Three Women Writing/Riding Feminism's Third Wave

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Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 26, No. 3, Fall 2003 (C 2003)

Three Women Writing/Riding Feminism’s Third Wave

Hokulani Aikau, Karla Erickson, and Wendy Leo Moore1

In this article the authors compare their own stories of developing a feminist consciousness in order to demonstrate how the distinction between feminist waves and feminist generations can be a productive one. They argue that the metaphor of waves must be delineated from the family metaphor of generation in order to maintain the ﬂuidity that exists within a generational cohort of feminist scholars. Their narrative begins where they all meet, at the University of Minnesota in 2001, and interweaves stories of how they eventually come together in the same institution as feminist scholars. Their stories illustrate that although they each identify as feminists, and each fall into the category often referred to as “third wave,”their pursuit of a feminist agenda has followed different trajectories. Taken together, their personal narratives unpack and explore the wave metaphor for describing individuals, provide a critique of feminist generations, and illustrate the multiplicity of third wave feminism. KEY WORDS: waves; feminism; generations; intersectionality; personal narrative; intellectual training.

THE POWER OF THREE: THIRD WAVE FEMINISM

How long [the wave] will live, how far it will travel, to what manner of end it will come are all determined, in large measure, by the conditions it meets in its progression across the face of the sea. Rachel L. Carson 1989, p. 116 On a humid afternoon in July, the three of us met beside the glistening waters of the Mississippi to share stories about feminism, graduate training, the paths we

1Correspondence should be directed to Karla Erickson, Department of American Studies, 104 Scott Hall, 72 Pleasant St. SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, e-mail: [email protected].

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pursue and the people, ideas and places—both institutional and geographic—that have pushed or pulled to get us here along our way. At this moment, summer 2002, and in this place, Minneapolis, Minnesota, we each tell our story of how we came to ride the third wave of feminism. As the introductory quote suggests, the duration and eventual outcome of this wave is still unknown, but one thing is certain: what each of us has encountered along the academic paths we have taken will inform the direction we go next. What strikes us almost immediately is that although we all consider ourselves third wave feminists, what this title means to us individually is slightly different. The difference comes from the distinct paths we took to get to a shared understanding that academic feminism must struggle with the intersectionality of power and privilege in order to keep the momentum of earlier waves flowing onto academic shores. Although we have traveled different paths to reach this place, our professional training intersects in two ways: first, we all consider ourselves feminist scholars, and second, we conduct our research with the support of a dissertation group led by our advisor, Jennifer Pierce. On this particular day, we have gathered to interrogate what it means to call ourselves feminists and, more particularly, to examine and re-articulate the wave metaphor so often used to describe feminism over time. Our interrogation of the wave metaphor began when Hokulani was conducting research in Hawai’i. As she sat on the beach reading the literature on third wave feminism, she listened to and watched the waves roll onto shore and wondered about the materiality of the wave metaphor. Where do waves come from? How do they operate? When she sat and watched wave after wave roll onto shore she wondered, how can we tell when one wave begins and another ends? According to surfers, waves come in at least three sets of three with the third wave being the ideal one to catch and ride to shore. The first two waves allow the surfer to read the size and speed of the waves that will follow. The surfer does not worry if she does not catch the third wave or if the set fades out before reaching shore because she knows that more will be coming on the horizon. Surfers turn their back to the shore and look to the horizon in eager anticipation of the next set of waves. Our interrogation of the wave as a metaphor for the movements of feminism allows us to keep in motion the fluidity and variation that exists within a single feminist generational cohort.2 This essay maps the diverse routes each of us has taken to academic feminism. As third wave feminists, we look to the horizon with eagerness and a sense of expectation as we watch for the next set of waves that will take us to different academic shores.

2Anthropologist Katherine Newman (1989) employed the concept of generational culture to explain the differences between experiences of divorced women who where born during the Depression of the 1930s and those born in the 1960s. She contextualizes their responses to divorce and subsequent life choices within larger cultural forces and ideas at the time of their upbringing. We borrow her term and designate ourselves a generational cohort which we view as a smaller subset of a generational culture who are being trained academically at the same university, at the same time, and in the same dissertation group. P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style ﬁle version Nov 28th, 2002

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The wave metaphor has been used in the immigration literature to describe the increase in the number of people who move from one place to another during a particular historical period (Foner 2000; Hathaway 1999). “Wave,” in this case, refers to the displacement and relocation of people from place to place and the resulting effect on the “coast” or “island” upon which they land. Not just the shores or points of destination are altered, but also the individuals that make the journey. In the case of feminism, waves seem to be a metaphor for the displacement and relocation not just of people, but also of theories, methods and ways of knowing. Just as waves are influenced by winds and currents in the fluid seascape of the ocean, we look broadly at structural forces in order to place the wave metaphor and our individual stories within larger contexts. Where feminist geographers have taken up the task of unpacking the link between the metaphor and materiality of geographic concepts (Pratt 1998; Bammer et al. 1998), we explore the usefulness of the wave metaphor to describe the variety of experiences, politics and forms of feminism that exist within one feminist generation. Drawing on our three stories, we argue that the wave metaphor provides third wave feminists with a concept that both recognizes our similar epistemological positions and acknowledges the distinct routes that brought us to these positions. Laying our personal narratives side by side, we hope to demonstrate what feminist waves actually look like. Despite being of the same generation and labeled the same “wave” of feminists in the academy, the choices we made along the way and the ways we used the intellectual and personal resources at hand not only shaped our journey, but position us as very different scholars and professors as we prepare to leave Minnesota for other institutions as faculty members. Our stories illustrate that although we each identify as feminists, our pursuit of a feminist agenda in the academy has different trajectories. Our differences demonstrate what we mean by waves. For example, Wendy did not embrace feminism until she became a graduate student, while Hokulani and Karla embraced feminism as undergraduates. Hokulani came to feminism as a women’s studies major, while Karla had to develop a major in women’s studies from the limited course offerings at the liberal arts college she attended. Our different personal histories, and the different institutional spaces in which we became scholars, are indicative of our differences but they do not overshadow the political, personal and professional visions that we share. Attention to the ways our stories intersect and diverge reflects our faith in the importance of telling one’s own story, which feminists have long identified as the key to empowerment. Our personal narratives frame our life histories and entry into feminism; as such they provide an illustration of the multiplicity of third wave feminism and a critique of the idea of a feminist generation. In the current literature by and about third wave feminists, the historical and institutional specificity of this position vis-à-vis second wave feminists remains unclear (Evangelisti et al. 1995; Fraiman 1999; Gubar 1998, 1999; Heywood and P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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Drake 1997; Holeland 2001; Looser and Kaplan 1997; Walker 1994; Wiegman 1999; Zita 1997). Generations and waves are used interchangeably in the literature. Here we use personal narratives to argue that generational and wave metaphors should not be interchangeable but in fact offer two different vantage points from which to view feminist legacies and trajectories. The generational metaphor relies on time as a distinguishing characteristic; specifically, feminist generations are defined by birth year and the years of training in graduate school. We argue that taken alone, a generational metaphor fails to fully describe the complex interplay of forces that affect when an individual encounters feminism, how one receives feminist ideas and politics, and the style and form of feminist politics one sub- sequently advances. Our attention to how each of us has developed as academic feminists demonstrates the variation that exists within a generational cohort. We show that, unlike a generational model that privileges time over space, the wave metaphor requires us to pay attention to historical time and institutional place. Our stories demonstrate the uneven dispersion of academic feminism at different universities and colleges, in different academic disciplines, and even at the same university. Our personal narratives also demonstrate that a close examination of the wave metaphor can be productive for keeping in play the multiplicity central to these feminist legacies and trajectories. Based in time, generational models tend to suggest more distinctive breaks rather than the crests and calms which waves describe. As much as our stories demonstrate the diversity within a particular generation, we hope our investigation of the science behind waves will speak to the inseparable connections between past, present and future waves of feminism. The science of waves speaks to how energy is carried forward from previous forces but also how it changes as it encounters obstacles, shores and currents. We begin by discussing our first encounters with academic feminism because we believe that how we come to feminism greatly shapes our reception of feminism as well as our political, intellectual and professional commitments. Our attention to our intellectual life cycles as third wave feminists allows us to identify the feminist legacies from which we draw energy as well as hints at the trajectory of our future journeys. Although the three of us come together at this time and at one place— recognizing what we share as a generational culture—our stories illustrate how different our experiences with feminism have been and the productivity of a wave metaphor for thinking through and about feminist generations. Standing on shore, waves appear to be separate, distinct entities connected only rhythmically to the one before and the one following. We offer an alternative way to read waves. We think about “second waves” and “third waves” not as consecutive, individual waves that we can count from the shore, but rather as the multiplicity of waves produced from larger generating forces, including both the fast swells that move out in front of storm centers and the smaller, slower waves that remain closer to the storm and signal its approach. We focus on the entire life P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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cycle of the wave, as Rachel L. Carson states, because just as the shape and size of the wave as it reaches shore is the culmination of the conditions it meets as it travels along the surface of the sea, each of us is shaped by the conditions we met in our travels. Just as the water particles that make up a wave rise, move forward, fall, reverse direction and rise again, our stories are travel narratives of riding/writing the third wave of feminism. Generational metaphors are a pragmatic solution for thinking generally about the paradigmatic currents and political winds that direct the ﬂows of feminist waves. From a satellite view from above, generational currents allow us to trace various waves of feminisms historically across time. However, generational language tends to privilege time as a measure of inclusion, and relying on years assumes an equal saturation of feminist thinking in all locations and for all individuals at a particular time. Emphasis on wave theory, unlike a generational model where time is privileged over space or place, allows us not only to consider the timing of our birth and our ﬁrst encounters with feminism, but also to situate our personal stories within the institutional spaces and material places we travel, the forces we encounter there, and the particular resources available to us at different ports along our journey. In order for the wave metaphor to be useful for feminists, we must take into account the entire life cycle of the wave, recognizing that much can happen to the wave before coming into view from the shore.

