LEXICON of Feminist Debates (or Prominent THEMES in Feminist Thought)
Feminist Thought and Practice
Bodies
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Epistemologies
Essentialism/
Social
Construction/
Difference
WMST 3330
Kinser
Critiques of mind as separate from, and privileged over, the body; Men-mind/rational; Women-body/nature, men to have “dominion” over
Reproduction marks women as mysterious, taboo, dangerous
Private vs. Public sphere
Sexual differences vs. gender diffs
Women’s bodies as material objects, “to be looked at,” subject to the male gaze
Race/class mark which bodies are for adornment and leisure, which for labor and exploitation
Sexual double standard and sexual exploitation of women’s bodies; trafficking in women; control over one’s own reproductive capacities
Struggle for women’s right to control their own bodies underlies much 2W feminist activism; 2W fems analyzed advertising, porn, film, art and violation
through battering, rape, forced sterilization.
Radical and cultural feminism women’s diffs (esp. m’hood) are resources feminism that must be taken back from patriarchal control; French feminists
direct attention to “writing the body” and of writing in the “white ink” of mother’s milk
Disputes among feminists over whether protective measures based on bodily differences and childbearing was in fact good for women.
Anorexia nervosa, bulimia, body image
Subjugation and disability; Disciplining of women’s bodies through medicine, fashion, family planning policies, genital mutilation
The body not as the essential ground of women’s difference, but as the site on which gender is constructed, inscribed, reinscribed, performed
Role of technology, science in (over)determining the body, and cyborgs as a response
 Theories of knowledge and knowledge production (what is true and important, what constitutes the past. To be excluded from knowledge production is to
live a “reality” not of one’s own making
 Critiques of “partial knowledge,” and how it perpetuates hierarchy and domination
 How social location—gender, race class, sexuality, age, ability—affects knowing, and knowledge production.
 Who has epistemological privilege—margins or centers? Are margins better for knowledge production? Who gets authority as knowers?
 How are women excluded from sites of knowledge production—educ, gov, church, arts and letters [the arts and literature], professions?
 Distortions of women’s lives and “history” in male accounts
 19th C. arguments, like cultural feminist args from 70s/80s: women’s exp with nurturance and care bring specialized knowledge to public arena;
encouragement to hear women’s experience through their stories as an attempt to produce new knowledge
 2W: CR [consciousness raising] as a model of generating knowledge from women’s exp, and WS academics transform disciplines and methodologies
 Postmodern critiques of the dualisms inherent in hegemonic Western thought, seeking sources that would rupture, subvert, interrupt that thought, and free
women from it.
 Fems of color and Third World fems argue for the epistemological privilege of their marginal positions, incl Anzaldúa’s “mestiza consciousness” which
comes from inhabiting contradictory locations simultaneously; it challenges dualism, is flexible, is tolerant of ambiguity.
 “The science question in feminism,” critiques of objectivity, empiricism, positivism, which deny relevance of identity, exp, locations of knowers/known, and
which perpetuate worldview of the privileged and exclude knowledge, exp, and questions of women and other marginalized groups.
 Feminist standpoint, and Situated knowledge introduced as models of knowing, replacing the “the view from nowhere”
 Sexual difference as innate, vs. the position that “one is not born a woman” (Beauvoir, Wittig)
 Essentialism and sisterhood or a unitary female culture or voice, radical feminist claims of universal oppression of women, psych theories and importance of
genitalia and single developmental pattern; claims that “the” women’s movement could speak for all wmn, in one voice
 Social Construction; social constructionists, following Margaret Mead argue that distinctions between sex and gender are socially produced
 18th, 19th, and 20th C. women struggled with essentialism/soc construction, though these terms are 20th C. Many 19th C. women based their arguments on
essentialist views.
 20th C. feminists of color, lesbian feminists, and postcolonial feminists called for anti-essentialist feminist theory, pointing out that the subject of 2W feminism
was white, middle-class, het
 Identity politics; Some have argued for a “strategic essentialism,” a politics for organizing and resistance that is rooted in identity defined as an “active
construction,” discursively mediated
 Some have argued against sharp essentialist/social constructionist distinctions, focusing on how each implicates the other, that the subject of feminism isn’t
“Woman” but rather “the female-embodied social subject”
1
Sojourner Truth, 1851
Josephine Butler, 1871
Emma Goldman, 1910
Margaret Sanger, 1920
Mary Douglas, 1966
Kate Millett, 1969
Sherry Ortner, 1974
Hélène Cixous, 1975
Mulvey, 1975
Luce Iragaray, 1977
Donna Haraway, 1985
Plaskow, 1986
Judith Butler, 1990
Angela Davis, 1991
Susan Bordo, 1993
Anne Fausto-Sterling, 2000
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, 2001
Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792
Monique Wittig, 1978
Audre Lorde, 1979
Lugones and Spelman, 1982
Donna Haraway, 1985
Sandra Harding, 1986
Gloria Anzaldúa, 1987
Patricia Hill Collins, 1990
Evelyn Fox Keller, 1993
Uma Narayan, 1997
Saba Mahmood, 2005
Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792
Sojourner Truth, 1851
John Stuart Mill, 1870
Stella Brown, 1923
Margaret Mead, 1935
Simone de Beauvoir, 1949
Sherry Ortner, 1974
Linda Alcoff, 1988
Joan Scott, 1988
Norma Alcoff, 1990
Kimberlé Crenshaw, 1997
Rosi Braidotti, 2002
Intersections
of Race, Class,
Gender
Language
 Intersectionality: Intersections of race, class, and gender
 lives are multiply constituted; “Interlocking systems of domination,” “multiple jeopardy”
 Intersections analyses allow us to understand our “capacity as women and men to be either dominated or dominating [as] a point of connection, or
commonality (hooks)
 this paradigm is posed against a hierarchy of oppression (one oppressive structure—racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism) is seen as the first or deepest
or most pervasive oppression; abolition vs. suffrage as example; Anita Hill vs. Clarence Thomas as another.
