Young Feminists Fight Back

Reviewed: The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism edited by Vivien Labaton and Dawn Lundy Martin. New York: Anchor Books, 2004, 346 pp., 14.95 paper.

For the past decade, mass media and young women have been duking it out over whether feminism still has a pulse. Corporate media seems pretty sure that it doesn't, proclaiming that feminism is either "dead" (Time cover story, 1998) and a "failure" (Newsweek, 1990; New York Times Magazine feature, 1988), or, alternately, that "Women's Issues Face a Tough Sell" (Florida Sun-Sentinel, 2002) in our "golden age of post-feminism – Wonderbras, not burning bras" (London Independent, 1995). As far back as 1982, the New York Times Magazine claimed to have identified a "post-feminist generation" who supposedly rejected the quest for equality as irrelevant and passe. Young women, the media tells us, are apathetic about their rights, preferring the watered down version of "girl power" hawked in Hollywood chicks-kick-ass products like Alias and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and bare-booty music videos from L'il Kim and Foxy Brown.

The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism, edited by Vivien Labaton and Dawn Lundy Martin, is the most recent entrant in a 13-year effort to refute these misrepresentations. Mid-'90s anthologies, such as Barbara Finden's Listen Up: Voices From the Next Feminist Generation (1995) and Rebecca Walker's To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (1995), offered generational and identity-based perspectives on young women's political ideology and activism. By 2000, Manifesta, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards' optimistic call-to-arms, had become a women's studies staple. Each in its own way, these texts proved that – as I wrote in the anthology Catching A Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century (2003) – "postfeminism is a fiction. Far from the media spotlight, girls and young women are undertaking exciting, creative, and uncompromising activism every day.

The Fire This Time attempts to advance a broader concept of what the third wave is and what it can become. Martin and Labaton are, respectively, the cofounder and first executive director of the Third Wave Foundation, the country's only national, multiracial, multi-issue, young women's philanthropic and activist organization, created in the mid-'90s to make feminism "hot, sexy, and newly revolutionary." They may not have commandeered "hot and sexy" from airbrained, miniskirted GOP pundettes like Ann Coulter and her ilk, but they have spent a decade on the front lines of a multicultural movement informed by antiracism, queer rights, labor organizing, and international justice. Their contributors are mobilizing to protect the rights of undocumented female laborers; securing legislative victories for transsexuals; and challenging male hierarchies in hip-hop culture. These young women and men are splitting open the borders of feminism so that, the editors write, "race, sexuality, nationality, and geography can move beyond being simply 'tolerated' or 'included.'" The result is "a new movement evolving from one in which there is a dialogue about feminism and race to a feminist movement whose conversation is race, gender, and globalization." The strongest illustration of these new open borders can be found in the essay in the book by Katherine Temple, "Exporting Violence: The School of the Americas, U.S. Intervention in Latin America, and Resistance." This hefty and powerful essay that should be required reading for every American studies student. The author embodies the multiplicity of priorities and strategies embraced by the third wave: she has done community development work in Guadalajara, Mexico, was challenging corporate corruption years before targeting Starbucks was cool, and currently serves on the board of a rape crisis center in North Carolina. A painter, Temple uses fine art, civil disobedience, and media to raise national awareness of the role the School of the Americas (SOA, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation),, a US-funded combat center, has played in training, arming, and propping up military war criminals who commit violent massacres in Nicaragua, Mexico, El Salvador, Panama, and other Latin American countries. Applying tools she acquired through working in a shelter for battered refugee and immigrant women, Temple develops a "Corporate Globalization Power and Control Wheel" to illustrate the impact of structural adjustment policies, anti-democratic trade agreements, and military aggression on millions of individuals, numerous governments, and the environment: