DHAMOON (2015) - Feminisms

Feminisms
Oxford Handbooks Online

Feminisms
Rita Kaur Dhamoon
The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics
Edited by Georgina Waylen, Karen Celis, Johanna Kantola, and S. Laurel Weldon
Print Publication Date: Mar 2013 Subject: Political Science, Political Theory, Comparative Politics
Online Publication Date: Aug 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199751457.013.0003
Abstract and Keywords
Although it has been noted that the ways feminists historicize, explain, and define
feminism are challenged and subject to interpretation, this article focuses on the idea
that feminist debates show openness and plurality to further clarification, inquiry, and
reflection. It studies the various ways of understanding feminism as well as its core
features and methods of inquiry used by feminists. The article also discusses the modern
debates among feminists and tries to identify some of the challenges and important
contributions of feminist scholars to the study of politics.
Keywords: feminists, feminism, feminist debates, methods of inquiry, study of politics
The Terrain of Feminism

How feminists explain, define, and historicize feminism is itself contested and subject to
interpretation. Rather than viewing this contestation as a problem about unity or
coherence, this chapter starts from the premise that debates among feminists
demonstrate plurality and openness to further reflection, clarification, and inquiry. We
will briefly consider different ways of understanding feminism, its central features, and
methods of inquiry deployed by feminists. The bulk of the chapter will deal with
contemporary debates among feminists as a way to outline some of the contestations and
key contributions of feminist scholars to the study of politics.
While the term feminism first appeared in France in the 1880s, Great Britain in the
1890s, and the United States in 1910, ideas around woman-centered political action has
long existed across the globe, even if the term was not used. Different historical and
geopolitical genealogies indicate that there are many forms of feminism rather than one
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Feminisms
formation. In the West, these variations are often described in terms of three waves of
feminism. The first wave, typically described as the period from the 1700s to the 1960s, is
characterized by expanding women’s education and civil rights as well as including
women in formal politics and the public sphere; the second wave, from the 1960s to
1980s, is presented as the era of formalizing equality rights for women through the law
and public policy and increased attention to differences among women; and the third
wave, from the 1990s onward, is typically represented as diverse, antifoundationalist,
pro-sex, celebratory of everyday action over theory, and amorphous and unregulated
(Walker 1995; Heywood and Drake 1997). Yet the narrative of the three waves, which has
had much play in feminist circles, (p. 89) tends to overdetermine the differences between
generations of feminism, even while there are various contexts and tactics across
different strands of feminism (Snyder 2008). Moreover, the notion of three waves has a
presumed a Western European and Anglo-American backdrop and is premised on a
narrow source base, namely, Eurocentric written texts, which exclude oral narratives,
sharing circles, and non-Western texts and epistemologies. Indeed, as a brown woman of
Sikh-Punjabi origin born in the United Kingdom and with a Western education, my own
interpretations of feminism are shaped by my shifting locations of insider–outsider and
the limitations of my Eurocentric training. A chapter on feminism written from other
standpoints would reflect differing interpretations.
The work of feminism can also be understood in other ways. Feminism is simultaneously
(1) a research paradigm that examines the form and character of gendered life
(ontology), investigates what can be known (epistemology), and develops and deploys
gender-centered tools of analysis (methods); (2) an ideology that contains a system of
general beliefs and values that explains how and why gender oppression occurs, and that
prescribes a vision of society and government based on liberation and change in gender
roles, whereby the forms of action and guiding principles are contested; and (3) a set of
social movements that seek to address unequal relations of power, which has in some
instances included men.
While feminism is varied, since at least the 1960s, it has been characterized by a number
of key aspects that regularly feature in the contemporary feminist debates discussed
below. First, central to all brands of feminism is the drive for social justice. Put
differently, feminism is a form of social critique (Dhamoon 2009). Second, feminists
center power, both as an organizing device that represses and produces gender relations
and as a site of transformation. Third, sex and gender are central categories of analysis,
and the relationship and substance of these categories is contested (Butler 1999;
Firestone 1997). Fourth, feminism has identified and debated the culture–nature divide,
specifically to examine whether subjects have natural affinities to particular roles and
sexual desires or to unpack socially constructed meanings related to gender (Arneil
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1999). Fifth, feminist analyses of the public–private divide have illuminated the
patriarchal framework that generates and assigns traditional gender roles and in doing
so have expanded an understanding of the political beyond the traditional focus on the
state and government and centered the idea that “the personal is political” (Millet 1970;
Hankivsky 2004). Sixth, while feminism has varied in scope, it is distinct from many other
approaches in that it links theory and practice and, in doing so, highlights the
significance of personal narratives, lived experience, subjectivity, and political praxis
(hooks 2000). Finally, feminism is characterized by distinct and varied interests, such that
feminists do not share a universal conception of the social world or a universal project;
indeed, it is precisely the possibility of theorizing and practicing feminism in various ways
that gives it global appeal.
(p. 90) Feminist inquiry entails a wide range of methods that draw on and expand
existing social science tools of quantitative and qualitative analysis (Hawkesworth 2006;
see also chapter 5). This includes various positivist methods that are based on studying
static, categorical, error-free variables such as surveys, regression modeling, and
statistical data analysis of particular groups of women in legislatures. Feminist methods
also draw on and develop interpretativism and critical theory whereby realities and
knowledge are treated as complex, fluid, subjective, discursive, socially constructed,
products of and productive of power, and subject to individual and social action.
Interpretativist and critical theory tools include standpoint theory, interview analysis,
ethnographic studies and autoethnography, studies of lived experience, discourse
analysis, a social determinants approach, narrative-based studies, participatory action,
and community-based research. Some feminist methods of analysis—especially the use of
oral traditions, narratives, storytelling, biography, and personal testimony—are criticized
by mainstream social sciences because they are not seen as positivist, rigorous,
theoretical, or scholarly enough. Yet much feminism seeks to challenge conventional
views on epistemology, to emphasize interdisciplinarity, and to offer innovative tools of
analysis and political action.
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Contemporary Feminist Themes and Debates

While sometimes it seems that feminism has become fractured since the 1970s and
therefore unsustainable as a large-scale movement, feminism has always included
divisions and differing visions. There has never been a single feminist vision of the world,
and indeed even within a single national context feminism has varied. In the
contemporary era, three debates have characterized Western feminist political theories
and practices:
• Equality as difference or sameness—where are the women?

