As we saw in the previous chapter, feminism is often contradictory. On one hand, there is an assumption that men and women are equal and potentially, with different socialization than today, the same. On the other hand, there is a celebration of women as different from men, with specifically feminine values that make them more nurturing and caring. On one hand, there is a focus on women’s individual achievements in education and in the workplace; on the other, an assumption that women are collaborative, a sisterhood. There is a focus on gender, exploring what it means to be a woman, and at the same time a desire to move beyond gender altogether, or, most recently, define it as a fluid concept that is more to do with how a person feels than their biology. It is argued that women are a class with interests in common but there is also recognition that women’s experiences vary according to their age, race, social class, disability and sexuality. Many of these contradictions were present in the earliest incarnations of the women’s movement. From the 1970s, particularly with the working out of the second-wave mantra that the personal is political, these tensions came ever more to the fore.
Today, campaigners and theorists alike tell us there is not one feminism but instead there are many different forms of feminism: from radical to liberal feminism, black feminism to lesbian feminism, from intersectional to the derogatory ‘white’ feminism. It seems the particular label is all important: it does more than just describe a political position; it speaks to a woman’s sense of identity. Many of these different feminisms have emerged not through campaigning and reshaping political allegiances but through academic debates within universities. Higher education has become the primary site for the development of feminist theory and ideas generated in the conference hall and seminar room overflow and influence the practice and discussion of feminism outside of the academy. This chapter explores how the feminisms that emerged in the 1970s have influenced current thinking about intersectionality and identity politics, leading to third- and fourth-wave feminism.
In Britain, the number of women students entering higher education grew steadily in the decades after the Second World War and by the late 1960s women comprised a significant proportion of postgraduate students, researchers, academics and senior administrators. In America, for reasons discussed in the first part of this book, an increase in the number of women students only really began to occur in the early 1970s. In 1972, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act was passed, which protected students from discrimination on the basis of sex in educational programs that receive federal financial assistance and in 1974 the Women’s Educational Equity Act (WEEA) was enacted. Such legislation no doubt accelerated the pace of change, but women were, by this point, already entering even the once most carefully guarded bastions of male academic privilege.
The increase in the number of women in universities at the same time as feminism was becoming increasingly influential brought the women’s liberation movement into higher education. However, this development was certainly not welcomed with open arms. Male-dominated universities were steeped in tradition and many scholars, particularly within the humanities, saw their role as conserving a national cultural heritage. The presence of women was considered a threat to academic standards, the standing of the university and the intellectual life of the nation. It was only when admitting women was considered to be in the best interests of the university that practice began to shift. Although institutions were slow to change, a younger generation of academics had already begun to question not just who should go to university but what should be taught and why. This was most explicit in the new field of sociology of education where the role of universities in credentializing the cultural capital of the upper class as objectively superior knowledge and thereby reproducing a social elite became widely discussed.
The questioning of academic tradition that began in the 1960s was not prompted by feminism so much as the growing challenge to Enlightenment values epitomized by the discrediting of positivism, an approach to research that suggested people and society could be understood according to logical scientific principles. Critical theorists, such as Frankfurt School scholars like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Jurgen Habermas, became increasingly influential within the humanities and called for culture, and especially literature, to be understood in relation to the social, political and ideological context in which it was produced. Cultural knowledge, according to this understanding, was simply a reflection of the power relations that gave rise to it; the purpose of study became to expose the way in which the culture industry colluded in maintaining the capitalist status quo. While critics of positivism challenged the possibility of knowledge bringing people closer to truth and the desirability of objectivity in research, critical theorists likewise argued truth was an illusory reflection of power.355 When scholarship became separated from Enlightenment values such as truth, objectivity and rationality, it was left hollowed out and in search of a purpose. This made it receptive to feminist thought.
The impact of the women’s liberation movement was first felt in universities as a challenge to the content of the curriculum. Women questioned the composition of the canon in literature and demanded greater representation for women writers. There was a move to uncover ‘forgotten’ women whose work was argued to be of an equivalent quality to men’s but had not been recognized. This prompted a useful discussion about literary quality, the taken-for-granted nature of the canon and the role of higher education in preserving a national cultural heritage. This initial demand for female equality was a challenge to institutions to ‘fulfil the promises of liberal education’.356 Outside of academia, second-wave feminism’s focus on the role of the private sphere in sustaining women’s oppression led to a demand for social science disciplines to give greater prominence to topics such as marriage, housework and family relationships, sexuality and mental health.357 This questioning of the curriculum was useful and led to a broadening of the scope of subjects such as sociology.
Many established academics were reluctant to embrace change and tinkering with the curriculum could only go so far in bringing about the changes feminists wanted to see within higher education. For this reason, Women’s Studies developed outside of traditional disciplines. It began at Cornell University in 1969 and quickly spread to other universities throughout America in the 1970s and Britain in the 1980s. Developing outside of established disciplinary practice gave those involved in Women’s Studies much more freedom to investigate not just new topics but also new research methods.
Feminists within universities brought the second-wave lesson that the personal is political to the heart of academic work. This went beyond seeking greater representation for women or broadening the range of topics covered and prompted a far more fundamental questioning of what counted as knowledge and whose knowledge was being legitimized within the university. Feminist scholars influenced by critical theory argued that existing assumptions about knowledge presented a masculine standard as universal and patriarchal power relations as fixed and natural: or, as feminist scholars point out, ‘malestream understandings and knowledge constructions may well be hegemonic’.358 This view developed within an intellectual climate that was already beginning to question whether the aspiration of scholarship towards truth and objectivity was either possible or desirable.
