first wave feminism, questioning why women cant do certain things. People seeking equality started about 150 years ago.
second wave feminism– 60s and about civil rights. In the 60s there was a big social change and a campaign about equal rights for women. 1960s, Jean Kilbourne and Laura Mulvey. 1867 suffragettes. Council of women in 1888.
Third wave feminism According to Barker and Jane (2016), third wave feminism, which is regarded as having begun in the mid-90’s has following recognisable characteristics:
- an emphasis on the differences among women due to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion
- individual and do-it-yourself (DIY) tactics
- fluid and multiple subject positions and identities
- cyberactivism
- the reappropriation of derogatory terms such as ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ for liberatory purposes
- sex positivity
According to Ariel Levy, in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs raunch culture is on the one hand, the idea of liberation involves new freedoms for sexual exhibition, experimentation and presentation, and on the other, it may well be playing out the same old patterns of exploitation, objectification and misogyny?
Raunch culture is the sexualised performance of women in the media that can play into male stereotypes of women as highly sexually available, where its performers believe they are powerful owners of their own sexuality’
fourth wave feminism also looked to explore these contradictory arguments and further sought to recognise and use the emancipatory tools of new social platforms to connect, share and develop new perspectives, experiences and responses to oppression, ‘tools that are allowing women to build a strong, popular, reactive movement online‘ (Cochrane, 2013). As such, from the radical stance of #MeToo to the Free the Nipple campaign, which Miley Cyrus endorsed and supported (which may encourage you to re-evaluate your initial reading of her video Wrecking Ball above), the use of new media technologies has been a clear demarcation for broadening out the discussion and arguments that are played out in this line of critical thinking.
Intersectionality:
‘In an attempt to understand what it means to be oppressed as ‘a woman’, some feminist scholars sought to isolate gender oppression from other forms of oppression’. Put another way, there was a tendency to be either ‘preoccupied with the experiences of white middle-class women or to ignore completely the experiences other women’ (Sigle-Rushton & Lindström, 2013, 129). It is from this that the development and articulation of intersectionality began to take shape. The early ideas around intersectionality can be traced to theoretical developments from the 1980’s, see for example, the work by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) or some of the propositions asserted around Queer Theory (see below) that brings together a set of complex ideas around the ‘multidimensionality of subjectivity and social stratification’
you cannot ‘understand Black women’s experiences of discrimination by thinking separately about sex discrimination and race discrimination’
(ibid)Sigle-Rushton & Lindström, 2013 p131
Hook: Multicultural Intersectionality
As Barker and Jane note, ‘black feminists have pointed ot the differences between black and white women’s experiences, cultural representations and interests’ (2016:346). In other words, arguments around gender also intersect with postcolonial arguments around ‘power relationships between black and white women’. So that ‘in a postcolonial context, women carry the double burden of being colonized by imperial powers and subordinated by colonial and native men’ (ibid).
As a way of exploring this notion of intersectionality ie the idea that an approach such as feminism, is NOT UNIVERSAL, SINGULAR or HOMOGENEOUS as this is a REDUCTIONIST and ESSENTIALIST way of seeing the world. Rather intersectionality highlights the way ideas and concepts such as ‘female‘, ‘feminist‘, ‘feminine‘ (Moi 1987) intersect with other concepts, ideas and approaches, such as, sexuality, class, age, education, religion, ability. A way of exploring these ideas is through the work of bell hook.
bell hook (always spelt in lower case – real name: Gloria Jean Watkins) advocates media literacy, the need to engage with popular culture to understand class struggle, domination, renegotiation and revolution. Put another, encouraging us all to ‘think critically’ to ‘change our lives’.ethnicity and race, see for example here work ‘Cultural Criticism and Transformation‘
Queer Theory
In the UK the pioneering academic presence in queer studies was the Centre for Sexual Dissedence in the English department at Sussex University, founded by Alan Sinfield and Johnathon Dollimore in 1990 (Barry: 141). In terms of applying queer theory to feminist critical thought, Judith Butler, among others expressed doubt over the reductionist, essentialist, approach towards the binary oppositions presented in terms of: male/female; feminine/masculine, man/woman. Arguing, that this is too simple and does not account for the internal differences that distinguishes different forms of gender identity, which according to Butler ‘tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes . . . normalising categories of oppressive structures‘ (14:2004).
identity can be a site of contest and revision‘
GENDER IS A PERFORMANCE
We perform a gender we aren’t actually one gender.
