![]() ![]() While third-wavers name diversity as a primary concern of third-wave feminism, these critiques by women of color and/or antiracist feminists suggest that third-wave feminism has not sufficiently shifted the mainstream feminist project to ensure that this inclusion of racial difference is fundamentally transformative. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty ( 1997b) concur that the institutional feminist narrative has extended only “token inclusion of our texts without reconceptualizing the whole white, middle-class, gendered knowledge base” (xvi). For instance, Chela Sandoval ( 2000) argues that while US third-world feminist scholarship has been included here and there in the mainstream feminist project, it has been “misrecognized and underanalyzed” as a “demographic constituency only (women of color), and not as a theoretical or methodological approach in its own right” (171). However, although deployments of difference are ubiquitous in third-wave texts, many women-of-color feminists and antiracist scholars challenge this inclusive claim. Inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and Audre Lorde, Snyder notes, “third-wavers depict their version of feminism as more inclusive and racially diverse than the second wave,” so much so that some second-wave feminists complain that the third-wave narrative makes the second wave seem “whiter than it was” (180). Claire Snyder ( 2008) outlines in her Signs New Directions essay on third-wave feminism, the movement’s commitment to an “intersectional and multiperspectival version of feminism” (176), nonjudgmental inclusivity, and postmodern antiessentialism seems to be a direct response to this call. When Audre Lorde and other women of color critiqued mainstream feminism for its “refusal to recognize” the “very real differences between us of race, age, and sex,” they were seeking to expose and interrupt the solipsistic agendas, experiences, and ideas of middle-class white women that were masquerading as concerns of the universal woman in feminism (Lorde 2005, 339). what contexts, under what kinds of race and class situations, gender is used as what sort of signifier to cover over what kinds of things. The second part of this article calls for a decolonial approach that recognizes the constitutive nature of race, engages in historically grounded analysis, and acknowledges alternative forms of anthologies in order to (re)open the contemporary feminist moment to the transformational potentialities of intersectional theorizing. These are the postrace historical narrative, the postmodern abstraction of women-of-color theories, the flattening and proliferation of difference through a long list of interchangeable elements, and irreconcilable contradiction. A close reading of mainstream third-wave texts demonstrates that while they incorporate some ideas, theories, and bodies of women-of-color feminism, there are four key syntactical moves that contain and dilute the transformative impact of antiracist feminist scholarship and serve to maintain whiteness. Many foundational third-wave texts suggest that race and racial justice are foregrounded in third-wave theorizing, yet women-of-color feminists and their antiracist allies have challenged this inclusive claim. The issues of race, inclusion, and diversity are central and contested themes in third-wave feminism. ![]()
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