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The Case Against Contemporary Feminism

By Jia Tolentino

It’s the same with feminism as it is with women in general: there are always, seemingly, infinite ways to fail. On the one hand, feminism has never been more widely proclaimed or marketable than it is now. On the other hand, its last ten years of mainstream prominence and acceptability culminated in the election of President Donald Trump. (The Times published an essay at the end of December under the headline “ Feminism Lost. Now What? ”) Since November 9th, the two main arguments against contemporary feminism have emerged in near-exact opposition to each other: either feminism has become too strict an ideology or it has softened to the point of uselessness. On one side, there is, for instance, Kellyanne Conway, who, in her apparent dislike of words that denote principles, has labelled herself a “post-feminist.” Among those on the other side is the writer Jessa Crispin, who believes that the push to make feminism universally palatable has negated the meaning of the ideology writ large.

Crispin has written a new book-length polemic on the subject, called “Why I Am Not a Feminist,” in which she offers definitions of feminism that are considerably more barbed than the earnest, cheeky slogans that have become de rigueur—“The future is female,” for example, as Hillary Clinton  declared  in her first video statement since the election, or “Girls just want to have fun-damental rights,” or “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” The dissidence at the root of these catchphrases has been obscured by their ubiquity on tote bags and T-shirts, and for Crispin the decline of feminism is visible in how easy the label is to claim. Feminism, she tells us, has become a self-serving brand popularized by C.E.O.s and beauty companies, a “fight to allow women to participate equally in the oppression of the powerless and the poor.” It’s a “narcissistic reflexive thought process: I define myself as feminist and so everything I do is a feminist act.” It’s an “attack dog posing as a kitten,” and—in what might be Crispin’s most biting entry—a “decade-long conversation about which television show is a good television show and which television show is a bad show.”

Crispin is the founder of Bookslut , a literary Web site that she started, in 2002, when she was a full-time employee at Planned Parenthood, in Austin, Texas. (She was ahead of the word-reclamation curve that culminated in the Slutwalk marches, which were first held in 2011.) After accumulating a modest but enthusiastic following, Crispin closed down Bookslut in 2016, with minimal ceremony. “I didn’t want to become a professional,” she told Vulture, adding, “I just don’t find American literature interesting. I find MFA culture terrible. Everyone is super-cheerful because they’re trying to sell you something, and I find it really repulsive.” Crispin is happy to take the contrarian stance, particularly within spheres that lend themselves to suppressive positivity. The point of “Why I Am Not a Feminist” isn’t really that Crispin is not a feminist; it’s that she has no interest in being a part of a club that has opened its doors and lost sight of its politics—a club that would, if she weren’t so busy disavowing it, invite Kellyanne Conway in.

The effect of the catchy title stands regardless. Crispin’s argument is bracing, and a rare counterbalance; where feminism is concerned, broad acceptability is almost always framed as an unquestioned good. “Somewhere along the way toward female liberation, it was decided that the most effective method was for feminism to become universal,” Crispin writes. And the people who decided this “forgot that for something to be universally accepted, it must become as banal, as non-threatening and ineffective as possible.” Another, and perhaps less fatalistic, way of framing the matter: feminism is a political argument of such obvious reason and power that it has been co-opted as an aesthetic and transformed into merchandise by a series of influential profiteers.

Crispin notes, accurately, that feminism’s history has been marked by a “small number of radical, heavily invested women who did the hard work of dragging women’s position forward, usually through shocking acts and words,” and that the “majority of women benefited from the work of these few, while often quickly trying to disassociate themselves from them.” Reading that second line, I immediately thought of an irksome scene in Megyn Kelly’s memoir , in which Kelly tells Sheryl Sandberg that she’s not a feminist, and Sandberg—whose entire feminist initiative is based on making the movement palatable to people like Kelly, and whose awkward accommodation of the Trump Administration should surprise no one—“passed no judgment” on Kelly’s distaste for the term. Crispin mostly focusses on younger and newer feminists, castigating them as selfish and timid, afraid of the second wave. They make Andrea Dworkin into a scapegoat, she writes; they “distance themselves from the bra-burning, hairy-armpitted bogeywomen.”

Here, and in some other places where Crispin’s argument requires her to take a precise measure of contemporary feminism, she—or this book’s production schedule—can’t quite account for the complexity of the times. From 2014 to 2016, I worked as an editor at Jezebel, a site that, when it was founded, in 2007, helped to define online feminism—and served ever afterward as a somewhat abstracted target for women who criticized contemporary feminism from the left. These critics didn’t usually recognize how quickly the center is always moving, and Crispin has the same problem. Much of what she denounces—“outrage culture,” empowerment marketing , the stranglehold that white women have on the public conversation—has already been critiqued at length by the young feminist mainstream. Her imagined Dworkin-hating dilettante, discussing the politics of bikini waxing and “giving blow jobs like it’s missionary work,” has long been passé. It’s far more common these days for young feminists to adopt a radical veneer. Lena Dunham’s newsletter sells “ Dismantle the Patriarchy ” patches; last fall, a Dior runway show included a T-shirt reading, “We Should All Be Feminists.” (The shirt is not yet on sale in the United States; it reportedly costs five hundred and fifty euros in France .) The inside threat to feminism in 2017 is less a disavowal of radical ideas than an empty co-option of radical appearances—a superficial, market-based alignment that is more likely to make a woman feel good and righteous than lead her to the political action that feminism is meant to spur.

The most vital strain of thought in “Why I Am Not a Feminist” is Crispin’s unforgiving indictment of individualism and capitalism, value systems that she argues have severely warped feminism, encouraging women to think of the movement only insofar as it leads to individual gains. We have misinterpreted the old adage that the personal is political, she writes—inflecting our personal desires and decisions with political righteousness while neatly avoiding political accountability. We may understand that “the corporations we work for poison the earth, fleece the poor, make the super rich more rich, but hey. Fuck it,” Crispin writes. “We like our apartments, we can subscribe to both Netflix and Hulu, the health insurance covers my SSRI prescription, and the white noise machine I just bought helps me sleep at night.”

That this line of argument seems like a plausible next step for contemporary feminism reflects the recent and rapid leftward turn of liberal politics. Socialism and anti-capitalism, as foils to Donald Trump’s me-first ideology, have taken an accelerated path into the mainstream. “Why I Am Not a Feminist” comes at a time when some portion of liberal women in America might be ready for a major shift—inclined, suddenly, toward a belief system that does not hallow the “markers of success in patriarchal capitalism . . . money and power,” as Crispin puts it. There is, it seems, a growing hunger for a feminism concerned more with the lives of low-income women than with the number of female C.E.O.s.

The opposing view—that feminism is not just broadly compatible with capitalism but actually served by it—has certainly enjoyed its share of prominence. This is the message that has been passed down by the vast majority of self-styled feminist role models over the past ten years: that feminism is what you call it when an individual woman gets enough money to do whatever she wants. Crispin is ruthless in dissecting this brand of feminism. It means simply buying one’s way out of oppression and then perpetuating it, she argues; it embraces the patriarchal model of happiness, which depends on “having someone else subject to your will.” Women, exploited for centuries, have grown subconsciously eager to exploit others, Crispin believes. “Once we are a part of the system and benefiting from it on the same level that men are, we won’t care, as a group, about whose turn it is to get hurt.”

A question of audience tugs at “Why I Am Not a Feminist.” It seemed, at points, as though anyone who understands the terms of Crispin’s argument would already agree with her. I also wondered how the book might land if Hillary Clinton had won—if the insufficiently radical feminism Crispin rails against had triumphed rather than absorbed a staggering blow. Instead, her book arrives at a useful and perhaps unexpected cultural inflection point: a time when political accommodation appears fruitless, and when, as Amanda Hess noted in the _Times Magazine _this week, many middle-class white women have marched in closer proximity to far-left ideas than perhaps they ever would have guessed. Exhortations to “transform culture, not just respond to it” are what many of us want to hear.

Of course, this being a polemic, there’s not much space given to how , exactly, the total disengagement with our individualist and capitalist society might be achieved. “Burn it down”—another nascent feminist slogan—is generally received as an abstract, metaphorical directive. The final chapter of Crispin’s book, titled “Where We Go From Here,” is four pages. In an earlier section of “Why I Am Not a Feminist,” Crispin rails against feminist flippancy toward men, writing, “It is always easier to find your sense of value by demeaning another’s value. It is easier to define yourself as ‘not that,’ rather than do an actual accounting of your own qualities and put them on the scale.” I agree.

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By Ariel Levy

By Susan B. Glasser

By David D. Kirkpatrick

All The Arguments You Need: To Convince Doubters of Feminism

For the next time you hear, “If feminism is about gender equality why isn’t it called human-ism?”

In our All The Arguments You Need series, we take on mindsets standing in the way of progress and rebut them with facts and logic.

One of the most prominent aspects of my identity is that I am a feminist. To me, it is not only a personal belief, but also a political fight. When I identify myself as a feminist in social settings, I have noticed it almost serves as an invitation for sexists, doubters and Devil’s advocates to engage me in debates. They come armed with arguments against feminism consisting of myths, misunderstandings, and misconstructions. I don’t have a problem participating in a discourse about feminism. It is only when we talk to those who are in the dark about the movement, those who are on the fence about it, and those who are on the other side of the line, that we can achieve the goal of gender equality. But, this involves, on my part, constant engagement and a burden to educate — nay, convince — people that the advocacy of social, economic and political equality of all genders is valid and logically grounded in statistics and experiential evidence. It is exhausting to have to draw constantly on my lived experiences and recollect relevant research — only to be met with straw-man arguments and a condescending “Why are you getting worked up?”