WAVES UPON DIFFERENT SHORES: FEMINISMS, TIME, AND SPACE

When feminist scholars use the term “wave” to describe successive generations of feminists and feminisms, what kind of waves are they referring to? In this section we examine the scientific basis of waves in order to critically examine the wave metaphor, identifying what waves can reveal about feminism. What can the wave metaphor tell us about contemporary feminism that we might not see otherwise? It is important to learn the language of waves to better understand the effectiveness of this metaphor to describe the fluid landscape of feminisms. The characteristics and anatomy of deep water waves is useful for thinking about the multiple and different types of waves that storms generate. As storms develop, waves are dispersed from the storm center into multiple directions. As a storm continues to move, swells, the large, fast-moving waves, pass through the smaller waves and move out in front announcing the approaching storm. The grouping of waves according to size and speed is called a “wave train.” As an illustration, for many U.S. second wave feminists, the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement and the student movements of the 1960s were the generating forces, or storm centers, that produced the multiple wave trains that characterize this generation. These social justice movements can be seen as different storm centers that produced various types of waves, such as liberal feminism, Third World feminism and radical feminism, to name only a few. Though storms subside, the P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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waves they produce can be revitalized by other winds and are taken to divergent shores by larger currents. They can also be transformed as they encounter various obstacles along their path, such as shoals, bars, islands and coasts. Our narratives speak to the uneven saturation of feminism. The intellectual spaces we inhabit, as well as our individual biographies prior to our first feminist encounters, determine how we react to and incorporate feminism into our life and work. To demonstrate the persistent but uneven movement of feminism take, for example, the year 1991. We mark 1991 to demonstrate the productive tensions between generations and waves. As women who came of age during the Reagan-Bush era and entered college in its shadow, our experiences resonate with these shared histories. In addition, the material backlash against feminism in the 1990s influenced the kinds of feminist waves that we encountered at college. On the political front, 1991 saw the beginning of the end of the Reagan-Bush era, the legacy of which would still be felt throughout the decade with the New Right continuing a rather successful propaganda campaign through the Right to Life movement, the growing ranks of evangelical followers, and the success of spokesmen like Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. As the political front continued to move in a conservative direction, the popular press began to declare feminism dead (Myron 1997). The cultural backlash against women’s gains toward achieving equality was encapsulated in Susan Faludi’s (1991) Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. As Faludi described, just as a majority of American women were self-identifying as feminists, the national media declared a “post-feminist” era. Despite the decreasing visibility of feminist change outside the academy, within the academy feminist scholars continued to produce significant scholarship. For example, in the same year that Faludi identified a war against women, the publication of Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought: Knowl- edge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990) infused women of color feminists and feminisms with renewed inspiration. Whether feminism was “dead” or moving in new theoretical directions, what remains clear from our stories is that different waves of feminism had reached the shores of the universities we attended. Wendy was an undergraduate student in 1991 in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. She did not come into contact with feminism or women’s studies at that time. Instead, after growing up a white girl in a working- and lower class black neighborhood, she experienced race as a more salient component of her identity. As a white woman, she did not believe that gender oppression had a severe impact on her life chances or the life chances of other white women. In her own life, receiving the benefits of white privilege, Wendy believed that racial oppression was a more constraining aspect of social structure than was gender oppression. She saw race first. It was not until she entered graduate school and made contact with Jennifer Pierce, in 1995, that Wendy was introduced to the scholarly works of feminists of color, and began to realize the saliency of gender. P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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Hokulani declared a women’s studies undergraduate major in 1991. She became a young scholar within a feminist framework at a time when there was a real backlash underway (Faludi 1991). As the gains made in the 1960s and 1970s were being corroded on the political front, by the time she entered college in 1989 the women’s studies program at the University of Utah was into its second decade as one of the oldest programs in the country. She continued along a feminist trajectory when in 1994 she traveled to the University of Memphis and the Center for Research on Women, the only research center in the country founded upon the understanding that race, class and gender are interlocking systems of power and privilege. Her experiences brought together a formal training in feminist theories and methods in a women’s studies program, as well as specialized training in intersectional pedagogy and research. For Karla, 1991 was the year she entered Illinois Wesleyan University, where she found an intellectual and political home in feminism through women’s studies and the support of some pioneering feminist scholars. Her childhood had prepared her to readily embrace and politicize questions of gender. However, the feminism she encountered in the early 1990s was not sophisticated enough to speak directly to inequality along multiple axes of identity. It was only later, in graduate school, that she found the tools to move beyond a white liberal feminism and to develop a feminist consciousness grounded in intersectional interrogations of power, privilege and lived experience.

FIRST ENCOUNTERS WITH FEMINIST WAVES

One of the contributions of a generational model for talking about intellectual trajectories and the life cycle of social movements is the notion of “coming of age.” For feminists, coming of age as a feminist is a particularly powerful moment when one starts to identify with feminism, make use of feminism, and develop feminist politics. This process begins with a first encounter with feminism. Of course, many individuals encounter feminist principles and practices and remain untouched and unconvinced. For each of us, we have, at different times in our lives, begun to identify as feminist scholars. We find this moment—our coming of age as feminists—an important point of departure for our interrogation of the wave as a metaphor for feminism. These first encounters are best understood when they are historically contextualized in our life stories. The varied and powerful generative forces working within each of our lives affect how and when we received feminism.

