Feminist Theory
Feminist theory is the body of thought that analyzes the nature, causes, and consequences of gender inequality and seeks to explain how relations of power are organized around sex and gender.
Definition
A family of theoretical approaches in the humanities and social sciences that take gender as a central axis of social organization and inquire into the sources and workings of women's subordination and gendered power more broadly.
Scope
This area surveys the major traditions of feminist thought as they developed across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: liberal demands for equal rights, radical analyses of patriarchy, materialist and socialist accounts linking gender to labor and capital, and Black feminist critiques of an undifferentiated 'woman'. It treats foundational distinctions such as that between sex and gender, the diversity of feminist positions, and the internal debates among them. The treatment is descriptive: it lays out the arguments and disagreements of these schools rather than advocating any single program.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What explains the historical and cross-cultural subordination of women?
- Is 'woman' a stable category, or is it produced by social and historical forces?
- How are gender, class, race, and sexuality related as systems of power?
- What would equality or liberation consist in, and how might it be achieved?
Key theories
- Woman as the Other
- Beauvoir's existentialist claim that woman has been constructed as the 'Other' against which man defines himself as the universal subject, so that femininity is a situation imposed rather than a natural essence, captured in the formula that one is not born but becomes a woman.
- Patriarchy as a system
- The radical-feminist thesis that male dominance is a distinct, primary system of power, not reducible to capitalism or law, organizing reproduction, sexuality, and the family; theorists differ over its origins and over whether it can be reformed or must be abolished.
- Margin and center
- hooks's argument that feminist theory built from the experience of privileged white women mistook a partial standpoint for the whole, and that centering those at the margins yields a fuller account of interlocking oppressions.
History
Modern feminist theory is often narrated in 'waves': a first wave centered on suffrage and legal personhood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; a second wave from the 1960s that politicized the family, sexuality, and labor and produced the liberal, radical, Marxist, and socialist currents; and later developments from the 1980s and 1990s in which Black, postcolonial, and poststructuralist critics challenged the universality of earlier theory. The wave metaphor is itself debated as a simplification of a longer and more plural history.
Debates
- Equality versus difference
- Whether feminism should seek the same treatment as men under shared standards, or should valorize women's distinct experiences and challenge the male norm built into apparently neutral standards.
- The unity of the category 'woman'
- Whether feminism can speak for 'women' as a group, given critiques from Black and postcolonial feminists that such generalizations universalize the situation of privileged women and obscure differences of race, class, and nation.
Key figures
- Simone de Beauvoir
- Shulamith Firestone
- bell hooks
- Patricia Hill Collins
- Catharine MacKinnon
Related topics
Seminal works
- beauvoir1949
- firestone1970
- hooks1984
- collins2000
Frequently asked questions
- Is there a single feminist theory?
- No. Feminism is plural: liberal, radical, Marxist, socialist, Black, postcolonial, and poststructuralist strands share a concern with gender inequality but differ sharply over its causes and remedies.
- What did Beauvoir mean that one 'becomes' a woman?
- That femininity is not a fixed biological destiny but a social situation a person is shaped into, an idea that anticipated the later distinction between biological sex and socially constructed gender.