If you’ve ever been in my place, and have wished you had facts and hard data to debunk some of the more absurd arguments against feminism thrown at you, here’s a quick primer for the next time it happens (which, it will).

“Where is the inequality? Men and women are already equal.”

According to the United Nations, one in three women is beaten , forced into sex or abused by an intimate partner. On each day of 2017, 137 women were killed by a family member. Women and girls together account for 71% of all human trafficking . A woman is raped every 13 minutes in India.

These are violent, obvious manifestations of inequality. We can see more subtle sexism in the fact that women’s clothes aren’t designed for them , school textbooks still propagate sexist stereotypes, 131 million girls are out of school globally, 113 countries don’t have laws to ensure equal pay for equal work , the majority of women in the Indian workforce earn roughly  Rs. 62 for every Rs. 100 that men earn, while doing 10 times more unpaid labor than men do — the list really does go on. And, that is a fact, too: According to the World Economic Forum’s most recent Global Gender Gap  report , at the current rate of progress, it will take another 108 years to reach gender parity. So, no; men and women are not already equal. This argument against feminism also resorts to the male-female binary, excluding transgender, gender-non-conforming and gender-fluid persons, which is simply the wrong way to go about discussing gender equality. On that front, too, we are lacking: Half of all transgender people are sexually abused at least once in their lifetime; 92% of the socio-economically challenged trans community cannot participate in India’s formal economy to this day. So, again, no; feminism is nowhere close to achieving its goal of equality. It’s going to take a minute.

“Women and men are biologically different, so how can they be equal?”

Sure, there are undeniable physiological differences between the two, but men and women don’t have different brains with different proclivities to certain vocations. Research has also found that men and women are essentially alike in terms of personality, cognitive ability, and leadership potential. Any difference between men and women is a part of socialization and not genetic coding . So, women aren’t missing from STEM fields because they’re ‘natural caregivers.’ Their absence is more likely because of structural barriers such as unfair parental leave policies in the workplace, or the fact that 71% of women field researchers  have received inappropriate sexual remarks and 26% have reported experiencing sexual assault. If the counter to this argument against feminism is that men are stronger than women and carry out tasks that women can’t, that is also flawed. Men and women possess different kinds of physical strength; men have fast-twitch muscles that are good for actions like lifting and moving heavy objects, while women have slow-twitch muscles giving them the strength of endurance good for, say, assembly line jobs. Besides, statements such as “men are stronger than women” are missing a qualifier: Most men are stronger than women.

“What about male problems like high suicide rates and false rape charges? Feminism is just sexist against men.”

Men’s significantly higher suicide rate is directly linked to the fact that they are  far less likely  than women to seek support for mental health problems. This is because they are brought up in a world in which they can’t express emotions freely on account of it being perceived as a feminine trait. Feminism seeks to retire all gender stereotypes and inequality, which would help everyone, regardless of sex and gender. This means issues such as violence against men will be taken more seriously because it will be divorced from the idea that masculinity means being invulnerable. As for false rape accusations, approximately only 2% to 5%  of all sexual assault accusations are false. That means, 98% of times, women are telling the truth. As unfortunate and illegal the cases of false charges may be, to expect feminists to drop the fight for equality is unreasonable and based only on the logically redundant argumentative technique: whataboutery. Finally, feminism can’t be sexist towards men because of how oppression works . It has a unidirectional, systemic flow, from a group at the top that has social and cultural sanction to misuse power, toward the group at the bottom. Patriarchy hurts everyone — even men — but as long as men are in a greater position of social power that allows them to oppress women culturally, socially, legally and financially, they can’t be victims of sexism.

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“Feminist women are so angry and aggressive. Why can’t they relax?”

Of course, we’re angry. We are conditioned from day one to conform to a certain norm of femininity . We get harassed on the streets. We get raped, abused and killed disproportionately. We don’t get equal access to education and opportunity as men get, and when we do, we don’t get paid as much as they do for the same job. Our reproductive rights are heavily regulated by men who conveniently dominate most decision-making roles. We are objectified and sexualized to the extent that entire multi-billion dollar industries, such as fashion and make-up, thrive on women’s insecurities. All of these drivers of inequality are exasperating and very personal, lived experiences for us. It’s not just an intellectual exercise for us to talk about these things repeatedly. So, of course, we’ll get angry sometimes, as people do. But feelings and fact are not mutually exclusive — yet another untruth patriarchy has given us. Feminist women having feelings does not negate the entire movement. According to one study , asking women not to “make everything about feminism,” and insinuating that they are somehow overdoing it in demanding gender equality and respect, is itself a more recent manifestation of modern sexist behavior.

“If feminism cares about equality, why is it called feminism? Why not egalitarianism or human-ism?”

‘Humanism,’ it seems, has come up as an alternative simply because it sounds a little bit like feminism and, phonetically, it gives the sense that it might mean being in favor of all of humanity having equal rights. But that’s just misconception. Humanism is a branch of philosophy and ethics that says that the source of human morality isn’t God but humanity’s capacity to be logical and triumph over dogma. So… that’s why feminism isn’t called humanism.

Egalitarianism is a school of political thought that says that all human beings are fundamentally equal and therefore should have equal rights to all resources. Sure, in that regard, egalitarianism has informed feminism by being a broader view of the fight for equality. But egalitarianism has had its heyday and has been dormant as a social movement for a while now, and yet egalitarian laws and practices have not succeeded in elevating the position of women in society. This is why we need something more — why we need feminism.

Unlike egalitarianism, feminism is a social movement that is inherently about action; it’s about tackling the world as it is right now, in which one particular gender is being oppressed. If all goes well, hopefully, we will all be able to call ourselves egalitarians. But until then, we need something specific to solve the problem of wide-ranging discrimination against women and other gender identities. Feminism got the name because it started as a socio-political movement advocating for women’s rights based on the premise that gender, specifically, is not an acceptable basis for discrimination or oppression. Through its own chain of reasoning, it has evolved into a movement for equal rights of all genders, which at no point takes away from any other human rights movement.

“I believe in equal rights of all genders but I don’t call myself a feminist.”

Too late. That’s literally the definition: You are a feminist.

Pallavi Prasad is The Swaddle's Features Editor. When she isn't fighting for gender justice and being righteous, you can find her dabbling in street and sports photography, reading philosophy, drowning in green tea, and procrastinating on doing the dishes.

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Stop Fem-Splaining: What ‘Women Against Feminism’ Gets Right

T he latest skirmish on the gender battlefield is “ Women Against Feminism ”: women and girls taking to social media to declare that they don’t need or want feminism, usually via photos of themselves with handwritten placards. The feminist reaction has ranged from mockery to dismay to somewhat patronizing (or should that be “matronizing”?) lectures on why these dissidents are wrong. But, while the anti-feminist rebellion has its eye-rolling moments, it raises valid questions about the state of Western feminism in the 21st century — questions that must be addressed if we are to continue making progress toward real gender equality.

Female anti-feminism is nothing new. In the 19th century, plenty of women were hostile to the women’s movement and to women who pursued nontraditional paths. In the 1970s, Marabel Morgan’s regressive manifesto The Total Woman was a top best seller , and Phyllis Schlafly led opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. But such anti-feminism was invariably about defending women’s traditional roles. Some of today’s “women against feminism” fit that mold: they feel that feminism demeans stay-at-home mothers , or that being a “true woman” means loving to cook and clean for your man. Many others, however, say they repudiate feminism even though — indeed, because — they support equality and female empowerment:

“I don’t need feminism because I believe in equality, not entitlements and supremacy.”

“I don’t need feminism because it reinforces the men as agents/women as victims dichotomy.”

“I do not need modern feminism because it has become confused with misandry which is as bad as misogyny, and whatever I want to do or be in life, I will become through my own hard work.”

Or, more than once : “I don’t need feminism because egalitarianism is better!”

Again and again, the dissenters say that feminism belittles and demonizes men, treating them as presumptive rapists while encouraging women to see themselves as victims . “ I am not a victim ” and “I can take responsibility for my actions” are recurring themes. Many also challenge the notion that American women in the 21st century are “ oppressed ,” defiantly asserting that “the patriarchy doesn’t exist” and “there is no rape culture.”

One common response from feminists is to say that Women Against Feminism “ don’t understand what feminism is” and to invoke its dictionary definition: “the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.” The new anti-feminists have a rejoinder for that, too: they’re judging modern feminism by its actions, not by the book. And here, they have a point.

Consider the #YesAllWomen Twitter hashtag, dubbed by one blogger “the Arab Spring of 21st century feminism.” Created in response to Elliot Rodger’s deadly shooting spree in Isla Vista, Calif. — and to reminders that “not all men” are violent misogynists — the tag was a relentless catalog of female victimization by male terrorism and abuse. Some of its most popular tweets seemed to literally dehumanize men, comparing them to sharks or M&M candies of which 10% are poisoned .

Consider assertions that men as a group must be taught “not to rape ,” or that to accord the presumption of innocence to a man accused of sexual violence against a woman or girl is to be complicit in “rape culture.” Consider that last year, when an Ohio University student made a rape complaint after getting caught on video engaging in a drunken public sex act, she was championed by campus activists and at least one prominent feminist blogger — but a grand jury declined to hand down charges after reviewing the video of the incident and evidence that both students were inebriated.