Feminist scholars argued that aiming for objectivity in research and judgement was little more than a mask for presenting masculine beliefs, values and assumptions as universal. According to this line of argument, women’s interests were best served not by better, or more objective research, but by abandoning false claims to objectivity and neutrality altogether. Instead, feminists argued for a new epistemology that would position researchers as gendered ‘situated knowers’, where both what is known and, significantly, the way it is known, ‘reflects the situation or perspective of the knower’.359 This emphasis on standpoint brings a new subjectivity to academic work. Not only does it help bring women’s experiences to the fore but, of far more consequence for the nature of scholarship, it positions truth as dependent upon context and an individual’s perspective. Claims of objectivity, truth and neutrality come to be rejected as simply reflections of power relations.
Understanding truth as multiple and perspectival calls for research methods that can get to the heart of personal experiences and understandings. This led to a new emphasis on qualitative research methods and, in particular, a search for methods that could upend the power relationship that existed between researcher and subject. Interviews became less structured and more an opportunity for academics to ‘give voice’ to groups whose experiences were previously not considered worthy of academic study. Narrative, life history and biographical research methods became recognized as important means of allowing women to tell their own stories. Recognizing the subjective element in research was not an impetus to transcending it; objectivity was seen as a masculine contrivance. Instead, giving voice or story-telling became an end in itself. This shift towards the subjective in the classroom led to the development of pedagogical approaches that mimicked the consciousness raising groups taking off outside the academy. Students were asked to recount their personal experiences, feelings and emotions and were, in turn, taught that these subjective states were of more significance than objective analysis of data.
The assumption that claims to objectivity were a mask to conceal patriarchal power led to the belief, shared with critical theorists, that all knowledge was ideology and all culture essentially political. As such, literature was viewed as a reflection of the ‘perspectives and ideals of its creators’.360 According to this way of thinking, work by men dominated the canon not because it was intellectually superior but because it matched the ideological prejudices of those responsible for constructing the school exam syllabus and the university curriculum. This called into question not just the content of the canon but the view that some works of literature could be judged to be qualitatively better than others. What was needed were multiple canons so that women’s work could be valued in its own terms rather than according to masculine standards. A feminist canon would not be any less political, it was argued, but would amplify previously marginalized voices. In the style of Millet’s Sexual Politics, texts were judged to be valuable not on the basis of their literary merit but for the lessons they could offer readers about the workings of patriarchy.
Feminism’s challenge to traditional bodies of knowledge and the drive to legitimize the study of new topics and new authors, new research methods and new approaches to pedagogy meant that educational goals easily became blurred with more explicitly political aims. Indeed, attempts to separate education from politics were considered disingenuous. Feminism’s strength lay in its candour; it did not make false claims to neutrality: it aimed to expose ‘the deep power relationships between men and women’.361 One feminist scholar describes the goal of Women’s Studies as being ‘to challenge political ideas, to transform women’s positions in social and public life, questioning their confinement to the family’.362
A feminism that questioned objectivity and truth claims sat comfortably alongside a turn towards post-modernism within the academy. Both had ‘uncovered the political power of the academy and of knowledge claims’.363 Both shared a disdain for the Enlightenment notion of universalism. The American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler argues: ‘I tend to conceive of the claim of “universality” in exclusively negative and exclusionary terms.’364 Whereas the rationality of the Enlightenment demanded a separation of ideas and self, under the influence of feminism this gave way to the view that such a separation was anathema to good research which situated the researcher, and her emotional responses, firmly within the research.
The argument that all knowledge is a reflection of its originator challenges the view that men and women make sense of the world in the same way. Instead, feminists contend, ways of knowing are gender specific and men and women make sense of the world in different ways, their subjective experiences leading them to different understandings. The assumption that women have a ‘specifically gendered consciousness’365 positions them firmly within a subjective and emotional domain. The quantitative, rational and logical are rejected as outdated and inherently disingenuous. As Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge explain in Professing Feminism, ‘Logic, the analysis of arguments, quantitative reasoning, objective evaluation of evidence, fair minded consideration of opposing views – modes of thinking central to intellectual life – were dismissed as masculinist contrivances that served only to demean and oppress women.’366
Academic feminists argue that not only do men and women have different life experiences but, more significantly, the qualitative and subjective way in which they experience the world is different too. There is no common or objective reality, shared by men and women alike. Instead, women’s understandings and interpretations of the world lead them to a different reality, though one that is forever destined to be expressed in what Australian feminist Dale Spender refers to as ‘manmade language’. Spender argues women need to ‘reclaim language’ in order to rediscover their own knowledge. ‘Feminism,’ she contends, ‘refers to the alternative meanings put forward by feminists.’367 As socialist feminist Lynne Segal wryly observes, this takes us a long way from tackling the practical obstacles women encountered on the road to equality. Instead, women’s oppression becomes reduced to the expression of a set of ideas.
