Feminism | Theoretical Frameworks

Four Main Theoretical Perspectives

Feminism has four main frameworks. There is a fifth, which I will include towards the end of this thread. I’m hoping to make a few threads that cover the basics, not just for others to read and discuss on the forum, but to also clarify the basic positions for myself. I have posted it in the ‘Philosophy and Psychology’ Section, as there is no Sociology section, or human sciences section.

Before we commence the thread, I am aware of the internet raging war of feminists and anti-feminists, MRA’s, MGTOW’s, SJW etc…I ask that the threads I post on this subject be disassociated from these terms and their many, many meanings. Feminism is a social study, it also has philosophy associated with it. Some of the following forms of gender inequality may not exist, or exist in the same form, but in order to understand the frameworks, I will have to consider these analyses as they are. Patriarchy has shifted mainly from private inequality to public relations over the years.

Take this for example:

Women do more work in the household than men.

I emplore anyone reading this to not take offence, if you do happen to do equal or more housework and you are a man, good for you! This is a private issue for feminism to tackle and may not be a prevelant in society as it once was, but this is not to say that it isn’t happening in the world today on large scales, take Islamic cultures for example, which have a very strict patriarchal structure of society.

I find feminism is only possible to understand objectively, if you can distance yourself from the considerations. While feminism, in its varying forms, may seem like an attack on men, even as if it is men-hating in general, I have to say I don’t see it that way and niether do I proffer such a view. Feminism discusses issues where they happen and how they happen.

This thread is not going to tackle feminism as ‘the fight for equality for both sexes’, rather it is to explain the differences between the frameworks and how they approach the subject. It is not to be taken as an activist thread. I am only atempting to convey what is actually written about in feminist texts. Feminism is a subject that can’t be discussed in isolation, the context is vast.

The four main perspectives are:

[list]
[*]Radical Feminism
[*]Marxist Feminism
[*]Liberal Feminism
[*]Dual Systems Theory Feminism
[/list]
The fifth perspective, which is the one I personally find the most interesting, is the Post-Structuralist school of thought on Feminism. We will get around to this.

Radical Feminism

Radical Feminists have an analysis of gender inequality in which men as a group dominate women. The system of domination is called patriarchy. Radical Feminists do not percieve patriarchy as being derived from any other social system of inequality; for instance, it is not a bi-product of capitalism.

‘The personal is the political’, is a slogan that questions who does the housework, who interrupts whom in conversation – these are seen as part of the system of male domination.

There are differences between Radical Feminists over the basis of male supremacy. This is often considered to involve the appropriation of women’s sexuality and bodies.

In other accounts, male violence is seen as the root cause. Sexual practice is seen to be socially constructed around male notions of desire, not women’s. Sexuality is seen as a major site of male domination over women, which men impose their notion of feminimity on women.

Heterosexuality is seen as the norm, socially institutionalised and this oragnises many other aspects of gender relations.

Male violence against women is considered to be part of a system of controlling women.

The main problems critics have raised about Radical Feminism is a tendency towards essentialism to an implicit or explicit biological reductionism and to a false universalism which cannot understand historical change or take sufficient account of divisions between women based on ethnicity and class.

Marxist Feminism

Marxists differ because they consider gender inequality to derive from capitalism, therefore patriarchy is not to be considered as an independent system.

Men’s domination over women is a by-product of capital’s domination over labour. Class relations and the economic exploitation of one class by another are the central features of social structure and these determine the nature of gender relations.

The family is considered to be beneficial to capital by providing a cheap way of taking care of workers, cooking food, washing clothes and for producing the next generation of workers. An important book to read is Silvia Federeici – Caliban and the Witch, in that book, she describes the onset of capitalism during enclosure and how women were subordinated into these roles in society. Women recieve maintainence from ther husbands, but pretty much perform these duties for free.

Capital benefits from the unequal division of labour in the home.

Other Marxists are not so economistic.

Some Marxist Feminists retain a materialist analysis of class relations and combine them with gender relations in terms of ideology and culture.

The main problem is that it too narrowly focuses on capitalism (although this does not make them irrelevant – see my threads on capitalism for more on this). It is unable to account for pre- or post-capitalist societies and it incorrectly reduces gender inequality to capitalism, rather than recognising the independce of gender dynamics.

Liberal Feminism

Liberalism differs from both of the other analyses. It doesn’t have an analysis of overarching social structures, but rather percieves doination as being the result of numerous small scale deprivations. In other words, they reject false consciousness and instead focus on rights.

There are two main strands of analysis:

[list=1]
[*]The denial of equal rights for women In education, employment and other important concerns. Women’s disadvantaged position is related to specific kinds of prejudice against women.
[*]Sexist attitudes that sustain situations Attitudes are analysed as traditional and unresponsive to recent changes in gender relations.
[/list]
Liberal Feminists have provided extensive documentation and data, empirical studies, on the lives of women.

The major surveys on women’s employment and divsion of domestic labour might fall into this category.

Liberal feminism fails to give an account of deep rooted gender inequality and the interconnectedness between its different forms. The persistence of patriarchal attitudes is not systemactically addressed, leading to partial accounts.

Dual Systems Theory

This is a synthesis of Radical and Marxist Feminism. It argues that patriarchy and capitalism are both present and important in the structuring of gender relations in society.

They either analyse it as a capitalist-patriarchal system or as a system that is so symbiotically closely related that it eventually becomes one system.

Patriarchy sustains a system of law and order, while capitalism seeks the pursuit of profit. Changes to one part, will result in changes in the other. Increases in demand for women in the work force for example, leads to demand of political change, in the increasing contradiction of women who are both wage-workers and domestic labourers.

