Third Wave Agenda Format: Paperback

Discusses the challenges and pleasures of creating a new feminism.

Young feminists have grown up with a plethora of cultural choices and images-in the distance from Gloria Steinem to Courtney Love, a chasm has been traversed and an entire history made. In Third Wave Agenda, feminists born between the years 1964 and 1973 discuss the things that matter now, both in looking back at the accomplishments and failures of the past and in planning for the challenges of the future.

The women and men writing here are activists, teachers, cultural critics, artists, and journalists. They distinguish themselves from a group of young, conservative feminists, including Naomi Wolf and Katie Roiphe, who criticize second wave feminists and are regularly called on to speak for the “next generation” of feminism. In contrast, Third Wave Agenda seeks to complicate our understanding of feminism by not only embracing the second wave critique of beauty culture, sexual abuse, and power structures, but also emphasizing ways that desires and pleasures such as beauty and power can be used to enliven activist work, even while recognizing the importance of maintaining a critique of them.

Combining research, theory, and social practice with an autobiographical style, these writers are hard at work creating a new feminism that draws on the submerged histories of other feminisms-black feminism, “womanism,” and working-class feminism, among others. Some topics explored in Third Wave Agenda include feminism in popular music, interracial coalitions, and tensions between individual ambitions and collective action.

Contributors: Barry Baldridge, Ana Marie Cox, Ophira Edut, Tali Edut, Carol Guess, Freya Johnson, Melissa Klein, Dyann Logwood, Annalee Newitz, Jeff Niesel, Jennifer Reed, Jillian Sandel, Leigh Shoemaker, Michelle Sidler, Deborah L. Siegel, Jen Smith, Carolyn Sorisio, and Lidia Yukman.

Leslie Heywood, the author of Pretty Good for a Girl and Bodymakers, is assistant professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where she teaches gender and cultural studies and twentieth-century literature.

Jennifer Drake is assistant professor of English and women’s studies at Indiana State University, where she teaches multicultural American literature, U.S. women writers, and creative writing.