TheLion said:
I guess Third Wave Feminism is what was going for. And the absence of a goal is what concerns me.
It's really difficult to pin down what third wave feminism actually is, because noone really came out and said "I'm a third wave feminist". It's generally quite a dismissive term. Actually I think the differences between different "waves" of feminism is generally hugely overstated. The only thing that I can see really "changed" in third wave feminist theory is what has been retroactively termed "queer theory", and I'll get onto that in a minute because you mentioned something interesting later on.
I guess you could say the third wave is the point at which feminism had become such a broad part of society as a whole that the organized element of it (which had been ailing for a while) kind of broke down. It's probably no coincidence that the 90s also gave us concepts like "girl power" and "real women", which I think get caught up in the critique of the "third wave". I guess you can't be a social force without also being a market.
TheLion said:
The latter would only be recapitulating the theory in the hopes that there will some kind of spontaneous enlightenment amongst the privileged group, even though the impossibility of this enlightenment is a core axiom of the theory in the first place.
I disagree..
If privileged people could not grasp the meaning of privilege, we would never had had white civil rights activists, we would never have had male pro-feminists (and we have, at every stage of feminist history), we wouldn't have LGBT allies. A concept like privilege is very difficult to convey to someone who has it, very few people naturally sees themselves as privileged, very few people believe that their life is great and the reason is because they're a man, or because they're straight, or because they're white. They think their lives suck, and the reason it's so hard to argue with that is that they're kind of right.
And actually, this is where the "third wave" can really help. But again, more on that later.
TheLion said:
To the contrary, I want it to evolve beyond theory. The theory is the beginning, not an end in and of itself. It's used to establish a foundation of political thought upon which you act.
And I would argue that there is huge amounts of action in our society.
You asked something earlier along the lines of "how is feminism going to destroy gender roles?" That's actually a very good question, because it's been a tension in feminism for a very long time. Gender exists, it has thousands of years of history and meaning. In order to mitigate the effect it has on our lives, the "feminist movement" had to to invoke that meaning themselves, to advocate and represent and speak for "men" and for "women". They had to acknowledge the existence of these things. They had to draw commonalities between all men and between all women, as well as differences between the two. Feminism could argue that men and women should be equal, but (however much its own theory pointed out that these things were arbitrary and produced by society) it could not challenge their existence.
Over time, it became apparent that, shock, not all women were actually the same. That as much as they were part of this category of "women", there were other things about them which made them different from each other. Some were white, and others were black or came from other ethnic minorities. Some were gay, others were straight and others were bisexual or what we would now call transgendered. Some were comparatively wealthy or well educated, while others were poor and had little formal education. Feminism had claimed to speak for all of these women as if they were a coherent category, but the reality is that they did not have a common
identity so much as a common
purpose, and as that purpose came closer to completion people felt less and less identification with the movement. That is why I rail so strongly against the idea of a feminist movement today, it kind of fell apart, and for me at least
that was a good thing. Yes, there are still feminists out there who whine about the lack of organized movement today and think it's terrible, but I think they're missing the point. The ability to be more than just "women" is exactly what feminism had been arguing for, the breakdown was actually another step on the path to mission accomplished.
But yeah.. we still have gender, we still have gendered norms and gendered roles. Feminism changed them, but it really got us no closer to getting rid of them, in fact some strands of feminism have probably contributed to these things by creating a new kind of consciousness among women which emphasized their shared experience and similarity at the expense of the enormous differences between them. Popular feminism can be godawful, it's Gerri Halliwell in union jack bikini talking about how having babies is "girl power" levels of awful. It's Julie Burchill ranting about "trannies" taking over from "real women" levels of awful (sorry, these are all British references).
But the fact is, there is a
huge political battle about gender going on very publicly and visibly right now, and it's not feminist, but it's there. It's there because there already is gender non-conformity in our society. It's more visible than ever before, to the point where celebrities now engage in it openly and where kids now grow up aware of things which, 50 years ago you couldn't even put in a film or books without risking censorship. I'm talking, of course, about the push for LGBT rights.
The same queer theory which feminists whine has no political application and can't possibly help the cause is being applied politically as we speak to the detriment of traditional gender roles. It's not the only voice in the LGBT rights lobby, it's not even the dominant voice, but certain ideas from it are already employed as rhetorical tactics in the effort to to win that debate and as such it is filtering into society. Put it this way, I don't know a single person under 40 who is in any way involved in LGBT activism (beyond showing up at Pride) and who has not read or tried to read
Gender Trouble.
Why is this important? Because "normative" ideas of gender have always been formed in opposition to non-conformity. Being a "real man" has been contingent on being heterosexual and cisgendered for as long as these ideas exist. A world in which fucking other men or having been born female-bodied has no bearing on what kind of man you are is already, to a large extent, a world in which gender norms have been destroyed.
Don't mistake the absence of a political feminist movement for the absence of political application of gender theory.
Yeah, I kinda rushed the ending there.. sorry if doesn't make sense, I need to walk the dog and this post is long enough.