Hokulani’s Story: Coming Out as a Feminist

Wave interaction best explains how I became a third wave feminist. Wave interaction is the process where swells from different storm centers meet, pass P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style ﬁle version Nov 28th, 2002

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through each other and continue on. One of several outcomes of this phenomenon is “for two or more wave trains to phase together so that they suddenly develop large waves unrelated to any storms in the crossing area” (Duxbury and Duxbury 1984, p. 215). If not universal, the characteristics of wave interaction that produce a third wave best describe the way I came to feminism and the kind of feminist I am today.3 I graduated from high school in 1988 and left home to become a nanny in St. Louis. This year-long experience along the banks of the Mississippi River broadened my horizons and opened my eyes to the many possibilities available to me. It was while working as a nanny that I first realized that a college education was attainable. My plan was to apply for admission to the University of Utah where I could be close to home but far enough away to still feel like I was on my own. As plans go, mine was a simple one with modest expectations. I was admitted to the University, where I declared an art major and began school in the fall of 1989. My first encounter with feminism was when I took my first women’s studies course in 1990, an elective called “Sex Roles and Social Change.” For the first time in my short college career the texts that I read and the discussions we had in class had relevance to my personal experience even when my experiences didn’t quite fit. Gender was obviously at the center of the analysis. My experiences as a young woman raised within the Mormon Church resonated with the battles waged by second wave feminists, but my Hawaiian family life was still much different from other families. The following year, I enrolled in the course “Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement.” It was there that I learned the language of racial oppression and was able to make the historical connection between the racial identity movements of the 1960s and the women’s movement. In this course, I adopted the language of African-American oppression and resistance to begin to understand my experiences as a biracial Hawaiian woman, where skin color combined with colonization to produce the oppressive atmosphere within which I was raised. It was in the shadow of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), also known as the Mormon Church, that I came out as a feminist. One of my apartments in college was located equidistant between two conservative institutions—the state capital building up the hill and the LDS temple down the hill. Nestled between these two bastions of conservatism, one autumn night in 1991 I called my parents to give them the news. I talked first to my dad, who then handed me off to my mom so she could deal with me. I enthusiastically told them my good news; I had declared women’s studies as my major. In the two years that I had been at the University of Utah I had been an art major, a math major and a secondary education major. I was excited to have finally found an

3This does not suggest that a storm center of seismic events on the earth’s crust cannot be generating forces for other third wave feminists. My discussion is limited by my historical understanding of how second wave feminisms developed on college campuses in the United States and when and where I encountered feminism’s second wave. P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style ﬁle version Nov 28th, 2002

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intellectual home. They did not share my enthusiasm. As my spirits began to fade, I looked out onto the magical scene of downtown Salt Lake City. The light from the street lamps and buildings filtered through the moisture in the air to soften the hard edges of the LDS church office building that soared in the foreground and smoothed out the sharp points of the temple’s spires in the background. But there was nothing to smooth over the hard edges of my father’s words. In his view, my decision had jeopardized not only my membership in the church but also my eternal salvation, and threatened the possibility that I would spend eternity with my family in heaven. In his estimation, if I was a feminist I could not be a faithful Mormon. I learned several years later that my parents’ response had more to do with their automatic association of feminism with lesbianism, so when I came out to them as a lesbian in 1995 they were not surprised. Whereas for my parents the backlash against feminism in the 1980s had effectively linked feminism to lesbianism, for me, feminism was exciting both personally and intellectually. From 1991 to 1994, I was introduced to what would become the canon of academic feminism. We read Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray, Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, Patricia Hill Collins and Toni Morrison, and countless others including influential male theorists such as Freud, Lacan, Foucault and Marx. My transcript from the University of Utah reads like a critique of disciplinarity: We challenged the transparency of history in “Women in History Since 1870”; we critiqued discursive boundaries of both feminist theory and literary criticism in “Feminism with and against Critical Theory”; and in “Advanced Feminist Re- search Methods” we challenged the objectivity of social science research. With the theoretical and methodological training I received in women’s studies I was prepared for graduate school. What was missing, however, from my women’s studies courses was sustained attention to how race and gender simultaneously produced my experiences as a biracial young woman. This attention to the intersectionality of race, class and gender would not be at the center of my academic training until I moved to Memphis as a master’s student. In the summer of 1994 I left home again and traveled to Memphis, back to the Mississippi River valley. Eager to see what the mighty Mississippi had for me on this voyage, I went to the Center for Research on Women (CROW) in the Department of Sociology at the University of Memphis without really knowing its full significance. CROW was founded in 1982 by Bonnie Thorton Dill, Lynn Weber and Elizabeth Higginbotham (who joined the faculty in 1983).4 Their mis- sion was to “validate and promote the views of women of color, working-class

4The initial funding for CROW came from a grant from the Ford Foundation which, in the early 1980s, provided seed money to start centers for research on gender and race across the country. Weber, Higginbotham, and Dill (1997) note that unlike the research centers established around the same time at Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Washington, the Center for Research on Women at the University of Memphis took as their point of departure that “race, class and gender are power relations of dominance and subordination that are socially constructed and historically speciﬁc and that are primary forms of social organization” (p. 230; italics in original). P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style ﬁle version Nov 28th, 2002

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women, and other groups that experienced oppression along multiple dimensions” (Weber, Higginbotham, and Dill 1997, p. 230). Finally, their pedagogy reflected their personal and political commitment to collaboration. Unlike at the Univer- sity of Utah, where the intersectionality of race, class and gender was taught as one of many frameworks, as a master’s student at CROW the faculty and my fel- low graduate students provided it as the model for incorporating intersectionality into research. When I joined the CROW community, I found a second intellectual home. In addition to the training I received in putting intersectionality into practice through pedagogy and research, I also inherited the precious gift of collaboration. Collaboration is not solely linked to joint authorship as much as it is connected to the idea that intellectual work is not a solitary process. At CROW we graduate students relied on each other to proofread our papers, to bounce ideas off each other, to boost our confidence when it started to wane, and to let loose and play when the work was done. We provided a support network for each other that went beyond the halls and walls of CROW and stretched into our personal lives as well. Together, we fell in love, got divorced, started new relationships, built lifelong friendships, and made Memphis our home. It was a place that bridged what can often be a painful divide between the personal and the academic. I came into my own as an academic feminist while at the Center for Research on Women. It was here that I was able to merge the feminist foundation I had from Utah with a commitment to intersectional research and teaching. It was at Memphis, in the mid-1990s, that I became a third wave feminist. While at the University of Utah and throughout my time at the University of Memphis, I was carried along by two wave trains. Attention to the divergent histories of feminism on these two college campuses emphasizes the different effects feminist waves can have. At the University of Utah, feminist waves were harnessed in 1977 to produce a women’s studies program that introduced its students to the feminist canon. At the University of Memphis, feminism took the form of a research center that provided support to feminist faculty and trained graduate students. Although the generating forces for each tradition may be different, at both Utah and Memphis the wave trains have been sustained by prevailing winds. I was trained to read and navigate these waves and they have combined, through wave interaction, to produce the kind of feminist I am today. When I arrived on the shores of the University of Memphis, I was still adrift. I did not know how to navigate my own vessel. I left Memphis ready to chart my own journey, prepared with the skills to handle whatever the academic sea would throw at me. I built my vessel from the intellectual tradition of intersectionality taught at CROW and filled it with the nourishment that comes from collaborative research. With a chart plotted, my vessel built and provisions loaded, I left Memphis and traveled upstream, against the current of the Mississippi River to Minneapolis. P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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Karla’s Story: Finding Feminism in Unlikely Places

