Feminist discourse across the waves: A rhetorical criticism of first, second and third wave women's discourse.

摘要

The goal of this research is to closely examine the rhetoric of landmark feminist writers from three distinct, historical movements that culminate in the divide between Western Feminism and a global movement that allows for the unity of women from any race, culture, or social class. The works criticized in this analysis come from First Wave feminism's foundational writers Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woof; Second Wave feminist writers Gloria Steinem, Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker, and from Third Wave feminism as a cyber-discourse, with attention to Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Kristen Rowe-Finkbeiner and Ariel Levy. The lens I view these works through comes from landmark French feminists Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray, providing a theory of existentialism, linguistic construction and thus, social construction to describes the box in which the writers of each feminist wave function. By deconstructing each of the rhetorical works using the lens of the French feminists, my goal is to recognize and deconstruct the foundations of Wollstonecraft and Woolfe as inherently male and thus, proscribing an essentialism to women that does not speak for women of other races, cultures or social classes but in fact, exoticizes these women as "other."