| This dissertation contemplates the political object "feminism" as a cultural predicament affecting and affected by dominant U.S. culture through a somewhat finer examination of the emergence at the beginning of the 1990s of the term "Third Wave feminism." I variously examine "Third Wave feminism" as movement, as politics, as an ideology, as a historical formation, as a paradigmatically specific conceptualization of feminism, and as a name that is used differently by feminists and nonfeminists attempting to make sense of the cultural dominance of what some call the "fear of feminism" and others "postfeminism." Throughout, I pose questions about who and what constitute the "Third Wave": are they young women of a particular generation, multicultural feminists, postfeminists, Post-Paglia feminists, feminists of color, power feminists, "Pseudo feminists," "do me feminists," womanists, etc.? Does, or can, "Third Wave" name something usefully without producing divides and gaps and divisions around age and generation, mothers and daughters, "the feminists" and "postfeminists"? Individual chapters examine the relationship between the terms "Third Wave" and "Second Wave" given the codification by feminists of color of the Second as "the white women's movement"; the usefulness of anthologizing as feminist discursive praxis; the significance of generational metaphors in the production of the vocabulary of postfeminism and the role of this vocabulary in mainstream media representations of feminism; the ways in which feminists attempt to engage, counter and dilute the power of the vocabulary of postfeminism as participants in public (feminist) discourse; and the role of the media activism, communications technologies, "grrrl" subcultures and the Internet in the production of alternative popular feminist cultures and politics in the 1990s. I conclude with a theoretical exploration of the analogical meaning of the "wave" in the production of histories of women's movements and feminism, proposing a shift from the preferred oceanic metaphor to a more layered, complex and multidimensional radio technology metaphor. |