It was a short leap from arguing that men and women had different ways of understanding the world to arguing that women’s ways of knowing were superior. Radical feminists such as Adrienne Rich claim that women’s bodies, the monthly menstrual cycle and the ability to give birth and feed a baby, bring them closer to nature than men. Others argue that patriarchal social relations which privilege men prevent them from having an unbiased view of reality. Women’s experiences of subordination, on the other hand, give them an understanding more grounded in sensitivity to the emotional realm. Sandra Harding argues a ‘feminist vantage point’ is ‘more illuminating than any existing vantage point’.368 Women, having experienced reproductive as well as productive labour, are able to develop ‘a more objective viewpoint than men who have more restricted experience and more to gain from hiding the truth’.369
In locating claims for intellectual insight within women’s experiences of subordination, feminist scholars were drawing a direct link between oppression and access to knowledge. Women’s status as ‘situated knowers’ is celebrated in comparison to those who seek knowledge ‘ruled by phallogocentrism’ and ‘disembodied vision’. Instead, feminist researchers ‘seek those ruled by partial sight and limited voice’ in order to access ‘the connections and unexpected openings situated knowledge makes possible’.370 It is women’s status as victims of patriarchy that affords them superior insight: oppression leads women to develop a superior value system and more finely tuned sense of morality. Sandra Lee Bartky describes feminist consciousness as a ‘consciousness of victimization’.371 By this logic, the most victimized sections of society are those with the best understandings of the world.
Establishing a link between intellectual insight and oppression paves the way for more oppressed groups to trump the claims of feminist scholars in a process of identity-driven one-upmanship. As a result, feminist scholars become committed to maintaining women’s status as victims and with every social and political advance made they are forced to seek out new sites of inequality. Patai and Koertge argue that such logic indicates ‘women who do not feel crippled by sexism must “learn” that in fact they were – and are – victims of this cultural offense’.372
The post-modern view of language as shaping not just interpretations of reality but reality itself led to the major intellectual assertion of academic feminism that gender itself is a social construction. The separation of gender from sex came to dominate feminist scholarship in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Christina Hoff Sommers notes, ‘the “sex/gender system” became the “controlling insight” of academic feminism’ and, once made visible, ‘we can see it everywhere’.373 Literature and language were implicated in the social construction of gender. Butler explores the idea of gender as a ‘performance’ in her 1990 book Gender Trouble in which she argues that the whole notion of biological sex difference ‘is a discursive formation that acts as a naturalized foundation for the nature/culture distinction and the strategies of domination that the distinction supports’.374
Butler questions the existence of a binary concept of ‘natural’ sex preceding and underpinning an ‘artificial’ gender. Rather than being a fixed category, whether socially or naturally determined, Butler sees gender as a fluid concept that is defined only in relation to what it is not: ‘a complexity whose totality is permanently deferred’.375 Just as gender cannot be counterposed to sex, neither can man be counterposed to woman. Butler wants to move away from ‘the presumption of a binary gender system’ which she considers ‘implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it’.376 She argues, ‘There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender.’ To this end, Butler sees gender as ‘always a doing’ rather than a fixed position. The consequences of this argument are explored in Chapter Ten.
Academic feminism holds two opposing positions. We are told that women experience the world differently to men and, furthermore, this experience of subordination affords them superior insight. At the same time, we are told that the category ‘woman’ is a social construction and individual understandings vary according to perspective. This subjective turn leads inevitably to the realization that women have little in common with each other. Not only is there no shared identity grounded in biology; what’s more, women’s understandings vary according to their social class, political outlook, race and sexuality. This raised a problem for feminism. Mitchell and Oakley explain: ‘If woman cannot be fixed as an identity beyond the biological female, neither can feminism have a unified definition.’377 Attempts at resolving the tension between the privileging of the subjective and the goal of representing the collective interests of all women absorbed feminists throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
The recognition that women’s experiences are diverse effectively ends the possibility of one united women’s movement. In reality, feminism has always been divided between those who argue for sexual equality (labelled by Hoff Sommers as ‘equity’ feminists) and those who emphasize women’s differences from men (‘gender’ feminists). Campaigns for suffrage and reproductive rights successfully masked such differences: legislation could allow for the realization of equality or it could permit women’s superior feminine virtues to improve society. Feminism had never represented a coherent ideological approach to understanding society but by the end of the 1970s it could no longer even pretend to have this goal.
Differences emerged first between liberal, socialist and radical feminism, each claiming different causes of women’s oppression and promoting alternative solutions.378 Although this splintering appeared to be new, in many ways the labels simply made explicit differences that had been present within the women’s movement from its inception. Whereas liberal feminism promoted rights for the individual woman within an existing capitalist society, socialist feminists looked at the collective oppression experienced by women and argued sexual equality could only be achieved within a society organized according to socialist principles. Radical feminism positions gender rather than social class as the key divide within society; it ‘celebrates women’s superior virtue and spirituality and decries “male” violence and technology’.379
For feminists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, definitions became all important. But the more feminism was defined in relation to women’s personal experiences, the more multiple it became. Some, such as Rosalind Delmar, expressed frustration with this fracturing: ‘instead of internal dialogue there is a naming of the parts: there are radical feminists, socialist feminists, Marxist feminists, lesbian separatists, women of colour, and so on.’380 However, with the privileging of subjectivity, this separation appeared unstoppable.
In the 1980s, the same accusation developed force from those within and outside of the women’s movement. Liberal, radical and socialist feminism alike were charged with presenting the experiences of white, Western women as universal and failing to account for the additional disadvantages faced by women outside of this narrow elite.381 As Nancy Cott explains, ‘Only women holding culturally hegemonic values and positions – that is, in the United States, women who are white, heterosexual, middle class, politically mid-stream – have the privilege (or deception) of seeing their condition as that of “woman” and glossing over their other characteristics.’382
Traditional feminism was criticized for being unable to explain the experience of imperialism in the oppression of women in the less developed world or the combined impact of sexism and racism encountered by black women in the West. In An Open Letter to Mary Daly, Audre Lorde noted that ‘beyond sisterhood is still racism’. ‘The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries,’ she argued, ‘but that does not mean that it is identical within those boundaries. Nor do the reservoirs of our ancient power know these boundaries, either. To deal with one without even alluding to the other is to distort our commonality as well as our difference.’383 Black feminists forged a movement that would recognize both race and class as feminist issues which intersected with gender to compound oppression.
