No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism

5. Unsettling "Third Wave Feminism"

The body of scholarship associated with “third wave” feminism has had a transformative impact on contemporary feminist intellectual agendas. Such work spans a vast set of writings that have addressed the ways in which multiple forms of inequality have shaped women’s subjectivities, lives, and modes of resistance. One of the distinctive features of third wave feminism was the systematic challenge that such work explicitly posed to previous conceptions of feminist thought and practice. In the language of one of the classic texts that marked the emergence of this challenge, This Bridge Called My Back,1 U.S. feminists of color sought both to decenter conceptions of feminism based narrowly on the experience of white, middle-class women and to call attention to inequalities that have historically shaped relationships between women in the United States.2 The forceful political and intellectual challenges of such writing had far-reaching implications as feminist and women’s studies programs sought to redefine intellectual agendas and curricula in order to address systematically and to integrate questions of difference. Although the call for feminists to address questions of difference such as race, sexuality, and class was not new, the impact and breadth of this new surge of writing and activism by feminists of color led to the characterization of this work as a new wave of feminism that had moved past the exclusions of past (and in particular second wave) feminist approaches. This classification sought to capture the significance and distinctiveness of this new flourishing field within feminist scholarship. However, the application of the conventional form of the historical periodization of feminism as distinctive Unsettling “Third Wave Feminism” Feminist Waves, Intersectionality, and Identity Politics in Retrospect LEELA FERNANDES 98 5 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb waves also has inadvertently led to misreadings and misrepresentations of the substantive contributions of emerging paradigms within this scholarship . Dominant narratives of third wave feminism tend to focus on three central paradigms—multicultural inclusion, identity politics, and intersectionality . Although these have certainly been key paradigms within feminist scholarship, third wave feminism represents a more complex and various set of debates and interventions than these paradigms suggest. This essay seeks to interrogate and move beyond the dominant narratives that currently depict third wave feminism within the field of interdisciplinary women’s studies. As Chela Sandoval has argued, the term third wave casts this field of knowledge into a teleological historical narrative that misses the ways in which such work has simultaneously occupied intellectual spaces in past feminist intellectual traditions even as it has often argued against or sought to move beyond dominant paradigms within women’s studies.3 Drawing on Sandoval’s theory of differential consciousness, the essay interrogates the institutionalization of third wave feminism through narratives of multiculturalism, intersectionality, and identity politics. The essay then moves beyond these dominant narratives and elaborates on both the points of connection between recent third wave feminist theory and other waves of feminist scholarship and the substantive theoretical contributions of third wave feminist theory that have often been rendered invisible by the three-wave approach to multiculturalism, identity, and intersectionality. I engage in this effort through a series of theoretical reflections that draw in part on my own observations of the ways in which third wave feminism is often deployed within and institutionalized by interdisciplinary feminist practices. My arguments are not intended to represent a comprehensive survey of third wave feminist theorists but instead draw on engagements with the intellectual work of various feminist scholars including Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandoval, Patricia Hill Collins, Jacqui Alexander, and Norma Alarcon. Third Wave Feminism: Narratives of Multiculturalism, Identity Politics, and Intersectionality The emergence of third wave feminism within the academy is conventionally associated with the trend within women’s studies and feminist scholarship to focus on questions of differences, with a particular emphasis on the UNSETTLING “THIRD WAVE FEMINISM” 99 integration of studies of race, class, and gender within the United States.4 One of the underlying effects of the three-wave model of feminism is the inadvertent representation of feminist thought as a teleological historical narrative of progressive inclusion. By framing new challenges to the existing terms of feminist thought and practice as a new “wave,” such work is defined primarily as a move toward the increasing inclusion of women of color within feminism. In other words, according to this historical narrative, if second wave feminism was the preserve of white, middle-class...