Two sources provided foundations for my feminist convictions. The first was a supportive, unencumbered childhood in the quiet green of the suburbs of Minneapolis and the second was created from the media images and words with which I fed my growing-girl mind. As a third wave feminist, I got in touch with the vitality of Betty Friedan, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Adrienne Rich, bell hooks and Gloria Steinem through the music of the Indigo Girls, Ani DiFranco and Sarah McLachlan. I first imagined gender equality with the help of “Free to Be You and Me” and Sesame Street. Passing through a history-poor educational system, my interests and attitudes were shaped by Spike Lee and Oliver Stone’s on-screen visions, and more recently by films like Boys Don’t Cry and American History X as visual negotiations with our nation, then and now. And I don’t think I’m alone: for many of us raised in the seventies and eighties and trained in the nineties, popular culture was the first bridge we crossed toward a politicized understanding of our gender. “Billy has a Doll” from “Free to Be You and Me” and “I am Woman” by Helen Reddy played in my home while I was deciding whether to join the Girl Scouts or the T-ball team. Though I didn’t know until college why feminists were too often denigrated as “bra burners,” I had already internalized the idea that beauty pageants and Barbie were bad for my health. Popular culture, as such, is part of what laid the groundwork for my early excursions into feminist inquiries. My story, taking place during the time and in the cities and institutions it does, is uneven. I felt safe and confident that women could do anything when I was young, wrapped in the benign privileges of middle-class liberalism in Minnesota. When I arrived at college I was exposed to an articulated feminist vision at precisely the time I most needed those tools to make sense of the contradiction between my awareness of my own and other women’s capacities, and the way women in general, and I specifically, were being treated during the early nineties in central Illinois. In 1991, when I entered Illinois Wesleyan University, women’s studies was offered as a minor which could be assembled from the limited course offerings available each semester. Most of the relevant courses were taught by the three women I worked with during my tenure there, and outside of that small umbrella of course offerings instructors seemed content to teach a less nuanced story of the past and present. Feminist issues received little play and, when taught, were often relegated to a token week out of the semester. During my stay at IWU, Georganne (George) Rundblad, Alison Sainsbury and April Schultz were the three professors who most influenced my development and were also three of the perhaps five professors I would have labeled “feminist.” However, I only spoke of them as feminists in protected circles. Against the backdrop of the Reagan-Bush era, IWU remained safely wrapped in a conservative politics, which required only occasional nods to “political correctness.” In P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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Minnesota, the dramatic move to the political right that had taken root nationally was often mourned and to some degree resisted by local politics. By contrast, amid the uninterrupted flatness of fields and roads that make up central Illinois, feminism was still a bad word. To be a feminist at that particular college in central Illinois in 1991 was to be a femi-Nazi, dangerous and, most important to me at the time, anti-male and therefore not fit to date men. It’s interesting that when word got out that we might be up to something deemed feminist we were not punished by being labeled dykes or lesbians, because the “threat” of a visible homosexual presence on campus was at that time still unspeakable. Gays and lesbians were invisible just like the people of color on campus. Being a feminist was punished by being perceived as “trouble” in a situation where heterosexuality was not only assumed, but the only recognized sexual orientation. It was within this context too that these three young professors did the important work of inspiring, identifying and cultivating a new generation of feminist scholars under less than friendly circumstances. When I think back to how I developed a budding feminist politics, I remember many compromises, a close circle of friends with whom I committed to staying independent (not joining a sorority), and the strong support of these three women. My story speaks to the uneven dispersal of the waves produced by storm centers. While my childhood laid the groundwork for me to be receptive to feminism, my personal journey led me to less receptive shores, where feminism was still gaining force. It wasn’t until my return to Minnesota for graduate school that I would move beyond gender analysis to a third wave intersectional feminism which could speak to the fluidity and multiplicity of women’s lived experience.

Wendy’s Story: Interrogating White Privilege as a Path to Feminism

The storm centers of the 1960s produced the waves of second wave feminism that washed me onto the shores that would become my world and would leave me both prepared and unprepared for the academy and feminism. My mother, who was born and raised in a small town in Wisconsin, attended a small state university in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There she encountered Jane Pierce, a white women’s rights activist, and Dr. Robert B. Bailey III. Dr. Bailey, despite being the first African-American man to receive a Fulbright Scholarship and completing his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, had difficulty finding an academic position when he returned to the United States due to blatant racism in the academy in the early 1960s. My mother’s experiences with these individuals were in part responsible for her courage to leave a bad marriage and set out to raise me on her own. They also caused her to be critical of the racial segregation in suburban America and led her to move us to an inner-city working- and lower class black neighborhood. My experience growing up a white child P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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of a politically conscious single mother in a black neighborhood constructed my particular standpoint. My mother was my only biological kin with whom I had regular contact. My father and my extended family lived in other states, or outside the country. My mother worked long hours, struggling to support the two of us completely on her own. As a result I became involved in adoptive kin relationships with many people in the community who took me into their families and their lives, most of them African-American. Reflecting back on my childhood as an adult trained with a sociological gaze, I believe that it was the power of intersections between race, class and gender that caused me to become an integral part of this black community, and to see it as my home. My mother worked at jobs created out of federally funded programs, as did many African-American women during this time (see Collins 1990). Like most families around us we were engaged in a constant struggle to meet financial obligations, and although I was not aware of it at the time, I now realize it must have been a combination of race, class and gender that caused my teachers to call my mother into their offices and berate her for my performance. They complained that I was loud in class, constantly talking, and questioning them at every turn. I was not disciplined and quiet or obedient, like a young white girl was “supposed” to be, and I was forever questioning their authority. They would place me into “gifted and talented” programs, only to pull me out later—complaining to my mother about my “behavioral problems.” As I look back, I remember that many of my teachers did not like me, although I often wished that they would. I did not have the cultural capital to succeed in those classrooms. I still remember the shame I felt when my seventh grade teacher called my mother in and asked her if she could not find a way to buy me a warm coat, because my journal entries spoke of how cold I was traveling to and from school in the winter. I hated that teacher for embarrassing my mother, and it was these seemingly innocent indignities that caused me to develop adversarial rather than nurturing relationships with my teachers. In my community, unlike in school, I found happiness and confidence. In the black community in which I grew up, most of my peers also suffered from the lack of cultural capital that was needed for success in the white, middle- class, male oriented educational system. We created and existed in a world where that assessment of us was unimportant, and we at least claimed to reject their prescriptions. It was this world and this community that became most important to me and to my definition of self. And so, looking back, I am sure it was no accident that the two most influential women in my life (besides my mother) were both African-American women, one a school counselor and the other the principal. They showed an interest and belief in me in a way that allowed me to believe in myself in the world of education. My counselor, Marci Wade, would pull me out of classes twice a week and bring me into her office to talk and write poetry. My principal, Shirley Keiser, kept me after school to help her with chores around the P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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school so that I would not go home to an empty house (because my mother was working). Even after I graduated to another school I took the bus back and stayed with her until her workday ended. The people in my community were extremely important to my life, my construction of self, and my understanding of the world in which I live. But it was not long before I learned that while this black community was the only one I recognized as my own, I was not completely an insider. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins (1990) discusses the role of black women working as ser- vants in the homes of white people. She describes their experiences as those of the “outsider-within,” suggesting that although they were racial outsiders, they were located within family structures in white peoples’ homes, which often gave them an insight into whiteness and demystified white power. In many ways my experience was that of the outsider-within. However, while the women that Collins described were in exploited positions as outsiders, in my experience the power relationship was reversed. Rather than being in an exploited position, I was (and still am) the beneficiary of unearned privilege from what Feagin (2001) calls the “racist relations” of the United States, that are structured upon white supremacy. Yet, like the black women in Collins’ research, the result of my positionality was a nuanced understanding of white supremacy and the contradictions of racial oppression. Race became the most salient axis of my identity, and I became very critical of whiteness. The contradiction was that this process occurred at the same time that I benefited from my whiteness. I learned about white privilege as a recipient. Area police saw me as someone they wanted to protect, not harass. Store clerks saw me as a potential sale, not a potential thief. School administrators saw my bad behavior as a momentary lapse of judgment, not as indicative of my essence. I saw white privilege everywhere because I received it, and many of the people I loved did not. This contradiction made me severely critical of whiteness and white supremacy. Because of my childhood experiences, my standpoint developed on the assumption that race was the most powerful dimension of social organization in United States society. As a white woman, I did not believe that gender oppression had a severe impact on my life chances, but I had seen the results of racial oppression up close, and I believed that racial oppression was more constraining than gender oppression. Perhaps I was blind to structural constraints that played into my experiences because I had many strong women in my life, and I believed that women could achieve anything they wanted. However, when I came to graduate school in 1995 in the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, Professor Jennifer Pierce challenged me to look more closely at gender by giving me the works of feminist women of color to read. My life experiences had given me an extremely critical race perspective, and when I read these works of women of color, who were critically examining the intersections between race and gender, this made sense. My nuanced understanding of structures of racial domination had prepared me to see the structural nature of gender and gender oppression. What it P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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meant to be white and what it meant to be black had always been problematic for me, so I was able to begin to grasp the critiques of what it meant to be a man and what it meant to be a woman. With Jennifer’s assistance I began to ﬁnd my voice as a feminist critical race scholar.