Within universities, the subjective turn initially left largely unanswered the question of how and why people experienced the world in different ways. The political theorist Iris Marion Young suggests that ‘a person’s particular sense of history, understanding of social relations and personal possibilities, her or his mode of reasoning, values, and expressive styles are constituted at least partly by her or his group identity’.384 This focus on group identity risks a return to the view that women all experience the world in the same way; Young’s answer was to expand both the range and the number of groups to which individuals could belong.
The academic climate that was receptive to feminism also welcomed new ideas about race, and critical race theory emerged first in the field of legal scholarship. Critical race theory challenged traditional approaches to legal scholarship, in particular, the liberal notion of civil rights. It critiqued liberalism for presenting racism as an aberration rather than a ‘normal’ state of society under white hegemony. This ‘normality’ occurs because, as one critical race theorist puts it, ‘Whites have been the primary beneficiaries of civil rights legislation.’385 Critical race theory and feminism share an assumption that the lived experience of subordination can best be uncovered through centring the subjective and privileging personal narratives in academic research. In addition, the rejection of objectivity leads, in both instances, to avowedly political aims.386
The focus on lived experience assumes only black people can ever have ‘experiential knowledge’ of racism. Just as feminism asserts that men and women do not share a common perception of reality, likewise critical race theory assumes that black and white people have no shared reality either. One critical race theorist notes that towards the end of the 1980s, ‘Scholars of color within the left began to ask their white colleagues to examine their own racism and to develop oppositional critiques not just to dominant conceptions of race and racism but to the treatment of race within the left as well.’387 The positioning of race and gender as mutually exclusive categories, particularly when no account was taken of social class, created ‘complex problems of exclusion and distortion for women of color’.388 The solution, proposed by critical race theorists, was to present ‘racism not as isolated instances of conscious bigoted decision making or prejudiced practice, but as larger, systemic, structural, and cultural, as deeply psychological and socially ingrained’.389
The term intersectionality was coined by the African American critical legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to articulate the ‘dual vulnerability’ experienced by women of colour. ‘On the simplest level,’ Crenshaw tells us, ‘an intersectional framework uncovers how the dual positioning of women of color as women and as members of a subordinated racial group bears upon violence committed against us.’390 She initially conceived of intersectionality as a provisional means of combining politics with post-modern theory. Its political expediency lay in its explanation of how ‘political and representational practices relating to race and gender interrelate’.391 Crenshaw distinguishes structural intersectionality, ‘the material consequences of the interaction of these multiple hierarchies in the lives of women of color’, from representational intersectionality, or the way that race and gender images ‘converge to create unique and specific narratives deemed appropriate for women of color’.392 The combined impact of structural and representational intersectionality was often the ‘erasing women of color’.393
The theory of intersectionality has been taken on board by scholars and activists looking to explore not just intersections of gender, race and class, but also sexuality, age and ability. Not all of these features of a person’s identity are necessarily permanent; some might be temporary or transient states. What’s important is not that these intersections are simply added together but instead that they combine with and constitute each other.394 In this way, intersectional feminism maintains a focus on women while at the same time practising its key assertion that women are not a homogenous group. Intersectional feminists argue that disabled women, transwomen, black women, working class and LGBTQ women not only experience the world in different ways but, more significantly, face multiple layers of intersecting oppression.
The popular website Everyday Feminism explains the attraction of intersectionality as ‘a frame that recognizes the multiple aspects of identity that enrich our lives and experiences and that compound and complicate oppressions and marginalizations’. Although women can no longer be considered a homogenous group, and there is no concept of universal rights to strive for, all women can locate themselves within this prism of oppression; everyone has multiple aspects of identity. Indeed, the primacy of identity means that for intersectional feminists, unlike radical feminists, identifying as a woman is distinct from and more important than the biological status of being female (or cis-gendered). Crucially, feminism that is not intersectional stands accused of ignoring ‘women’s overlapping identities – including race, class, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation’ and how they ‘impact the way they experience oppression and discrimination’.395 With this we return to the concept of ‘spirit murder’ and, in order to prevent this, the practice of intersectional feminism becomes most preoccupied with the act of listening.
Just as with feminism, the premise of intersectionality means it can never provide a solution to the problems it asks us to observe. In its emphasis on the personal, lived experience of oppression, it constructs a barrier, an intersectional framework that prevents people transcending their experiences or campaigning for the liberation of those who are not like them. Instead, all those outside of a particular intersection can do is listen, all the while constructing their own framework of overlapping oppressions. There are no collective aspirations or shared political goals that unite all women. There is no common humanity or ‘sisterhood’ but neither is there the rugged individual of liberalism. Instead, as academic Helen Pluckrose explores, there is the group, and it is group identity that becomes all important.396 Intersectionality holds no promise of liberation from group membership towards membership of the shared category ‘human’.
Group identity obliterates individuality in the assumption not only that all members share a common experience and wish to label themselves accordingly but also that they share a political outlook. In focusing on the group, intersectionality elides key differences between people; and biology once again becomes the defining feature of a person and a causal explanation for their social status. This follows logically from Catharine Mackinnon’s 1979 assertion that ‘white males have long been advantaged precisely on racial and sexual grounds, differentially favoured in employment and education because they were white and male. To intervene to alter this balance of advantage is not discrimination in reverse, but a chance for equal consideration for the first time.’397 This is an argument for equality that entrenches the biological differences between people as insurmountable; it gives rise to the popular demand that people – particularly white men – need to ‘check their privilege’ before speaking, or in other words, to shut up. Dialogue across separate intersectional frameworks becomes impossible.
