Art366: Cyberfem+New Media Practices

Third-Wave Feminism

Page history last edited by ThePinkChuck 10 mos ago

All right all you lady surfers, get aboard. The third wave is here. And you are sliding through a bumpy sea of the lipstick jungle age.

Third-Wave feminism proceeds Second-Wave feminism but seen to many as Second-Wave’s combatant rather then its faithful follower. Third-Wave is an extension in many sorts because its followers live in a world constructed by Second-Wave feminists but Third-Wave feminism looks to redefine and widen what seemed like freedoms to Second-Wave, in many ways, have now become barriers.

Third-Wave feminism and feminists want feminism to reach a state of individualism; “people keep insisting on defining and defining and making a smaller and smaller definition” Jennifer Baumgardner discusses her ideology as co-author of Manifesta: Young women, Feminism, and the Future. It is one definition and standard—for Second-Wave it fought to disband marriage and lipstick and bras entirely—that Third-Wave feminism looks to transform in this ever-evolving movement for women.

Defined in the book The Women's Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism, Third-Wave feminism began in 1991 when Anita Hill’s appearance at the Senate hearings to provide light on Clarence Thomas’s misdeeds before his appointment into Supreme Court and has been functioning until recent years there has been talk of a Fourth-Wave in motion. However, the core issue at hand is the dichotomy between Second and Third waves.

Alana Wingfoot, an author on The 3rd WWWave, cites the differences in this chart:

http://www.3rdwwwave.com/display_article.cgi?149

Third-Wave is like the baby wave following the monolithic mother scorned of a wave. It is not as big, not as bold but it wants to be different from its mama, because it sees that mama is not always right and comes from a different time than her. This wave is important because it will grow. This wave is making its own strides of definition on this human land.

In the visual art realm, Third-Wave Feminism has taken its own pace and place. In early as October 3rd, 2007, Third-Wave was re-appropriating some girlie art culture—girlie culture is what Second-Wave has a problem with; it is a culture arriving in the 1990s in movies like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and activist groups like Riot Grrrl, which looks to reclaims words like bitch, slut, cunt, girl all with a little color on their lips. Women, like Susan Beal and other women in Portland, are getting crafty. Susan Beal thinks “crafting can be a feminist act, a bold reclamation of what generations before her devalued or took for granted.” This movement of stitchery looks to not surrender to old housewife molds but to infuse the mold with a new appreciation. Hobby, rather than just an imposed livelihood, is the differential between crafters of now ("Crafty Bitches") and crafters of the past (your Grams sewing a scarf because Gramps needed some neck love on his way to work and she making the home).

Loooking within a cat-eye glass, Sex and the City is staple for the Third-Wave feminism. Four women who siege a mass conscious about their sexual relationships and, most importantly, the selfless relationship between each other serves as a popular visual example of what is Third-Wave feminism. “The concern with the individual and choice is what makes the show intrinsically Third Wave,” states Astrid Henry, former coordinator and assistant professor of Women Studies at Saint Mary's College.