me, crying in the club: joseph in dream daddy, especially as the only overtly religious dad, deserved a chance to reconcile his faith with his sexuality in a way that made him take responsibility for his cheating and other unhealthy relationship choices without being figuratively or literally demonized by the narrative and/or fans
soooo there’s this girl at my closest mcdonalds who, without fail, gives me my iced coffee for free every time
to be fair i’ve been a regular for a good 5 years or so, so most staff know me and my year-round iced coffee obsession and don’t need me to order. but still, even the ones i joke are my “friends” because we chat a bit have never given me one for free, ever, before this girl, who i don’t think i’ve ever actually talked to. and now not only does she give them to me, she also upsizes it??
expert testimony (aka ex-mcdonalds employee friend) says she’s hitting on me, but idk??? she looks so young and also we’ve never talked???
Hello, my friends and I are taking a course in gender studies and we were wondering how you define fourth wave feminism. We have read definitions by scholars and we wanted to hear a perspective that may differ. Thank you!!
[Posting since I get this question a lot]
Hi there! Since the fourth wave is currently happening (and even that’s arguable to some - some say we’re still in the third wave, though most of my peers don’t associate with third wave feminism much at all), you’d get a different definition from everyone you asked. Honestly, you’d probably get a different answer from me if you asked me tomorrow. Feminism is a big thing~
In my opinion, fourth wave feminism is about recognizing your privilege, and literally learning how to learn, via listening to the experiences of those who are entitled to speak about various kinds of oppression, rather than reading one article about transphobia and then speaking over those affected individuals, or trying to speak for an entire marginalized community. It’s about realizing that it’s not about white women being referred to as “women” and everyone else being referred to as “everyone else”. It’s not “women get paid 78 cents to the man’s dollar” when “women” is only referring to white able-bodied women and “man” is only referring to white able-bodied men. It’s more like “white women make 78 cents to the white man’s dollar, but that’s a rather erasive statistic, because white women make even more than black men! Who make even more than black women, who make even more than Latina and Hispanic women, who make much much more than people with disabilities who are of any gender, because they’re allowed to be paid below minimum wage legally!” (And of course even this sentence is excluding millions of others)
Fourth wave feminism, to me, is about white women not being the “default”. Like, it’s not about us non-black women “including” black women in the women’s rights movement, because it’s not “our” movement to include them in. It’s about realizing that this movement is meant for everyone, not white straight cisgender able-bodied upper middle class women followed by everyone else. Fourth wave feminism is about realizing that feminism and oppression are not black and white, straight and narrow concepts. You can’t divide things into “POC rights” and “women’s rights” and “queer rights” and “trans rights” without forcing someone who is a black, queer, trans woman to just ignore core parts of their identity in the name of one particular movement, because it’s not that simple and easy to divide up. Revolutionary movements of oppressed people cannot be spliced up like that except in Venn diagrams on paper. The real world doesn’t work like that. Intersectionality is absolutely crucial to feminism. There’s no “baby feminism” kit where first you learn about slut shaming and then you learn about bio-reductionism and then you learn about Islamophobia and then you learn about lower-class oppression and then you learn about transphobia and then you learn about transmisogyny and then you learn about transmisogynoir, because all of those things are connected to each other, and many people are affected by all of those at once.
Fourth wave feminism is about liberation and education. It is about acknowledging that you have been racist at points in your life, doing all that you can to unlearn your internalized racism, and participating in anti-racist acts, rather than simply labeling yourself an “ally” without doing shit for anyone. It’s about prioritizing not actually being racist over not seeming racist. It’s about knowing that feminism is not just about “equality”, that it’s not nearly as simple and trivial as that. It’s about having the hard conversations where you realize you’ve been doing something incredibly offensive, and then admitting to that and working to fix it, even if the offended party does not forgive you. It’s about realizing when it simply isn’t your place to speak on an issue, despite how much you might care about it. It’s about changing your opinions as you gather new information, rather than becoming so sure of your ideals that you never listen to another person’s perspective ever again.
As I wrote in my sidebar, “fourth wave feminism is about examining the intersections of structures of privilege and oppression without diluting them, forcing people into boxes, or implying that the feminist movement "belongs" to anyone in particular. Feminism is about the liberation of oppressed peoples from their oppressors and MUST be all-inclusive.”