• Differences among women—which women?
• The relationship between sex and gender—what work does the category of woman do
in feminist thought and in broader sociopolitical life?
Whereas the first debate tends to assume a stable binary of man–woman, the other
debates center on challenging the universality and stability of the category of woman and
in doing so put into question the conventional foundations of feminism-as-women and
raise questions about the unity of feminism. The rest of the chapter will explore these
debates and the ensuing implications for the study of gender and politics.
(p. 91) Equality as Sameness or Difference: “Where Are the Women?”
Early feminist critiques of political study, especially the Western canon, were centered on
tracking the absence of women in the core texts of the Western tradition (Zerilli 2006,
108). Among others, Jean Bethke Elshtain (1981), Susan Moller Okin (1979), and Carole
Pateman (1988) traced the ways Western canonical texts restricted women to the private
realm of the household and justified their exclusion from the public realm on the basis of
naturalized conceptions of sex and gender, the sexual division of labor, and citizenship.
For example, Okin (1989) criticized John Rawls’s theory of liberalism because it could not
account for injustices entrenched in familial relations. While some feminists argued that
the canon was bankrupt, others aimed to integrate women into existing canonical
understandings of the political; yet others aimed to transform key concepts such as
democracy, citizenship, freedom, equality, and rights by centering gender as a
constitutive category of politics (Zerilli 2006, 110–111). A major theme that emerged from
questioning the Western canon was a fundamental challenge to the idea that biology was
destiny, which had positioned women as a naturally inferior class. As Simone de Beauvoir
([1949]1973, 267) famously said, “One is not born a woman, but becomes a woman.”
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Since at least the 1960s, various schools of feminism emerged as a response to this idea
of socially constructed gender roles to ask, “Where are the women?” In exploring this
question, some argue that equality means that men and women should be treated the
same, others that equality means recognition of differences between men and women,
and others still that move beyond the equality/difference debate to reject the idea of
measuring women against male norms.
Echoing earlier arguments made by Mary Wollstonecraft (1792) and John Stuart Mill
([1869]1999), liberal feminism emerged as a way to integrate women into existing
frameworks on the premise that men and women should be treated equally. This school of
feminism drew on classical liberal ideas regarding the state, individual autonomy,
progress, rationality and reason, and legal rights to argue that women’s exclusion in the
public sphere was unjustified. As well as extending existing liberal ideas to women and
applying these to issues of employment discrimination, pay equity, and representation in
government, liberal feminists also challenged the public–private divide to argue that
issues such accessible and universal childcare were matters for the state rather than just
concerns about private–domestic life. This challenge to the public–private divide has led
to a field of study known as ethics of care. Ethic of care feminists demonstrate that care
is publicly and politically relevant, dependent on relationships and networks of human
interdependency that require a shift in the values adopted by the state when developing
public policies (Tronto 1994; Chakraborti 2006). As Olena Hankivsky (2004, 1) notes, “An
ethic of care has brought to the fore public dimensions of our lives that have been largely
uninvestigated…The values [of an ethic of care] can be considered essential to living a
worthwhile, (p. 92) fulfilling, and balanced life.” Other feminists, such as Wendy Brown
(1995), while supportive of care ethics, question the capacity of the liberal-democratic
state to adequately address feminist concerns even if the state is (a limited and
regulatory) site of change.
Like liberal feminism, socialist and Marxist feminism also acknowledges physiological
differences between men and women and develops the idea that women should be
treated the same as men. However, reflecting their ideological roots, socialist and
Marxist feminists develop their analyses on the basis of class divisions and social
structures rather than the autonomous individual and attitudes. While socialist feminists
are more apt to favor peaceful and piecemeal change and are more willing to make
changes within the existing system (e.g., have unions represent the interests of working
women), Marxist feminists favor revolutionary transformation. Both, however, are critical
of capitalism and the division of labor in public and private spheres because it creates
exploitation and economic dependence of women. Both are also critical of liberal
feminism because it is too easily co-opted by the “malestream” and overly focused on
equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome. These feminists argue that class
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and gender relations are formed through one another. An understanding of patriarchal
capitalism allows these forms of feminism to challenge the masculinist character of the
family wage, unions, unpaid household work, low wages for women (Hartmann 1997,
104), and international division of labor that creates racialized-gendered workers in the
so-called third world (Mohanty 2003).
Unlike liberal feminism and socialist feminism, radical feminism starts from the premise
that women and men are different and that there is no need for them to the same. This is
the school of feminism that is often deemed to be antimale, in part because it calls for
separateness between men and women and alternate social arrangements rather than an
expansion or modification of the existing system. And because feminism is often
represented as radical by the mainstream, it sometimes is referred to as “the F word”—
that which is unspeakable. Yet through consciousness-raising groups and other forms of
organizing, radical feminism importantly informs public discourses on reproductive
freedom, violence against women, pornography, sexual harassment (Dworkin and
MacKinnon 1997), homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality (see the chapter by Lind
in this volume), the rights of sex trade workers, and rape. As well, radical feminists such
as Kate Millet (1970) developed theories that expanded meanings of politics to include
personal and sexual relationships and demonstrated that the study of patriarchy was
intrinsically linked to power, a key concept in politics. Contrary to the aforementioned
schools of thought, early radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone (1997) argued that
sex class sprang directly from biological reality, specifically the reproductive functions of
the traditional family; in short, there was a knowable essence to woman. Female
dependence on men arose because of patriarchy and oppression of the female body.
While acknowledging the importance of a material-economic (p. 93) analysis, radical
feminists also emphasize that the original division of labor (i.e., child-bearing) is also
psychosexual in that women are falsely made to believe that sex with men is compulsory
and pleasurable. As a result, radical feminists want a revolution that eliminates not only
male privilege but also the “dialectic of sex,” namely, the sex distinction itself, whereby
“genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally” (Firestone
1997, 25). This, some argue, would occur in part through new technologies that would
provide more reproductive freedom for women, erase the categories of homosexuality
and heterosexuality, and foster female-based relationships.
Over the past three decades, feminist contentions and theories have moved beyond the
ideological terms of liberal, socialist, and radical and are now shaped by inventive
combinations of numerous forms of critique that include these but also extend to critical
theory, discourse ethics, analytic philosophy, hermeneutics, structuralism, existentialism,
phenomenology, deconstruction, postcolonial theory, psychology, and neo-Marxism (Dietz
2003, 400).
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This hybridization informs male feminism (or profeminism). Male feminism is radical in
that seeks to address the roots of patriarchy but differs from the school of radical
feminism in that it is not premised on eliminating the sex distinction. Male feminists
specifically challenge antifeminist men’s rights movements that blame women for divorce
and custody laws that supposedly favor women; often, antifeminists oppose women’s
rights and changes in the traditional family structure on the basis of religious and
cultural norms. As well as challenging such ideas, male feminists criticize the masculinist
position, which holds that the traditional masculine ideal is threatened by the
feminization of society. Drawing on the established feminist idea that gender is socially
constructed, male feminists argue that because gender roles are learned they can be
relearned differently, and as such feminism can serve men’s interests (Brod 1998). And
indeed, various strands of men’s and masculinity studies have emerged that aim to be
consistent with antisexist and antiheteronormative ideologies. David Kahane (1998, 213–
215), however, also notes that male feminism is intrinsically an oxymoron, because while
men are capable of deepening their understanding of their own roles in sexist privilege
and oppression and operationalizing this knowledge, they are still part of the problem
since they cannot fully know or transcend the advantages conferred to them. As a result,
male feminists must be willing to develop ambiguous understandings of the self because
they are implicated in patriarchy, to be open to criticism and self-criticism, and to engage
in activist friendships to negotiate courses of action.
In a similar vein to some of the previously mentioned forms of feminism, ecofeminism also
aims to reconcile differences between binaries, in this case between masculinity and
femininity and nature versus man. Drawing from poststructuralism, postcolonialism, neo-
Marxism, and other frameworks, different strands of ecofeminism maintain that a strong
parallel exists between men’s dominance over women and the violation of nature by men
and masculinist (p. 94) attitudes and methods that construct women as passive and
economic development above nature (Mies and Shiva 2005; Ress 2006; Schaefer 2006).
Anti-globalization activist-scholar Vandana Shiva (1989) argues that women’s liberation is
dependent on ecological liberation (especially in the context of the color line that
constitutes the Global South), and on the adoption of the feminine principle, which men
can also adopt to create life-enhancing societies, not life-reducing or life-threatening
conditions. For some ecofeminists, capitalist and patriarchal systems intersect with
neocolonial and racist structures, in which ecological breakdown and social inequality are
intrinsically related to the dominant development paradigm that puts profiteering man
against and above nature and women. For these feminists, productivity can be
reconceptualized outside the domain of capital accumulation and destruction and in
terms of sustainability, valued women’s work, harmony between nature and men and
women, and local indigenous and diverse knowledge. As such, men are not situated as
the standard for evaluating humanity and political life.
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“Which Women?” Differences among Women
While the first set of debates assumes stable binary categories of woman–man, the
second takes up differences among women through feminist standpoint and in terms of
subjectivity rather than a unified category of women. While some issues are continuous
across feminist debates (e.g., the body), at times the focus on differences among women
has collapsed into a form of identity politics that has been criticized by some feminists,
especially for displacing issues of class (Fraser 1997). Yet one of the major political
insights of analyzing differences among women is that everyone’s life is composed of
multiple, intersecting discourses of power that are irreducible to a single dimension, such
as gender. Intersecting differences, or intersectionality—which is discussed more
specifically later and also in Chapter 2 of this volume—have become increasingly
significant to feminism because they challenge the idea of a universal notion of sisterhood
and women’s experiences.
Since at least the mid- to late 1800s in the United States, figures such as Sojourner Truth
advocated for women’s rights and fought against slavery and spoke to the struggles
facing black men and women (King 1988, 42–43); these U.S.-based black women
challenged the racism of white suffragists who were then fighting for the right of
particular women to vote without adequately addressing slavery. Further, Tharu and
Lalita’s (1991) landmark collection traces women’s writings in India across eleven
different languages from as early as 600 BC, demonstrating the abundance of ideas about
gender construction and norms.Indeed, Maitrayee Chaudhuri (2005) rejects the claim
that feminism in India is a Western import, yet also notes that the tentacles of colonialism
have meant that Western feminism can choose whether to engage with non-Western
thought and praxis, whereas this is not the case for those working in the peripheries.
(p. 95) Chandra Mohanty (2003, 17–24) offers a form of third world feminism, sometimes
called postcolonial feminism, in which she centers the intersections of race, class, and
gender discourses. She critically deploys the term third world to refuse Western feminist
frameworks that assume and privilege an ethnocentric and homogenized conception of
feminism and patriarchy; this is because the average third world woman is often
constructed as sexually constrained, ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition bound,
passive, and family oriented, and this image is juxtaposed with the supposed educated,
modern, autonomous, family-free, sexually liberated Western woman. Through discursive
and historical materialist analysis, Mohanty (2003, 34–36) warns against universalizing
women’s experiences because this decontextualizes the specific historical and local ways
reproduction, the sexual division of labor, families, marriage, and households are
arranged. With the intention of building noncolonizing feminist solidarity within national
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borders and across borders, Mohanty draws attention to the micropolitics of context,
subjectivity, and struggle as well as to the macropolitics of global economic and political
systems and processes.
Third world feminism is very much shaped by historical shifts within nationalist
movements, which have occurred in the form of anti-colonial/anti-imperial struggles,
national modernization reform movements, state exploitation of women, and religious-
cultural nationalist revivalisms (Heng 1997). In India, Dalit women, for instance, have
been critical of feminists both within and outside of the country who frame women’s
rights related to employment and land claims without considerations of caste and class
(Rege 2006) and who separate feminist theorizing from political organizing. Building on
the work of feminists like Mohanty and Li Xiaojiang (1989) in China, Feng Xu (2009, 197)
explores the heterogeneity of Chinese feminism in relation to Maoist ideas, the reform
era, and UN-based international feminism to highlight that “meaningful debates about
Chinese feminisms do occur within China itself, rather than always and only in dialogue
with Western and Japanese interlocutors.” In the context of Nigeria, Ayesha M. Iman
(1997) makes the case for local feminism that has developed in the context of the post-oil
boom and military regimes that have dominated since British colonial rule. Palestinian
feminist movements are heavily shaped by the ongoing occupation that creates
oppression and not just formal gender equality rights between men and women (Kawar
1996). These feminists emphasize the specificities of history, nation, and power.
In the United States, black feminists such as bell hooks (2000), Audre Lorde (1984),
Patricia Hill Collins (1990, 2000), and Evelyn Simien (2006) have also refused
universalizing assumptions about sisterhood. hooks, for example, examines white
privilege, classism, and sexism in the work of Betty Friedan, who hooks argued made
synonymous the plight of white and nonwhite women. hooks did not question that women
were oppressed but argued instead that sexism varied in content and form; accordingly,
her work as a black feminist has emphasized the value of examining patriarchal white
supremacist capitalism. As well as challenging the erasures of racialization, sexual desire,
and class (p. 96) by white feminists, black feminism centers the specialized knowledge
created and lived by African American women, which clarifies a standpoint of and for
those women, who themselves are differently and differentially situated. Importantly, the
issues facing African American women in the United States and black women in other
parts of the world including those in other settler states and different nations in Africa or
the Caribbean may overlap but cannot be conflated.
Chicana feminism has as many different meanings as there are different Chicanas. In
general, this form of feminism refers to a critical framework that centers the relationship
between discourses of race, class, gender, and sexuality inequality as they affect women
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of Mexican descent in the United States. Cherrie Moraga (1981, 52–53) approaches
Chicana feminism as “a theory in the flesh [which] means one where the physical realities
of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings—all
fuse to create a politic born out of necessity. Here, we attempt to bridge the
contradictions in our experience. We are the colored in a white feminist movement. We
are the feminists among the people of our culture. We are often the lesbians among the
straight. We do this bridging by naming ourselves and by telling our stories in our own
words.” Gloria Anzaldúa (1999) conceptualizes such differences in terms of psychological,
sexual, spiritual and physical borderlands, hybridity, and mestiza identity—all of which
have become relevant to feminism beyond Chicana contexts. Edwina Barvosa (2009)
argues that the ambivalences, hybridities, and contradictions are important components
of self-crafted identity formation. Importantly, Cristina Beltran (2004) warns that while
theories of hybrid and mestiza identity have generated social justice agendas, some have
also collapsed into unifying discourses that suffer from the same dreams of homogeneity,
unity, authenticity, and idealized experiential knowledge that plague unreflective streams
of identity politics. As such, like other kinds of feminism, Chicana feminism is constantly
reflecting on its own borders and hegemonies.
In settler societies like Canada, the United States, and Australia and New Zealand,
indigenous feminists like Cheryl Suzack et al. (2011), Andrea Smith (2005, 2006), Joyce
Green (2000, 2007), and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) have identified the impact of
genocide and continuing forms of colonialism by addressing such issues as the
disproportionate rates of violence against indigenous women, indigenous methodologies,
and indigenous women’s resistance. Drawing on specific instances of racism and sexism
outside of their communities as well as sexism within their communities, indigenous
feminists have argued that patriarchy cannot be eliminated without addressing
colonialism. This is because laws implemented colonialism by regulating and attempting
to eradicate indigenous women’s bodies and knowledge and dispossessing all Indigenous
peoples from their land. For indigenous feminists, resistance against such tactics is
grounded in connections with other women and also in terms of their specific nation (e.g.,
Métis, Cree, Mohawk, Dene) and relationship to the (p. 97) land. This entails collective
action with indigenous men, regenerating indigenous epistemologies and cultures in all
spheres of life (including decolonizing feminism), and centering the role of women as
respected decision makers. Some view political change within the nation-state, while
others propose a turn away from the state and toward indigenous communities and
epistemologies.
Grounded in activist work, antiracist feminism (which can include black and indigenous
feminism) exposes the ways sexism operates within nonwhite communities, and how
white supremacist discourses in Western nations interweave with patriarchal and
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capitalism. Before and since the events of September 11, 2001, antiracist feminists have
challenged, for example, sexist Eurocentric and Islamophobic representations of the veil,
which are overly determined to be inherently oppressive. As well as challenging
hegemonic modes of Othering that exclude nonwhite women from mainstream society,
antiracist feminists have also resisted other feminist analyses that pit one form of
difference against another. Susan Moller Okin’s (1999) essay “Is Multiculturalism Bad for
Women?” for example, has prompted much debate about cultural rights versus sex
equality rights (Nussbaum 2000; Phillips and Dustin 2004; Arneil et al. 2007; Song
2007). Liberal feminists like Okin claim that cultural accommodation of group rights
undermines individual women’s rights, contravenes the values of a secular state, and fails
to address how most cultures and religions and especially non-Western cultures and
religions are oppressive. Antiracist feminists show that such arguments merely replicate
conservative positions on the veiling of women, homogenize Islamic cultures as barbaric,
sustain moral panic about “an invasion” of Islam, uncritically rely on the state to protect
secularism and individual rights, and perpetuate a rescue script whereby European states
and men are supposedly saving imperiled Muslim women from dangerous Muslim men
(Thobani 2007; Razack 2008). Resembling Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (1988) essay
“Can the Subaltern Speak?” these feminists identify the closures and openings for
marginalized women by centering the interactions between racism, patriarchy, and
imperialism.
Importantly, anti-racist feminists have reflected on the fissures and connections between
them. Bonita Lawrence and Enaskhi Dua (2005), for instance, note that not all nonwhite
peoples are equally socially situated and that, as such, political liberation strategies need
to reflect this. In particular, they examine the ways indigenous experiences, knowledge,
and perspectives get overshadowed in antiracist work. To counter this, they argue it is
necessary to decolonize antiracism.
Related to antiracism feminism is the form of feminism that has emerged from critical
whiteness studies. Like nonwhite feminists, Peggy McIntosh (1995) argues that issues of
racism and sexism are about not just the disadvantages of others but also the privilege of
some. In particular, she examines white privilege among white feminists using the
metaphor of an invisible weightless knapsack that carries special provisions, assurances,
tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and
blank checks that enable (p. 98) white women and white feminists to appear neutral,
normal, and the universally referent point (77). Ruth Frankenberg (2000) follows
McIntosh, in that she too analyzes the ways race discourses privilege white women
because whiteness is a location of structural advantage, a set of usually unmarked and
unnamed cultural practices that are co-constructed through norms of gender, class, and
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dis/ability. In drawing attention to white privilege, this school of feminism foregrounds

