Feminist Theory Midterm Study

Midterm Exam Prep

Module 1: Introduction

Epistemologies

Theories are discourses that offer a general account of how a range of phenomena are interrelated.

Epistemologies are the critical reflections/theories of who can be knowledge producers and how knowledge is produced.

Different Epistemological Groundings:

1. Empiricist epistemology

   1. Producing knowledge that relies on data or information that can be observed through the senses.

   2. Relies on empirical data to challenge claims that women are inferior or claims used to support inequalities between men and women.

2. Standpoint epistemology

   1. Reacting to the fact that women are a multi-vocal population. Generalizations of women’s experiences are usually false; and feminist theory runs the risk of highlighting some aspects/ignoring others.

   2. Positively recognizes that no one can know everything—knowledge is tied to social location. It recognizes the role that power plays in knowledge formation and strives for “strong objectivity.”

3. Postmodern epistemology

   1. Thinks of totalizing theories of women as attempts to dominate rather than liberate.

   2. What counts as true at any time is not about the way the world “really is,” but rather the result of social power relations that legitimize a particular narrative.

bell hooks

bell hooks argues that instead of feminism being defined as a movement to achieve social equality/equality with men, rather it should be defined as a movement to end sexual oppression.

Systems of domination: social and economic pressures made it easier for women to stay at home rather than seek careers/employment.

Feminism is personal: feminism cannot be affective in changing the status quo of sexual domination and oppression if we think of it as personal.

Feminism isn’t about greater personal autonomy, it is about overcoming group oppression.

Module 2: Liberal Feminism

Liberal Feminisms

Liberal Feminism: feminism that seeks to work within democratic, often capitalist systems to achieve equal rights.

First Wave Feminism: mid-19th to early 20th century, concerned with achieving voting and property rights.

Second Wave Feminism: 1960s-1980s, concerned with seeking broader rights—education, workplace, reproductive rights.

Third Wave Feminism: 1990s-early 2000s, concerned with intersectionality.

Enlightenment: focus on reason, autonomy, self-determination, inalienable rights (Locke, Rousseau), and these rights are applied to white men: Coverture, Cult of Domesticity, Doctrine of True Womanhood.

Liberal feminism adopts enlightenment values and applies them to women with the:

• First women’s rights convention in 1848

• Declaration of sentiments

19th amendment passes in 1920, and this ends the First Wave of Feminism.

The Feminine Mystique is published by Betty Friedan in 1963, and this begins the Second Wave of Feminism.

Remember The Problem That Has No Name—the sort of idea that women wanted something more than their husband, their children, and their home.

Module 3: Radical Feminism and the Sex Wars

Radical Feminisms

Of all the feminist perspectives, radical feminism was the most women-centered approach. “The Personal is Political”was coined by Carol Hanisch in 1969.

Essentialism

Women are oppressed because of their biology (Firestone, Beauvoir)

• Mensuration

• Childbearing

• Menopause

The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone in 1970: Women’s oppression is the earliest and most fundamental form of oppression that provides the model for all later forms of oppression.

Ecofeminism

Women are closer to nature

• Naturally more nurturing

• Closer to nature because of menstruation

Compulsory heterosexuality: heterosexuality isn’t natural; it’s political, social, and cultural, and its goal is to keep women oppressed by men. (Adrienne Rich, Gayle Rubin)

Lesbian

Heterosexuality keeps women from standing in solidarity with one another, childbirth and childrearing keeps women oppressed, and the conclusion is that you can’t trust men, distance yourself from childcare activities, and live in feminist communes.

Feminist

Heterosexual women were concerned about a movement where only women who cut ties to men could be trusted—some feminist women were still deeply attached to their children/future children, and gender matters independent of sexuality.

Sex Wars

Sex as pleasure (Gayle Rubin): the idea that feminism shouldn’t try to police sex. Sexual liberation is the goal of feminism: sex should be consensual, and if it is, women should be able to have the sex that they want to.

Sex as oppression (Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon): the idea that pornography is at the center of a cycle of abuse that in which sexual exploitation, sexual assault, and abuse are tolerated.

Module 4: Marxist, Socialist, and Anarchist Feminisms

Old versus new

Old left: 19th and early 20th centuries, where social class (not gender) is the primary model of oppression. Concerns of class encompass Marxism and anarchisms.

New left: Mid 20th century, where race, gender, sexual orientation, and the Vietnam war concern the new left, (as well as social class).

Frederick Engels Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: The origins of marxist, socialist, anarchist feminisms come from Engels, as he argues that women’s oppression is not biological, but sociohistorical. It is tied to patriarchal institutions and the reproduction of class systems.

Patriarchy: a set of social relations which has a material base and in which there are hierarchical relations between men and solidarity among them.

The end of patriarchy requires the end of private property and class revolution.

Standpoint feminism: develops directly out of Marxism; the idea that women, like workers, have privileged knowledge of everyday life and people, men don’t live in the everyday world (and thus men produce abstract, conventional knowledge that is out of touch with real life). Women’s knowledge is actually superior and should be used for feminist political goals.

Heidi Hartman

The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: We cannot just blindly accept marxism as the leading theory for feminism; it understands women’s oppression to be a relationship between women and the economic system:

1. Subsume women’s relation to men under the worker’s relation to capital

2. Everyday life—women’s domain— is in the service of capital

3. Understanding domestic work as surplus value in the aid of capitalism

Never does marxism tell us why women are subordinate to men, instead it just explains women’s marginalization in terms of economic systems, and doesn’t look at gender.

Capitalism and patriarchy are partners:

• Capitalism adjusts to patriarchy

• Family wage

• Patriarchy adjusts to capitalism

• Custody of children

Socialism is the goal: to achieve this, coalitions must be formed with groups that have different interests. But this cannot rely on men to liberate women after the revolution.

Module 5: Intersectionality

Identity Politics

Identity politics: when individuals from a particular race, class, gender, religion, etc. form political alliances based on their identities (a move away from party politics).

Essentialism: core properties that are shared or define a specific group.

Standpoint theory: women occupy a special social position from which they understand the world more accurately and holistically than men.

Margin to the center: marginal social locations generate more critical vantage points because they have to move between dominant and marginalized worlds.

Black Feminist Thought

Combahee River Collective: Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier came together to form the Combahee River Collective; they were disillusioned with the Black liberation movement of the 1960s/70s as they felt out of place being Black women, but also experienced being on the periphery of the white male left.

Module 7: Intersectionality Continued

Kimberle Crenshaw

Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex, Kimberle Crenshaw’s paper that defined intersectionality, came out in 1989.

Race and gender, as categories of discrimination, are typically understood as single-axis or unidirectional frameworks,and thus to claim discrimination under the law, you have to claim that “but for” your race OR your gender you wouldn’t have been discriminated.

Three Cases:

1. DeGraffenreid v. General Motors

2. Moore v. Hughes Helicopters

3. Payne v. Travenol

Disability theory

Disability theory: emphasizes how the physical environment shapes disability