Credits, references, and bibliography

http://www.skatelog.com/countries/us/ca/douglas-aircraft-skaters.htm

Woman-centered Perspective:

1. Situations and experiences of women in society
2. Describe and evaluate from the perspective of women

"Waves"

1. 1848-1920 (vote)
2. 1960-1990 (economic and social equality)
3. 1990-present: to be determined

The Basic Theoretical Questions

• What about women?
  • Deliberate exclusion
  • Actuality versus popular role conceptions
  • Invisibility
• Why is this so?
• How can we change and improve the social world?
• What about differences between women?

"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

1. Gender as a social construct
2. Social Construction versus biological
3. 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
• Explanations:
  • Biological: hormones, left/right brain (Alice Rossi, see "The Feminist Papers")
  • Institutional: role structure, sexual division of labor, socialization, gendered scripts (distinctive forms of activism)
  • Interactional: institutional explanation too deterministic. Focus on the practical work of "doing gender."
  • Phenomenological (and existential): marginalization of women as the "other."
    • Cultural system created by men, women at best on the margins, at worst: objectified opposite of male
    • Differences are a result (in part) of this exclusion and internalization of otherness.
    • Can women achieve distinctive subjectivity?
• Theorists of difference seek to create a social space that accepts women as different and with positive contributions to make to society

Gender Inequality

• Not only different, but unequal.
• Inequality is structural, not based on difference
• Change is possible

1. Liberal Feminism: women and men are equal (1848 Seneca Fall, NY)
   • Rejection of second-class status
   • Empower women to secure full equality through political process
   • Gender as a social construction
   • Sexism: system of prejudice that legitimates discrimination
     • Language
     • Male body as standard (medicine and work)
     • "Gendered spheres": male public and paid, female private and unpaid
   • Critique of taken-for-granted inequality: wages, glass ceiling, "second shift," domestic violence, rape, and feminization of poverty.

   
   http://www.dmacc.cc.ia.us/instructors/gdtitchener/Welcome_files/Therorists/bernard.jpg

   • Jessie Bernard: The Future of Marriage
     1. Marriage idealized as the destiny for women, responsibility and constraint for men, egalitarian
     2. Institutionally: empowers the male--authority and freedom. Wives--compliant, dependent, domestic
     3. 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.
     4. 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

1. Issue of domination: women "being used, controlled, subjugated, and oppressed by men." (2, page 195)
2. Patriarchy: the primary power structure-intentional and deliberate. Gender difference and inequality are by-products.
3. Two variants of Gender Oppression:
   1. 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.
   2. Radical Feminism
      • Women are of absolute positive value as women
      • Women are everywhere oppressed (patriarchy), and oppression is part of all institutions and structures
      • Patriarchy the first and most pervasive system: least noticed but most significant
        • Men learn how to control, women learn subordination

      
      http://gaelia.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/smash_patriarchy.jpg

      • Patriarchy as violence (2, page 199)
      • Beauty myth
      • Ideals of motherhood, monogamy, chastity, heterosexuality
      • Sexual harassment
      • Practices of gynecology, obstetrics, and psychotherapy
      • Unpaid labor
      • And, overt violence: rape, sexual abuse, prostitution, incest, hysterectomies, pornography (and historical: witch burning, foot-binding, infanticide)
      • Physical power establishes and maintains control.
      • Men's interest: women and sexual gratification, child-bearing, labor force, "trophies," and emotional support.
      • Defeat patriarchy though consciousness raising
        • Confrontation
        • Separation (women-run collectives and lesbian feminism)

Structural Oppression

1. Socialist Feminism
   • Critique of capitalism and patriarchy
   • Marx and Engels (The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State): patriarchy and property relations (economic)
   • Socialist feminists--patriarchy intertwined, yet independent
   • 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
     • Ideas are central--not mere by-products
     • Not just class, but social inequality
   • Chrys Ingraaham's White Weddings
     • Mandatory and Costly
     • Exploitation
     • Selling the concept
     • Heteronormativity
     • "...the white wedding us 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 if 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.
     

     
     
     Patricia Hill Collins

2. Intersectionality Theory

• 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.

Dorothy Smith

Contemporary Application: Terry Schiavo

Internet Exercises

Exercise 1

1. 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.
2. 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?
3. [Click on the button that says “Take Action.”]  Which initiatives do you support and which ones do you oppose? Why?
4. What would a socialist feminist or an intersectionality theorist think about the site’s advocacy of these issues?
5. How many of the initiatives listed here are international or global in scope?

Exercise 2

1. Go to http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/wlm/mcafee/   Read the essay on the revolutionary potential of the women’s movement and answer the following questions.
2. What are the five ways in which the oppression of women functions in a capitalist society?
3. How do the authors feel about consumerism in a capitalist society?
4. How does the development of a bourgeois, democratic society affect women?
5. According to the authors of this essay, what are the four kinds of women’s groups?

Annotated Weblinks

1. The Feminist Theory Website: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/enin.html
2. Feminism and Women’s Studies: http://feminism.eserver.org/
3. Feminist.com: http://feminist.com/
4. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/
5. Women’s Studies Resources:  Feminist Theory: http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/wstudies/theory.html
6. 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.
7. Schools of Feminist Thought:  Factions and Subsets of the Feminist Movement: http://www.sapphireblue.com/dissident_feminist/factions.shtml
8. Like One of the Family: http://www.fathom.com/feature/35639 (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.)
9. Jane Addams on Cultural Feminism: http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/DSS/Addams/CULTFEM3.HTML
10. Queer Theory: http://www.queertheory.com/
11. The National Organization of Women: http://www.now.org

Works Cited

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. Contemporary Sociological Theory and Its Classical Roots: The Basics. St. Louis: McGraw-Hill. The chapter on Contemporary Feminist Theory is by Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge.

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Last Updated: Monday, November 9, 2009 7:42 AM

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