Consider that a prominent British feminist writer, Laurie Penny, decries the notion that feminists should avoid such generalizations as “men oppress women”; in her view, all men are steeped in a woman-hating culture and “even the sweetest, gentlest man” benefits from women’s oppression. Consider, too, that an extended quote from Penny’s column was reposted by a mainstream reproductive-rights group and shared by nearly 84,000 Tumblr users in six months.

Sure, some Women Against Feminism claims are caricatures based on fringe views — for instance, that feminism mandates hairy armpits, or that feminists regard all heterosexual intercourse as rape . On the other hand, the charge that feminism stereotypes men as predators while reducing women to helpless victims certainly doesn’t apply to all feminists — but it’s a reasonably fair description of a large, influential, highly visible segment of modern feminism.

Are Women Against Feminism ignorant and naive to insist they are not oppressed? Perhaps some are too giddy with youthful optimism. But they make a strong argument that a “patriarchy” that lets women vote, work, attend college, get divorced, run for political office and own businesses on the same terms as men isn’t quite living up to its label. They also raise valid questions about politicizing personal violence along gender lines; research shows that surprisingly high numbers of men may have been raped , sometimes by women.

For the most part, Women Against Feminism are quite willing to acknowledge and credit feminism’s past battles for women’s rights in the West, as well as the severe oppression women still suffer in many parts of the world. But they also say that modern Western feminism has become a divisive and sometimes hateful force, a movement that dramatically exaggerates female woes while ignoring men’s problems, stifles dissenting views, and dwells obsessively on men’s misbehavior and women’s personal wrongs. These are trends about which feminists have voiced alarm in the past — including the movement’s founding mother Betty Friedan, who tried in the 1970s to steer feminism from the path of what she called “ sex/class warfare .” Friedan would have been aghast had she known that, 50 years after she began her battle, feminist energies were being spent on bashing men who commit the heinous crime of taking too much space on the subway .

Is there still a place in modern-day America for a gender-equality movement? I think so. Work-family balance remains a real and complicated challenge. And there are gender-based cultural biases and pressures that still exist — though, in 21st century Western countries, they almost certainly affect men as much as women. A true equality movement would be concerned with the needs and interests of both sexes. It would, for instance, advocate for all victims of domestic and sexual violence regardless of gender — and for fairness to those accused of these offenses. It would support both women and men as workers and as parents.

Should such a movement take back feminism — or, as the new egalitarians suggest, give up on the label altogether because of its inherent connotations of advocating for women only? I’m not sure what the answer is. But Women Against Feminism are asking the right questions. And they deserve to be heard, not harangued. As one of the group’s graphics says , “I have my own mind. Please stop fem-splaining it to me.”

Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine.

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44 Student Essay Example: Feminist Criticism

The following student essay example of femnist criticism is taken from Beginnings and Endings: A Critical Edition . This is the publication created by students in English 211. This essay discusses Ray Bradbury’s short story ”There Will Come Soft Rains.”

Burning Stereotypes in Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains”

By Karley McCarthy

Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” takes place in the fallout of a nuclear war. The author chooses to tell the story though a technologically advanced house and its animatronic inhabitants instead of a traditional protagonist. The house goes about its day-to-day as if no war had struck. It functions as though its deceased family is still residing in its walls, taking care of the maintenance, happiness, and safety of itself and the long dead family. On the surface, Bradbury’s story seems like a clear-cut warning about technology and humanity’s permissiveness. Given that the short story was written in the 1940s, it’s easy to analyze the themes present and how they related to women of the time. Bradbury’s apt precautionary tale can be used as a metaphor for women’s expectations and role in society after World War II and how some women may have dealt with the fallout of their husbands coming back home with psychological trauma.

To experience “There Will Come Soft Rains” from a feminist perspective, readers must be aware of the societal norms that would have shaped Bradbury’s writing. “Soft Rains” takes place in the year 2026. Yet the house and norms found throughout were, “modeled after concept homes that showed society’s expectations of technological advancement” (Mambrol). This can be seen in the stereotypical nuclear family that once inhabited the house as well as their cliché white home and the hobbies present. According to writer Elaine Tyler May’s book Homeward Bound, America’s view of women’s role in society undertook a massive pendulum swing during the World War II era as the country transitioned through pre-war to post-war life. For example, in a matter of decades support for women joining the workforce shifted from 80% in opposition to only 13% (May 59). Despite this shift, the men coming back from the war still expected women to position themselves as the happy housewife they had left behind, not the newfound career woman architype. Prominent figures of the 40s, such as actress Joan Crawford, portrayed a caricature of womanhood that is subservient to patriarchal gender roles, attempting to abandon the modern idea of a self-sufficient working-class woman (May 62-63). Keeping this in mind, how can this image of the 1940s woman be seen in Bradbury’s work?

Throughout Bradbury’s life he worked towards dismantling clichés in his own writing. A biography titled simply “Ray Bradbury” mentions that even in his earlier work, he was always attempting to “escape the constrictions of stereotypes” found in early science fiction (Seed 13). An example of him breaking constrictions could be his use of a nonhuman protagonist. Instead, Bradbury relies on the personification of the house and its robotic counterparts. Bradbury describes the house as having “electric eyes” and emotions such as a, “preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia,” something that would make the house quiver at the sounds of the outside world (2-3). While these descriptions are interesting, Bradbury’s use of personification here is a thought-provoking choice when one breaks down what exactly the house is meant to personify.

One analysis of this story notes that the house’s personification, “replaces the most human aspects of life,” for its inhabitants (Mambrol). Throughout the story, the house acts as a caretaker, records a schedule, cooks, cleans, and even attempts to extinguish an all-consuming fire. While firefighting is not a traditionally feminine career or expectation from the 1940s (more on that later), most of the house’s daily tasks are replacing jobs that were traditionally held by a household’s matriarch. Expanding further on this dichotomy of male/woman tasks, a chore mentioned in the story that is ‘traditionally’ accepted as a masculine household duty—mowing the law—is still assigned as a male task. This is feels intentional to the house’s design as Bradbury is, “a social critic, and his work is pertinent to real problems on earth” (Dominianni 49). Bradbury’s story is not meant to commentate on just an apocalypse, but society at large.  Bradbury describes the west face of the house as, “black, save for five places” (Bradbury 1-2). These “five places” are the silhouettes of the family who had been incinerated by a nuclear bomb. The family’s two children are included playing with a ball, but the mother and father’s descriptions are most important. The mother is seen in a passive role, picking flowers, while the father mows the lawn. The subtext here is that the man is not replaceable in his mundane and tedious task. Only the woman is replaced. While this is a small flash into the owners’ lives, what “human aspect” or autonomy of the father’s life has been replaced by the house’s actions if the house is mainly personifying only the traditional 1940s female-held positions? The message here is that a man’s position in society is irreplaceable while a woman’s is one of mere support.

While this dynamic of husband vs subordinate is harmful, wives supporting their partners is nothing new. Homeward Bound explains that life after World War II for many women meant a return to their previous position as a housewife while many men came home irreparably damaged by years of warfare. PTSD, known then as shellshock, affected countless men returning from the war. Women were often expected to mend the psychological damage as part of their domestic responsibilities, even if they were unprepared for the realities of the severe trauma their husbands had faced (May 64-65). The psychological effects of the war came crashing into women’s lives the same way that the tree fell into the autonomous house in “Soft Rains”. As mentioned earlier, firefighting is not a task someone from the 40s would expect of women, but the house’s combustion and its scramble to save itself can be seen as a metaphor for women attempting to reverse the cold reality that the war had left them with. The picturesque family they had dreamed of would forever be scarred by the casualties that took place overseas. While Bradbury may not have meant for women to be invoked specifically from this precautionary tale, it’s obvious that him wanting his science fiction to act as, “a cumulative early warning system against unforeseen consequences,” would have impacted women of the time as much as men (Seed 22). The unforeseen consequences here is the trauma the war inflicted on families.

While men were fighting on the front lines, women back home and in noncombat positions would still feel the war’s ripples. In “Soft Rains” the nuclear tragedy had left, “a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles” (Bradbury 1). Despite the destruction, the house continues its routine as though nothing had happened. This can be seen as a metaphor for how women responded to the trauma their husbands brought back from the war. Women were urged to, “preserve for him the essence of the girl he fell in love with, the girl he longs to come back to. . .The least we can do as women is to try to live up to some of those expectations” (May 64). Following this, many could have put their desires and personal growth to the side to act as a secondary character in their husband’s lives.

The final line can be read as the culmination of similarities between post-war women and Bradbury’s house. The violence and destruction that fell upon the house in its final moments leaves little standing. What’s remarkable is how the house still attempts to continue despite its destruction. The final lines of the short story exemplify this: “Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: ‘Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…’” (Bradbury 5). The house is acting just like the women from the 40s, clinging to their past in an attempt to preserve something that had already been lost, society’s innocence. One analysis points out that, “The house is depicted in this way because it represents both humanity and humanity’s failure to save itself” (Mambrol). While it might be wrong to say that women were unable to save themselves in this situation, this quote does touch on an idea present in the feminist metaphor for “Soft Rains”. The preservation of “the essence of the girl he fell in love with, the girl he longs to come back to” was a failure (May 64). The same way that the house cannot preserve itself from destruction, women cannot preserve an image of themselves that had already dissolved. As mentioned earlier, women had already entered the workforce, a huge step towards removing sexist stereotypes around women’s worth. After garnering work-based independence, it seems impossible that the idea of women solely as men’s support would not immolate.

