Unsettling “Third Wave Feminism”

The body of scholarship associated with “third wave” feminism has had a transformative impact on contemporary feminist intellectual agendas. Such work spans a vast set of writings that have addressed the ways in which multiple forms of inequality have shaped women’s subjectivities, lives, and modes of resistance. One of the distinctive features of third wave feminism was the systematic challenge that such work explicitly posed to previous conceptions of feminist thought and practice. In the language of one of the classic texts that marked the emergence of this challenge, This Bridge Called My Back , 1 U.S. feminists of color sought both to decenter conceptions of feminism based narrowly on the experience of white, middle-class women and to call attention to inequalities that have historically shaped relationships between women in the United States. 2 The forceful political and intellectual challenges of such writing had far-reaching implications as feminist and women’s studies programs sought to redefine intellectual agendas and curricula in order to address systematically and to integrate questions of difference.