Girlfight the Power: Teaching Contemporary Feminism and Pop Culture

by Alyson Bardsley

Some are ready to declare the third wave has crested (some claim it was never much more than a little swell). I'm not sure. What follows is an account of teaching a course entitled "Grrl Power and Beyond: Third Wave Feminism and Contemporary Popular Culture," in the interdisciplinary American Studies Program at my college. I taught this class at the invitation/request of my colleague Catherine Lavender, the director of our American Studies program, who'd asked me for years to teach a "riot grrl" course. As a fan of punk in the early 1980s and a more distant admirer of the Riot Grrl phenomenon in the 1990s I was happy to do so. However, while researching the course I saw the need to expand its scope to include other aspects of "third wave" feminism. I assumed "third wave" would be a useful and appealing category for my students, both to help them see themselves in relationship to feminism and as a way into a set of pop cultural artifacts, as it generally designates the feminism of women born after the 1960s who take some aspects of second wave feminism for granted and critique other aspects (more on this below). I also assumed that third wave would be essentially neutral for me, that I would consider it from a distance, as I had Riot Grrl music and culture, a fan but not a member. The results were rather more complex. My students' varied backgrounds and attitudes, and what I discovered was my own under-interrogated relationship to feminism, raised a lot of questions for me.