The shape of the shores and the obstacles encountered on the way affect how a wave hits ground. Although we are all third wave feminists, our first encounters with academic feminism demonstrate the uneven dispersal of feminism at different colleges and universities, in different communities, cities, and states. One of the reasons we find the wave metaphor so useful for describing our varied experiences is that it is really the intersection of waves in our own lives that shape our first encounters with feminism. For example, Hokulani and Wendy were both working within sociology departments, and while the version of sociology that Hokulani was introduced to was feminist and anti-racist, Wendy’s was not. Even though both Wendy and Karla were raised in the Twin Cities, they were raised in very different social milieus. Wendy was quick to recognize race, while Karla more easily identified with gender. In the next section, we draw our experiences at the University of Minnesota together to show that even within a particular institution at a particular time, feminism is received and embraced unevenly.

INTELLECTUAL CURRENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

Winds, currents and waves have an interdependent relationship in the earth’s oceans. Currents are pushed by the wind and affect the surface ﬂow of water. Currents transport water along semi-predictable paths across the ocean following the hemispheric wind patterns that guide them. In the academy, we talk about intellectual currents as a metaphor for new theories or the institutionalization of well-worn ways of knowing. Adding currents to our metaphorical understanding of how energy and water move helps us to think about the many forces that shape knowledge production at a particular institution. Our life histories prior to graduate school shaped what we hoped to ﬁnd at the University of Minnesota, our approach to our research, and the alliances we sought out. Not only were we in motion, but the University itself, far from a homogenous entity, was criss- crossed with differences according to discipline, and even within disciplines. Be- low we describe how we interacted with the currents we each discovered at the University.

Wendy’s Story

I entered the graduate program in sociology in 1995, and came into contact with my advisor Jennifer Pierce, a feminist and critical race scholar. It was Jennifer who introduced me to the works of feminists of color and challenged me to look P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style ﬁle version Nov 28th, 2002

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critically at gender issues. But it was through watching Jennifer’s experience in this department that I learned, experientially, the importance of gender and the potential consequences of washing up on hostile shores. In the first semester of my second year, a graduate student (and friend) found me in the computer lab and told me that the faculty had voted 12-7 to deny Jennifer tenure. It was clear, from the defensive discussions that followed, that Jennifer was denied tenure because the department did not see feminist (and race-critical) scholarship as legitimate. (See Pierce, this issue.) Those of us who supported Jennifer organized a graduate student meeting to discuss the problems of exclusion in the department and the action we planned to take against the department and the decision. Ten minutes into our meeting a student whose advisor was the former chair of the department and had been leading the charge against Jennifer showed up. He made two statements. First, he said that if we were planning to do anything that would make the department look bad (for example, speaking with the media) we should understand that all graduate students, including those who did not support Jennifer, had an interest in the department, and that anyone who impacted the department negatively might be liable in a court action. Second, he said that the real issues we should be discussing were issues that impacted all graduate students, like health insurance and teaching assistant pay. I was momentarily silenced by a mixture of confusion and rage. Other students began talking to him about what he thought could be done about the graduate assistant pay. This went on for about five minutes. In classic white patriarchal manner, he had come in and threatened us with the structural power that he owned, and had entirely stifled any further discussion about the sexism and racism of the department (indeed insinuating that if we suggested the department was sexist and racist, he would take legal action against us for harming its reputation). I then realized that from the vantage point of many of the students in the room this was a theoretical discussion. For them there were no real-life consequences. I screamed at everyone in the room, “This is not some theoretical discussion—this is my life—this is real life!” Then I walked out. A small number of students left with me. This experience made me realize that while there was space within this department of sociology for white women, that space was limited to those white women who would “buy into” the system as it existed.5 Jennifer had challenged the normative structures of the discipline of sociology as delineated by this sociology department, and the consequence was that those in power denied her tenure and threatened to seriously harm her academic standing. I saw that movements toward “gender equality” in the academy (and elsewhere) were being constructed and delineated by white men. It was not a gender equality defined by women on their terms, or one that seriously challenged normative views about gender. In- stead, what was being sold as gender equality was women’s right to participate in patriarchal structures. This form of gender equality had male defined boundaries,

5See Zinn et al. (1986) for a discussion of a similar form of inclusion and exclusion in women’s studies. P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style ﬁle version Nov 28th, 2002

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as well as racially defined boundaries, and if one did not stay within them there were negative consequences. I realized then that gender oppression could not be separated from racial oppression. Both were systems of power and domination that were mutually justifying, and often distinctions between them were difficult to make. After that experience I was determined to leave the graduate department, so I applied and was accepted to the University of Minnesota Law School. Unfor- tunately, I found an even more hostile place. Lani Guinier, Michelle Fine, and Jane Balin conducted research at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and concluded that “[t]here is something about the law school environment that has a negative academic impact on female law students” (1997, p. 9; author’s italics). They go on to say, “Learning to think like a lawyer means learning to think and act like a man”(p. 29) While Guinier, Fine and Balin do not specifically examine race, they suggest that learning to think like a lawyer really means learning to think and act like a white man. In my first year a conservative Asian-American man taught me constitutional law. He raged in his writings about the identity politics of students of color who wanted him to be a mentor. In class he belittled Kenneth Clark’s research on the effects of segregated education on young black children,6 and said that women should not push the Virginia Military Institute for admittance because the women might be raped by men in the bathrooms. In my second year, a white woman who taught me employment discrimination said that racial disparities in the workforce might not be due to discrimination, but simply to choices made by people of color about where they wanted to work. When I protested that the logical consequence of her argument was the assumption that more African-American and Latino people wanted to work in low prestige, low wage, unsafe jobs, she replied, “It’s more complicated than that.” But when we talked about gender discrimination several weeks later, she said that of course the disparately low numbers of women in construction indicated gender discrimination—and not preference. In addition to interactions with professors there were the blank stares, rolled eyes and, sometimes, loud sighs of students when I forcefully brought up issues of race and gender in the classroom. Despite the fact that the University of Minnesota has a very successful women’s studies department and is the home of the Center for Advanced Fem- inist Studies, a research center focusing on feminist scholarship that began in 1983, the waves of feminism had failed to saturate the shores of the law school or the department of sociology. In these two institutional spaces, I found myself constantly battling against people who were attempting to mediate my perspectives on feminism and critical race theory and who were sometimes even hostile.

6Kenneth Clark’s psychological testing concerning the consequences of segregation is cited in footnote 11 of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case. P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style ﬁle version Nov 28th, 2002

