Third Wave Feminism's Unhappy Marriage of Poststructuralism and Intersectionality Theory

• Main Author: Susan Archer Mann
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth 2013-06-01
• Series: Journal of Feminist Scholarship
• Subjects: third-wave feminism; feminist theory; feminist epistemology
• Online Access: http://www.jfsonline.org/issue4/articles/mann/

This article first traces the history of unhappy marriages of disparate theoretical perspectives in US feminism. In recent decades, US third-wave authors have arranged their own unhappy marriage in that their major publications reflect an attempt to wed poststructuralism with intersectionality theory. Although the standpoint epistemology of intersectionality theory shares some common ground with the epistemology of poststructuralism, their epistemological assumptions conflict on a number of important dimensions. This contested terrain has generated serious debates within the third wave and between second- and thirdwave feminists. The form, content, and political implications of their "unhappy marriage" are the subject of this article.