Definition and explanation of Third Wave feminism.

To give you a brief definition of my own, third wave feminism is a new look at an old philosophy. "Second Wave" feminism is the traditional feminist philosophy that people think of when they think of the womens rights movement of the 50's-70's. Out of second wave feminism came the critique that it solely focused on the problems that plagued heterosexual upperclass white women.Third wave feminism embraces the intersectionalities of all people who identify themselves as female. It realizes that what oppresses one may empower another. It recognizes the unique oppressions of different types of women, rather than saying that all women are universally the same. The book "The Third Wave Agenda" by Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake has a passage that I think is very enlightening, for those who might be just discovering what it means to be "Third Wave."

From the Book: " Because our lives have been shaped by struggles between various feminism as well as by cultural backlash against feminism and activism, w eargue that contradiction-or what looks like contradiction, if one doesnt shift one's point of view- marks the desires and strategies of third wave feminists. Whereas conservative postfeminist thinking relies on an oppostition between "victim feminism" (second wave) and "Power feminism" (third wave), and suggests that "power feminism" serves as a corrective to a hopelessly outmoded "victim feminism," to us the second and third waves of feminism are neither incompatible nor opposed. Rather, we define feminism's third wave as a movement that contains elements of second wave critique of beauty culture, sexual abuse, and power structures while it also acknowledges and makes use of the pleasure, danger, and defining power of those structures.

One group of feminists not accounted for by this polarity- ourselves among them- is young feminists who grew up with equity feminism, got gender feminism in college, along with postructuralism, and are now hard at work on a feminism that strategically combines elements of these feminisms, along with black feminism, women-of-color feminism, working-class feminism, pro-sex feminism, and so on. A third wave goal that comes directly out of learning from these histories and working among these traditions is the development of modes of thinking that can come to terms with the multiple, constantly shifting bases of oppression in relation to the multiple, interpenetrating axes of identity, and the creation of coalition politics based on these understandings-understandings that acknowledge the existence of oppression, even though it is not fashionable to say so. We know that what oppresses me may not oppress you, that what oppresses you may be something I participate in, and that what oppresses me may be something you participate in. Even as different strains of feminism and activism sometimes directly contradict each other, they are all part of our third wave lives, our thinking, and our praxes: we are products of all the contradictory definitions of and differences within feminism, beasts of such a hybrid kind that perhaps we need a different name altogether."
BY LESLIE HEYWOOD AND JENNIFER DRAKE