F 'em!
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Trans feminism, both the idea (from Judith Butler) that gender is performed and the belief that gender exists on a spectrum, complicated the legitimacy of women-only spaces as sites of unadulterated liberation. Reclaiming words like “slut” and “girl” replaced protests. Transparency about whether a feminist had worked out her body image issues, felt upset by an abortion, or believed that any hair could be unwanted replaced strong, black-and-white statements. Activists spoke from personal places, not to overshare, but to tell the truth about their lives and what had happened to them.
Third Wave feminism was portable—you didn’t have to go to a meeting to be feminist; you could bring feminism into any room you entered. Where the Second Wave radicals believed in mass movement and the liberal feminists believed in creating women’s institutions to influence men’s, a Third Waver might say, “Every time I move, I make a women’s movement,”7 indicating a feminism that is more individually driven. Institutions like NOW and Ms. magazine attenuated, in part because Third Wave feminists didn’t need any members to be feminist. And while they were committed to a pro-girl and pro-woman line, that didn’t preclude empathy for or interest in men’s experience of, for instance, sexual assault or abortion.
THE FOURTH WAVE (APPROXIMATELY 2008–ONWARD!)
By the time Obama and Hillary were facing off in the Democratic primaries, a critical mass of younger feminists began expressing themselves. They were tech-savvy and gender-sophisticated. Their youth was shaped by the 1980s backlash, Take Our Daughters to Work Day initiatives (also knows as the Girls’ Movement, led by Second Wave women) of the ’90s, and 9/11. Perhaps most significant, though, their experience of the online universe was that it was just a part of life, not something that landed in their world like an alien spaceship when they were twenty or fifty.
Much like the Third Wave lived out the theories of the Second Wave (with sometimes surprising results), the Fourth Wave enacted the concepts that Third Wave feminists had put forth. The Doula Project made sure the phrase “all-options” was more than just rhetoric, by creating doula services not just for childbirth, but for women placing an adoption or getting an abortion, too. Drawing from their own experiences, young activists created after-abortion talk lines, such as Exhale and Backline, to enable women and men to get the support they needed after a procedure—no enforced political line included. Trans-health initiatives (like that at the Feminist Women’s Health Centers in Atlanta) and trans-inclusive organizations like Third Wave Foundation (helmed by feminists in their twenties and thirties) reinforced the potential for all people to access feminine and masculine genders.
In place of zines and songs, young feminists created blogs, Twitter campaigns, and online media with names like Racialicious and Feministing, or wrote for Jezebel and Salon’s Broadsheet. They commented on the news, posted their most stylish plus-size fashion photos with info about where to shop, and tweeted that they, too, had had an abortion. “Reproductive justice,” coined by women of color in the 1990s, became the term of choice for young feminists. Transgenderism, male feminists, sex work, and complex relationships within the media characterized their feminism.
WHAT DO ALL of these waves add up to? Some analyze the era-specific crests of feminism as merely more splits, keeping feminists fighting with one another so that they don’t see the much larger and more challenging issues that unite them. A Second Wave friend of mine, Rosalyn Baxandall, notes that the First and Second Waves were part of larger social movements—abolition and civil rights—and were thus different than the trickles of activity she sees as having come later. But I see the cultural transformation that my generation harvested from the Second Wave’s ideas and revolution was the social movement of our day. Likewise, the Fourth Wave’s deployment of social media has once again transformed politics and feminism.
Personally, I believe that the Fourth Wave exists because it says that it exists. I believe the Fourth Wave matters, because I remember how sure I was that my generation mattered.
Because of media advances and globalization, waves of mass change are coming faster and faster. The waves are all part of the same body politic known as feminism, and combine to become a powerful and distinct force. “One aspect of the ‘waves’ metaphor that I kinda like,” the historian Louise Bernikow wrote on our Second Wave–dominated LISTSERV, “is the idea that waves recede and gather strength and come back stronger, don’t they?”
“Tsunami!” replied Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, the professor who resented Martha Lear’s coinage of “Second Wave.” “Let’s do it.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m gaga over the many people who helped me with this book. Many thanks to Sarah Nager, Tara Storozynsky, Jessica Baumgardner, Anastasia Higginbotham, and Gretchen Sayers for editing and other supportive gestures. My deepest appreciation to Cathi Hanauer, Ada Calhoun, Ellen Seidman, and Kim Cutter for skillful original editing of the reprinted essays in this book. I’m grateful to Kathleen Hanna, Amy Ray, Ani DiFranco, Julia Serano, Björk, Loretta Ross, Shelby Knox, and Debbie Stoller for their time and insightful interviews. Finally, thank you to Merrik Bush-Pirkle for thoughtful, supportive, and sensitive guidance throughout the editorial process, and to Jill Grinberg, for being a super agent and friend.