MacKinnon makes clear the connection between ‘maleness’ and power. As Daphne Patai notes, if men are always powerful, ‘“Victims” by contrast, are always innocent and by definition weak.’398 This points to a further problem of intersectional feminism: in defining people according to multiple measures of oppression it sets in place a hierarchy, where some identities are judged more worthy of recognition than others. The insult of ‘white feminism’ is attached to non-intersectional feminism that, in the words of one writer, ‘really only helps white people’. ‘White feminism’, its critics argue, overlooks class, race and sexuality and assumes ‘that women being equal means that all women face identical struggles, regardless of racial identity’.399 Here we see the limitations of intersectional feminism made clear: it demands not just ideological but biological purity and thereby returns us to outdated and prejudiced beliefs in naturalized differences. It ties people into a victimhood associated with group identity; it undervalues both the universal human experience and, at the same time, individual freedom and autonomy.
Intersectional feminism arose when the differences between women became more prominent than the common experience of womanhood. In order for feminism to survive it needed to find a way that could account for differences at the same time as presenting a specifically gendered experience of oppression. Feminism succeeded through first finding a common enemy for women: not in men individually but in male psychology, masculinity, exercised through patriarchy and expressed in culture. Then, in intersectionality, feminism found a way to see women as a collective with interests in common while simultaneously acknowledging overlapping aspects of their identity that could combine and compound oppression in different ways. However, some women, even those who consider themselves to be feminists, refuse to buy into this narrative of female oppression and to locate themselves within an intersectional framework. The only way intersectional feminism can account for this is to argue against a link between sex and gender. This has the additional advantage of expanding the category of women to encompass men who identify as women.
An opposition emerges between intersectional feminism and white feminism based not on identity so much as viewpoint which, in turn, sets in place a policing of women’s speech. When the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie commented that transwomen had not had the same life experiences as women who were born female she came in for criticism from feminists who sought to defend the intersectional orthodoxy.400 Her previously elevated position within intersectional feminism, premised upon her being a woman, black and from a developing country, was hastily rescinded.
Since Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 article, ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex’,401 the working out of ideas around intersectionality within the academy has been reflected in the broader feminist movement outside of universities. New thinking in feminism began to coalesce around the label ‘third wave’ in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Rebecca Walker, the daughter of author Alice Walker, is credited with having coined the term third-wave feminism in a 1992 essay that ends with the declaration: ‘I am not a postfeminism feminist. I am the Third Wave.’402
Walker’s essay, written when she was 22 years old, explores the continued need for feminism in the face of what she describes as a backlash against the movement: ‘The backlash against U.S. women is real. As the misconception of equality between the sexes becomes more ubiquitous, so does the attempt to restrict the boundaries of women’s personal and political power.’ Furthermore, Walker spells out her frustration with the civil rights movement: ‘When will progressive black men prioritize my rights and well-being? When will they stop talking so damn much about ‘the race’ as if it revolved exclusively around them?’403 The early 1990s saw an increase in work reflecting on the relationship between gender and race as overlapping sources of oppression. A 1994 anthology, The Third Wave: Feminist Perspectives on Racism was typical in focusing upon strategies for challenging racism from a feminist perspective and, in particular, giving voice to women of colour.
Walker recognized a need for both feminism and the civil rights movement, but as a young, non-heterosexual woman of colour, she argued that neither spoke to the specificity of her experiences. As a result, she launched an activist collective called Third Wave:
Third Wave is a member-driven multiracial, multicultural, multi-sexuality national non-profit organization devoted to feminist and youth activism for change. Rather than focusing on specific goals to bring about legal change for the benefit of individuals, Third Wave aimed primarily to be inclusive; By using our experiences as a starting point we can create a diverse community and cultivate a meaningful response.404
Third-wave feminism begins from two quite disingenuous assumptions. Firstly, it assumes that earlier incarnations of feminism had nothing to say about the experiences of black women. But this is not true: in America the original women’s movement emerged out of and worked closely alongside campaigns for abolition. As Raquel Rosario Sanchez, writing on Feminist Current explains, ‘The women’s rights movement has existed for over a century, and extends across countries and time periods. It is not accurate to assume that until the term ‘intersectional feminism’ came along in the U.S., the women’s movement cared only about the needs and concerns of white, Western, upper-class women.’405 The second misconception, apparent in the name ‘third wave’, is that there was a distinct break between the different schools of feminist thought. Just as the notion of a hiatus between first- and second-wave feminism is a myth premised on the equation of feminism with a women’s movement, likewise there is no gap in feminist activity or theory between the second and third wave.
Feminism did not grind to a halt in the 1980s. It continued; most prominently in radical feminist campaigns against pornography led by Dworkin and MacKinnon in the US and in socialist feminism in the UK. Lesbian feminism and black feminism also became well established in this decade. Within the academy, as we have seen, feminism’s meeting with post-modernism led to a focus on culture and the workings of language. Feminism in the 1980s became far more fragmented and by the end of the decade it was difficult to talk of a coherent feminist movement but this certainly did not mean that feminist thought was on pause.
