Question

What is 3rd wave feminism according to Naomi Wolf and Rebecca Walker?

And how might either the Cyndi Lauper or Indigo Girls video connect to some of the ideas outlined by those scholars?

2 paragraphs

Answer 1

The term third wave is often attributed to Rebecca Walker, who used it in a 1992 essay in Ms. magazine to refer to a generation of women who came of age enjoying the benefits of second-wave feminist activism from the 1960s and 1970s and whose politics are often more personal and contradictory than the “women’s liberation” social movement that preceded them.2 The term was actually used earlier, in the late 1980s, by some feminists of color who proposed an anthology entitled The Third Wave: Feminist Perspectives on Racism, to be released by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. Although the anthology was never published, the challenge to white feminism by women of color is a key component of third-wave feminist thinking.3 Other hallmarks typical of third-wave writing and thinking include conflict, ambiguity, and paradox; breaking down the essentialist construction of gender and insistence on women’s diversity; the notion that identity is multiple, intersecting, and shifting rather than conceptualized as a unified self; autobiography and personal experience as the foundation for feminist theorizing; engagement with popular culture; reclamation of some aspects of traditional femininity such as fashion, beauty culture, and domestic arts; celebration of women’s Introduction 3 sexual agency; coalition politics; and individual empowerment (more than social movement).4 Television representations, music, and other “common texts” such as magazines, novels, and films are not incidental to understanding the third wave and its political potential. Popular culture is a crucial site for defining, shaping, and understanding this iteration of feminism. Influenced by critical theory and by generational immersion in mass-mediated culture, “third wave activists are well aware of the power of representations to promote or contest domination. Since we understand the ‘real’ as an effect of representation and understand that representational effects play out in material spaces and in material ways, we take critical engagement with popular culture as key to political struggle. Besides, we’re pop-culture babies; we want some pleasure with our critical analysis.”5 Analyzing the ways that women’s lives are depicted on television, in film, through magazines, and in literature is legitimate political activism, because those representations are used by women (and men) to make meaning and create realities. “Representations of feminism” are also crucial because these representations cannot be dismissed as distortions or caricatures; they determine what feminism “really means” in the larger society, which is governed not by academic discourse but by “talk show audiences and Cosmo readers” who experience feminism, femininity, through popular texts.