handout MLA 1999

Katie King, Alternative models of "feminist generations":
MLA roundtable: Feminist Futures, Future Feminisms (29 December 1999)

Alternative models of "feminist generations":

• As mother-daughter relationships; as student-teacher relationships:
these are two ubiquitous models of generational difference used by feminists; they
render generational differences as diadic, pedagogical, age-stratified, successive, mutually exclusive; power differences as relatively benign and "familial", generational control as pedagogical and inevitable.

• The Third Wave from 1963-1973:
Third Wave Agenda's 1997 model is age-stratified, defining the Third Wave as feminists born between 1963-1973.

• Entry into activism: Whittier's 1995 model with micro-cohorts:
Whittier's model challenges age-stratification or stage in life cycle as definitions of generations, rather initial politicization during the same era define generations, which are internally volatile and divergent in micro-cohorts. Two large generations: the Second Wave and the Third Wave.

Second Wave micro-cohorts:
=initiators (1969-1971) [years refer esp. to study in Columbus OH]
=founders (1972-1973)
=joiners (1974-1978)
=sustainers (1979-1984)

Third Wave micro-cohorts (don't have names just descriptions): (AKA post feminist); understood by Whittier to redefine meanings of "feminism" by conflict with Second Wave building new collective identities (mid 1980s and later):

= micro-cohort 1: reluctant to use term "feminist" because of media associations and initial belief that feminism had completed its political tasks; rethinks these assumptions over next ten years and becomes outspoken and pro-feminist
= micro-cohort 2: establishes earlier continuity with Second Wave & esp. with radical forms, disruptive social and cultural action.

• Other micro-cohorts: multiple identities working in multiple social movements:

Extending Whittier's model to conceive of other micro-cohorts: for example, those with multiple identities working in multiple social movements, with different social & historical time lines: eg. various women of color, or queer activists. Cf. Sandoval's "differential consciousness": "enough strength to confidently commit to a well-defined structure of identity for one hour, day, week, month, year; enough flexibility to self-consciously transform that identity according to the requisites of another oppositional tactic if readings of power's formation require it; enough grace to recognize alliance with others committed to egalitarian social relations and race, gender, sex, class, and social justice, when their readings of power call for alternative oppositional stands."

• Other micro-cohorts: Activist ages of different disciplines & interdisciplines:

Extending Whittier's model to conceive of different disciplines and interdisciplines politicized by women's studies at different time periods and to varying degrees in particular institutions and departments and by diverse cohorts of feminists with a range of activist histories, generations and visions. In other words, some fields may have different feminist "activist ages" than others, and some fields may be dominated by different feminist generations and cohorts than others.

• Queer as a generational politics:

in a politics of refusal Queer may be used in a limiting move, rejecting whole systems of political alliance and academic and political literatures, as a way of processing overwhelming weights of materials, inheritances, generational subjections, and illegitimate uses of generational and geopolitical power. Critiques of the term Queer might practice their own generational politics, constructing a self-valorizing history political movement now misunderstood, rejecting as inaccurate and inadequate the political assumptions about the powers and resources of women's studies, feminism and women's movements, as too various to be unilaterally rejected. Queer may create alliances across generations by virtue of its very instabilities of meaning.

• Matrix of seasons of an academic life:

Knefelkamp's 1990 "seasons of an academic life", rethinking "our present practices of faculty induction, socialization, tenure, and promotion" (each with a virtue, a vulnerability and an essential gesture):

(1-4 are classroom centered):
1st season: power of ideas (joy, knowledge=/=Truth, searching),
2nd: the faculty role (passion, overwhelmed, teaching itself),
3rd: the student (wonder, mastering students, making connections),
4th: the public self beyond classroom (instrumental caring, careerism, theory into practice);

(5-8 are contradictory complications):
5th: multiple & competing commitments ( will, guilt, continuing to work),
6th: need to stop out (rest, shame, reward fluidity),
7th: marginality (mutuality, isolation, diverse communities with commonalities),
8th: acting in spite of fears (courage, despair, refusal to give up).

A kind of differential consciousness is required to map and move among these meanings and models of feminist generations, to value all of them tactically, name them generously, and commit to one or more at the appropriate times, while empathizing with the necessarily and properly divergent commitments of others.

Materials referred to:

• Chela Sandoval. Methodology of the Oppressed (Minnesota 2000).
• Nancy Whittier. Feminist Generations: The Persistence of the Radical Women's Movement (Temple, 1995).
• Leslie Haywood and Jennifer Drake. Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism (Minnesota, 1997).
• L. Lee Knefelkamp. "Seasons of an Academic Life." Liberal Education 74:3 (May/June 1990): 4-11.
• Katie King. "Interdisciplinarity, Generations, Languages in Women's Studies: Sites of Struggle in Layers of Globals and Locals." Chapter in book manuscript on Feminism and Writing Technologies.

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