicated by women popularly associated with and thus representative of Generation X in order to assess the nature of the relationship between Generation X and third-wave feminism and to chart the presence of feminism in contemporary popular culture. Ultimately, I argue that the overlap between “third wavers” and Generation X is great and that third-wave feminism is more appropriately understood as a “Gen X” subculture than as an evolutionary phase of feminism.

Mediating third-wave feminism: appropriation as postmodern media practice

In this essay, we explore how sensibilities of third-wave feminism are appropriated by and in the context of postmodern media such that they are commodified, reinscribed, and sold to audiences in an hegemonic fashion. To this end, we analyze gendered representations of women located at various mediated sites of popular culture in whom gender is conspicuous and primary: Alanis Morissette, Kate Moss, and Ally McBeal. We argue that, in each case, the appropriation of third-wave feminist tenets is accomplished via a postmodern aesthetic code of juxtaposition that serves to recontextualize and reinscribe those sensibilities in a way that ultimately functions to reify dominant patriarchal codes and discourses.

Women as Wives, Servants and Slaves: Rethinking the Public/Private Divide

Critiques of the public/private divide in Western political thought do not go far enough in analyzing the full range and character of relations in the private sphere as demonstrated in this article, which analyzes John Locke's theorisation about the relative authority of wives, servants and slaves. A third-wave feminist analysis is used to illustrate the theoretical relevance of group-based identities that, far from having a uniform relation to the political power afforded to free (male) citizens, are hierarchically stratified. Thus it is demonstrated that a basic problem within second-wave feminist analysis of Lockean, and more broadly defined liberal thought, is the tendency to categorize women as ''wives'' of free citizens, and not to analyze adequately other dimensions of identity, thereby ignoring the explicit divisions and hierarchy among different groups of women in one of the earliest accounts of the private sphere in liberal theory.

Traversing Lines of Control: Feminist Anthropology Today

Feminist anthropology has been a forerunner in debates about power differentials between those observing and those being observed. This article explores how theoretical interventions made by third-wave feminists have led to revisions of the canon, particularly in the understandings of methodology (fieldwork), subject matter (culture), and ethnographic writing. It also highlights some of the problems of placing gender at the center of experience, over differences based on race, class, or sexual orientation. While some feminists have pointed to the impossibility of an ethical feminist anthropology, others have suggested that interdisciplinary ideas and linkages outside academia can lead to greater participation in public policymaking and social struggles that affect the lives of women being studied.

Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Construction of Canada ed. by Veronica Strong-Boag, Sherrill Grace, Avigail Eisenberg, Joan Anderson

REVIEWS Veronica Strong-Boag, Sherrill Grace, Avigail Eisenberg, and Joan Anderson, eds. Painting the Maple: Essays on Race, Gen­ der, and the Construction of Canada. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1998. 296. $29.95 paper. The essays gathered here are the result of compelling collab­ oration embodied through discussion groups, workshops, sem­ inars, and a conference between women from Nursing, Politi­ cal Science, English, Sociology, History, and Geography. They met together to ask how we might productively reflect on the policies, practices, and cultural representations through which nation is constructed, maintained, and changed by seeing from different disciplinary angles. Given the institutional and practi­ cal limitations on interdisciplinary work, this collection answers one of its opening questions — why is it important to persist in such endeavours? — by its example. A clear rapprochement emerges between the seven essays that address literary, popu­ lar culture, and media representation, and the six essays that engage political, immigration, multicultural, and health care policy and practices. While all the essays here do not successfully speak “two lan­ guages,” or even directly talk to each other, the volume, taken as a whole, indicates that deep reflection on each of the vexed categories — “Canada,” “race,” and “gender” — as these mutu­ ally influence each other is not only enriched by such interdisci­ plinary inquiry, but also requires it. Each of these problematic categories has been the object of much interdisciplinary inter­ rogation in the varied contexts of Canadian Studies, Women’s Studies, Cultural Studies, and Aboriginal, Black, and Asian Studies for the past two decades. This volume’s simultaneous contribution of meaningful cultural analysis to each of these contexts is the result of third-wave feminism’s imperfect but productive struggle to account for the complex relations be­ tween powerful multiple factors of the experience and construc­ tion of social identity. The essays here go well beyond the early add-on or “double oppression” attempts at analysis of genderplus -race or gender-plus-class. Understanding of mutually con­ stitutive relations between categories typifies the collection. Perhaps the most important work accomplished collectively by this volume is the persistent assertion that national citizen­ 517 ESC 26, 2000 ship is inescapably formative of social identity. Indeed, as sociol­ ogist Jo-Anne Lee and political scientist Linda Cardinal argue, feminist thinkers have, to their detriment, under-explored this key factor: “feminism must embrace the cultural construction of citizen identities and national identity as feminist issues be­ cause nationalizing forces are central to understanding women’s lives” (236). This intervention counters at least a half-century of second-wave (mostly middle-class white women) feminists who identify with Virginia Woolf’s much misunderstood World War II pronouncement: “As a woman I have no country.” While I applaud Lee and Cardinal’s call to read for the constitutive centrality of nation, I find their focus on “patho­ logical” “Anglo-Canadian” nationalism to be symptomatic of an enduring problem in feminist thought (and manifest also in some of the other contributions to this volume). Lee and Car­ dinal wisely call for the need to move beyond “present models of oppression based on the ‘colonial’ model” that are “inap­ propriate to contemporary relations of power” (236), yet their essay is partially entangled with this very model. Several of the other essays axe locked into reading for “assumptions-biaseshegemonic practices” (p. 8), an analysis of the sort initiated by Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which often works from an oppressor/oppressed binary framework. Interrogations of the politics of representation and its con­ sequences have an important role, but much work of this kind has already been done in literary/cultural studies, as well as historical, sociological, and contemporary anthropological con­ texts at both theoretical and practical levels. I believe we are at a transitional moment exemplified by the later Said in Cul­ ture and Imperialism (1993); here, Said’s stated goal is “to convey a more urgent sense of the interdependence between things. [... ] we must speak of overlapping territories, inter­ twined histories” (60). Senior historian Veronica Strong-Boag’s essay on the Anglo-Mohawk performance poet Emily Pauline Johnson is exemplary in its treatment of the intertwined his­ tories of subjugation, resistance, and transformative practices...