Third-wave feminists, as we see with Walker, often describe themselves as responding to a perceived backlash against feminism. Susan Faludi, in her 1992 book Backlash, argues that by the end of the 1980s there was a sense of women’s gains being reversed. She suggests that what was making women unhappy was not, as was being suggested at the time, equality, but the rising pressure to halt that nascent equality. There is indeed some truth in the notion of a backlash to feminism at this time. Criticisms came in particular from a socially conservative religious right which saw feminism as a threat to the traditional patriarchal family. Faludi notes, ‘The most recent round of backlash first surfaced in the late 1970s on the fringes, among the evangelical right. … By the mid-eighties, as resistance to women’s rights acquired political and social acceptability, it passed into popular culture.’406 These ideas were taken on board by Conservative politicians in the UK who campaigned around ‘back to basics’ family values and an American Republican party that made political capital out of opposition to abortion. There was a perception in some sections of the media at this time that feminism had served its purpose – that women had equal rights because they were able to go out to work and university and could, at least in theory, compete with men on a level playing field.
However, the backlash Faludi describes was taking place at the same time as women were continuing to make significant inroads into education, work and politics. Feminist ideas were becoming far more influential than ever before and gaining widespread acceptance among the labour movement, major political parties, national governments and within the management of institutions such as schools and colleges. In many ways the backlash can be seen as a response to this success; for the first time feminism is perceived as a serious threat to the status quo.
Third-wave feminism may appear to be a response to a backlash but in many ways this presentation is misleading. It overstates the opposition to feminism and downplays the successes women were achieving. Third-wave feminism can itself be seen as a backlash against earlier incarnations of second-wave feminism that placed a priority on legal equality and stood accused of working only in the interests of white, middle class, heterosexual and able-bodied women. This appears most clearly in third-wave feminism’s vocal rejection of ‘liberal’ feminists like Katie Roiphe, Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Sommers who argued that women were not the victims radical feminism considered them to be.
Third-wave feminism prioritized the experiences of young, non-heterosexual women, women of colour, working-class women and transwomen. However, in creating space for the experiences of different groups of women, third-wave feminism built upon many of the ideas that had been established by later second-wave feminists, in particular the centrality of subjectivity and personal experience. Third-wave feminism does not, therefore, mark a clean break from an older feminism, but it does develop a distinct generational consciousness, perhaps expressed most succinctly in the title of a 2001 anthology edited by Barbara Findlen: Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation.
The editors of Third Wave Agenda similarly describe themselves as, ‘gathering the voices of young activists struggling to come to terms with the historical specificity of our feminisms and with the times in which we came of age (the late 1970s through the late 1980s)’.407 Here, the term ‘third wave’ is used quite specifically to refer to women born between 1963 and 1973; elsewhere it correlates more loosely to Generation X. Some consider third-wave feminism to have been superseded by a fourth wave while others still use the term third wave seemingly as a synonym for ‘young people’s feminism’.
Many self-professed third-wave writers are quick to stress the specificity of their generational experience in relation to feminism. They argue they grew up with, to use Hoff Sommer’s terms, ‘equity feminism’, a view that women and men were equal, but then, at college, ‘got victim feminism’ along with post-structuralism. Rather than opting for one or the other, third-wave feminists set out to create ‘a feminism that strategically combines elements of these feminisms, along with black feminism, working-class feminism, pro-sex feminism, and so on’.408 Elsewhere the generational experience is expressed in relation to the labour market. For early second-wave feminists getting a job was considered to be a conscious choice involving a rejection of domesticity and therefore a feminist act; for younger women, on the other hand, work is a financial necessity and not a choice. However, it is argued that although the vast majority of women work nowadays, the jobs they have are primarily low paid and insecure.
The mass movement of women into work that occurred between second- and third-wave feminism has shifted attention away from the position of women in the home and the source of women’s oppression as lying within the financial dependency and drudgery of the housewife role. The third-wave focus on youth meant that the particular issues concerning older women and mothers were often overlooked. Instead oppression came to be seen more as a result of culture and personal relationships – again, ideas that started to develop under second-wave feminism. The separation between the realms of political activism and cultural production was contested and culture came to be seen as inherently political.409 Sexual politics became a key feature of the culture wars. According to this way of thinking, craft, art, music, even fashion and make-up were interpreted as forms of political expression. Women were considered to be divided less by social class and more by the lifestyle choices they made.
Third-wave feminism shared with second wave a focus on power as played out in relations between men and women but whereas for an earlier generation this translated into a critique of capitalism, now capitalism became seen as just one among many of the factors contributing to women’s oppression. The focus on patriarchy became more dominant as a source of subjugation experienced by women in common and distinct from men. In this way second- and third-wave feminism share an exclusive focus on women: it is women’s rights that are promoted, not human rights.
The move from second- to third-wave feminism consolidates the idea of women not just as object of feminism but as the subject of feminism too. With the privileging of the subjective that emerged from within the academy, third-wave feminism comes to be ever more closely associated with a gender specific way of thinking and of experiencing the world. To be a third-wave feminist is not just to advocate for women’s rights but to have a particular consciousness emerging from gendered experience. It is argued that third-wave feminism involves, ‘the development of modes of thinking that can come to terms with the multiple, constantly shifting bases of oppression in relation to the multiple, interpenetrating axes of identity’.410 But when the development of these modes of thinking is made contingent upon a lived experience of oppression then it is an accomplishment only some can achieve.
