To try to shore up its sense of community without losing individual focus, the third wave of US feminism often falls into the trap of overhyping the experiences of individual women and the worth of women's history, defending these methods at all costs even when other disciplines suggest that statistics might be more useful in the grand scheme of things. Though quantitative areas and styles of narrative-based activist research are gaining in popularity – an obvious example is the “It Gets Better” video project begun by Dan Savage – they remain underrepresented across most fields, leading to the need for “standard” feminist methods textbooks like Shulamit Reinharz’s Feminist Methods in Social Research[1] and Liesbet van Zoonen’s Feminist Media Studies.[2] Though these methods do center the individual as a key part of an argument, they can depoliticize arguments by abstracting too much information; worse, because the great strength of these methods is their emotional appeal, some researchers or individuals co-opt the social justice movement the methods are designed to serve as a place for personal advancement or attention.

The introductions to many books on the third wave, including Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism, seek to popularize and valorize qualitative methods, particularly those methods which highlight, analyze or seek to extract a personal narrative. By doing this, researchers seek to challenge "whiteness," or the "promise of whiteness": the promise of individual distinction, merit, privilege and rewards, what lies down the path of quantification and competition:

[T]hat oh-so-American ideology has been ingrained into our deepest senses of ourselves, an ironic legacy of the second wave feminist and civil rights struggles that fought for equal access to the opportunities of white men. Despite our knowing better, despite our knowing its emptiness, the ideology of individualism is still a major motivating force in many third wave lives.[3]

Similarly, Dan Savage posted a video of himself explaining how, in his own life, his exposure to homophobia had decreased and his tolerance had increased; by speaking this way, Savage hoped to prevent LGBT teenagers from committing suicide, which they are four times as likely as straight teens to attempt.[4]

Savage had found a way for the latest generation’s famous self-obsession to be turned to a good cause: through the power of personal narrative, LGBT teenagers could be reassured that all was not at an end. And the early videos’ emotional impact and pull was both remarkable and quantifiable: Savage and his partner’s video, only one of tens of thousands of submissions, received well over a million views by the time this paper was written.[5] The videos had an emotional draw that many viewers found compelling, if depressing; even though the project was titled “It Gets Better,” many of the contributors retold tragic histories as a way of cementing identification with bashed LGBT teens. And, rather than giving them undiluted hope in the form of stories purely about how it gets better, video contributors must have been aware on some level of what Brian Massumi discussed when he spoke about the difference between “pleasantness” and “happiness” and the importance of intensity.[6] Hearing about others’ travails was pleasant, for LGBT teens and for relatively disinterested viewers, because it awoke intense emotion; the stories pushed listeners through the choking fear they shared with the speaker and into a promised land of hope and narrative closure. But the appeal of the personal story is a dangerous one: though at first the project sought out videos from a few gay celebrities and many average gay people, contributions began to pour in from celebrities – including, after a while, many straight celebrities, including President Obama[7] and Justin Bieber.[8] The project began to be criticized as a way for people to use a platform designed for social justice as a venue for self-promotion, a way to hijack a situation many people expected to be emotionally evocative and use it to tie those emotions to a brand or name.

Many people over the years have accused feminists of something similar. Could the fear of losing distinction, noted by Third Wave Agenda as the effects of capitalist and white-supremacist promises to the upper classes, explained by Teresa Brennan as the human desire for “living attention,”[9] possibly contribute to the wealth of navel-gazing appearing in NWSA Journal and other feminist publications, both inside and outside of the academy? Third Wave Agenda appears to answer the question:

[O]ur struggles to negotiate individualism's powerful seductions and betrayals provide the third wave with an odd form of common ground, linking us across our many differences. So many of us are panicked about our futures and places, or lack thereof, in the world… The specter of anonymity, linked as it is with the threat of un- and underemployment for all workers, is one of our generation's biggest fears.

In other words, the struggle to kick the habit of self-centeredness and is complicated by our generation’s withdrawal symptoms. Heywood and Drake continue to quote David Wild in Rolling Stone, who speaks of The Real World as a vehicle for the narcissistic terrors of young people allergic to anonymity. Wild's "ghetto of obscurity" creates a desperate need to rise above, to distinguish oneself, to appear on reality TV, to post an “It gets Better” video even if you don’t care that much or don’t have anything to say – to be recognized as special. (Maybe even to publish?) And as Teresa Brennan suggests, attention is actually what gives affect its force – and affect is a two-way street. Authors and video bloggers are energized, and their pathos is energized, when they are paid attention; they crave and begin to seek that attention.[10]

