If Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville Made You a Feminist, What Kind of Feminist Are You?: Heterosexuality, Race, and Class in the Third Wave

In 2008 Liz Phair released the Fifteenth-anniversary edition of her debut album, Exile in Guyville, on ATO Records. The album, which had been Matador Records’ biggest hit of the 1990s but had fallen out of print, created a newfound flurry of publicity in popular music magazines and on indie rock Web sites.¹ Almost immediately, gushing responses flowed relentlessly from Third Wave feminist blogs, a source that did not exist when the album was first released. In one of jezebel.com’s numerous postings on the album’s reissue, Moe Tkacik opined, “I think we can all agree that to deny its greatness is on par with killing puppies and date rape.”² Ann from feministing.com wrote that the album was one of her “click” moments leading her to feminism.³ Most widely read and circulated, however, was Shakesville blogger Kate Harding’s “The album that made me a feminist,” which appeared on Salon’s “Broadsheet”:

“Guyville” was not only my favorite album of 1993 but an early foundation of my feminism. In those days, I still didn’t like to call myself a feminist (icky!), and I actually believed that as a white, middle-class person, I would never face any institutional challenges to my own success. All that gender gap stuff had been figured out already, and the women who still complained about sexism were boring relics.

But getting pissed off at individual men who screwed you over? Now that I could get behind. And in 1993, there was no better soundtrack to getting pissed off than “Exile in Guyville.” . . .

When I listened to that album, I felt as if Liz Phair was speaking for me—except I hadn’t actually had most of the experiences she was talking about. Or anything like them. It was almost like there was something, oh, I don’t know . . . universal about her songs. Like she was describing struggles between men and women that went way beyond individual relationships—something I was already a part of, already felt, even if I’d never had a real boyfriend. It was almost as if I was finally wising up to the continued need for feminism.

(And man, did Liz Phair ever create a monster with that.)⁴

In response to Harding, the feminist blogosphere lit up with divergent opinions on the album’s legacy, its effects on Third Wave feminism, its presentation of white, middle-class heterosexuality, and even whether Phair’s album could truly be called “feminist.” In particular, Third Wave feminists of color protested the album’s distinction as a “feminist” document, citing Phair’s limited generic appeal and lack of concrete feminist statements that could ally her with women outside the white middle class. Similarly, queer Third Wavers noted that her subsequent albums increasingly depended on her heterosexual, overtly seductive image rather than on her music. In short, if Exile in Guyville made you a feminist, what kind of feminist are you? Were those “universal” experiences that Harding identified really all that common?

At the center of these debates lies the implications about the centrality of popular culture in shaping a Third Wave feminist as a public, but the medium of communication—blogs on the Internet—also plays a part in shaping that public. The Third Wave has often defined itself against the Second Wave as a more inclusive movement, with a focus on acknowledging the intersectional aspects of identity, yet the Third Wave depends largely on niche-market popular culture for its transmission, leading to a disjuncture between discourses that stress inclusion and practices that can circumscribe participation.⁵ From alternative rock to hip-hop feminism, from zines to blogs such as Jezebel, from roller derby to neoburlesque, the activities of the Third Wave often operate through youth culture.⁶ But the same engagement with popular culture that has enabled the movement to remain relevant to younger women has also foreclosed on opportunities for connections between women, especially in cases where whether one identifies as feminist...