Stafford Library: Women's Studies Resource Guide: Third Wave

Third Wave

Third Wave Feminism From Feminist Philosophies A-Z

Heavily influenced by postmodern feminism and Third World feminism as well as strategically and critically employing the methodologies of a number of different types of feminism, third wave feminism embraces the contradictions that are generated by taking a pluralistic approach to the critical analysis of western culture, oppression, masculinity, femininity, class, race and colonialism.

Issues of the Third Wave

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Pornography
Prior to the 1980s pornography generally referred to sexually explicit material. Obscenity is the legal definition of pornography that appeals to the prurient interest, offends, and lacks serious artistic, political, or scientific value. To date, the legal argument for limiting pornography is based on the notion that its degree of sexual explicitness is associated with harm. Research indicates that it is the violence toward and degradation of women in some pornography, not sexual explicitness al
Reproductive Rights
From From Suffrage to Senate: America's Political Women
Reproductive rights are based upon the premise that human dignity and equality grant each person the right and the responsibility to make reproductive decisions for herself or himself. Information about human sexuality and reproduction is fundamental to making those decisions, as is access to the services necessary to act upon the decisions.
The Intersection of Race and Gender
From Encyclopedia of American Studies
Rather than assuming that all women were similarly oppressed, women of color took issue with unitary theories of gender and addressed the differences among women's experiences.
Sexism in Language
Refers to discriminatory language practices, for example trivialising or demeaning references to women; or to sexist bias in the language system, for example GENERIC MASCULINE forms, LEXICAL GAPS (an absence of words referring to women's experiences)

Selected E-Books

Historical and Multicultural Encyclopedia of Women's Reproductive Rights in the United States by Judith A. Baer
Call Number: eBook Collection (EBSCOhost)
ISBN: 0313306443
Publication Date: 2002
Ungrateful Daughters by Justyna Wlodarczyk
Call Number: : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost
ISBN: 9781443823692
Publication Date: 2010-10-01

Leaders and Activists of the Third Wave

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Judith Butler (1956- )
Butler has a powerful and prolific voice that resonates not only within feminist philosophy but in critical legal studies, literary theory, lesbian and gay theory, psychoanalysis and race studies.
Naomi Wolf (1962- )

From Culture Wars in America: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices
Feminist author Naomi Wolf is known for her best-selling first book, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (1991), regarded as one of the central texts of third-wave feminism.