Whereas Simone de Beauvoir described feminists as women or men who fight to change the position of women, by the mid-1980s feminism had become a ‘gender-specific’ way of thinking created by, for, and on behalf of, women. As Rosalind Delmar notes, perceiving of women as both subject and object, ‘can produce a circular, self-confirming rhetoric and a hermetic closure of thought. The feminine subject becomes trapped by the dynamics of self-reflectivity within the narcissism of the mirror image.’411 The product of this narcissistic self-reflection can be seen in writing by third-wave feminists that ‘relies on personal anecdote for definitional and argumentative strategies’.412 In the second wave, feminism became associated with the women’s movement; in the third-wave feminism came to be identified with women: to be a woman was to be a feminist and to oppose feminism – or at least one dominant idea of it – was to be anti-women.
The combined focus on both subjectivity and inclusion in third-wave feminism throws up problems for political activity when the lived experiences and the political interests of group members are disparate. Bell hooks, a leading light in third-wave feminism discusses one solution, ‘Rather than thinking we would come together as “women” in an identity-based bonding, we might be drawn together rather by a commonality of feeling.’413 This focus on feeling and emotion explains why facts about women’s lives have little impact upon the view that women are victims. The existence of the pay gap and rape culture has become an article of faith that feminists ‘feel’ to be true. The emphasis on shared emotional responses shapes the third-wave approach to activism and theorizing through personal anecdote and collaboration. Rather than formulating specific campaign objectives which may exclude some members, feminist praxis, ‘a political position in which “knowledge” is not simply defined as “knowledge what” but as “knowledge for”’414 is developed through ‘coalition politics’. The therapeutic ethos of the consciousness raising group is replicated and transformed into a model for political action.
The more third-wave feminism acknowledges the differences between women, the more it is forced to promote gender as the unifying category around which coalitions of those who share a ‘commonality of feeling’ can form. Intersectionality splinters the universality of womanhood through the need to pay deference to the complex and overlapping oppressions experienced by working-class women, women of colour, transwomen and non-heterosexual women. The focus on the social construction of gender means that the woman is understood not as biology but as identity. Judith Butler argues, ‘A new sort of feminist politics is now desirable to contest the very reifications of gender and identity, one that will take the variable construction of identity as both a methodological and normative prerequisite, if not a political goal.’415
The absence of a common experience does not signal the end of feminism but precisely the opposite: the more fractured and contingent womanhood becomes, the more it needs to be defended as an identity, a feeling and a way of being in the world. Third-wave feminism asks us to see ‘woman’ as a diverse and socially constructed category, constructed out of and in response to a common experience of gender oppression. Calling misogyny into question, or arguing that women’s lives have changed for the better, not only challenges the need for feminism but is perceived as an attack upon what it means to identify as a woman.
A determination both to see and make sense of the world through a prism of gender escalates the antagonisms between the sexes feminism once sought to overcome. Lasch argues that this preoccupation with gender simplistically reduces every issue to opposition between men and women. As such, it ‘tends to coarsen our sensibilities rather than to refine them. It replaces historical explanation with formulas, rips ideas out of context and often strengthens the very stereotypes it seeks to discredit’.416 In reducing the totality of human experience to a never ending gender war in which men are perpetually called to account for their role in the oppression of women, third-wave feminism also challenges the concept of individual autonomy.
Judith Butler is critical of an earlier incarnation of feminist theory and literature that ‘has assumed that there is a “doer” behind the deed’.417 In Butler’s view there are no autonomous actors, no ‘doers’, simply identities constructed through the cultural script of oppressing or being oppressed. The second-wave aspiration for sexual equality, which viewed women as capable of participating in the world on the same basis as men, is abandoned for a view of women as fragile, not doers but done to, acted upon, and all the while, internalizing the patriarchal ideology that sustains their own oppression. What it means to be a woman returns us once more to an experience of victimization.
The legacy of third-wave feminism is that every issue today, from education to pay, from children’s toys and clothes to workplace dress codes, statues, banknotes and literature is viewed through a prism of gender. For all the promotion of gender fluidity, gender neutral bathrooms and school uniforms, ‘pink stinks’ and ‘let toys be toys’ initiatives, it seems that gender is more entrenched as a way of dividing up and making sense of the world than ever before. Success for one gender, most often men, is presented as being at the expense of the other, usually women. This creates a need to remind women that they are victims of patriarchy and of men in particular; as one feminist writer puts it: ‘Whenever we talk about patriarchy, either in general or in any particular element, we need to bear in mind that the main problem is men: men’s choices, men’s ways of seeing and treating women.’418 In this way, feminism sets men and women in opposition to one another.
There is little consensus as to whether or not feminism has entered a fourth wave. In a 2009 interview with the New York Times, the prominent feminist journalist Jessica Valenti suggested that a fourth-wave feminism was emerging online, through social media and blogs. Valenti goes on to reinforce the idea of a ‘wave’ as a generational consciousness: ‘I know people who are considered third-wave feminists who are 20 years older than me,’ she claims.419 The feminist website Bustle defines fourth-wave feminism as founded upon the ‘queering of gender and sexuality based binaries’. It is sex positive, trans-inclusive, anti-misandrist, body positive and digitally driven.420 This list of defining features reveals fourth-wave feminism to be less a coherent ideology or a political response to a particular issue and more a branch of identity politics. Indeed, identity politics is expressed most clearly and concretely today in feminism.
Just as third-wave feminism did not mark a complete break from second-wave feminism but instead emerged out of and developed some of its key ideas, so too, in turn, has fourth-wave feminism emerged from the third wave. In particular, fourth-wave feminism owes much to the third-wave concept of intersectionality. For fourth-wave feminists it is the intersecting oppressions that forge a person’s identity that are all important. Gender is the most important of these characteristics, but it is fluid, constructed and based more upon innate feelings than biology. Although we can find the roots of today’s fourth-wave feminism in the third wave, the influence of identity politics marks a distinct break from the feminism that existed prior to the 1970s that was developed within the context of a binary political opposition between left and right.
