Third Way/ve

Abstract

This article argues that the ‘Third Way’ philosophy that has been adopted by centre-left parties throughout Europe and the United States provides the conceptual framework to analyse contemporary postfeminism and its contentious micro-politics that emerges out of personal and daily gender-based struggles. The notion of a postfeminist micro-politics complicates the critical perception of postfeminism as a depoliticized and anti-feminist backlash and offers a dynamic model of political action that takes into account the multiple agency positions of individuals today. Postfeminism and the politics it endorses differ from emergent political movements such as third wave feminism in that they are not founded on second wave feminist theory and activism. Instead, postfeminist politics adopts a Third Way perspective to reconcile a number of conflicting concerns, from feminist calls for female equality and theoretical debates on anti-essentialism to the consumerist demands of capitalist society. These controversial new junctures are examined by paying particular attention to postfeminism’s female sexual agent who becomes the ‘entrepreneur’ of her own image, buying into standardized femininities while also seeking to resignify their meanings. In particular, the article discusses the paradoxical possibilities of ‘active consumption’ and ‘fashion feminism’ whereby women endeavour to achieve empowerment by exerting their consumer agency and using their bodies as political tools within the parameters of a capitalist economy.

Making Sense of the Waves: Wipeout or Still Riding High?

“…Though Gamble (2001) believes that it takes a number of different forms -some more dominant than others -and it achieves change in diverse ways, for the most part third-wave feminism is a product of the popular media and academic cultural studies programs (see also Genz, 2006). For the purposes of this discussion, we see it as taking two forms: Postfeminism and integrative feminism, both of which are essentially neoliberal in nature (see Table 3).…”

How to organise your body 101: postfeminism and the (re)construction of the female body through How to Look Good Naked

“…In fact, Kim (2001: 321) noted the three approaches that have been said to define postfeminism: as the post second-wave era especially in the 1990s, as a backlash rhetoric (mentioned above) and as a frame of reference which comprises the intersection of postfeminism with other movements like postmodernism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism. Other feminists, like Stéphanie Genz (2006), have argued that postfeminism should not be considered a polarised discourse since this prevents the engagement with 'postfeminist plurality' and proclaims postfeminism as 'easily categorized and contained in well-defined boxes' (p. 336). Postfeminism has been and still is a subject of considerable debate, being criticised for its apolitical intentions since women now, arguably, enjoy access to education, employment and new family arrangements (Aronson, 2003: 904) -an attitude influenced further by the media and popular culture, which imply that feminist action is no longer needed.…”

Categorical feminism

“…Karsch 2004; Rúdólfdóttir and Jolliffe 2008;Scharff 2012). In turn, these empirical findings have been theorised as symptoms of a contemporary culture in which 'hatred' and an 'active, sustained, and repetitive repudiation or repression' of feminism (McRobbie 2004:6) have engendered some kind of 'post' (Gill 2007), 'commodity' (Goldman 1992) or 'Third Wave' (Genz 2006) feminism.…”