While Bradbury’s “Soft Rains” can be viewed as an apt precautionary tale with real modern world issues at hand, in many ways it is a period piece. As a writer in the 1940s, it’s hard to imagine that Bradbury’s story would not have been influenced by the framework of a nuclear family and the stereotypical expectations of this time. Bradbury’s use of personification opens dialogue about gender roles in the 1940s and how war had complicated patriarchal expectations. Despite his attempt to bypass science fiction stereotypes, his story is full of metaphor for gender stereotypes. Using a feminist lens to analyze the story allows it to be read as a metaphor for war and its effects on married women. The standard analysis appears to say that, “machine no longer served humanity in “There Will Come Soft Rains”; there humanity is subservient to machinery” (Dominianni 49). From a feminist perspective, instead of machine, the house represents patriarchy and gender norms. While men suffered greatly during World War II, women often put their wants and futures on hold to support their husbands. This is a selfless act that shows the resilience of women despite their society’s wish to downplay their potential and turn them into mere support.

Works Cited

Bradbury, Ray. “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains.” Broome-Tioga BOCES, 1950, pp. 1-5. btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf.

Dominianni, Robert. “Ray Bradbury’s 2026: A Year with Current Value.” The English Journal , vol. 73, no. 7, 1984, pp. 49–51. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/817806

Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains.” Literary Theory and Criticism , 17 Jan. 2022.

May, Elaine Tyler. “War and Peace: Fanning the Home Fires.”  Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era.  20th ed., Basic Books, 2008, pp. 58-88.

Seed, David. “Out of the Science Fiction Ghetto.”  Ray Bradbury (Modern Masters of Science Fiction).  University of Illinois, 2015, pp. 1-45.

Critical Worlds Copyright © 2024 by Liza Long is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Feminist and Antifeminist Everyday Activism: Tactical Choices, Emotions, and ‘Humor’

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• Published: 14 September 2021
• Volume 39 , pages 275–290, ( 2022 )

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• Mélissa Blais   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6797-1520 1 &
• Francis Dupuis-Déri 2  

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Taking inspiration from responses in focus groups and an on-line survey in which feminists shared their experiences about antifeminism in their daily life, this paper demonstrates that everyday activism involves two protagonists confronting each other, in this case a feminist and an antifeminist. Focusing on feminists’ perceptions, emotions and tactical reactions, this paper also shows how these confrontations are not necessarily limited to one or two attacks and counterattacks and how they can be influenced by the presence of a ‘third party’ (other men or women, other feminists or antifeminists). In order to shed light on these conflictual dynamics, the question of antifeminist ‘humor’ and its effects on feminists is discussed more in depth. Finally, we show that there is a significant relation between public or organized activism and everyday activism, for both the social movement and its countermovement.

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Feminists are not the only people interested in how activism intersects with everyday life. Environmentalism, for instance, claims that every individual can save the planet with small everyday acts and veganism rejects the use of animal products in meals, clothing and beauty products, etc. The LGBTQI movement has also a variety of publications on the subject, including Everyday Activism: A Handbook for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual People and Their Allies ([ 58 ]. Hyers [ 38 ], p 541) talks about “activism on the interpersonal front” in her study on the choices made by gay and bisexual men to keep silent or to respond assertively when they “feel wronged by incidents of everyday heterosexism” (see also [ 64 ], with regard to trans people who practice digital storytelling). Finally, Essed [ 22 ] studied “everyday racism” in the United States and warns against the temptation of proposing a strict dichotomy between “institutional racism” (macro level) in the public sphere and “individual racism” (micro level) in the private sphere (see also [ 14 ]: 19, [ 39 ]: 81, [ 21 ]).

In studies published in French, authors often use the term militantisme au quotidien (everyday activism) not to discuss activism in personal relationships, but instead union and grassroot association members’ involvement on the ground (Cultiaux and Vendramin [ 13 ]). In October 2016, a one-day workshop on everyday activism was organized by Montserrat Emperador Badimon and Marcos Ancelovici at the Université Lyon 2 (entitled “‘Sous les pavés, le quotidien!’: regards croisés sur l’imbrication entre vie quotidienne et militantisme”). The large majority of presentations discussed how individuals commit to supporting activist public organizations or mobilizations. Also in French, Henry [ 33 ] has published a short book on daily chauvinism. Finally, the online project Sexisme ordinaire (ordinary sexism) provides a platform for women to “collect cases of sexism they experience in their everyday lives. […] By sharing your story, you can show the world that sexism really does exist, that women experience it every day, and that it’s a legitimate problem to be discussed.” [ http://francais.everydaysexism.com ] In English, another study used the term everyday activism to describe the experience of the daughters of feminist mothers [ 57 ].

Although quite similar, everyday activism as discussed by Mansbridge is nevertheless distinct from the speech and practices of subaltern individuals (slaves, for instance) studied by James Scott. In the latter case, the subaltern individual avoids triggering a direct conflict with the dominant group (slave-masters, for instance), but keeps alive their rebellious spirit against structural injustice by quietly sharing and spreading a “hidden transcript” of stories, legends, rumours, jokes and songs [ 55 ]. In Mansbridge’s definition, the ‘everyday activist’ seeks open conflict with her or his political opponent.

One limit of the survey is that it provided only two choices, and no reference to a third position, such as being ‘non-feminist’ (see Nelson et al. [ 51 ]).

The expression mansplaining refers to men who explain things to women (events and situations, ideas, theories, etc.) that have to do with women’ lived experiences (and that often the man doesn’t know about at all) [ 56 ].

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Acknowledgements

This text was written as part of a research project initiated by L’R des Centres de femmes du Québec (L’R of the women's centres of Quebec), in partnership with the Institut de recherches et d’études féministes (IREF) (Institute of feminist studies) and the Réseau québécois en études féministes (RéQEF) (Quebec network of feminist studies), as well as with the Protocole/Relais-femme (Protocol with women) under UQAM’s service to the communities (SAC-UQAM). The research team includes, in addition to the two authors, Odile Boisclair (L’R), Lyne Kurtzman and Ève-Marie Lampron (SAC-UQAM), as well as a research assistant participating at the planning meetings, Marie Soleil Chrétien. This work was initiated with the financial help of the Fonds de recherche Société et Culture Québec (FRQSC), through the Réseau québécois en études féministes (RéQEF), and supported by a grant from the Protocole/Relais-femme (SAC-UQAM). The text has been translated from a French unpublished version, by Elle Warkentin.

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Blais, M., Dupuis-Déri, F. Feminist and Antifeminist Everyday Activism: Tactical Choices, Emotions, and ‘Humor’. Gend. Issues 39 , 275–290 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12147-021-09290-7

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5 Essays About Feminism

On the surface, the definition of feminism is simple. It’s the belief that women should be politically, socially, and economically equal to men. Over the years, the movement expanded from a focus on voting rights to worker rights, reproductive rights, gender roles, and beyond. Modern feminism is moving to a more inclusive and intersectional place. Here are five essays about feminism that tackle topics like trans activism, progress, and privilege:

“Trickle-Down Feminism” – Sarah Jaffe

Feminists celebrate successful women who have seemingly smashed through the glass ceiling, but the reality is that most women are still under it. Even in fast-growing fields where women dominate (retail sales, food service, etc), women make less money than men. In this essay from Dissent Magazine, author Sarah Jaffe argues that when the fastest-growing fields are low-wage, it isn’t a victory for women. At the same time, it does present an opportunity to change the way we value service work. It isn’t enough to focus only on “equal pay for equal work” as that argument mostly focuses on jobs where someone can negotiate their salary. This essay explores how feminism can’t succeed if only the concerns of the wealthiest, most privileged women are prioritized.

Sarah Jaffe writes about organizing, social movements, and the economy with publications like Dissent, the Nation, Jacobin, and others. She is the former labor editor at Alternet.

“What No One Else Will Tell You About Feminism” – Lindy West

Written in Lindy West’s distinct voice, this essay provides a clear, condensed history of feminism’s different “waves.” The first wave focused on the right to vote, which established women as equal citizens. In the second wave, after WWII, women began taking on issues that couldn’t be legally-challenged, like gender roles. As the third wave began, the scope of feminism began to encompass others besides middle-class white women. Women should be allowed to define their womanhood for themselves. West also points out that “waves” may not even exist since history is a continuum. She concludes the essay by declaring if you believe all people are equal, you are a feminist.

Jezebel reprinted this essay with permission from How To Be A Person, The Stranger’s Guide to College by Lindy West, Dan Savage, Christopher Frizelle, and Bethany Jean Clement. Lindy West is an activist, comedian, and writer who focuses on topics like feminism, pop culture, and fat acceptance.

“Toward a Trans* Feminism” – Jack Halberstam

The history of transactivsm and feminism is messy. This essay begins with the author’s personal experience with gender and terms like trans*, which Halberstam prefers. The asterisk serves to “open the meaning,” allowing people to choose their categorization as they see fit. The main body of the essay focuses on the less-known history of feminists and trans* folks. He references essays from the 1970s and other literature that help paint a more complete picture. In current times, the tension between radical feminism and trans* feminism remains, but changes that are good for trans* women are good for everyone.

This essay was adapted from Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability by Jack Halberstam. Halberstam is the Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is also the author of several books.

