Mean Spirits: The Politics of Contempt Between Feminist Generations

Current models for individuatton in academe exacerbate generational tensions between second and third wave feminists. Feminist pedagogues must be wary of getting caught in the “vicious circle of contempt,” where students are expected to compensate for a teacher's past narcissistic wounds, instead, we must be willing to mourn the wounds we have received at the hands of a contemptuous culture and to acknowledge same-gender attachments that are disavowed in dialectical models of subject production.