‘It’s All About the Benjamins’

Abstract

Although conversation and debates about third wave feminism have been ongoing since the 1990s, there has been a lack of theory that delineates and contextualises third wave feminist perspectives, especially in the U.S. This chapter provides a partial redress of this through illustrating how third wave feminist perspectives are shaped by the material conditions created by economic globalisation and technoculture, and by bodies of thought such as postmodernism and postcolonialism. Since writers usually identified as the ‘third wave’ are most likely to be part of a generation that has come of age in these contexts, the chapter outlines some of the economic variables that have heavily impacted the current generation in the U.S., and demonstrates how they have resulted in a feminist movement that is not focused on narrowly defined ‘women’s issues’, but rather an interrelated set of topics including environmentalism, human rights and anti-corporate activism. While discussions of third wave feminism have tended to limit themselves to the context of North American consumer culture — and have thus largely been identified with writers living in the U.S. — these discussions can only have theoretical and practical value if they are set within the larger frames of globalisation and technoculture.