“Rebecca Solnit: How Change Happens” – Rebecca Solnit

The world is changing. Rebecca Solnit describes this transformation as an assembly of ideas, visions, values, essays, books, protests, and more. It has many layers involving race, class, gender, power, climate, justice, etc, as well as many voices. This has led to more clarity about injustice. Solnit describes watching the transformation and how progress and “ wokeness ” are part of a historical process. Progress is hard work. Not exclusively about feminism, this essay takes a more intersectional look at how progress as a whole occurs.

“How Change Happens” was adapted from the introduction to Whose Story Is it? Rebecca Solnit is a writer, activist, and historian. She’s the author of over 20 books on art, politics, feminism, and more.

“Bad Feminist” extract – Roxane Gay

People are complicated and imperfect. In this excerpt from her book Bad Feminist: Essays , Roxane Gay explores her contradictions. The opening sentence is, “I am failing as a woman.” She goes on to describe how she wants to be independent, but also to be taken care of. She wants to be strong and in charge, but she also wants to surrender sometimes. For a long time, she denied that she was human and flawed. However, the work it took to deny her humanness is harder than accepting who she is. While Gay might be a “bad feminist,” she is also deeply committed to issues that are important to feminism. This is a must-read essay for any feminists who worry that they aren’t perfect.

Roxane Gay is a professor, speaker, editor, writer, and social commentator. She is the author of Bad Feminist , a New York Times bestseller, Hunger (a memoir), and works of fiction.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

Essay on Feminism

500 words essay on feminism.

Feminism is a social and political movement that advocates for the rights of women on the grounds of equality of sexes. It does not deny the biological differences between the sexes but demands equality in opportunities. It covers everything from social and political to economic arenas. In fact, feminist campaigns have been a crucial part of history in women empowerment. The feminist campaigns of the twentieth century made the right to vote, public property, work and education possible. Thus, an essay on feminism will discuss its importance and impact.

Importance of Feminism

Feminism is not just important for women but for every sex, gender, caste, creed and more. It empowers the people and society as a whole. A very common misconception is that only women can be feminists.

It is absolutely wrong but feminism does not just benefit women. It strives for equality of the sexes, not the superiority of women. Feminism takes the gender roles which have been around for many years and tries to deconstruct them.

This allows people to live freely and empower lives without getting tied down by traditional restrictions. In other words, it benefits women as well as men. For instance, while it advocates that women must be free to earn it also advocates that why should men be the sole breadwinner of the family? It tries to give freedom to all.

Most importantly, it is essential for young people to get involved in the feminist movement. This way, we can achieve faster results. It is no less than a dream to live in a world full of equality.

Thus, we must all look at our own cultures and communities for making this dream a reality. We have not yet reached the result but we are on the journey, so we must continue on this mission to achieve successful results.

Impact of Feminism

Feminism has had a life-changing impact on everyone, especially women. If we look at history, we see that it is what gave women the right to vote. It was no small feat but was achieved successfully by women.

Further, if we look at modern feminism, we see how feminism involves in life-altering campaigns. For instance, campaigns that support the abortion of unwanted pregnancy and reproductive rights allow women to have freedom of choice.

Moreover, feminism constantly questions patriarchy and strives to renounce gender roles. It allows men to be whoever they wish to be without getting judged. It is not taboo for men to cry anymore because they must be allowed to express themselves freely.

Similarly, it also helps the LGBTQ community greatly as it advocates for their right too. Feminism gives a place for everyone and it is best to practice intersectional feminism to understand everyone’s struggle.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Feminism

The key message of feminism must be to highlight the choice in bringing personal meaning to feminism. It is to recognize other’s right for doing the same thing. The sad part is that despite feminism being a strong movement, there are still parts of the world where inequality and exploitation of women take places. Thus, we must all try to practice intersectional feminism.

FAQ of Essay on Feminism

Question 1: What are feminist beliefs?

Answer 1: Feminist beliefs are the desire for equality between the sexes. It is the belief that men and women must have equal rights and opportunities. Thus, it covers everything from social and political to economic equality.

Question 2: What started feminism?

Answer 2: The first wave of feminism occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It emerged out of an environment of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics. This wave aimed to open up new doors for women with a focus on suffrage.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Feminism: An Essay

Feminism: An Essay

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on April 27, 2016 • ( 6 )

Feminism as a movement gained potential in the twentieth century, marking the culmination of two centuries’ struggle for cultural roles and socio-political rights — a struggle which first found its expression in Mary Wollstonecraft ‘s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The movement gained increasing prominence across three phases/waves — the first wave (political), the second wave (cultural) and the third wave (academic). Incidentally Toril Moi also classifies the feminist movement into three phases — the female (biological), the feminist (political) and the feminine (cultural).

The first wave of feminism, in the 19th and 20th centuries, began in the US and the UK as a struggle for equality and property rights for women, by suffrage groups and activist organisations. These feminists fought against chattel marriages and for polit ical and economic equality. An important text of the first wave is Virginia Woolf ‘s A Room of One’s Own (1929), which asserted the importance of woman’s independence, and through the character Judith (Shakespeare’s fictional sister), explicated how the patriarchal society prevented women from realising their creative potential. Woolf also inaugurated the debate of language being gendered — an issue which was later dealt by Dale Spender who wrote Man Made Language (1981), Helene Cixous , who introduced ecriture feminine (in The Laugh of the Medusa ) and Julia Kristeva , who distinguished between the symbolic and the semiotic language.

The second wave of feminism in the 1960s and ’70s, was characterized by a critique of patriarchy in constructing the cultural identity of woman. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) famously stated, “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman” – a statement that highlights the fact that women have always been defined as the “Other”, the lacking, the negative, on whom Freud attributed “ penis-envy .” A prominent motto of this phase, “The Personal is the political” was the result of the awareness .of the false distinction between women’s domestic and men’s public spheres. Transcending their domestic and personal spaces, women began to venture into the hitherto male dominated terrains of career and public life. Marking its entry into the academic realm, the presence of feminism was reflected in journals, publishing houses and academic disciplines.

Mary Ellmann ‘s Thinking about Women (1968), Kate Millett ‘s Sexual Politics (1969), Betty Friedan ‘s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and so on mark the major works of the phase. Millett’s work specifically depicts how western social institutions work as covert ways of manipulating power, and how this permeates into literature, philosophy etc. She undertakes a thorough critical understanding of the portrayal of women in the works of male authors like DH Lawrence, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller and Jean Genet.

In the third wave (post 1980), Feminism has been actively involved in academics with its interdisciplinary associations with Marxism , Psychoanalysis and Poststructuralism , dealing with issues such as language, writing, sexuality, representation etc. It also has associations with alternate sexualities, postcolonialism ( Linda Hutcheon and Spivak ) and Ecological Studies ( Vandana Shiva )

Elaine Showalter , in her “ Towards a Feminist Poetics ” introduces the concept of gynocriticism , a criticism of gynotexts, by women who are not passive consumers but active producers of meaning. The gynocritics construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, and focus on female subjectivity, language and literary career. Patricia Spacks ‘ The Female Imagination , Showalter’s A Literature of their Own , Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar ‘s The Mad Woman in the Attic are major gynocritical texts.

The present day feminism in its diverse and various forms, such as liberal feminism, cultural/ radical feminism, black feminism/womanism, materialist/neo-marxist feminism, continues its struggle for a better world for women. Beyond literature and literary theory, Feminism also found radical expression in arts, painting ( Kiki Smith , Barbara Kruger ), architecture( Sophia Hayden the architect of Woman’s Building ) and sculpture (Kate Mllett’s Naked Lady).

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Article contents

Feminism and the politics of difference.

• Maria O’Reilly Maria O’Reilly School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.177
• Published in print: 24 January 2012
• Published online: 22 December 2017

Feminist scholars and practitioners have challenged—and sought to overcome—gendered forms of inequality, subordination, or oppression within a variety of political, economic, and social contexts. However, feminists have been embroiled in profound theoretical disagreements over a variety of issues, including the nature and significance of the relationship between culture and the production of gendered social life, as well as the implications of cultural location for women’s agency, feminist knowledge production, and the possibilities of building cross-cultural feminist coalitions and agendas. Many of the approaches that emerged in the “first” and “second waves” of feminist scholarship and activism were not able to effectively engage with questions of culture. Women of color and ethnicity, postcolonial feminists and poststructural feminists, in addition to the questions and debates raised by liberal feminists (and their critics) on the implications of multiculturalism for feminist goals, have produced scholarship that highlights issues of cultural difference, division, diversity, and differentiation. Their critiques of the “universalism” and “culture-blindness” of second wave theories and practices exposed the hegemonic and exclusionary tendencies of the feminist movement in the global North, and opened up the opportunity to develop intersectional analyses and feminist identity politics, thereby shifting issues of cultural diversity and difference from the margins to the center of international feminism. The debates on cultural difference, division, diversity, and differentiation have enriched feminist scholarship within the discipline of international relations, particularly after 9/11.