Whereas older feminists had a view that men and women could be equal or that all women shared experiences in common, this has now disappeared completely. Whereas second-wave feminists emphasized the biological experience of being a woman, fourth-wave feminism encompasses anyone, male or female, who identifies as a woman. While second-wave feminists argued female biology led to superior understandings, and greater insight emerged from the experience of subordination, fourth-wave feminists afford the transwoman an elevated status. The more oppressed features a person identifies with, the more, it seems, others have to learn from them.
The bind of fourth-wave feminism is that identity, particularly identities that are fragile constructs or premised on an experience of oppression, need to be defended with vigilance. Threats to identity are everywhere, most especially in culture and images. In the summer of 2013 British campaigners drew attention to an economic injustice: not the financial disparities between rich and poor but the lack of women represented on banknotes. In 2015 there were similar complaints that the new British passport design featured just two women. In the US, activists have demanded more statues of women in New York’s Central Park. In London a campaign against an advertisement featuring a woman in a bikini posing the question, ‘Are you beach body ready?’ led to the successful removal of billboard posters in summer 2016. The focus on words and images, more than actions or material inequalities, comes in part because genuine inequalities between the sexes are few and far between while there remains an overarching assumption that words and images create the reality we all inhabit.
The impact of such campaigns is to make people ever more defined by their gender, sexuality and skin colour. The act of embodying characteristics that a previous generation of activists sought to surpass becomes all consuming. Rather than a celebration of gender and sexual fluidity, of the endless possibilities for people to transform and make themselves anew, the obsessive desire for affirmation means people come to see themselves as ‘born this way’ – even though what they are born with is a mental rather than physical state – and bravely playing out a pre-determined script in the face of an increasingly intolerant society. This leads only to the proliferation of more identities seeking confirmation. The most effective way for any identity group to gain recognition is to stake a claim to victimhood and to present themselves as increasingly vulnerable and fragile.
Identity politics effectively marks the end of class politics. Whereas previous generations of activists made sense of the world through competing class interests, in the context of identity politics, social class becomes reconceived as just another identity, a badge to be worn, signified through cultural choices around food, clothes and television programmes as much as through job or income.
Feminists have never agreed on the relationship between class and gender. In 1973, the sociologist Anthony Giddens maintained, ‘female workers are largely peripheral to the class system’.421 It was assumed that the location of women’s oppression within the home situated them outside of a formal relationship to social class. On the other hand, Ann Oakley wrote a few years later that, ‘class inequality and gender inequality coexist’.422 Some feminists argue that social class is used as a means of dividing women and denying their collective experience while others claim that women themselves constitute a class. This is to assume that women have more in common with each other than they do with any man; a view expressed by the Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy: ‘What patriarchy does is to create a dominant group (men) that holds systemic, individual power over an oppressed group (women), creating a system wherein sexism keeps women, as a class, in a vulnerable and subordinate position.’423
Today, at the same time as some feminists present women as a class with interests in common, others criticize the concept of social class because it doesn’t divide women enough. Social class, they argue, ignores the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and (dis)ability that make some women’s lives more difficult than others. As DiDi Delgado, a poet and activist notes: ‘I think working class is a misnomer, since work is no indication of any shared socio-economic status. An undocumented sex worker, for example, and a white housewife trying to get her Etsy Store off the ground don’t have much in common. Saying both are working class does a lot to alleviate the conscience of those in positions of privilege.’ She explains, ‘Terms like working class often erase intersections of oppression and replace them with a fictional shared experience.’424
When working class is defined so broadly as to encompass anyone who works, it does indeed become meaningless. However, there are certainly still differences in the experiences of women who are in unskilled, insecure and low-paid employment and those who are in better paid and more secure, professional occupations. It tends to be middle-class feminists who lead privileged lives and have the time to seek out prejudice and inequality who are the main drivers of today’s feminism. But this is rarely acknowledged as the focus on race, gender, disability, sexuality and myriad other identity signifiers distract from the significance of class.
Whereas a focus on social class spoke to a political project that moved beyond the individual to forge solidarities that went beyond race, gender and sexuality, identity politics abandons such universal objectives. Instead, focus is turned only upon the self in a narcissistic act of definition. Rather than looking out on the world, identity politics demands we look inwards. Rather than forging solidarity with others, we demand recognition for ourselves, for what makes us special. A focus on identity speaks to exhaustion with politics and a cynicism about humanity.
Online and in the mainstream media, feminism appears to be more dominant than ever before. But feminism today means something quite different from in the past. The focus placed on the private sphere moved second-wave feminism away from legal and practical obstacles women faced to achieving equality with men. In turn, it found both a common problem all women could unite around: patriarchy and male behaviour and at the same time the experiences of women became splintered. A women’s movement gave way to radical, socialist, black and lesbian feminisms. Rather than a demand for equality, feminism now places women’s disparate identities to the fore and becomes an insistence that difference be recognized.
Today’s identity-driven, fourth wave, or intersectional feminism fills the vacuum left by the death of traditional, left versus right, social class–based politics. Whereas the politics of a previous era could, at best, unite disparate people around universal demands, identity politics can only ever speak to the particular interests of a select group. For today’s feminists, this group is people who identify as women; it is a club for people who share the same emotional responses, tastes, political perspectives and lifestyle. The final chapter of this book takes up the consequences of this move, exploring the impact of feminism on what it means to be a woman today.