the structural racism of privilege and penalty.
Another school of feminism that has become more prominent over recent decades is
called critical feminist disability studies. Scholars like Parin Dossa (2009) and Rosemarie
Garland-Thomson (2002) show not only that disability studies need to better engage with
feminist theory but also that feminist theories of reproductive technology, bodily
differences, ethics of care, and immigration need to integrate a disability analysis. This is
in part because, like gender, disability is a socially fabricated idea rather than a
biomedical condition that demarcates disability in terms of otherness. Feminist disability
theories are aimed not only at integrating marginalized subjects into mainstream society
but also at transforming society, expanding and deepening feminist theory, and centering
ability and disability systems as ideological rather than biological markers of the body.
These theories examine gendered subjectivity in terms of constructs of disability and also
compulsory systems of ablebodiedness that normalize and preserve advantaged
designations of autonomy, wholeness, independence, competence, intelligence, and
value. For example, women’s breasts are typically sexualized, except if removed or
medically scarred, thereby affecting sexual status and self-esteem and causing
marginalization; state-led policies of forced sterilization of those deemed physically or
mentally incapable and selective abortions to get rid of fetuses with disabilities are
feminist concerns; and racialized women with disabilities are redefining the parameters
of their social worlds. In short, these issues are about reproductive freedom, codes of
sexual desire, and intersections of marginalization and resistance affecting differently
positioned women.
Sex and Gender Debates: What Is Woman?
Whereas the first debate centers on bringing women into the male-dominated political
realm and the second challenges universalizing conceptions of woman by centering
differences, the third debate puts into question the very idea of a pregiven feminine
subject with a set of assigned interests that arise from bodily and social experiences of
being a woman, even if differentially situated.
In particular, this more recent debate centers on the relationship between sex and
gender (see also the chapter by Hawkesworth in this volume). Whereas earlier feminists
often assumed that sex was a biological category and gender referred to the socially
constructed meanings attached to a sexed body, more recently feminist critics question
the normalized binary structure of the (p. 99) biological (and not only social)
representations of male–female, man–woman, and masculinity–femininity. This is because
these binaries maintain the idea of a natural relationship between a biological body and a
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social identity. Feminist critics do not question that cultural meanings are socially
produced or that intersecting differences matter, but they do challenge grand narratives,
including the underlying assumption that identity politics (whether a single identity or
multiple intersecting identities) is the basis of feminism because it reifies the body
(Butler 1990; Brown 1995). Indeed, feminists are divided on how to respond to issues
related to the body and sexuality, including “how to create gender equality when women
enjoy female objectification (pornography), claim the right to make money servicing male
sexual needs (prostitution), and eroticize relationships of inequality
(sadomasochism)” (Snyder 2008, 189).
One brand of feminism that has grown out of the critique against a sex-equals-gender
approach is poststructural feminism, which has also shaped debates about differences
among women. This brand of feminism draws on Michel Foucault’s conception of power,
whereby power is a productive force that constitutes the subject in and through
disciplinary power and biopolitics. While poststructural feminism accepts the notion that
gender is not naturally but socially signified, it also challenges the assumption that sex is
natural rather than also constructed through language. In short, sex does not lead to
gender, but it is gender—‘sex’ too is socially made. Accordingly, the constitution of the
modern subject (e.g., the female subject, the male subject, the black lesbian subject)
through systems of meaning making that produce and organize sex must also be
deconstructed. Drawing from psychoanalytic, Foucaultian, and feminist theories, Judith
Butler (1990, 1993), for example, does not seek to include women in the category of the
rational autonomous agent (a key goal of liberal feminism) but instead advances a
deconstructive and genealogical approach to critique the conditions through which
subjects become particular kinds of sexed, sexualized, and gendered bodies. Butler
insists that gender is the effect of specific formations of power and practices of
phallogocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality.
Butler (1990) offers the notion of performativity to foreground the idea that woman is not
something that subjects are but rather something subjects do within already existing
terms: “gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a
highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time and produce the appearance of
substance, of a natural sort of being” (25). Performativity is not a performance by an
actor or subject who preexists; rather, it a process by which gender identities are
constructed through language, meaning that there is no gender identity that precedes
language (the doctor who delivers a baby declares “it’s a boy” or “it’s a girl,” for
example). Following from this, Butler questions the coherence of a subject. Even the
categories of man and woman, she argues, are performatively produced through
repetition as if they are original, true, and authentic (Butler 1997, 304); correspondingly,
compulsory heterosexuality is also constructed and regulated through repetition. (p. 100)
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Gender categories and sexual desires, in other words, are neither essentially stable nor
fully knowable, for they are produced in the process of imitating their own idealizations.
This is why “there is no ‘proper’ gender, a gender proper to one sex rather than another,
which is in some sense that sex’s cultural property. Where that notion of the ‘proper’
operates, it is always and only improperly installed as the effect of compulsory
system” (ibid., 306). In effect, Butler rejects the sex–gender distinction (thus pushing
against other forms of feminism that assume that man–woman maps easily onto
masculine–feminine) and concludes that the materiality of the body can be understood
only through specified and contextualized cultural interpretation and discourse.
While Butler has been criticized by other feminists because her early work downplayed
the material body and omitted an analysis of transgenderism, transsexuality, and
racialized sexualities—issues she has since addressed (Butler 1993, 1999)—her work has
importantly shown that identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes
and as such need to be persistently troubled and subject to reinterpretation. Moreover,
Butler’s work, among others, has importantly prompted the development of such fields of
inquiry as queer studies or queer theory, which grew out of and is integral to feminist
studies (as well as lesbian and gay studies). Queer theory, which emerged in the 1990s,
builds on the feminist idea that gender is a constitutive feature of political life and that
sexual orientations and identities are shaped by social forces. In the U.S. context, queer
theory also emerged in response to political practices, specifically homophobic responses
to AIDS. But further to feminist work (and lesbian and gay studies), queer theory expands
the focus to include any kind of sexual activities or identities that are deemed to be
deviant and offers a critique of traditional identity politics that consolidates categories
like women, gay, and lesbian.
The open-endedness of social categories is also characteristic of transfeminism, an