• women’s agency
• women of color
• multiculturalism
• cultural difference
• differentiation
• cultural diversity

Introduction

The politics of cultural difference, division, diversity, and differentiation has emerged as one of the most contentious concerns of feminist theory and practice in the late modern era. At least since Simone de Beauvoir ( 1973 :301) famously distinguished (biological) sex from gender by stating that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” feminist scholars and practitioners, of varying ontological, epistemological, and methodological persuasions, have sought to understand the role that cultural beliefs, values, norms, languages, representations, customs, and practices across time and space play in the construction, reproduction, and contestation of gender roles, identities, subjectivities, and structures of power. In doing so, they have aimed to challenge and overcome gendered forms of inequality, subordination, or oppression within a variety of political, economic, and social contexts; to render visible masculinist ideas, meanings, and representations that are often concealed or naturalized as “commonsense” understandings of reality; and to transform power relations and improve the material conditions of women's (and men's) lives.

Nevertheless feminism, as a plural and interdisciplinary field of contesting perspectives rather than a unified body of thought and practice, has been gripped by deep theoretical disagreements over not “only” the nature and significance of the relationship between culture and the production of gendered social life, but also of the implications of cultural location for women's agency, feminist knowledge production, and the possibilities of building cross-cultural feminist coalitions and agendas. Many of the approaches that emerged in the “first” and “second waves” of feminist scholarship and activism failed to effectively engage with questions of culture. Liberal feminists, for example, generally overlooked culture in their analyses or regarded it as a mere obstacle to sexual equality – one which can be overcome through legal and institutional reform and the achievement of full equality with men. Grounded in an individualistic paradigm of rights, equality, autonomy, and rationality, the liberal feminist project is built upon the presumption of sameness between men and women, reflecting a belief in “a fundamentally sexually undifferentiated human nature” (Beasley 1999 :52) regardless of spatial or temporal location. Meanwhile, Marxist/socialist feminism's emphasis on social-economic structures (e.g., divisions of labor), and its examination of women's systematic economic and social oppression as the product of a patriarchal and/or capitalist social system (Jackson 2001 :284), has tended to downgrade culturally constituted differences between and among men and women (see discussions by Kuhn and Wolpe 1978 ; Eisenstein 1979 ; Coward 1983 ; Barrett 1988 ). As Scott ( 1986 :1061) points out, “[w]ithin Marxism, the concept of gender has long been treated as the by-product of changing economic structures; gender has had no independent analytic status of its own.” Radical feminist analyses, as epitomized by the work of Mary Daly ( 1978 ) and Adrienne Rich ( 1977 , 1979 ) among others, also suffer from similar deficiencies – their emphasis on women's shared oppression, unique location, and essential “feminine” qualities, their turn to femininity as a basis on which to critique patriarchal culture and (re)imagine a more just society, and their aim of positively redefining “female” virtues and values in reaction to misogyny and sexism, mean that radical feminists not only tend to deny differences among women but also generate homogeneous, essentialist, and ahistorical conceptions of “womanhood” that reflect and contribute to power-laden and damaging cultural stereotypes about women (Young 1985 ; Alcoff 1988 :408–15; see also Echols 1983 , 1984 ; Eisenstein 1983 ). 1 Moreover, feminist standpoint theories – as exemplified in the work of Nancy Hartsock ( 1983a ), and which draw in particular on Nancy Chodorow's ( 1978 ) psychoanalytic study on the family and Carol Gilligan's ( 1982 ) psychological analysis of male and female moral development – often overstate the commonality of women's experience of material and ideological oppression. Thus, attempts to develop better critical insights into the realities of gendered social relations by “locating knowledge or inquiry in women's standpoint or in women's experience” (Smith 1997 :392) and to use these theoretical approaches to transform gender inequalities of power have been faulted for their reliance upon the standpoint of the “generalized,” as opposed to “concrete,” “other” (Benhabib 1986 ). By falsely assuming that humans are separate and essentially alike, rather than culturally and socially situated individuals “with a concrete history, identity, and affective-emotional constitution” (Benhabib 1986 :411), standpoint feminists often erroneously produce universalistic knowledge claims that are asserted to be generalizable to all humans regardless of context (Hutchings 1999 ).

In response to the perceived “culture-blindness” of many of these feminist approaches, a number of innovative perspectives emerged from a “third wave” of boundary-shifting scholarship and activism that sought to transform understandings of the complex relationship between gender, culture, and the production of feminist knowledge. As this essay will reveal, the work of women of color and ethnicity, postcolonial feminists and poststructural feminists, in addition to the questions and debates raised by liberal feminists (and their critics) on the implications of multiculturalism for feminist goals, have all been instrumental in spotlighting issues of cultural difference, division, diversity, and differentiation. In particular, such works have foregrounded crucial questions regarding the universality/particularity of feminist theories, the importance of spotlighting identity, subjectivity, and agency in feminist scholarship, the politics of cultural representation, and the potential tensions arising between the goals of sexual and cultural equality. As a result of these debates, many feminists within the third wave have highlighted the need to decenter and destabilize the dominating, exclusionary, ethnocentric, elitist, and power-laden discourses and practices of second wave feminism, to recover the “subjugated knowledges” (Foucault 1980 , cited in Spivak 1988 :272) and agency of those marginalized by feminism's propensity toward “epistemic violence” (Spivak 1988 ), and to reconstruct feminist scholarship and activism by embracing diversity, complexity, multiplicity, ambiguity, and contradiction (Bailey 1997 ; Mann and Huffman 2005 ). In doing so, they have repeatedly spotlighted and broached what Joan Scott has referred to as the “paradox” at the heart of the feminist movement:

Feminism was a protest against women's political exclusion: its goal was to eliminate “sexual difference” in politics, but it had to make its claims on behalf of “women” (who were discursively produced through “sexual difference”). To the extent that it acted for “women,” feminism produced the “sexual difference” it sought to eliminate. This paradox – the need to both accept and to refuse “sexual difference” – was the constitutive condition of feminism as a political movement through its long history. (Scott 1996 :3–4)

While the pervasiveness of women's oppression across cultures requires a distinctly feminist politics of recognition (Baum 2004 :1074), the demands for recognition made by women differentiated by race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, (dis)ability, nationality etc., has produced, in Henrietta Moore's ( 2000 :1130) words, the “affirmation that women have different contexts and histories, that they have suffered multiple and various forms of subordination and discrimination, and that their situation in the world is the product of differential relations between groups of people – classes, nations, races, ethnic and religious groups, and so on.” This awareness, as Moore notes, results in two fundamental challenges for feminist politics: (1) to reenvision how we recognize difference once we appreciate that “the recognition of difference along one dimension was insufficient;” (2) to appreciate that “the recognition of difference is only a starting point because the purpose of recognition is to transform the context in which differences are lived” ( 2000 :1130–1).

This essay therefore traces the variety of ways in which four significant strands of third wave feminism have engaged with questions of cultural difference, division, diversity, and differentiation, outlining some of the major contributions of each to our understandings of the relationship between culture and gender, and exploring the implications for international feminist scholarship and practice. It first investigates the contributions made by women of color and ethnicity, illustrating how their critiques of the “universalism” and “culture-blindness” of second wave theories and practices exposed the hegemonic and exclusionary tendencies of the feminist movement in the global North, and opened up space for the development of intersectional analyses and feminist identity politics, thereby shifting issues of cultural diversity and difference from the margins to the center of international feminism. Next, the major concerns of postcolonial feminist theory are outlined, noting especially the historical relationship between “Western” feminism and nineteenth-century colonialism and its continuing impact on feminist theorizing and activism, particularly on cross-cultural modes of representation and communication. Third, the essay examines the dilemmas raised by liberal feminists in relation to the issue of multiculturalism, exploring the crucial question of whether promoting respect for and recognition of cultural diversity conflicts with the feminist goal of achieving gender justice and equality. Fourth, the central claims of poststructural feminist theory are explored, noting in particular its rejection of totalizing “metanarratives” and unitary categories, and its celebration of diversity, complexity, multiplicity, and contradiction as a way of ensuring political inclusiveness. Finally, the essay concludes by reflecting on how these debates have enriched feminist scholarship within the discipline of international relations, particularly after 9/11.

Essentially metatheoretical in scope, the essay seeks to critically assess the key conceptual, theoretical, and methodological discourses used to “explain” and “understand” the cultural (and hierarchical) construction of gender – through the complex processes of gender symbolism, gender structure , and individual gender (Harding 1986 :17–18) – and to reflect upon the implicit and explicit assumptions upon which feminist theories and activist agendas are built. It is hoped that reading this essay alongside others by Nancy A. Naples and Nikki McGary (“Feminism, Activism, and Scholarship in Global Context”) and by Melinda Adams and Gwynn Thomas (“Transnational Feminist Activism and Globalizing Women's Movements”) in the Compendium series will provide the reader not only with an overview of the key challenges presented by cultural difference for feminist theorizing and praxis, but also of the possibilities for the negotiation and contestation of gender roles, identities, subjectivities, and structures of power.