My life while writing this book was enriched immeasurably by Gretchen Sayers, Anastasia Higginbotham, Jessica and Andrea (plus families), Mom and Dad, and my favorite feminists, the Bedbaums.
PHOTO CREDITS
page 50, Kathleen Hanna: © Allison Michael Orenstein
page 74, Debbie Stoller: © Aliya Naumoff
page 106, Shelby Knox: © Tonja Hindman Hagy
page 122, Björk: Courtesy of Bust magazine, © Naomi Kaltman
page 142, Ani DiFranco: © Rhea Anna
page 166, Loretta Ross: © Tsubasa Berg
page 198, Julia Serano: © D. Rita Alfonso
page 220, Amy Ray: © Bitch magazine
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Writer and activist Jennifer Baumgardner is the author of Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics and Abortion & Life, and the coauthor, with Amy Richards, of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, and Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism. As coowner of the feminist speakers’ bureau Soapbox, Inc., Baumgardner runs Feminist Summer Camp and Feminist Winter Term in New York with Richards, and she has lectured at more than three hundred schools. She writes for Glamour, The Nation, Real Simple, and Babble, among other publications, and is the producer of the awardwinning documentary I Had an Abortion, and of a forthcoming film about rape. A teacher at The New School, she lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.
SELECTED TITLES FROM SEAL PRESS
For more than thirty years, Seal Press has published groundbreaking books. By women. For women.
We Don’t Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists, edited by Melody Berger. $15.95, 978-1-58005-182-8. In the tradition of Listen Up, the under-thirty generation of young feminists speaks out.
Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape, by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti. $16.95, 978-1-58005-257-3. This powerful and revolutionary anthology offers a paradigm shift from the “No Means No” model, challenging men and women to truly value female sexuality and ultimately end rape.
What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide to Sex and Safety, by Jaclyn Friedman. $17.00, 978-1-58005-344-0. An educational and interactive guide that gives young women the tools they need to decipher the modern world’s confusing, hypersexualized landscape and define their own sexual identity.
Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism, by Nona Willis Aronowitz and Emma Bee Bernstein. $19.95, 978-1-58005-273-3. Two young women set out on the open road to explore the current state of feminism in the US.
Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, edited by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman. $16.95, 978-1-58005-308-2. Collects and contextualizes the work of this generation’s trans and genderqueer forwa
rd-thinkers—new voices from the stage, on the streets, in the workplace, in the bedroom, and on the pages and websites of the world’s most respected news sources.
Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists, edited by Courtney E. Martin and J. Courtney Sullivan. $16.95, 978-1-58005-285-6. Notable writers and celebrities entertain and illuminate with true stories recalling the distinct moments when they knew they were feminists.
FIND SEAL PRESS ONLINE
www.SealPress.com
www.Facebook.com/SealPress
Twitter: @SealPress
1 The web has drastically changed distribution since this essay was written.
2 I won’t pretend I came up with the whole line in that moment, but, so you have it, it’s the first line of Howl and goes, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked . . . ”
3 Lang settled with the writers’ union during the fall of 1998 after two years of litigation.
4 The plaintiff, Jane Roe, was Norma McCorvey, who sought an abortion but couldn’t get one. In her life, she had at least three pregnancies and gave birth to three daughters, none of whom she got to raise, culminating in the Roe baby. Thus, the most famous person associated with legal abortion apparently never had one.
5 Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Ballantine Books, 1975).
6 Garrison, Ednie Kaeh. “U.S. Feminism—Grrrl Style! Youth (Sub)Cultures and the Technologics of the Third Wave.” Feminist Studies 26 (spring 2000), 141–70.
7 From Ani DiFranco’s song “Hour Follows Hour.”
F’EM!
Goo Goo, Gaga, and Some Thoughts on Balls
Copyright © 2011 by Jennifer Baumgardner
Published by
Seal Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
1700 Fourth Street
Berkeley, California
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baumgardner, Jennifer, 1970-
F ’em! : goo goo, gaga, and some thoughts on balls / by Jennifer Baumgardner.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-580-05423-2
1. Feminism. 2. Women social reformers. I. Title. II. Title: Feminism. HQ1155.B.42—dc22
2011008282
987654321