Instead of linking this generational panic to the emergence of life writing and phenomenology as mainstays of feminist scholarship or the rise in pop value of social justice programs, Third Wave Agenda describes the panic as the cause of "backlash against affirmative action programs, the tightening of border security and anti-immigration laws, and the legislation ending welfare as we know it." Fear of anonymity and loss of privilege drive Republicans, those people across the aisle desperately interested in their own exclusivity. Heywood and Drake come dangerously close to the truth when they admit that "this is a contradiction that feminism's third wave has to face: an often conscious knowledge of the ways in which we are compelled and constructed by the very things that undermine us." If emotional states can be transferred as affects, it would stand to reason that one of the free-floating dissatisfactions of the 20^th century is the fear of anonymity, and according to Brennan, it should affect feminists as well – certain feminists might have different resistances to affect, but they should not be able to think of themselves as apart. But according to Third Wave Agenda, it’s apparently not a problem that is tied to the narrative practices in use by feminists – it's just an ephemeral, floating problem, theoretically responsible for our mysterious continued inability to pluralize properly or play well with women of color.

In fact, this problem is almost a blessing: this "isn't just Generation X whining, but rather, a form of spiritual sickness that most compels generationally third wave men and women to activism and that most works as a galvanizing force for social change," implying that the very guilt or emotions inherent in an “It Gets Better” video spur average people to action – the presence of the video is a kind of proof that they possess the emotional charge to follow through with more substantive action. Heywood and Drake support this by leaping right past bell hooks' point in this quote from “Postmodern Blackness”:

The overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance. Radical postmodernism calls attention to those shared sensibilities which cross the boundaries of class, gender, race, etc., that could be fertile ground for the construction of empathy—ties that would promote recognition of common commitments, and serve as a basis for solidarity and coalition.[11]

Bell hooks thinks this overriding sense of despair can be an incredible basis for solidarity and coalition. She does not think of it as a magic bullet that will spontaneously produce coalition-based activism, and indeed recognizes the white need to reassert community as emblematic of a people who are not especially concerned with "ways to end exploitation and oppression in the context of their lives”; she probably wouldn’t think much of Dan Savage.

But Third Wave Agenda takes the point there:

[I]t may be that the longing for community that is characteristic of some white feminists will serve as a motivation to form coalitions that seek to "end exploitation and oppression" affecting lives other than just their own. In addition, the concept of "equal rights"… because most young Americans internalize it naively, can lead to coalition.

Falling right into that trap of internalizing naïve coalition-building, Heywood and Drake do return to the problematic forces shaping white women's experience with feminism, to admit that

paths to a coalition-based feminist consciousness have often been based in ignorance, contradiction, and confusion. In some fundamental ways many of us still don't "get it." Striving for the success and equality with white men that second wave feminism made possible, white women in particular often became so focused on individual achievement and success that we became wholehearted supporters of the very structures we most wanted to contest.

They even extend the characterization to men and women of color who have gained access to traditionally white privileges, like higher education and the upper-middle class. But they make sure to limit the problem of individualism (and hence the problem of naïve coalition-building) to their pre-feminist lives, just as anyone producing an “It Gets Better” video would likely argue that this isn’t about them, it’s about the cause. In fact, the poison of individualism was what woke Heywood and Drake up to the need for feminist coalition:

In short, many of us have been clueless, swallowing status quo gambits whole, not choking until we find they have eaten us up from the inside--our hearts, livers, stomachs, lungs--until we can't feel or eat or breathe. We once could eat and breathe, and because we could, others couldn't. Third wavers know in theory that, as hooks wrote in 1984, "[B]roader perspectives can only emerge as a whole, and global revolutionary politics." But we don't always know how to accomplish this.

It seems reasonable that this failure to emerge as a whole, to engage in global revolutionary politics, could be due to the tendency of whiteness and a collective generational urge to distinguish individuals – that confluence could lead the feminist third wave to privilege methods like life writing above broader quantitative study, and could certainly be part of the reason that more than 10,000 “It Gets Better” videos have been posted but suicide by gay teenagers has not been seen to decrease. Since it can’t be the use value of these methods, a pathological need for individual distinction could certainly explain why many of us don’t “get it,” why we “don’t know how to accomplish” anything.