The “wave” metaphor is employed here to reflect the existence of mass-based feminist movements that, like waves, “ebb and flow, rise and decline, and crest in some concrete, historical accomplishments or defeats” (Mann and Huffman 2005 :58) – a “first wave” originating in the nineteenth century that sought formal civic equality for women through political enfranchisement; a “second wave” that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, which focused on explaining the origins and pervasiveness of women's oppression across time and space, on radically questioning and reconstructing gender roles, and on extending the feminist struggle for equal rights (for an excellent overview see Nicholson 1997 ); and a “third wave” which endeavored to deconstruct and decenter the dominant discourses and practices of second wave feminism and reconstruct feminist scholarship and activism by embracing diversity, complexity, multiplicity, ambiguity, and contradiction (Bailey 1997 ; Mann and Huffman 2005 ). In adopting this approach I recognize the danger that dividing up feminisms into discrete strands or “waves” may (1) overstate the common elements that unify each wave; (2) understate the diversity of competing feminisms within each mass movement; and (3) downplay the continuity of earlier and later waves (Guy-Sheftall 1995 ; Ruth 1998 ; Springer 2002 ; Mann and Huffman 2005 ). The term “wave” was, according to Orr ( 1997 :43), coined in the 1970s to emphasize the contemporary (“second wave”) movement's “connection and indebtedness to the Woman's Rights movement of the nineteenth century ” (the “first wave”). However, as Cathryn Bailey ( 1997 :18–19) points out, the second wave was “named primarily as a means of emphasizing continuity with earlier feminist activities and ideas,” while the third wave “seems to identify itself as such largely as a means of distancing itself from earlier feminism, as a means of stressing what are perceived as discontinuities with earlier feminist thought and activity.” This essay outlines some of the major debates and perspectives that have contributed to the emergence of a third wave of feminist theorizing and activism centered upon the recognition of cultural difference and its implications for feminist politics. These alternative trajectories of feminist thought and practice have articulated very different responses to the politics of difference. Liberal feminists, for example, have focused on how multicultural liberal states should best respond to the claims made by minority groups for the recognition of, and respect for, cultural difference, and have sought to mediate between what are often viewed as competing demands for cultural rights and sexual equality (e.g., Deveaux 2006 ). Feminists of color and ethnicity have embraced identity politics as a source of empowerment, community, and intellectual development, while poststructuralist feminists question the notion of coherent identities and view freedom as resistance to categorization and identity (Coleman 2009 :4). Postcolonial feminists, meanwhile, have rejected both the notion of universal “woman” and power-infused discourses of “Third World difference” that construct monolithic representations of women in the global south (Mohanty 1991 ). Insisting that feminists in the global North shake off orientalist and ethnocentric modes of thought, postcolonial feminists have worked to highlight the historical and cultural specificity of women's lives, to uncover the intersections of race, class, nationality, religion, sexuality, etc. with gendered forms of subordination and inequality, and to contest political, economic, and sociocultural hierarchies of power both locally and globally (Rajan and Park 2000 :54).

Contributions by Women of Color and Ethnicity

The scholarship and activism of feminists of color and ethnicity in the global North, as it emerged from the late 1960s, has been paramount in challenging the “hegemonic” (Spivak 1985a :271) or “imperial” feminisms (Amos and Parmar 1984 ) of the second wave movement. Evolving from “the matrix of the very discourses denying, permitting, and producing difference” (Sandoval 2004 :196) and “frequently speaking simultaneously from ‘within and against’ both women's liberation and antiracist movements” (Frankenberg and Mani 1993 :302) this strand of third wave feminism played a crucial role exposing the parochial yet falsely universalist nature of Anglo-European feminist analyses as narrowly constructed from the lived experiences of white, middle-class, educated, heterosexual women (Zinn and Dill 1996 :321). Variously described as “multicultural feminism” (Jaggar and Rothenberg 1993 ), “US Third World feminisms” (Sandoval 2004 ), “black feminism” (Collins 2000 ), and “multiracial feminism” (Zinn and Dill 1996 ), the term “women of color and ethnicity” is used to reflect the fact that this strand of feminist theory and activism emerged from the interaction and alliance of women of many races and ethnic backgrounds, from different histories and cultures, within the so-called “Western,” “developed” world, and also underscores the commitment of these women to highlighting “race as a power system that interacts with other structured inequalities to shape genders” (Zinn and Dill 1996 :324). Different in race, class, language, ideology, religion, culture, and ethnicity, women of color and ethnicity developed gender analyses that were fundamentally shaped by their unique experiences as “outsiders-within” (Collins 2004 ). As women who were doubly marginalized as women and as racialized subjects, they have “produce[d] distinctive oppositional knowledges that embrace multiplicity yet remain cognizant of power” (Collins 1998 :8) and that therefore situate women and men in multiple systems of oppression and domination (Collins 2004 ).

The work of women of color and ethnicity has laid bare the racist underpinnings of the feminist movement in the global North (Dubois 1978 ; Davis 1982 ; Smith 1982 ), its historical connections to imperial ideologies, institutions, and practices (Amos and Parmar 1984 ; Ferguson 1992 ; Melman 1992 ; Midgley, 1992 , 2007 ; Ware 1994 ; Lewis 1996 ), and its propensity to marginalize, exclude, and erase the experiences and voices of women of color and ethnicity from its theories and practices (hooks 1981 , 1984 , 1989 ; Hull et al. 1982 ; Lorde 1983 , 2007 ; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983 ; Amos and Parmar 1984 ; Anzaldúa 1990 ). Accordingly, women of color and ethnicity compelled the women's movement in the North to acknowledge and confront the destructive, divisive, and oppressive effects of its “culture-blindness,” obliging feminists to recognize the cultural particularity of their theories and analyses, to make space for the marginalized voices of culturally marginalized groups (Burton 1998 :562), and ultimately to destabilize or “decenter” (hooks 1984 ) the dominant discourses and practices of “hegemonic” feminisms through intersectional analyses focused on critically explored political issues of cultural diversity and differentiation.

Crucially, the feminist movement was exhorted to examine the forms of cultural imperialism, discrimination, and oppression that it had internalized, and to focus on building a movement that embraced difference rather than homogeneity (Mann and Huffman 2005 :60). Thus, in their groundbreaking book This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa ( 1983 ) charted the main foci for a broad-based political movement of women of color and ethnicity in the United States:

(1) how visibility/invisibility as women of color forms our radicalism; (2) the ways in which Third World women derive a feminist political theory specifically from our radical/cultural background and experience; (3) the destructive and demoralizing effects of racism in the women's movement; (4) the cultural, class, and sexuality differences that divide women of color; (5) Third World women's writing as a tool of self-preservation and revolution; and (6) the ways and means of a Third World feminist future. (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983 :xxiv)

One of the most significant contributions made by this strand of third wave feminism has been its deconstruction of the “essentialist woman” of second wave feminism and of the unitary theories it promotes – e.g., those privileging a single aspect of social relations in the construction and reproduction of gendered identities, such as reproduction (O'Brien 1983 ), caring (Gilligan 1982 ), production (Hartsock 1983b ), or sexuality (MacKinnon 1989 ). This assumption of sameness and commonality of oppression (1) ignores or obscures the differences that exist between women, based on nationality, race, class, religion, language, sexual orientation, etc; (2) conceals the significance of such heterogeneity for feminist theory and politics; (3) wrongly regards the lived experiences of white, educated, middle-class, heterosexual women as representative of, and normative for, the experiences of all women (Spelman 1990 :ix); and (4) works to enable and maintain the domination of feminisms that are culturally located in white, Eurocentric, and Western political thought (Amos and Parmar 1984 ). It also reflects and reproduces what Adrienne Rich ( 1979 ) calls “white solipsism” – the tendency of much of feminist theory “to think, imagine and speak as if whiteness described the world” ( 1979 :299) and to view social reality with “a tunnel-vision which simply does not see non-white experience or existence as precious and significant, unless in spasmodic, important guilt-reflexes, which have little or no long-term, continuing momentum or political usefulness” ( 1979 :306). The task for feminism, as articulated by women of color and ethnicity, was not only to deconstruct and dismantle the hegemonic and exclusionary theories and practices that had dominated the women's movement, but also to provide space for the formulation and construction of “autonomous, geographically, historically, and culturally grounded feminist concerns and strategies” (Mohanty 1991 :51).

The exclusionary manner in which “women's experiences” were being constructed by white, middle-class, heterosexual women prompted black feminist Frances Beale ( 1970 ) to warn that second wave feminism was developing into a “white women's movement” by insisting on narrowly organizing along the binary gender division male–female alone (Beale 1970 , cited in Sandoval 2004 :198). Many feminists in the global North were guilty of sidestepping, rather than confronting head-on, the racism and ethnocentrism at the center of the women's movement, and relegating the ideas and experiences of women of color and ethnicity to the margins of feminist theorizing and activism (hooks 1984 ). As bell hooks ( 1984 ) asserts:

All too frequently in the women's movement it was assumed that one could be free of sexist thinking by simply adopting the appropriate feminist rhetoric; it was further assumed that identifying oneself as oppressed freed one from being an oppressor. To a grave extent such thinking prevented white feminisms from understanding and overcoming their own sexist–racist attitudes toward black women. They could play lip-service to the idea of sisterhood and solidarity between women but at the same time dismiss black women. (hooks 1984 :8–9; cited in McEwan 2003 :407)

The feminist movement was therefore challenged by women of color and ethnicity to move “away from the celebration of universality and sameness” and toward the recognition of “the implications of differences among women's experiences and understanding the political factors at work in those differences” (Amos and Parmar 1984 :7). On the one hand, feminists were urged to confront the personal prejudices that were dividing the feminist movement – to “reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there” (Lorde 1983 :98). The message was that racism, and all other forms of intolerance and prejudice, could no longer be ignored in feminist theory and practice if the feminist movement was not merely to be an exercise in “female self-aggrandizement” but rather a movement committed to a struggle “to free all women: women of color, working-class women, poor women, disabled women, lesbians, old women – as well as white economically privileged, heterosexual women” (Smith 1982 :49). On the other hand, the very phrase “women of color” was redefined not as the negation of whiteness but rather as the acclamation of a positive identity (McCann and Kim 2003 :154). Consequently, Collins ( 2004 ) celebrates black female intellectuals in the United States for making creative use of their marginality (or “outsider-within” status) to generate a distinctive standpoint on self, family, and society – by affirming the importance of black women's self-definition and self-valuation, drawing attention to the interlocking nature of oppression, and asserting the importance of Afro-American women's culture. Likewise, Gloria Anzaldúa ( 1987 ) credits her shifting identity as a Mexican-American lesbian moving through multiple cultures and locations as productive of a “higher” consciousness, a new mestiza consciousness – one that develops “a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity” and which “operates in a pluralistic mode … [so that] nothing is thrust out, the good, the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned” ( 1987 :79). The perception and celebration of differences between groups of women in terms of race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, etc., combined with a desire to destabilize the ethnocentrism and heterosexism of predominant feminist assumptions, resulted in moves toward “identity politics” by groups who felt linked by a common culture, experience, or language (Phillips 1993 :146–7; Evans 1995 :22).

