The Pink Patriarchy Podcast

Why Carceral Feminism Gets Consent Wrong (Again)

Spoiler: If your feminism relies on police and prisons, it's not protecting us—it's punishing us. For a movement that claims to be rooted in liberation, carceral feminism sure loves a cage. Carceral feminism is the belief that the best—or only—way to address gender-based violence is through criminalization, policing, and punishment. It rose to prominence in the 1990s alongside tough-on-crime legislation and second-wave calls for legal reform. On the surface, it sounds reasonable: violence against women is bad, so we should punish the people who commit it.

First Wave Feminism: The Birth of a Movement

The term feminism entered the political landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as these long-standing struggles began to cohere into identifiable movements - particularly in Europe and the United States. Historians refer to this period as first-wave feminism, a label that is tidy in theory and messy in reality. It reflects a movement shaped by its time, its geography, and its proximity to power.

Fourth-Wave Feminism, Power, Platforms, and the Fight Over What Comes Next

Fourth-wave feminism didn’t arrive quietly. It emerged loudly, online, and mid-crisis - shaped by social media, economic instability, racial reckoning, and a growing refusal to pretend that representation alone equals justice. Emerging in the early 2010s, this wave is defined less by a single ideology than by its tools and terrain. Digital platforms became the organizing space. Hashtags became rallying cries. And long-ignored forms of harm - sexual violence, state violence, economic precarity - were suddenly impossible to look away from. If earlier waves argued over who women are, fourth-wave feminism returned to a harder question: who holds power, who is harmed by it, and how that harm is enforced. In theory, this was a correction. In practice, it’s where things get messy.

Third-Wave Feminism: Identity, Agency, and the Turn Toward the Individual

Third-wave feminism emerged in the 1990s as both a continuation of and a reaction against the second wave. By this point, many of the second wave’s gains - legal protections against discrimination, expanded access to education and employment, and public conversations about violence and reproduction - were formally in place. But it was increasingly clear that those victories had not translated into liberation for everyone. The dominant feminist narrative is still centered on white, heterosexual, middle-class women and treats race, sexuality, class, disability, and culture as side issues rather than foundational ones.

Second-Wave Feminism, When the Personal Became Political

Second-wave feminism emerged in the 1960s not because first-wave feminism had “finished the job,” but because its victories exposed how much work remained undone. Women could vote, in theory. They could own property, on paper. But in daily life, their bodies, labor, and private lives were still tightly controlled. The promise of equality stopped at the courthouse door and fell apart in kitchens, bedrooms, workplaces, and doctors’ offices.