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Karla’s Story

While my upbringing prepared me to be receptive to a feminist line of thought and my undergraduate training sparked my interest and introduced me to key questions within feminism, I feel that it is only as a graduate student that I have moved fully into my own as a feminist scholar. For me, this final step in my socialization provided me with my chosen arena in which to “give back” rather than simply receive feminist ideas and support. Located in a progressive American studies department, my interests have been encouraged since the day I arrived at the University of Minnesota; but for me, academic work is ignited only through a simultaneous engagement with people and, most often, with other women. Having first encountered academic feminism at IWU, one of the most startling discoveries of my return home was how centralized feminist considerations were to the training at the University of Minnesota. Here, feminism was not a dirty word. There was nothing hush-hush about feminism, and only the most outdated, old-school professor thought to teach in a format or with texts that ignored a multicultural nation, or the conditions of oppression and domination. Here the texts that April, Alison and George used in their courses were assumed to be significant contributions to any canon, not radical interventions in the curriculum. Having traveled north two states and into institutions with very different clientele and leadership, I was suddenly in the middle of the political spectrum rather than unspeakably left, as I had come to think of myself at IWU. These conditions allowed me to pursue my questions and scholarly concerns with more ease and allowed me to push the limits of my inquiries. Along with the many benefits of a feminist friendly learning environment, it’s important to note that at times I felt less inspired. Conducting feminist research without a fight wasn’t quite the same thrill as it had been in a more toxic setting. Over time I’ve come to think of this experience as somewhat representative of feminists from my age and class group—third generation—that at some point in our own training and eventual move into positions of leadership we find ourselves in the privileged position of taking feminism for granted. Unlike the experience of the generations of feminists who have come before us, not everything requires a good fight. There are spaces that are safe for us to speak our minds, institutions where the issues addressed under the rubric of women’s studies are not foreign or marginalized but included across the curriculum. There are, indeed, places where the “old school” which I characterize as parlaying a dominant male WASP version of the past and present really seems to be antiquated, on its way out and losing power. We encounter these feminist friendly places along the way, which is not to say that we don’t have to fight for our convictions and for the right to define ourselves in opposition to cultural stereotypes and gender trappings, or that we get to pursue our careers and interests uncontested; but not every step of our experience as feminist scholars is fraught with challenge, as might be said of the P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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generation of women who trained us, and certainly of ﬁrst generation feminists in the academy. One of the key differences at the University of Minnesota was a strong feminist cohort within the faculty that enabled me to choose among feminist scholars who could support my work. There was a feminist presence that criss-crossed the academy. The range of options available to me at this level is one of the particular advantages of third generation feminists. There are moments at the University of Minnesota when the informal networks of feminist scholars across generations combine with ofﬁcial, institutionalized feminist debates, publications, talks and courses to offer a vision of what it can feel like to work in an academy where feminism is appropriately taken for granted.

Hokulani’s Story

I have to backtrack a little bit to describe how I came to be traveling up the Mississippi River to Minneapolis. I began the arduous task of applying to Ph.D. programs in the fall of 1996. After earning a master’s degree I stayed in Memphis an additional year teaching in the Department of Sociology. In my search for programs, I found out what a privileged and sheltered education I had received thus far. After leaving Utah and Memphis I was warped. My understanding of the field of sociology looked far more diverse and critical than it really was. I began my search by looking for sociology programs that focused on qualitative research methods, specifically those that had faculty who did ethnography, as well as programs that were feminist friendly and whose courses and faculty reflected a commitment to the intersectionality of race, class and gender. The enormity of the task lessened rather quickly. I realized almost immediately that if I stayed in sociology I would not easily be able to replicate my experience at CROW. But I held strong to my commitment to find a Ph.D. program that would support the kind of research I wanted to do. In the end, I applied to only five programs—four in sociology and one in American studies. I surprised myself by applying to the University of Minnesota’s American studies program. I had not heard about the program—not surprising since American studies was originally founded by and continues to be dominated by historians and literary scholars—but was interested in the kinds of work the graduate students were doing and the support they gave each other. I was also intrigued to learn that the American studies students at the University of Minnesota had established an organization, MAS(S) COLOR,7 which acted as a watchdog and support group for graduate students of color. I realized that American studies at Minnesota was the kind of place I would be able to do Native Hawaiian cultural studies and that applying to this program

7MAS(S) COLOR stands for Minnesota American Studies Students of Color. P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style ﬁle version Nov 28th, 2002

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would also mean entering a landscape that had become a battlefield over the politics of race. I was not deterred by students’ stories of the political battles that had been waged; in fact, I had come to expect them. I was energized by the fact that graduate students of color organized themselves and demanded changes in the program. Having encountered and weathered many storms myself while an undergraduate, I was sympathetic to their struggle and knew that I could contribute to and further their cause. I also knew what it was like to be in a supportive environment; I knew the benefits of graduate student collaboration and faculty mentors. I began the Ph.D. program in American studies in the fall of 1997, a time of transition when the winds of change were beginning to blow. Whereas my cohort of eight had two students of color, more recent cohorts have seen an increase, reaching nearly fifty percent. The department’s commitment to diversity goes beyond student representation in admission and is reflected in the developing field of post-nationalist American studies that dominates the research of both students and faculty. The focus on a post-nationalist American studies builds on theoretical currents in the field that call for a critique of the history and legacy of United States imperialism. In addition, a post-nationalist theory calls into question the boundaries of the nation/state and calls for attention to both the local and global. My research on the construction of a uniquely Mormon Polynesian identity through migration and tourism is part of the intellectual current that brings the feminist wave I rode onto the shores of American studies at the University of Minnesota.

RIDING THE WAVE/WRITING THE WAVE

Once a wave reaches an academic shore, where does it go from there? When we return to standing on the shore, the life cycle of the wave does not end once it reaches shore. Rather, waves roll onto shore and back out again encountering another set of waves. What will become of these waves we cannot know. Similarly, as graduate students preparing to leave these shores, we can only imagine in what direction the winds or currents will take the waves we ride and write next. We three share a generational culture. Not only were we born and trained during the same decades, we each eventually found our way here, to the University of Minnesota, at the turn of the century. We have argued that our stories, taken together, speak to the insufficiency of a generational metaphor alone to explain the movement of feminism. Through our re-investigation of wave theory, we find the wave metaphor better able to speak to the varied travels and the disparate currents that have carried us here and will carry us out again, onto new academic shores as faculty members. What forces will combine to form the next wave and what obstacles will it encounter? As third wave feminists, we are just beginning to define our place in the feminist movement and the feminist academy. It remains to be seen how each of us will influence knowledge production at the particular places—geographic and institutional—in which we will work as faculty. The wave and currents at those P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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new sites will intersect with our own hopes and plans as scholars. How do we prepare to set out on the next step of the journey? Our histories foreshadow the types of waves we can expect to ride. Here, we write the feminist waves we hope to ride onto new academic shores.

Karla’s Story

When I say that I have too often taken feminism for granted, it is a particular brand of feminism that might be called white, middle-class, liberal feminism, or perhaps better labeled “complacent feminism.” Part of my ability to take feminism for granted has included my ability to “pass,” to mask and unmask myself as a feminist. More importantly, both in my early education and at IWU, my ability to stake feminist claims and make progress on gender equity issues and the spaces in which I felt safe to perform a strong femininity and be taken seriously were predicated on a willingness to stop at questions of justice along lines of gender. What has been harder, and far less taken for granted for me, is developing an intersectional feminism which pays simultaneous attention to how power is wielded through gender, race, class and sexuality. My youth and training prepared me to expect that I would be taken seriously and that my complaints regarding inequities according to gender would be heard, while my particular social position and the culture of my home blinded me to the freedoms I experienced as a white, middle-class, educated American feminist. Revealing these gaps and oversights and the blindness that accompanies privilege has at times made me feel stupid and complicit. I often felt that I had been lied to or misled when the limits of my training were revealed—when I came face to face with the questions I had not been encouraged to ask. In the last two years, I have developed a syllabus for a course I call “Working Through Whiteness.” The course description begins:

The goal of Working Through Whiteness is to take on the labor of interrogating and attack- ing racism by making whiteness visible. Racism is still one of the foremost social problems plaguing our nation. Racism is perpetuated by a system that prevents white people from honestly engaging with what it means to be white in a racist nation. This course is committed to not only looking—peering, if you will—at whiteness, but breaking down the historical advantages of whiteness and the present day costs of the “possessive investment in whiteness.” We will work together to break through the silence, fear and anxiety sur- rounding discussions of racism, and particularly of what it means to be white. The course will culminate in in-class presentations which hone our ability to see whiteness as it is expressed in popular culture, and to begin to deﬁne what it would mean to develop an antiracist identity: to simultaneously be white and work against racism. This is important work: challenging—at times intimidating—but refreshingly real. I invite you to accompany me on this journey through the white wall, and I look forward to learning from and working with you. My syllabus is designed with the culture of my home in mind; this course is still necessary for much of the student body at the University of Minnesota in a P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style ﬁle version Nov 28th, 2002

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way that it might not be elsewhere. I feel that it is my particular responsibility— considering my own legacy of blindness and privilege—to help usher students through the process of passing through their own privilege, to help them avoid being paralyzed by guilt when they encounter the silences and limitations that accompany their own position. This work of moving through whiteness, because it has been my own struggle, galvanizes me as a teacher. Part of my “good fight” is to take the complacent feminism that empowered me and to complicate it early on, to teach the contradictions of culture, to reveal the intricacies of experience as crosscut by privilege and oppression along more than simply gender lines. I offer Working Through Whiteness hopeful that making the work of dis- mantling racism overt will help students earlier in their journeys, that, as with feminism, change will be facilitated by a group of students who encounter models of moving through whiteness earlier than I did. Just as I have benefited from the official and unofficial mentoring of second wave feminists, I hope my students can pick up where my early work leaves off: at the challenge of making feminism attentive to injustice along all lines of privilege, not simply gender. The work we do today toward a more nuanced, informed, intersectional, transnational feminism is also an even blend of being demanding, exhausting and exhilarating, both in our private struggles to engage what we are positioned to see and know and the work we do in our classrooms to assist our students in similar intellectual journeys.