outgrowth of feminist, lesbian and gay, and queer studies. While seemingly more
prominent since the 1990s, transfeminism has been in existence for much longer,
routinely addressing issues related to the loss of family, housing and employment
discrimination, social stigma, and high rates of violence and also confronting transphobia
within some feminist circles (Stryker 2008, 101–111). Transfeminism is not simply about
blending feminism and transgenderism but about disrupting the idea of a binary (male–
female mapped onto man–woman) and reconceptualizing gender in terms of a continuum.
This is in part because the very meaning of transgender is in a constant state of
becoming. Currah, Juang, and Minter (2006, xiv) remark that since 1995, ‘transgender’ is
“generally used to refer to individuals whose gender identity or expression does not
conform to the social expectations for their assigned sex birth. At the same time, related
terms used to describe particular identities within that broader category have continued
to evolve and multiply.” Although the terminology of transgenderism may be insufficiently
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inclusive in some instances and imprecise in others, it has come to also include the social
category of (p. 101) transsexuality (Namaste 2005, 2). Bobby Noble (2006, 3) sees the
terms transsexual and transgender as essentially contested and free-floating but adds that
“at its most provocative, trans- and the space it references refuses the medical and
psychological categorical imperatives through which it has always been forced to
confess.” Various related terms (e.g., transvestite, cross-dresser, trans, female-to-male,
male-to-female, boyz) recode identity language, such that the category of transgender has
expansive and contested meanings, although these too are subject to various kinds of
normalizing processes of meaning making; these normalizing processes are especially
apparent in discussions about who is really trans and whether intersex should be
included in the definitions of transgender and transsexuality (Currah et al. 2006. xv;
Greenberg 2006; Stryker 2008, 9).
The history of peoples who challenge socially, medically, and legally imposed gender
boundaries is wide-ranging (Stryker 2008). Some indigenous peoples use the term two-
spirited people to refer to the spiritual identity of those who embody masculine and
feminine spirits or genders within the same body. Importantly, the language of two-
spirited is contested and tends to be universalizing of different indigenous traditions
(Lang 1998), and there is too often a presumed link between two-spiritedness and
transgenderism. The distinctiveness of indigenous non-normative genders lies in the link
to the role of visionaries and healers who do not view sexuality and gender as separable
from other aspects of life. But because indigenous epistemologies still remain on the
margins, including in much feminist political thought, more understanding is needed on
how indigenous peoples describe genders and sexualities that fall outside mainstream
binary system of governmentality and how to interpret non-Western categories in ways
that adequately represent differing indigenous meanings.
The similarities and differences between meanings can also be found in East Asian and
Western understandings of key feminist terms. While it is important to examine the
widening gulf between rich and poor nations in terms of first world–third world or north–
south (as feminist debates about differences among women illuminate), this often
excludes the diversity of East Asian feminism, which is neither Western nor from the
Global South (Jackson, Jieyu, and Juhyun 2008). East Asian feminists have pointed out
that meanings of sex, gender, and sexuality vary according to language and cultural
specificity. Gender and sexuality, for example, have no preexisting equivalents in Asian
languages and do not translate very well but have still been taken up and also reinvented
by East Asian scholars (ibid., 2). Moreover, it is not clear how the mix of individualism
and traditional collective will in places like Taiwan, China, and Korea differently affects
the stability or deconstruction of conventional binaries of man–woman (ibid., 19). The
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point here is that even critiques of (feminine, masculine, trans) subjectivity will vary
according to cultural and historical context.
Overall, the third debate about the meaning of woman destabilizes a binary-based
understanding of female and male biological bodies that neatly map (p. 102) onto
conventional feminine and masculine social bodies. In other words, this approach to
gender politics rejects the idea that sex equals biology and gender equals culture. Not
only can female biological bodies be men and socially masculine, but the spectrum of
possible gender identities transcends the conventional binary of male–female that
dominates the various schools of feminism discussed in early sections. Ultimately this
gender trouble is a challenge to the naturalized coherency of sex, gender, sexual desires,
and woman—categories often presumed to be stable among feminists discussed in earlier
sections.
Is the Subject of Woman Dead in Feminism? Is