Other writers keep them seperate. On the economic level, order is maintained by capitalism, while on the unconscious level, patriarchy holds the law. This framework was taken from Sigmund Freud, whose work is often considered anti-feminist, due to sexist intrepretations of women’s sexuality and desires, nevertheless was found useful for this framework.

Other writers consider patriarchy as operating at the level of expropriation of women’s labour by men. Segregation of the workforce is also taken into account. Occupational segregation is used by organised men to keep access to the best paid jobs for themselves at the expense of women. Women also perform more duties at home than men do. Women’s disadvantaged position in the workforce makes them vulnerable in marriage arrangements.

Dual Systems theorists state that patriarchy existed long before capitalism, so it cannot be reduced to it.

The main problem I have with Dualists is that they do not cover the full range of patriarchal structures. Sexuality and violence are not given much analytic space. Most suggest either material or the cultural levels are the basis for patrairchy. A broader range of structures needs to be addressed.

Radical Feminists have contributed primarily analyses of sexuality, violence, culture and the state, socialist feminists on housework, waged work, culture and the state. A proper synthesis should include –

[list=1]
[*]waged work
[*]housework
[*]sexuality
[*]culture
[*]violence
[*]the state
[/list]
Post-Structural Feminists

These feminists draw from the works of Derrida and Foucault, while they were not feminists themselves, their texts contain many useful resources for feminists. Although Foucault makes few references to women or to the issue of gender in his writings, his treatment of the relations between power, the body and sexuality has stimulated extensive feminist interest.

The deconstruction of specific categories in texts by Derrida has advanced feminist analysis within the field of cultural studies.

Foucault sees discourses as power, but it is very dispersed and capillary. This is a very different view of power compared to all the other theoretical perspectives.  Foucault’s idea that the body and sexuality are cultural constructs rather than natural phenomena has made a significant contribution to the feminist critique of essentialism.

Judith Butler, another Post-Structural Feminist also works with Queer Theory. Queer theory is a multilayered, and rather complex, field of study. To assign a single-sentence definition to this theory would be incomplete as it would fail to touch on the various ways it is interpreted, applicable and used. In particular, Queer Theory’s overreaching goal is to be sought out as a lens or tool to deconstruct the existing monolithic ideals of social norms and taxonomies; as well as, how these norms came into being and why. In addition, it analyzes the correlation between power distribution and identification while understanding the multifarious facets of oppression and privilege. It is vital to understand queer and Queer Theory as an applicable concept providing a framework to explore these issues rather than an identity. Queer is an inclusive umbrella term for those not only deemed as sexually deviant in relations to a social hegemony but also used to describe those who feel marginalized as a result of social practices and identity. It is a “site of permanent becoming”.

Feminism, perhaps more than any other movement against domination, has thought hard about how projects of personal change can and must interact with social struggles. In some early forms, feminism was typically conceived of as the struggle of women to transform their relationship with men. A simple reading, along the lines of the Clausewitzian image of the duel, would see this as a project in which one social body (women) confronts another (men) and seeks to reconfigure the power relation between these two groupings. However, it has become apparent to more recent feminists that any such project is also a project of self-transformation, in which the identity of ‘woman’ is itself put into question.

The identity of ‘woman’, understood as a fixed natural kind, is a ‘myth’, an ‘imaginary formation’. At the same time, it is certainly the case that in our current world some people are identified – or marked, as Wittig puts it, citing Colette Guillamin – as women. They are identified in this way not only by (those marked as) men, but also by others marked as women and, in many cases, by themselves. And this marking is not merely a superficial naming but:

ideology goes far since our bodies as well as our minds are the product of this manipulation. We have been compelled in our bodies and in our minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been established for us.

The project thus involves a movement between two different schemes of identity, two ways of grouping a social ecology. Now, in the present, and formed historically by past relations of domination (and so also by past resistance), there is an identity scheme in which human beings are classed as men and women. The future goal of the project is a quite different identity scheme.

At this point, let us say that a new personal and subjective definition for all humankind can only be found beyond the categories of sex

In Nomadic Subjects, Braidotti’s feminist project embarks from the point that ‘there can be no subjectivity outside sexuation, or language; the subject is always gendered: it is a “she-I” or a “he-I”’.

The tense of this ‘always’ is not entirely clear: if it means that we can’t imagine any potential future form of language and sexuality without binary gender, this opposes Wittig’s project from the start. On the other hand, we might read it to say that people living now have (with few exceptions) grown up gendered as male or female. Braidotti’s account of sexual difference then deepens the conception of how humans are ‘marked’ by gender from birth through infancy and as we learn to move, to speak, to value and interpret the world, to experience and shape our bodies, to identify others and ourselves as subjects and as objects and as members of groups, and to practice domination and resistance.

Both projects develop around three distinct perspectives, or moments, of identity. For both, the starting point is a past and present definition of ‘woman’: an identity that is shaped by a history of domination and struggle, but that lives very much in the present as it is deeply incorporated into bodies and relationships here and now. Second, both projects move towards a future in which gendered identities will be transformed: whether, for Wittig, destroyed outright; or, for Braidotti, remade. Thirdly, to reach this future involves the formation of more specific alliances, communities and forms of life, that are actively engaged in resistance here and now: ‘feminists’, ‘lesbians’, ‘feminist women’.

The feminist projects, are collective projects: rather than isolating herself, the self-transforming subject finds or creates an alliance, a community of subjects. who work together on their overlapping projects. Here the project form of life is a collective form of life – perhaps indeed, a culture – that takes shape through the interactions of a group of allied bodies.