 White women’s movement in 1W and 2W failed to incorporate intersectionality effectively, though 3W and its catalysts in the 80’s have done so more
effectively
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Power
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Psychoanalysis
in/and
Feminism
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Critiques of lang have been central to feminist analysis, incl forms of address; “generic” he, man; God as father
Questions about whether women can express themselves given patriarchal language’s limited capacity to tell their experience
Finding one’s voice, of naming oneself, “reclaiming,” “reconstructing,” “stealing” language are therefore essential activities and metaphors 4 fem theory
19th C grappled with women’s public silence, asserting right to name of “author” or “citizen” B4 they could speak or write publicly about politics, suffrage, birth
control…
20th C claiming language and authorship; 2W—giving public language to women’s exp; Freidan’s “problem that has no name”
2W Consciousness Raising (CR) as a tool of language discovery and creation; reforming discourse of church, academy, household, workplace; critiques of
“generic” “man” and “he”
Writing the body in their own language (French feminists) or l’écriture feminine rather than the “father’s” words
Through 19th and 20th C: question of whether language is distinctly marked by gender; seeking out literary forms that spoke of and to their exps (letters,
diaries, autobiographies, novels, memoirs, and now blogs)
Use of bilingual texts to raise questions about translation and cultural identity (Latina, Asian, and Native American women writers & scholars)
Assymetrical division of power, Power as force exerted through domination and exploitation is critiqued; Power as equality and human rights is sought
(Power over vs. Power to)
Explorations of power in public as well as private spheres
2W radical fem’s insight that “the personal is political” expanded 19th C and 20th C liberal fems’ focus on public policy; Sexual politics: male dominance
suffuses our most local and intimate lives
Suspicion of power led to emphasis on consensus, “sisterhood is powerful”.
Critiques of power through domination, exploitation of the earth—ecofeminism, of the military and militarizing women’s lives
Materialist analyses of technologies of production and commodification, post-colonial critiques of imperialism, and globalization
Foucault’s notion of regulatory mechanisms of self-surveillance and self discipline
this as been both a productive and problematic framework for fem and fem theory
Freud’s biological determinism; lack of, and envy of, the penis; deficient genitalia.
Horney argues that social process an social relations, rather than genitalia, are the source of sex diffs; not penis envy but power envy
Fems have found some Freudian concepts useful, for ex. the unconscious and the method of the talking cure.
de Beauvoir’s critique—male as norm and female as “mutilated male,” as “other” rather than autonomous being
Lacan’s re-read of Freud: men break away from prelinguistic connection with mother, enter into language, subjectivity, and the symbolic order; women
don’t make this break, they remain tied to the mother and outside of language.
Cixous & Iragary borrow from Lacan in their phallogocentrism—the rule of language, the law, and the phallus as “transcendental signifier,” but also used
Lacan’s notion of women as outside of language as resource for new and subversive fem thinking, l’écriture feminine
Still, feminist-theorized psychoanalysis remains important tool for understanding interrelationships of gender, sexuality, subjectivity
2
Sojourner Truth, 1851
Anna Julia Cooper, 1892
Charlotte Perkins GiIlman, 1989
Mary Church Terrell, 1989
Ida B. Wells, 1901
Pauli Murray, 1970
Combahee River Collective, 1977
Audre Lorde, 1978
Heidi Hartmann, 1981
Mitsuye Yamada, 1981
Lugones and Spelman, 1983
Gloria Anzaldúa, 1987
bell hooks, 1989
Norma Alarcón, 1990
Kimberlé Crenshaw, 1997
Susan B. Anthony, 1872
Virginia Woolf, 1929
Betty Friedan, 1963
Hélène Cixous, 1975
Mary Daly, 1978
Lugones and Spelman, 1983
Kramarae and Treichler, 1985
Gloria Anzaldúa, 1987
Sojourner Truth, 1867
Anna Julia Cooper, 1892
Hélène Cixous, 1975
Marilyn Frye, 1978
Ynestra King, 1989
Chandra, Talpade Mohanty,
1984, 1991
Catherine MacKinnon, 1989
Cynthia Enloe, 2000
Stella Browne, 1923
Joan Riviére, 1929
Karen Horney, 1932
Simone de Beauvoir, 1949
Kate Millett, 1969
Gayle Rubin, 1975
Nancy Chodorow, 1978
Monique Wittig, 1978
Carol Gilligan, 1982
Sexual
Division
of Labor
Sexualities
“Third
World”/Global
Feminism
 Arrangement of work into clearly gendered Public and Private spheres, or spheres of Production and Reproduction; particularly explored/critiqued by
Marxist, materialist, and socialist feminists in 19th and 20th C; rooted in Engle’s Origin of the Family, which added to Marx’s gender-blind division of
labor analysis
 Need to pass private property on through inheritance (brought about when societies were able to produce “surplus value,” creating accumulation of private
property, necessitated control of wmn’s sexuality and thus confinement of wmn in the fam, the private sphere of reproduction. This division of labor
serves the goals of industrial capitalism (women’s unpaid labor in priv. sphere sustains workforce)
 19th C and 20th C fems critiqued division of labor in childrearing and occupational segregation of workforce; other fems responded that nothing in this analysis
examined poor women from drudgery as household servants.
