Not My Mother's Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism by Astrid Henry

Author:Astrid Henry [Henry, Astrid]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2011-04-21T18:01:23.410000+00:00

N o t M y M o t h e r ’ s S i s t e r

of one of the most infl uential writers of the second wave, Alice Walker, and it is precisely Rebecca Walker’s sense of feminism as so deeply hers, so deeply a part of her daily life, that causes her to worry about the re-percussions of challenging the established order: the rules that govern the feminist ghetto. Th

at it is Walker who is the editor of this collection—combined with the fact that To Be Real is, in great part, a black feminist text—suggests another way of interpreting the phrase “feminist ghetto.” Rather than necessarily reading contradiction into the pairing of the two terms, the phrase may instead point to the ways in which, for Walker, feminism and blackness are not in opposition to one another.

Th

ey are not independent concepts; they are not inherently in confl ict.

In beginning her introduction to To Be Real by declaring that “my life was like a feminist ghetto,” Walker picks up on the dual meaning of the word “ghetto”—as both a space of confi nement and as a black space.

Feminism, she suggests, is both.

My reading of the phrase “feminist ghetto,” while admittedly tentative, also points to the fundamental theme of contradiction within Walker’s introduction specifi cally and To Be Real generally. As the editor, she describes “looking for essays that explored contradiction and ambiguity” in living feminist lives in the 1990s and says that she is interested in “using the contradictions in our lives” as the basis for feminist theory.⁶ Embracing these contradictions is central to the new vision of feminism put forward in her introduction—a feminism founded on the notion of being real. Walker describes her decision not to abandon feminism but rather to try to change it from within: Neither myself nor the young women and men in this book have bowed out.

Instead, the writers here have done the diffi

cult work of being real (refusing

to be bound by a feminist ideal not of their own making) and telling the truth (honoring the complexity and contradiction in their lives by adding their experiences to the feminist dialogue).⁷

Within the pages of To Be Real, as in most other self-described thirdwave texts, the complexities and contradictions within the lives and politics of this new generation are heralded as the third wave’s greatest innovation and intervention into feminism. Th

e argument that attention

to complexity is what makes the third wave of feminism new and dif-ferent has often been bolstered by the claim that second-wave feminism is overly simplistic and dogmatic. In the case of To Be Real, however, its argument isn’t so much against one-dimensional feminism as it is for 150

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.