Feminism Dead without the Subject of Woman?
In sum, feminism has been shaped and invigorated by critiques against the idea that the
traditional feminine subject, woman, is the basis of feminist politics: namely, that the
category of woman is isolated from or prioritized over other categories; that the
designation of women as a single, coherent, already constituted group has the effect of
signifying all women equally as powerless and without agency; and that the very process
of definitively defining gender excludes and devalues some bodies and practices while
normalizing others.
These critiques raise a prickly issue in feminist thinking, which is dubbed by Seyla
Benhabib (1995) as “the death of the subject.” Benhabib asks, if the subject is a fiction, a
performative process of becoming or socially made body that refuses sex–gender
binaries, what is the basis of feminism or womanhood? If there is no knowable subject,
what drives feminist movements and in whose name are liberation claims being made?
These questions have sometimes been framed in terms of essentialism versus
antiessentialism and social constructivism, whereby it is argued that essentialist readings
of identity assume too much (i.e., that there is a fixed and permanent social group
identity of women), and constructivist interpretations do not assume enough (i.e., that
there is no such thing as a social group of women).
One kind of response from feminists to this essentialism versus antiessentialism tension
has been to develop what has come to be known as intersectionality (also see the chapter
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by Hill Collins and Chepp in this volume). While there is a burgeoning literature on
intersectionality among feminists, it remains a marginalized lens of analysis in
mainstream political study. Intersectionality is a contested term and framework of
analysis, but as an umbrella term it can be generally defined as “the complex, irreducible,
varied, and variable effects which ensue when multiple axes of differentiation—economic,
political cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential—intersect in historically specific
contexts” (p. 103) (Brah and Phoenix 2004, 76). Ange-Marie Hancock (2007, 64) specifies
that intersectionality is based on the idea that more than one category should be
analyzed, that categories matters equally and that the relationship between categories is
an open empirical question, that there exists a dynamic interaction between individual
and institutional factors, that members within a category are diverse, that analysis of a
set of individuals is integrated with institutional analysis, and that empirical and
theoretical claims are both possible and necessary.
The term intersectionality was specifically coined and developed by American critical
race scholar Kimberle Crenshaw (1989, 1991) as a way to address legal doctrinal issues
and to work both within and against the law. Crenshaw used the metaphor of intersecting
roads to describe and explain the unique ways racial and gender discrimination
compounded each other. Crenshaw’s formulation of intersectionality opened up a
conceptual space through which to study how a combination of various oppressions work
together to produce something unique and distinct from any one form of discrimination
standing alone. Building on the idea of intersectionality, feminists have developed
(sometimes conflicting) concepts and theories of interlocking oppressions (Razack 1998,
18), multiple jeopardy (King 1988), discrimination-within-discrimination (Kirkness 1987–
88), multiple consciousness (Matsuda 1992), multiplex epistemologies (Phoenix and
Pattynama 2006), translocational positionality (Anthias 2001), interconnectivities (Valdes
1995), synthesis (Ehrenreich 2002), positional and discursive intersectionality (Yuval-
Davis 2006), and assemblages (Puar 2007). What these differing ideas all share is the
need to move beyond a single-axis approach that presents the category of woman as
stable and undifferentiated.
A number of other feminists have attempted to attend to the critiques of ‘woman’ by

