"Feminism
deconstructs established systems of knowledge by showing their masculine bias
and the gender politics framing and informing them." (2,
page 187) Feminism is also being "deconstructed" from within--varieties
of experience are challenging the "established" perspective, and postmodernism
is challenging the concepts of gender and self.
Contemporary
Feminist Theories
Gender as a social construct.
Social Construction versus biological.
Sociology of Gender: special focus.
"And,
what about the women?"
Different
experiences than men.
Unequal
treatment.
Oppression.
Variety
of experience: structural oppression--intersections of class, race, age, etc.
Gender
Difference
Cultural
Feminism: positive aspects of the "female character." Styles
of communication and openness--better for organizing society.
Marriage idealized
as the destiny and fulfillment for women, responsibility and constraint for men, and idealized as an egalitarian relationship by society.
Institutionally:
empowers the male--authority and freedom. Wives--compliant, dependent,
domestic
Two marriages:
Man's: constraint
and burden, yet, authority, independence and right to the service
of the women (sexual and domestic)
Wife's: affirms
"fulfillment." Experiences powerlessness, dependency,
and servitude.
Married women
and stress: marriage "good" for men, bad for women.
Liberal Feminists:
eliminate gender as central organizing principle in distribution of social
resources.
Legal and institutional
change.
Gender
Oppression
Issue of domination: women "being
used, controlled, subjugated, and oppressed by men." (2,
page 195)
Patriarchy:
the primary power structure-intentional and deliberate. Gender difference
and inequality are by-products.
Two variants of Gender
Oppression:
Psychoanalytic Feminism: based on Freudian
psychoanalytic theory
All
men work, through their daily activities, to create and sustain patriarchy
Emotions,
fears, pathology
Socio-emotional
environment of the young child
Balance
of individuation and recognition by other
Centrality
of relationship with mother
Relationship
with mother: ambivalence--need and dependence/fear and rage, with father
occasional and secondary.
Male
(culturally valued) seeks separation of identity from mother. In adult--urge
to dominate.
Female:
discovers identity in a culture that devalues female. As adult, submissive
to male and "kinship" with women.
Capitalist
Patriarchy and domination: "large-scale structural arrangement, a
power relation between groups or categories of social actors." (2,
page 201)
Reproduced by
intentional action of individuals
Women's perspective
is key
Women may actively
participants in oppressing others
Historical
Materialism:
Material conditions
(and activities that produce them) shape human experience and being
These conditions
change over time
History is a
record of these changes
Realm of meaning
beyond classic historical materialism
Material conditions
not just economic, but also, the body, sexuality, child-rearing, domestic
tasks, and the production of know,ledge: humans a creators
"...the
white wedding is passionately desired by brides and their families
because it encodes the "heterosexual imaginary": the dream
vision of romantic love between a man and woman that obscures and
erases from the mind all knowledge of the work required to maintain
a relation between unequals..." (2,
page 203)
Socialist
Feminism: Global solidarity, redistribution of societal resources, and
the duty to make visible the inequalities that shape people's lives.
Vectors
of Oppression and Privilege: race, class, global location, sexual preference,
and age.
The
pattern of the intersection produces the particular experience of oppression
(black women and employment discrimination [Crenshawe])
The privilege of
some is based on the oppression of others
Difference as a
conceptual tool for legitimating oppression: the "mythical norm"
(Audre Lourde)
Allows dominants
to control social production
Also becomes
part of individual subjectivity
Othering
(Gloria Anzaldua): witihin a subordinated group, compromises solidarity
Standpoint:
Shared perspective of (embodied) actors in groups characterized by "heterogeneous
commonality." Knowledge is always partial and affected by power.
Although intersections differ, standpoint is affirmed through group
history and interaction. Group members pivot between senses of self--move
from group home to wider society: Outsider
Within.
(see local copy)
Need to "bear
witness, protest, and organize."