 Some fems (Firestone) argued that division of reproductive labor is cornerstone of sex/gender system; Other radical fems and cultural fems argue that
women’s private sphere can be a retreat, an entirely separate culture
 Some argued turning women’s unwaged labor into paid labor, or wages for housework.
 Others argued moving men into private sphere and sharing domestic life equally
 “Sexualities,” as plural, suggests multiple possibilities for sexual identity, sexual orientation, sexual expression; defined through fem theory as well as gay
and lesbian theory and queer theory.
 Sexuality as a site of domination and simultaneous resource for resistance, self-definition, and subjectivity.
 19thC: claim sexuality for women; resist notions of women’s “virtue” and sexlessness. Resisted efforts to regulate women’s sexuality, reproduction. Critiques
of sexual double standard—female chastity and male promiscuity.
 Freud introduced into Western theory that sexuality is the key determinant of identity and penis is superior over clitoris; “normal” sexuality is vaginally
oriented, determined by penetration
 Loosening the grip of Freudian theory in defining female sexuality was a major project of the 60s and 70s. Some argued for sexual liberation, and others for
androgyny, or a break from rigid male/female dualisms
 Critiques of compulsory heterosexuality, some argued lesbianism is the only true freedom from patriarchal domination. Rich’s “lesbian continuum” redirected
this debate: heterosexuality is a political institution that deploys a vast ideological apparatus to enforce it as normative.
 Discussions of pornography, so-called “anti-sex” feminists, and pro-sex feminists
 Sexual desire as socially constituted through time; Queer theorists—neither sex nor gender exists, except as fluid performances of arbitrary categories;
transgender and transsexual writers have reintroduced questions of the essential nature of the sexual self.
 Global/Third world feminisms focus on impact of Western values on commercial sex trade, AIDS, health and family planning policies
 “Third World Women” designates the majority of the world’s women, who live outside the industrialized West, sometimes also including women of color
within Western countries.
Quotation marks indicate need to problematize this term:
 1) Whatever coherence “3rd World women” might claim is political, coming from a common context of struggle.
 2) “3rd World” suggest hierarchy of 1st and 3rd Worlds that is the legacy of colonialism and imperialism. 19th C. colonialism left 3rd World women largely
invisible or represented then as the “exotic other”
 20th C anthropologists, also sociologists and economists, who discussed women and/in development
 global feminism—“recognizing that the oppression of women in one part of the world is often affected by what happens in another, and that no woman is
free until the conditions of oppression of women are eliminated everywhere.” (Charlotte Bunch)
 Western women’s efforts to talk about 3rd World women were critiqued by 3rd World women for exporting a Western feminist agenda round the world and
failure to recognize the resistance and liberation struggles already being undertaken
 Postcolonial theory seeks a space and discourse in which the knowledge, activism, and subjectivity of 3 rd World women can be articulated.
3
Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792
Friedrich Engels, 1884
Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
1898
Alexandra Kollontai, 1914
Heidi Hartmann, 1981
Victoria Woodhull, 1873
Margaret Sanger, 1920
Stella Browne, 1923
Margaret Mead, 1935
Kate Millett, 1969
Radicalesbians, 1970
Hélène Cixous, 1975
Charlotte Bunch, 1975
Adrienne Rich, 1980
Carol Vance, 1984
Catherine MacKinnon, 1989
Judith Butler, 1990
Judith Halberstam, 1998
Margaret Mead, 1935
Fatima Mernissi, 1975
Chandra Talpade Mohanty,
1984/1991
Gloria Anzaldúa, 1987
The Beijing Declaration and
Platform for Action, 1995
Uma Narayan, 1997
Inderpal Grewal and Caren
Kaplan, 2001
Saha Mahmood, 2005