theorizing gender as an analytic category rather than a natural identity (Harding 1986;
Beckwith 2005). Hawkesworth (1997, 681) notes that gender as category advances
theories about “the cultural production of heterosexual desire, the psychoanalytic
production of individual identity, the power asymmetries in social life, or the structure of
perception.” While recognizing these as improvements to conventional feminist notions of
sex equals gender, Hawkesworth argues that even in these instances gender is presented
as a universal explanan, whereby “it covertly invokes the very biological ground it set out
to repudiate ….[It] operates within the confines of a base/superstructure” (662). To
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Feminisms
counter this naturalizing trend she warns against collapsing diverse notions of sexed
embodiedness, sexuality, sexual and gender identity, gendered divisions of labor,
gendered social relations, and gender symbolism into the single term gender.
While Butler is a severe critic of fixed and stable subject formations, she also recognizes
that politically marginalized peoples may want to or have to insist on deploying
categories like lesbian or gay because they are threatened. There is no question that
some subjects (like lesbians and gays) are under threats of obliteration, and these threats
end up dictating the terms of political resistance (Butler 1997, 304). Nonetheless, these
categories, she maintains, are injurious in (p. 104) that they reinstall a call for essence,
when in fact it is crucial to ask which version of lesbian or gay identity is being deployed,
by whom, and what benefits and exclusions are subsequently produced. While any
consolidation of identity requires some set of differentiations and exclusions, there is no
way of controlling how that identity will be used, and if it becomes permanent and rigid it
forecloses “futural significations.” As such, echoing Spivak’s (1988) call for “strategic
essentialism” in which alliances are developed as contingent and temporary formations,
Butler (1997, 305) calls for “strategic provisionality,” whereby identities are approached
as sites of contestation, revision, and rearticulation.
Young (1994) argues that a pragmatic feminist category of woman is important because it
maintains a point of view outside of liberal individualism and gives feminist social
movements their specificity. Drawing from Jean Paul Sartre, Young offers the notion of
gender as seriality. As opposed to a group that presupposes that a collection of persons
recognize themselves and one another in a unified relation, Young says a series enables
an understanding of a social collective whose members are unified passively by objects
around them (e.g., rules about the body, menstruation, pregnancy, sexual desire,
language, clothes, division of labor). Because women have different attitudes toward
these objects, there is an unorganized gender existence, members are only passively
unified and isolated from one another, and the series is blurry and shifting. Young argues
that gender as seriality avoids the assumption that women are a passive social collective
with common attributes and situations; refuses the idea that a person’s gender identity
defines them singly, whether psychologically or politically, links gender to other
serialities such as race; and is distinct even while it is mapped onto sex as a series.
Integrating the critique that not all women share the same biology or the same
experiences, Michaele Ferguson (2007) reconceptualizes identity in terms of practices of
doing as opposed to objects that have intrinsic meaning. She rejects identity-as-object
because “when we conceive of identity as something we can know and get right, we end
up with a choice between two undesirable options: either we continue searching in the
vain hope that we will succeed where others have not and discover true essence our
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identity, or we resign ourselves to the incoherence of the subject of democratic and