Hokulani’s Story

The trend in American studies at the University Minnesota toward a post- nationalist framework is similar to a current bringing a new intellectual tradition to the program. As the flow of water and the flow of ideas pass in and out depending on the winds and currents, the people and ideas, so do the boundaries of American studies. In my own research I have moved from the land based metaphors developed by Chicana feminists such as Gloria Anzaldua (1987) toward water metaphors, such as waves and currents. My examination of the imperial relationship between the United States and Hawai’i through the lens of tourism and cultural preservation efforts by the Mormon Church recognizes that processes of racialization cannot be limited to nation/state boundaries. To study the relationship between travel and tourism between the United States and Hawai’i a new model for boundaries and borders is needed. As exciting and transformative as the work in Chicana/o studies is, one limitation of borderlands discourse is that it is a land based metaphor. The notion of borderlands does not travel as well beyond the continental boundaries of the Americas. Despite the feminist friendly and ethnic studies centered focus of American studies at Minnesota, I was recently reminded that we must continue to be on the lookout for gatekeepers. I was surprised to find my work blocked at the borders of the national American Studies Association. I had come to believe that the national association was a place where feminist and ethnic studies scholars had found an P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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intellectual/institutional home (Washington 1998). I was excited by the conference theme and by the diversity of panels and presentations. I did not expect to have my access blocked, nor did I expect to be confronted by a border patrol. Although I had been nurtured in supportive departments, as an interdisciplinary feminist and anti-racist scholar I was warned that I could expect to encounter the coast guard patrolling the academic sea. What surprised me was that the border patrol in American studies at the national level did not object to my feminist critique or my focus on Hawaiian cultural preservation at a tourist site, but to the fact that I study the intersectionality of gender, Hawaiian culture and the Mormon Church. My dissertation “Polynesian Pioneers: 20th Century Racial Formations and Migration from Hawai’i to Utah” looks at the role the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints plays in the experiences of Polynesian saints as they migrate from Hawai’i to Utah. I had planned to use the oral histories I collected earlier that year to look at the intersection of work, religion and race through the stories told by former Polynesian workers at a tourist attraction. A salient feature of these workers’ ethnic identities is their membership in the LDS church. In order to talk about the racial formations that happen at this tourist site I also have to contend with how religion informs this process. Imagine my surprise when I was informed by a program committee member that my paper did not get accepted in part because there were other committee members who were suspicious that I would turn my presentation into an opportunity to proselytize for the Church. There were also other more pragmatic reasons why the paper was not accepted which had to do with fit. My paper crosses the boundaries of so many fields—Native studies, work, religion and tourism—that they were hard-pressed to find a place for it. I tell this story to illustrate how I have been lulled into a false sense of security. The programs where I have received my training have been supportive of me. I still harbor the belief that there is a sociology program out there that will want someone like me: a scholar of color who does intersectionality as well as interdisciplinary research, and who has a commitment to feminist and anti-racist pedagogy. The training I received at Utah, Memphis and now in Minnesota has prepared me well to navigate the sometimes turbulent waters of academe. This story also illustrates how third wave feminists, like myself, set sail from these early ports of call but set off in new directions. My attention to the intersections of race, gender, religion and nation on the currents of post-nationalist American studies carried my craft into a treacherous harbor of the national association. My research topic also brings me full circle. As I mentioned earlier, when I came out as a feminist I was carried away by second wave theories and methods, taking me further from my family of origin. In wave theory, water particles oscillate as the energy that waves generate carry them along but ultimately return them very nearly to their original position. Currents, on the other hand, direct the flows and movement of water itself. One of the greatest advantages I have experienced as a third wave feminist has come from the feminist waves and intellectual currents that inform my dissertation topic and that simultaneously return me “very nearly” to my “original position”—I came home. P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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Wendy’s Story

I have returned to sociology, to complete my Ph.D., largely because Jennifer Pierce convinced me that I would be able to create my own space to do feminist, critical race scholarship within the discipline of sociology. Yet my return has not been as optimistic as the homecomings of Karla and Hokulani. I remain an outsider in the Department of Sociology. Jennifer moved her tenure line to American studies because of the nasty battle she fought for tenure and the harassment she experienced in the process. My dissertation chair, Rose Brewer, who fought a tenure battle of her own in sociology years before, had moved her tenure line to Afro-American studies even before I entered the sociology department. Despite my status as an outsider in the Department of Sociology, I remain determined to ﬁnd an academic space for my work. Critical race theorist Derrick Bell says,

Every day, in countless ways, people endure without response the affronts we all encounter. Tolerance may be a prerequisite for life in civilized society, but those who make it a rule to let the small indignities pass without complaint can become so conditioned to remaining silent that they will find themselves unable to fight the more serious battles. Far from insignificant, it is the willingness to take on the small challenges of daily life that prepares one to take a stand when people’s basic rights are threatened (1994, p. 151). The experiences I have had in academia may or may not be perceived as small indignities, but I have been unwilling to remain silent about the pain they have caused me and the way in which being an outsider in the academy has been a constant struggle. Through my experience in academia, I have found and developed my own voice, a voice to challenge the normative “realities” of the academy, which are raced, classed and gendered. As Audre Lorde suggests, all women have anger, and if we channel our anger we can use it to point out the exclusions of power, to challenge the power structure as it exists. She says, “I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts” (1984, p. 130). My homecoming and my identity as a feminist is about channeling anger, so that anger does not paralyze me, but helps to push me along on my journey and continues to give me the voice to name the causes of my anger.

GENERATING THE NEXT WAVE

Each water particle ...returns very nearly to its original position. Rachel L. Carson 1989, p. 114 In this article we have brought together our personal narratives to demonstrate how feminist waves and intellectual currents interact to produce three different third generation feminists. The stories we tell of our ﬁrst encounters with feminism and the ride on which these feminist waves have taken us also serve to illustrate P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style ﬁle version Nov 28th, 2002

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various examples of the life cycle of third wave feminists. Movement through time and space are key elements of wave theory, as we have emphasized. Although the stories we tell resemble a travel narrative of both physical and intellectual journeys through feminist waters, the distance we travel is relative. Our personal narratives demonstrate that although we are all third wave feminists, our individual trajectories have been assembled from varied feminist legacies producing three distinct third wave feminists. In conclusion we return to the question with which Hokulani sparked this joint essay: Where will the next wave begin? As our stories suggest, multiple generative forces interact to form waves. Once formed, waves hit the shore unevenly. In the near future, each of us will head out, riding the speciﬁc currents of our third wave feminism, but today, as we gather in this shared institutional space, we reﬂect on the movement of the water particles that make up a wave. The oscillating movement of the wave carries water particles forward but not necessarily along the journey with it. Each water particle follows a unique path initiated by the wave that returns it “very nearly to its original position”—home.