But at this point in its argument, Third Wave Agenda veers away to talk about the second wave and why third wave feminists have derided its focus on sisterhood and coalition, instead of interrogating their own resulting “coalition“ “politics.” Rejecting these as previously useful but too "frilly” for the modern era, Heywood and Drake name US third world feminism as the feminism that "modeled a language and a politics of hybridity that can account for our lives at the century's turn." US third world feminism taught us how to see lives marked by intersectionality and contradiction, in large part because early third wave work was closely focused on critiquing the white second wave, which denied US third world lives and their concerns.[12]

Here, a distinctive colonizing perspective emerges that Heywood and Drake overlook. Yes, US third world work brought up intersectional narratives and personal experience because, for all that the second wave was about sisterhood and consciousness-raising, it very definitely sidelined the experiences of women of color to argue for an "essential" feminine experience. At that time, personal narrative was absolutely necessary to Gloria Anzaldúa and other early third wavers of color because the second wave was using a whitewashed master narrative. The only way for these writers of color to prove that the white experience wasn’t an essential one was to turn the paradigm on its head by means of experiential data, not inference: here is a brown life, a queer life, a disabled life, an intersectional life. See how different the world looks for these specific women? This is why the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and other experience-based qualitative researchers has been relevant, powerful and useful: no one else told the story Anzaldúa was telling.

Unfortunately, no one could say that about a single essay in Third Wave Agenda, though the authors "hope that in these pages we have begun—provisionally, slowly, making some dumb mistakes—to pay our debts to those women whose work has sometimes literally saved lives." And one could probably extend the characterization to the “It Gets Better” videos. I'll buy that Anzaldúa's and hooks' work or some of the earliest videos saved lives; I'll even buy that narrative can lead to empathy, which could form a good basis for activist work. But the authors of Third Wave Agenda do not plan on telling me how that shift came about, and the “It Gets Better” authors of recent weeks seem convinced that they are contributing just by putting up the message, not by its receipt; feminists ascribe this process to a kind of magic, titling their section on third wave writing "Keeping the Faith." Instead of working from the stories told by their predecessors, third wave feminists seek to reproduce those acts of story-telling, empowerment, and above all recognition for themselves because of the common faith that “writing itself can be transformative,” because, as Manifesta notes:

[T]estimony is where feminism starts. Historically, women’s personal stories have been the evidence of where the movement needs to go politically and, furthermore, that there is a need to move forward… The media and even some feminists fail to apprehend this first step when they criticize… the Third Wave propensity to explore women’s personal stories in essays and memoirs. Recent Third Wave anthologies… are the foundation of the personal ethics upon which a women’s movement will be built. The maligned memoir—which when written by a woman is often referred to as a “confessional”—is more than a diary entry that has been typeset. Memoirs… are all introducing Third wave women’s experiences into the cultural atmosphere. (Baumgardner & Richards, 20)

Unfortunately for contributors to academic feminist writing outlets like the NWSA Journal, mainstream feminist scholarship doesn't emerge into a cultural atmosphere in need of the experiences of third wave women; and though gay teens do need to hear the stories of those who’ve been where they are, Justin Bieber isn’t likely to tell the right story. This rhetorical situation is prescribing a response, but it’s also prescribing a respondent.[13] And instead of providing new narratives of the sort provided by hooks and Anzaldúa, NWSA Journal is so loaded down with the experiences of middle-class assistant professors that the stories shouldn’t surprise or inform anyone who actually reads the journal. These narratives almost universally fail to add to the powerful story that hooks and Anzaldúa told, because these are not hidden narratives, just as Justin Bieber’s isn’t a hidden narrative about queer youth (unless there’s something he’s not ready to tell us).

In taking on the duty of narrating, the Manifesta and Third Wave Agenda anthologists and the “It Gets Better” video bloggers are missing the biggest point of the life writing that inspired them: when Gloria Anzaldúa was doing it, it was dangerous and revolutionary; it was rare; it incited action; it was action. Authors who seek solely to recognize the experiences of some or even all people have allowed the work of archiving narrative to eclipse the purpose of storytelling within the context of feminist action or queer activism in the public sphere: these stories are meant to be inspiring us to do activist work – to cross over into public media, to be taken up by people who would not necessarily describe themselves as radical, to stay alive. Narratives are tools, not the finished product of consciousness-raising activities, and while Anzaldúa’s story was the hammer to the second wave nail, a white neoliberal associate professor’s story in disguise as activist research is a square peg in a round hole, if that hole is defined as any sort of traditional disciplinary scholarship – the type which helps activists by telling them things like where the wage gap is, how many women experience sexual violence, or how local practices of resistance can be adapted or enriched by Western helpers. There are stunningly few facts or policy recommendations more specific than “honor local custom” or “be welcoming” to be found in third wave feminist books like Third Wave Agenda or Manifesta, just as the straight contributors to “It Gets Better” rarely have anything better to say than “be strong.” “Be strong” means less when it comes from someone who has never had to use that strength; even the emotional identification of shared suffering is broken, leaving the viewer and author totally dissociated and a bit annoyed with each other.