feminist politics. Neither choice is compelling” (35). Drawing on the work of Linda Zerilli
(2006), she develops an account of collective gender identity in terms of inherited
systems of beliefs rather than knowledge about all members, how the category of woman
gains meaning through complex social practices rather than presumed commonalties,
and political exchanges rather than truth claims. A theory of gender, Ferguson concludes,
must acknowledge an infinite contestability about its own terms, engage in continuous
self-critique, and refuse to settle the question of who “we” are.
Rather than posing a problem for feminism, continuous critical questioning of concepts
and categories that seem foundational (such as woman) opens up the possibilities of
imaging and reimagining differences in alternative and new kinds of ways (Dhamoon
2009). Accordingly, the subject of woman need (p. 105) be neither dead nor revered but
persistently critiqued even when it is deployed; and feminism does not die without the
subject of woman because this would assume that both feminism and organizing concepts
are unidimensional, unconditional, stable, and permanent. Put differently, the making of
woman is itself an activity of politics.
Futures of Feminism
Different feminisms have already corrected omissions and distortions that permeate
political science, illuminated social and political relations neglected by mainstream
accounts, and advanced alternate explanations for political life (Hawkesworth 2005, 141)
and alternate ways of organizing and living. As this field of study continues to develop, it
is important to keep in mind that when feminism becomes singular and is narrowly
defined and when particular centers are universalized as the referent points (e.g., white
women, Western feminism, heterosexual women, lesbians), much is missed about history,
difference, and political organizing.
The vast spectrum and depth of feminism is testament to its wide appeal and global
application. This diversity may raise the question of what, if anything, links different
strands of feminism together in practice (however loosely or tightly), if not the biological
female body or the socially constructed shared sense of womanhood? This depends on
coalitions and alliances between different kinds of feminist worldviews, experiences, and
practices—coalitions driven by social justice concerns rather than unified conceptions of
identity or common experiences. Different types of feminism already envision ways of
making social change, including the following: inclusion into mainstreams; working with
or against state institutions; turning away from the state entirely and toward local
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communities; reformulating major institutions such as the traditional family; closing the
separation between men and women; engaging in new reproductive technologies;
offering discursive deconstructions that produce category crises; and generating
decolonized, cross-border feminist communities. While many of these agendas may
conflict, the possibility of alliances and coalitions lies in critiquing and therefore
disrupting the work of power—what Chela Sandoval (2000, 61–63) refers to as
confrontation with difference and an “ethical commitment to egalitarian social relations.”
Inevitably, many of these alliances and coalitions will be temporary and context specific
because the sites of power and transformative capacities of power will be differently
understood. But what cuts across all feminisms is a critique of the forces and relations of
power. It is this work of critiquing power that will continue to be delineated by feminists
from differing vantage points, and that has led to a shift among feminists from a politics
based on sisterhood to one based on solidarity among differences.
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Rita Kaur Dhamoon

