Harvesting Our Strengths: Third Wave Feminism and Women's Studies‪.‬

When we approached the directors of the Institute for Feminist Theory and Research (www.iftr.org.uk) about organising a conference on third wave feminism we were not even sure what we meant by the term. What we did know was that our theory and praxis of feminism was not the feminism of the second wave, although it was inextricably informed and enabled by it. We recognised that the feminist entry into the academy in the 1970s was an unprecedented historical moment, but one which resulted in an abstracted "feminism" which was understood largely as a theoretical-academic discipline. This feminist discipline was revealed--through exposure to criticism by a generation familiar with poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism--as an elitist, colonising, and heterosexist hegemony in the name of feminism. Our objective for the Third Wave Feminism conference (July 2002, University of Exeter) was to examine this particular moment in feminist theory and history that has come to be understood as the "third wave," and to do so without acceding to the defeatism implicit in the backlash politics of post feminism.