Perhaps, in our haste to embrace a new strategy of "being feminist" or “living activism,” we embraced a little less than we thought, taking the newness but leaving the radicalism. It’s true that disability studies (including the new-minted fat embodiment studies), women of color studies, queer and transgendered studies, and politics of various locations and regions have all made inroads into women's studies, most visibly through articles which rise from a position of adversity, asking the establishment why it has ignored this or that group. And, indeed, this is some of the most important work women's studies does – women's studies itself is a discipline that arose in the last fifty years, had to fight tooth and nail for recognition, and is still in danger of slipping into the bottomless pit of humanities miscellany. But is has not, in general, tried to cross back over out into the public media – feminist professors are not public experts in the way professors of political science often are. Where, for example, are the feminists commenting on gendered news items on CNN or Fox? (Yes, there are Republican feminists, and the fact that we don’t see them in Third Wave Agenda should be troubling.) Feminists who write books like Third Wave Agenda and Manifesta and blog about The Vampire Diaries, don’t see much crossover success; most people take little notice of online hubs like Jezebel, Feministe, Feministing or girl-power.org until they erupt into a battle with better-known entities,[14] after which they fade back into obscurity. Feminist messages in third wave cultures are stuck in a feedback loop.

And what was the last thing you heard about the “It Gets Better” project since Justin Bieber added a video? While at first the story was that Dan Savage had begun a revolutionary project, the story changed to who was adding videos.[15] Bieber’s own video doesn’t actually mention LGBT people at all, though he premiered it on The Ellen Show and said he posted it in response to a “faggot”-laced verbal assault at a Canadian laser tag outing.

It isn’t that personal narratives are pointless, or that they never do anything for activism. Narrative did a whole lot for Gloria Anzaldúa’s case against the white feminists who blithely believed in a raceless sisterly solidarity in the face of all logic. And I do think that, especially in the early days of the “It Gets Better” project and based on the video responses by gay teenagers, Dan Savage’s project produced a benefit for the people affected by its message. But narrative methods can be just as intoxicating for the narrator as the listeners, and activists must remember that humans seek attention just as much, and probably more than, justice.

---

[1] Shulamit Reinharz, Feminist Methods in Social Research, ed. Lynn Davidman (New York: Oxford UP, 1992).

[2] Liesbet van Zoonen, Feminist Media Studies (Los Angeles: Sage Publishing, 2007).

[3] Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, “Introduction,” Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism, Ed. Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota UP, 1997): 1-23.

[4] NPR, “Dan Savage: For Gay Teens, Life ‘Gets Better’,” 23 Mar 2011.

[5] Dan Savage and Terry Miller, “It Gets Better: Dan and Terry,” It Gets Better Project, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IcVyvg2Qlo (21 September 2010).

[6] Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Post-Contemporary Interventions) (Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2002), 25-26.

[7] Barack Obama, “President Obama: It Gets Better,” It Gets Better Project, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geyAFbSDPVk (21 October 2010).

[8] Justin Bieber, “Justin Bieber on Ellen – bullying (it gets better),” It Gets Better Project, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUJ4oVvrcqY (23 Nov 2010).

[9] Teresa Brenna, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 33-34.

[10] Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 40.

[11] bell hooks, "Postmodern Blackness,” Colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: a reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia UP, 1994): Pages 421-27, Google Books, web, accessed 5 Feb. 2011.

[12] Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Manifesta (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000): 50-86.

[13] Lloyd Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (January 1968): 1-14.

[14] David Futrelle, “Scott Adams to Men’s Rights Activists: Don’t bother Arguing with Women; They’re Like Children,” Feministe, http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/03/24/scott-adams-to-mens-rights-activists-dont-bother-arguing-with-women-theyre-like-children/ (March 2011, accessed Apr 22 2011). Postings on Feministe, one of the oldest, best established, and most popular feminist blogs within the pop third wave circuit, receive an average of 20 or fewer comments. The cited post about Scott Adams received just over 300, and a subsequent posting about Scott Adams, also by guest blogger David Futrelle, received 199. Posts that receive more than 30 comments are almost universally links to other authors; replies become inflated through comment warfare.

[15] “Justin Bieber Makes World’s Shortest It Gets Better Video Yet,” Kevinism: Infotainment, http://www.kevinism.com/?p=3983 (30 Nov 2010).