Rita Kaur Dhamoon is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of the
Fraser Valley, Canada.
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Feminisms

Oxford Handbooks Online

Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: feminists, feminism, feminist debates, methods of inquiry, study of politics

The Terrain of Feminism

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Contemporary Feminist Themes and Debates

• Equality as difference or sameness—where are the women?

(p. 91) Equality as Sameness or Difference: “Where Are the Women?”

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“Which Women?” Differences among Women

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dis/ability. In drawing attention to white privilege, this school of feminism foregrounds

Sex and Gender Debates: What Is Woman?

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The open-endedness of social categories is also characteristic of transfeminism, an

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Is the Subject of Woman Dead in Feminism? Is

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A number of other feminists have attempted to attend to the critiques of ‘woman’ by

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identity, or we resign ourselves to the incoherence of the subject of democratic and

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Arneil, Barbara. 1999. Politics and feminism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Benhabib, Seyla. 1995. “Feminism and postmodernism.” In S. Benhabib, ed., Feminist

Subscriber: University College London; date: 02 April 2017

Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that matter. New York: Routledge.

Chaudhuri, Maitrayee (Ed.). 2005. Feminism in India. London: Zed Books.

Subscriber: University College London; date: 02 April 2017

Dietz, Mary G. 2003. “Current controversies in feminist theory.” Annual Review of

Ehrenreich, Nancy. 2002. “Subordination and symbiosis: Mechanisms of mutual support

Ferguson, Michaele L. 2007. “Sharing without knowing: Collective identity in feminist

Fraser, Nancy. 1997. Justice interruptus: Critical reflections on the “postsocialist”

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2002. “Integrating disability, transforming feminist

Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2007. “When multiplication doesn’t equal quick addition:

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Hartmann, Heidi. 1997. “The unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism.” In L.

Hawkesworth, Mary. 1997. “Confounding gender.” Signs 22(3): 649–685.

Hawkesworth, Mary. 2005. “Engendering political science: An immodest proposal.”

Hawkesworth, Mary. 2006. Feminist inquiry: From political conviction to methodological

Iman, Ayesha M. 1997. “The dynamic of winning: An analysis of women in Nigeria.” In M.

King, Deborah K. 1988. “Multiple jeopardy, multiple consciousness: The context of a

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Li, Xiaojiang. 1989. Xinggou [sex gap]. Beijing: Sanlian Press.

Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister outsider. New York: Crossing Press.

Millet, Kate. 1970. Sexual politics. New York: Doubleday.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory,

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Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the oppressed. Minneapolis: University of