Feminist Theory and Criminology Vocabulary

Vocabulary flashcards covering core epistemologies, theoretical challenges, and key analytical concepts from Kathleen Daly's overview of feminist theory and criminology.

Knowledge Problem for Feminism

The theoretical challenges emerging in the 1980s concerning how feminist knowledge and truth claims are produced, evaluated, and justified.

Identity Politics

Naming who one was in terms of social location or identity, associated with a particular set of experiences, viewpoints, and varied knowledges about women.

Theoretical Imperialism (Theoreticism)

A theoretical mode where the primary activity is abstract concept discussion, often resulting in a misunderstanding or disregard of empirical social research practices.

Feminist Empiricism

An epistemology categorized by Sandra Harding that seeks to improve knowledge by removing sexist and androcentric biases without transforming the underlying methodological norms of science.

Feminist Standpoint

An epistemology conceptualized by Sandra Harding asserting that women's subjugated position provides the possibility of more complete and less perverse understandings than the dominant position of men.

Feminist Postmodernism

A heterogeneous set of critiques challenging Enlightenment thought, hierarchical dualisms, disembodied claims of truth innocent of power, and assumptions of a stable, coherent self.

Realist Feminist Approach

Maureen Cain's methodological framework that preserves space for an autonomous material world and extra-discursive social relations while incorporating a relational standpointism.

Class-Race-Gender

A mode of feminist enquiry that conceptualizes relations of inequality not as additive and discrete, but as intersecting, interlocking, and contingent.

Matrix of Domination

Patricia Hill Collins's framework describing how intersecting social relations operate across three structural levels: personal, group, and systemic.

Doing Gender

Candace West and Donald Zimmerman's construct defining gender as a situated accomplishment and a routine, methodical, recurring outcome constituted through social interaction.

Doing Difference

West and Fenstermaker's conceptual framework extending 'doing gender' to race and class, viewing all social encounters as inherently classed, raced, and gendered experiences.

Sexed Bodies

A mode of feminist enquiry analyzing corporeal specificity and the ways power constructs and takes hold of bodies through discourses and practices.

Moebius Strip Metaphor

Elizabeth Grosz's conceptual metaphor used to demonstrate embodied subjectivity through the continuous inflection of mind into body and body into mind.