Toward
a Feminist Sociological Theory
"Drawing
on these lines of argument, feminist sociology has begun to create a general
sociological theory focused on the problems of structure and agency, the micro
and macro linkage, the nature of power, inequality, and social change. These
analyses understand social life as an ongoing series of enactments of oppression
and responses to oppression. They also develop a vocabulary for talking about
micro-macro relations that includes such concepts as relations of ruling, local
actualities of lived experience, and texts. This vocabulary allows feminist
theorists to consider how the everyday lives of women are patterned by structural
inequality." (1)
"This emergent feminist
theory views human agents as living and acting within a complex field of power
that they are determined by and that in in their agency they both reproduce
and contest. Social life is presented as an ongoing series of enactments of
oppression by agents who cannot be absolved from their responsibility for the
reproduction of domination even when we can explain the social structures framing
those enactments."(2, page 207)
Group
Standpoints: motivations for group reproduction and resistance--not purely
deterministic.
A
structure for hope and creative action
For
turning anger into constructive purposes: liberation politics
Relations of the Ruling: control of social production
Local
Actualities of Lived Experience: social production is an EDL activity engaged
in by real people (production and communication)
Relations
of ruling manifest themselves via "texts" that extract the lived
experience of individuals and translate them into forms consistent with power
structures (and typically alien to the individual): tax forms for jobs, MyView
for registration, etc. (objectification)
These
elements constitute the organization of social life and account for the domination
of social actors
All
of this is coded by gender and race: women find themselves more deeply embedded
in the ongoing reality of lived actualities, men tend to be freer to dominate
Duplicated
in economic and racial subordinates
"Texts"
organize inequalities
"Difference
us an organizational principle of the texts of the relations of ruling"
(2, page 211)
Different
experiences for subordinates and dominants
Action:
privilege versus "incidentalism." Women are not pursuing goals,
but dealing with demands of the moment (needs of others).
Interaction: Mutuality
and freedom for dominants, constraint and inequality for subordinates
(division or labor and micro-interactions)
Knowledge of self:
built on perspective of equals for dominants, structure by definitions
of dominants for women and other subordinates
Bifurcated
consciousness: lived experience versus social typifications
"How do people
survive when their own experience does not fit the established typifications
of that experience?" (2,
page 211)
By addressing this
cognitive break, change can happen.
Go
to http://www.feminist.org/ Take a look at
the various buttons on the left side of the screen and answer the following
questions.
Judging
from the kinds of issues represented on this site, do you think the Feminist
Majority Foundation is closer to liberal feminism or radical feminism? Why?
[Click
on the button that says "Take Action."] Which initiatives do you support
and which ones do you oppose? Why?
What
would a socialist feminist or an intersectionality theorist think about the
site's advocacy of these issues?
How
many of the initiatives listed here are international or global in scope?
This
site provides links to articles in feminist theory, reviews of books relevant
to feminist theory, and an image gallery of women philosophers and theorists.
Like
One of the Family: http://fathom.lse.ac.uk/Features/35639/gen.html (This is a link to a lecture given by Patricia Hill Collins, which was provided
by the London School of Economics. It features both a text and audio version
of the lecture.)
1.
Much of this page comes from the "Instructor's Manual" to accompany Contemporary
Sociological Theory and Its Classical Roots: The Basics, Second Edition,
George Ritzer, Mcgraw-Hill, 2007. The Instructor's Manual was prepared by James
Murphy, University of Maryland, College Park and Todd Stillman, Fayetteville
State University. These excerpts are from chapter 8. 2. Ritzer, George. 2007/2010/2013. Contemporary Sociological Theory and Its Classical Roots: The Basics. 2nd/3rd/4th editions. St. Louis: McGraw-Hill The chapter
on Contemporary Feminist Theory is by Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Gillian
Niebrugge.
URL: http://www.umsl.edu/~keelr/3210/3210_lectures/feminism.html
Owner: Robert O. Keel: rok@umsl.edu
Last Updated:
Friday, August 14, 2015 9:19 AM
