Su Lin Yu

RECLAIMING THE PERSONAL: PERSONAL NARRATIVES OF THIRD-WAVE FEMINISTS

As a feminist concept and practice, the personal has its own dynamic history. In the early seventies, the emphasis on “breaking silence” and “naming one’s oppression” brought the practice of consciousness-raising to the forefront of the feminist movement. The slogan “the personal is political” was coined by Carol Hanisch in 1969 in a Redstockings pamphlet and became the main slogan of second-wave feminism in the United States. This slogan arose out of a recognition that the private domain is from the beginning publicly and politically constructed by patriarchal ideologies and that it is there that power relationships based on sex and gender are played out. “It means,” writes Catherine MacKinnon, “that women’s distinctive experience as women occurs within that sphere that has been socially lived as the personal—private, emotional, interiorized, particular, individuated, intimate—so that what it is to know the politics of women’s situation is to know women’s personal lives” (21). In so doing, feminists challenged women’s exclusion from the public world of politics and economics, while reintroducing the personal experience of being female into the political discourse of the day (Evans 290). They worked to extend the meaning of “the political” to include areas of social life previously treated as “personal.” Relating personal experiences in the context of “consciousness raising” was so well-established in early second-wave feminist theory and practice that MacKinnon designated it the feminist methodology (1982). As Lisa Maria Hogeland defines it,

Third-Wave Feminism: A Transnational Perspective

Abstract This paper not only discusses theories and practices of third wave feminist writing from a transnational feminist perspective, but also examines the possible interconnections and network exchanges between western and Asian women in the context of third-wave feminism. First, I shall examine the relationship between western feminists and third world women, using an overview of the literature on difference and identity in the last two decades of feminist engagement with postcolonial and multicultural discourses. Next, I shall examine the rhetoric and writing of young feminists in the Asian context. After examining the issues and concerns of the new generation of Asian women, I will examine the possibility of a transnationalthird wave feminist movement and the effects it may have on local communities. This project seeks to initiate a platform for dialogue between western and Asian feminist scholars so that we may build stronger transnational alliances.

Sisterhood as Cultural Difference in Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses and Cristina Garcia's The Aguero Sisters

he women’s movement is probably the key historical event forcing a revision of the modern feminist family. In the 1970s, feminists promoted the metaphor of sisterhood as a challenge to patriarchy. The feminists’ call for global sisterhood would create an alliance of women everywhere on the basis of the commonality of women and opposition to the patriarchal societies within which women live. In the United States, for instance, sisterhood has been used effectively to enlist the sympathies of women on behalf of a variety of reforming causes and enjoin women to activism. Throughout the 1970s, the metaphor of sisterhood was the dominant model for female and feminist relationships. As the slogan goes, “Sisterhood is powerful”; traditionally, it has created a strong emotional bond. In other words, sisterly connections have provided comfort and, most important, empowerment in the practical realm of social relations. “Feminists have proposed a family of sisters based on their presumed psychological, biological, and cultural identity to and with each other. The figure of the sister protects a feminist family by suggesting that the family of women is capacious enough to contain all women no matter how different from each other they may appear to be” (Michie 3).1 Although sisterhood may be powerful, it is by no means unproblematic or completely benign. Sisterhood, as proposed by second-wave feminism, has been increasingly challenged from both within and outside feminism.2 Louise Eichenbaum and Susie Orback, in their discussion of female friendship state, “the ideology of ‘sisterhood is powerful’ has, in some ways, served to obscure much [. . .] pain” (21). The word sisterhood not only suggests a homogeneity of experience that is difficult to prove or imagine but also performs an idealizing function that

The Parallax Gap in Gish Jen's The Love Wife: The Imaginary Relationship between First-World and Third-World Women

ABSTRACT Focusing on the relationship among three women (Blondie, Lan, and Mama Wong) in Gish Jens The Love Wife, we shall explore the imaginary binary relationship between Blondie and Lan and the gaze of the (m)Other (Mama Wong) involved in the binary relationship. We are engaged in an arduous query—how does one deal with the Other woman, her otherness?—that can be explicated and linked to a larger social context: the relation between Western and Third-World women.