Third Wave

The term third wave feminism, coined in the early 1990s, is a term for a dynamic, sometimes contentious, body of thinking and activism within contemporary feminism. It defies easy definition, including even in terms of when to mark the origin of third wave ideas. In general, however, third wave feminism is viewed as the “next wave of feminism” that followed [Page 1452]second wave feminism. Although there is an origins dispute, there is no doubt that from the early 1990s to the present, the third wave has become a global, more diverse inquiry into social systems of sex, race, and gender inequality and differences than occurred during second wave feminism.

Even though there is no single approach, three core strands of early third wave thinking/activism-postfeminism, power feminism, and Girlie feminism-are often included under the label third wave feminism and remain important today. Among the three strands, core sensibilities exist, even if various methods and ways of thinking are used. First, third wave feminists take the achievement of the second for granted in the sense that most (but not all) third wavers were raised after the successes of second wave feminism and, as a result, tend to assume women's equity and emphasize and organize around diversity, multiplicity, and contradiction. Indeed, third wave feminism celebrates difference in terms of identity construction, in which signifiers such as race and binary gender are rejected in favor of ambiguity and multiple subject positions.

Third wavers are also committed to a politics of difference rather than commonality, such that they embrace contradiction so that apparently inconsistent political viewpoints coexist in the name of third wave feminism. As a result, and unlike much second wave politics, third wave feminists organize around differences or diversity among women rather than via a unified concept of women. Today, primarily under the rubric of “intersectional analyses,” much third wave feminism continues to develop ways of thinking that recognize the intersection of various multiple, shifting bases of oppression, primarily around race, class, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability, and aim to create coalition politics based on interlocking-yet always shifting and changing-forms of oppression and axes of identity.