ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes recent contributions to diversity within feminism and feminist therapy. The first approach, feminist postmodernism, emerged as a new force in feminist theory in the 1980s and has continued to be a powerful influence as well as focus of debate throughout the 1990s and the early twenty-first century. In contrast to the second-wave feminisms, which were embedded in social activism, postmodern feminism emerged from within academic disciplines and has become a method for considering the changing nature of knowledge and the limitations of that which is called knowledge. It has become a foundation for questioning existing theory and thinking about the meanings and implications of difference and diversity. As noted by Ann Cacoullos (2001), “the objects or subjects of oppression themselves are seen and acknowledged to be more diverse, such that the phenomena being investigated and theorized are far more complex than they were thirty years ago” (p. 72).