Hokulani’s Story

In previous trips to La’ie, before I began traveling to Hawai’i to do research for my dissertation, this place of my birth felt foreign. I knew I wasn’t supposed to feel this way. When I was twenty-four years old I went with my family to Hawai’i. It was the first time I had been “home”—I was raised to call Hawai’i “home” even though it did not feel like it—since our small family moved to Utah in 1973 when I was three years old. By 1994 the family was no longer small. Keawe, Mapuana, Maui and Kemalia were born on the continent and joined the three of us, Keala- Jean, me and Kenikenihia, who were born in Hawai’i. Keala-Jean’s husband and two children were also on this momentous family vacation. Despite being with my entire family in the town where I was born, I did not feel at home. As we toured the town mom and dad showed us the houses where our grandparents lived, the park where a house we once lived in had stood, and the beach that mom used to take Keala-Jean and me to when we were babies. Despite this nostalgic tour, there was nothing familiar about this place. I am now thirty-two years old. During the winter of 2002, I spent seven weeks, Monday through Friday, reading the oral histories of La’ie community members and former Polynesian Cultural Center workers archived in special collections at Brigham Young University, Hawai’i. On days when I left the library early I could hear the canoe pageant underway at the adjacent Polynesian Cultural Center. During this visit I stayed with an aunt who lived just off campus in faculty housing. Some days when I finished with my research I would feel restless and had to walk. I toured the town, following an imagined map taken from the stories I read in the archives. This was a different kind of nostalgic tour. Naniloa Loop, the road that I take to get from auntie’s house to Hukilau Beach, where I would go to read, used P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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to be the railroad line that took workers to the sugar plantation in Kahuku. Puuahi Street, the shortcut that I take to get to the grocery store, was once the only road into the village. Trees have been planted at the end of the road; now it is a dead end. The main entrance to La’ie has been moved to Hale Laa Boulevard, which leads to the LDS Temple. All of the house lots along Iosepa Street were set aside for those families who returned in 1917 to La’ie from Iosepa, Utah. The paved roads that I walked down were no longer nameless. The familiarity I feel now comes from these stories of a time long past but still living in the words stored in the archives. Before there was the college there were watermelon patches. Before there was the Polynesian Cultural Center there were taro patches. Before there was a park that housed a double hull canoe there was a house, my house. La’ie is now home. I feel the spirit of my ancestors when I walk those streets. Their stories of the train, of visions above watermelon patches, of harvesting taro, of ﬁshing in the sea, of dancing at the cultural hall, of the souvenir stands along the road, of building the temple, the college and the Center are carried on the wind. I hear their voices whispering to me, reminding me to listen. If I listen I’ll learn. So I listen. I listen for their voices to call me home again.

Wendy’s Story

My brother Georgie came to join our family after his aunt Mae died. I’m not sure if he adopted us or we adopted him, but at that time we became sister and brother. He was a Blood, and everyone else in the neighborhood was a Crip. But because we lived in St. Paul, not Los Angeles, he made it to adulthood alive, and was only stabbed twice. One weekend in August of the summer after my first year in college, we drove with his girlfriend to a cabin on the North Shore of Lake Superior. That weekend he and I sat on the rocks, high above the edge of the lake, listening to Lalah Hathaway sing “Baby, baby don’t cry...It’s better to dry your eyes...” and Georgie said to me, “How come white people get all the peaceful places?” Then he told me he wished he hadn’t always had to live surrounded by chaos. I feel that way about academia. White people get all the peaceful places. The space that is normative, positivistic, objective and neutral is white space. When I enter the academy with a feminist, critical race perspective I live surrounded by chaos—constantly challenged, mediated, even disliked and alienated. On first reading, my story seems to be all about race, because gender is below the surface. I question authority, I speak up when not invited to, I challenge power—always standing ready to kick ass to defend my position. These are not the things that a woman should do—especially a white woman. And when I walk into a space, people in that space see me as white and as a woman, and as a result they have particular expectations about what my perspectives will be and how I will behave. So it is generally not long before I have created chaos. But I think that P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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there is an important relationship between chaos and storm centers, so I hold out hope that the chaos I create will be part of a larger project to make the academy a peaceful and inspirational place for all anti-racist, feminist scholars. In the meantime, I must remember to tell Georgie that in my experience in the academy, it is white men who get all the peaceful places.

Karla’s Story

My generation is one of feminism(s), which attempts to honor lived experience in all its multiplicity, contradiction and intersection. Unlike other feminist travel tales, mine involves little geographical movement. Instead, against the backdrop of Minnesota’s green and glimmering lakes, I have mainly traveled in my thinking. Mine is a story of passing through seasons of intellectual growth from beneath the trees lining the Mississippi River to the prairies of Illinois, from the lazy green of suburbs to the city—leaving home only to return again, changed. I use “home” in keeping with bell hooks’ notion that “home is that place which enables and promotes varied and ever changing perspectives, a place where one discovers new ways of seeing reality, frontiers of difference” (1994, p. 99). In this way, “home” does not speak to an idealized, sanitized, safe haven from the outside world but rather a space from which one can better perceive where one is in relation to others, to imagine a future and to percolate change. When I think about the currents of thought in the academy, I think about my cohort, an intense and collaborative group of eight individuals who began graduate school with me in 1998. The people with whom we enter and move through graduate training have a profound influence on how we understand our place in our discipline, in recent intellectual debates, and in the academy as a whole. We have supported each other intently but easily, pushing each other without a tendency to compete mercilessly. We have made it through the rigors of graduate training together by honoring a need for fun and by treating each other as friends and equals, not competitors, and our individual visions have been expanded by that camaraderie. When I think of we eight as one slice of a larger contingent of scholars trained in the early nineties, I feel invigorated by our potential to change not only our fields but the academy itself, the way that knowledge is conferred, the nature of collaboration and the balance between teaching, learning and scholarship. Almost finished with our training, our time of thinking together in the same space is almost over, yet the traces of the questions we have been exposed to or formed together travel with us, in our imaginations. As such, my cohort is engrained in me and in my particular approach to the work of being a professor and establishing another intellectual home. I know from graduates of other programs that my experience is not the norm, and the cumulative effect of feeling at home in my discipline, my institution, my department, my chosen committee and my cohort has provided and will continue P1: GMX Qualitative Sociology [quso] ph203-quas-466798 May 15, 2003 19:10 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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to provide me with confidence and the desire and impetus to give back, to create similar conditions for my own students. I am protected by the work of waves of scholars who precede me, individuals like my advisor, Jennifer Pierce, who works to insure that we arrive in our profession armed with the tools necessary for success and a careful combination of confidence and healthy skepticism for the potential perils of academe. I hope that, as in my childhood, our entry into the academy will feel unencumbered, that I will once again feel that women, and specifically feminists, are recognized and perhaps—someday—welcomed into the academy. While my hope for the future is to be part of a push by third generation feminists to build a feminist academy, my plan in the meantime is to perpetuate these pockets of hope, promise and security for my students in my classroom, during my office hours, and within the sphere of my influence. I do this work based on a conviction that as feminisms transform and evolve, these pockets of giving back and working forward will join once again to form a feminism that is connected but not united, committed to pursuing feminist concerns that leave space for the multiplicities, contradictions and fluidity of culture and experience. My conviction is not ahistorical, because my arrival here at this desk writing this essay, experiencing the power to tell my story with no holds barred, is carried on the backs of three generations of feminists who have believed that the work they did made a difference—and it has for me and my own generation of feminist scholars. And so the wave continues.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to acknowledge the support and counsel of our dissertation group, Piercing Insights, for comments on earlier drafts, and Robert Zussman for his excellent feedback on this article. All three of us are deeply indebted to Jennifer Pierce for her remarkable mentoring, her friendship and, speciﬁcally, her feedback on this piece. Hokulani: I would like to thank Satina Smith, a dear friend, who helped me ﬁnd the path I am on and who gave me critical feedback on more recent drafts. Wendy: I would like to thank Doc Bailey and my mom for putting me on the road to critical thinking and helping me, once again, to tell my story here. Karla: I would like to thank my grandmother, mom and sister, my own three generations of feminists who inspire me, and Danielle Sadler, my dearest friend, who always helps me ride the wave.

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