Culture wars can be described as two halves of the same whole attempting to live out their differences harmoniously, but with such differences of a complex subject such as feminism, there is often much in-fighting and tumultuous division. These wars are competitions so to speak between the partially privileged white women of the second wave and the frequently excluded women of color of the third wave, who face a wholly different set of setbacks and discrimination based on their varying sexual orientations, identifications, and cultures.
On page 10 of “Third Wave Agenda”, Heywood goes on to include a quote from historian David Roediger, “ Whiteness describes, from Little Big Horn to Simi Valley, not a culture but precisely the absence of culture. It is the empty and there-fore terrifying attempt to build an identity based on what one isn’t and on whom one can hold back”. White feminism has often been criticized as a misrepresentation of conflicting agendas of privilege and struggle.
These culture wars are a large part of feminism because they define the direction and progress of the movement. If feminists don’t focus on the grander scheme of things, this divisive mentality will cost them all they have already fought for. In modern times, we can already see how this has affected how other people view feminism and feminists. It may be a hard pill to swallow, but many people view and wrongfully portray feminism as a man-hating movement. This confusion of what feminism is leads people to believe the misconceptions, preventing those who are ready for the much-needed change to move forward.
*The reason I make the distinction of white women being partially privileged is the mere fact that although they face women-centered discrimination, they’re living in a white-dominated society where anything that is ethnic or cultural is shot down and appropriated.*
