Women Who Run from the Wolves: Feminist Critique as Post-Feminism

Abstract

For some time now I have been intrigued by the discourses on post-feminism con­sistently articulated within popular media. In an attempt to interrogate and under­stand the rise of this post-feminist movement, this article discusses three of the most popular treatments of the topic: René Denfeld’s The New Victorians (1995), Katie Roiphe’s The Morning After (1993), and Christina Hoff Sommers’s Who Stole Feminism? (1994). Specifically concerned with how these works define feminism, how they articulate the “crisis” of the movement, and what solutions they propose, I am interested in uncovering what is at stake in these debates. The similarities between these books (all published in the early 1990s, all discussing campus femi­nism, all written by feminist-identified, university-educated women) allow for an assessment of how these young, white, well-educated women position themselves against a movement once thought to be theirs alone. While each author claims to offer insight into the current crisis facing feminism, it is my contention that, collec­tively, these works signal a fear of the perceived radicalism of feminism on univer­sity campuses, a radicalism which these authors attribute to the increasing influence of queer theory, “radical” lesbians, and feminists of colour. These fears over the potential radicalization of young women belie a concern over the loss of literary and canonical traditions, as well as an attendant concern over the legacy of the university as a cultural, intellectual, and social institution.

Whence Orthodox Jewish Feminism? Cognitive Dissonance and Religious Change in the United States

“…Crenshaw (1989) coined the term "intersectionality" to describe how multiple forms of oppression reinforce one another, and subsequent feminist scholarship has focused extensively on diversity among women and their multiple experiences of oppression (Davis 2008). At the same time, liberal feminist ideas are still widely circulated outside the academy (Kinahan 2004).…”