The 1980s thus brought a sustained critique of feminist theoretical frameworks grounded solely in the concept of gender, as women of color and ethnicity sought to build feminist theories of differences among women, to consider the ways that women's lives are shaped by the multiple identities that women negotiate in their lives, and to understand the complex relationships that exist between gender domination and other dimensions and modalities of social relations and subject formations, such as nationality, race, class, religion, language, sexual orientation, etc. (Yuval-Davis 1997 ; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989 ; McCann and Kim 2003 :148–9; McCall 2005 :1771). Debates emerged regarding whether to interpret these relationships in terms of an additive process, in which each axis of identity or discrimination is distinct and viewed as internally homogeneous, or as a constitutive process, where each social division is viewed as having a different ontological basis and as irreducible to the others (Yuval-Davis 2006 ; Squires and Weldes 2007 :187). The additive model of oppression, which interpreted the combinations of race and gender and other identities/oppressions as productive of a “double-jeopardy” (Beale 1970 ) or “multiple jeopardy” (King 1988 ), was critiqued for its tendency to treat each axis as isolated or separable and to obscure the relations between gender and other elements of identity, and between sexism and other forms of oppression (Spelman 1990 :115). This model later gave way to the recognition of the simultaneity of systems of oppression and inequality in shaping women's experience and identity, and a theoretical framework of intersectionality (McCann and Kim 2003 :150) in which gender is “constructed by a range of interlocking inequalities” (Zinn and Dill 1996 : 326) – what Collins ( 2000 :23) terms a “matrix of domination” – and redefined “as a constellation of ideas and social practices that are historically situated within and that mutually construct multiple systems of oppression” (Collins 2000 :263). The intersectional framework aims to provide a more thorough understanding of the complexity of women's lives and to destabilize unitary theories and categories of gender through an exploration of the relationality of dominance and subordination and of the relationship between social structure and women's agency. To achieve this it draws upon a wide range of methodological approaches and studies drawn from the lives of diverse groups of women in order to maintain “a creative tension between diversity and universalization” (Zinn and Dill 1996 :327–9). Through such analyses, feminists were exhorted “to go beyond a mere recognition of [cultural] diversity and difference among women to examine structures of domination, specifically the importance of race in understanding the social construction of gender” (Zinn and Dill 1996 :321).

Contributions of Postcolonial Feminist Theory

Postcolonial feminists, like feminists of color and ethnicity, have also insisted on the vital significance of cultural and historical particularity to understanding gender relations, urging feminists in the global North to abandon hegemonic theories of universality in favor of the recognition of cultural difference and diversity (Jordan and Weedon 1995 :185–6). Their work has emerged both from within and against the feminist movement and mainstream postcolonial studies – as a reaction against the universalizing tendencies of “imperial” feminisms and against the neglect of gender analyses by eminent postcolonial theorists (Mills 1998 :98) such as Said ( 1979 , 1993 ), Fanon ( 1968 , 1986 ), and Bhabha ( 1994 ), scholars whose work has been influential in exposing and deconstructing the discursive hierarchies of power and domination through which nineteenth-century imperialism was conceptualized and made possible, and which continue to influence present-day behavior and modes of thought in both former colonial and colonized lands. (See Geeta Chowdhry and L.H.M. Ling's essay “Race(ing) International Relations: A Critical Overview of Postcolonial Feminism in International Relations” in the Compendium for a fuller account of postcolonial feminism in IR and its relationship with both feminist IR and postcolonial studies scholarship.)

Postcolonial feminists have highlighted the gendered and gendering nature of colonial(ist) discourses and practices, uncovering the ways in which colonial(ist) policies and practices relied upon the mobilization of hierarchically ordered gender identities. As McClintock ( 1995 ) asserts, “imperialism cannot be understood without a theory of gender power … gender dynamics were, from the outset, fundamental to the securing and maintenance of the imperial enterprise” (cited in Mills 1998 :100). Thus, Sharpe has drawn attention to the positioning of white British women in India as passive and “rapeable,” in need of protection against the aggressive “barbarism” and “savagery” of indigenous men, in order to “permit [violent] strategies of counterinsurgency to be recorded as the restoration of moral order” ( 1993 :6). Moreover, Pettman has problematized the infantilizing attitudes of colonizer women, especially missionary women, toward colonized women, arguing that “even where the former saw the latter as sisters, in a precursor to global sisterhood, they retained notions of difference in race and cultural hierarchy that represented ‘other’ women as little sisters or surrogate daughters” ( 1996 :29; see also Ramusack 1990 ). Colonialist attitudes continue to resonate in contemporary international relations, both within the discipline of IR and within contemporary practices of global politics. For Agathangelou and Ling, the discipline of IR resembles a “colonial household” that arrogantly seeks to impose “order” and establish “civilization” within “a space that is already crowded with local traditions of thinking, doing and being … by appropriating the knowledge, resources, and labor of racialized, sexualized Others for its own benefit and pleasure while announcing itself the sole producer – the father – of our world” (Agathangelou and Ling 2004a :21). Several others have highlighted how policies and practices of international intervention (e.g., of democracy promotion, development, foreign aid, peacekeeping, etc.) by the global North in the global South are conceptualized, legitimized, and made possible through the discursive mobilization of hierarchically ordered and racialized gender identities. Interventionist discourses generally seek to promote the notion that the global North has a duty or moral obligation to “modernize,” “democratize,” and “develop” societies in the global South (Doty 1993 , 1996 ; Orford 1999 , 2003 ; Whitworth 2004 ; Krasniqi 2007 ). Whilst the Northern/Western “self” is constructed as “democratic, freedom-loving, and humanitarian” (Doty 1993 :125), Southern/non-Western “others” are depicted as “disordered, chaotic, tribal, primitive, pre-capitalist, violent, exclusionary and child-like” (Orford 2003 :43), thereby enabling western intervention to be legitimized as benevolent acts of “rescue” and “salvation” rather than manifestations of realpolitik .

The problematic history of colonial(ist) intervention on behalf of “other” women, coupled with a concern for the power that colonial(ist) discourses continue to hold over “white feminist” theories and practices, has led postcolonial feminists to spotlight the politics of cultural representation, the ethics of speaking and writing for or on behalf of “others,” and questions of agency within feminist analyses (McEwan 2003 :406–10; Wilson 2007 :129; see also Alcoff 1991–2 ). Mohanty famously problematized “the construction of ‘third world women’ as a homogeneous ‘powerless’ group often located as implicit victims of particular socioeconomic systems” in Western feminist discourse rather than as agents (Mohanty 1991 :57). She highlights the ways in which feminist scholars in the global North depict the “average third world woman” as someone who “leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and her being ‘third world’ (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.)” ( 1991 :56). Comparing the self-presentations of “Western” feminists with their representations of women in the “third world,” she asserts that “universal images of ‘the third world Woman’ (the veiled woman, chaste virgin, etc.), images constructed from adding the ‘third world difference’ to ‘sexual difference,’ are predicated upon (and hence obviously bring into sharper focus) assumptions about Western women as secular, liberated and having control over their own lives” (Mohanty 1991 :74).

Similarly, Narayan ( 1998 ) argues that feminist attempts to avoid gender essentialism, by taking into account issues such as class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc., can result in “culturally essentialist” images of differences among women when “[s]eemingly universal essentialist generalizations about ‘all women’ are replaced by culture-specific essentialist generalizations that depend on totalizing categories such as ‘Western culture,’ ‘Non-Western cultures,’ ‘Western women,’ ‘Third World women,’ and so forth” ( 1998 :87). This is, in her view, a form of “‘cultural imperialism’ … [which operates through] an ‘insistence on Difference,’ by a projection of Imaginary ‘differences’ that constitute one's Others as Other” ( 1998 :89), which she traces back to the colonial era. Narayan argues that such constructions are problematic given that they are often used by “traditionalists”/“fundamentalists” in the global South in political movements that are detrimental to women's interests. Consequently, she contends that feminists must adopt a stance of anti-essentialism in relation to both women and culture – by combining “criticisms of the adverse effects of particular ‘traditions’ on women … with a critical stance toward ahistorical and essentialist pictures of those ‘traditions’” ( 1998 :96) and by “pointing to the internal plurality, dissension and contestation over values, and ongoing changes in practices in virtually all communities that comprise modern nation-states” ( 1998 :102).

Postcolonial feminists have also pointed to the need for feminists in the global North to acknowledge the “situatedness” of their knowledges (Haraway 1988 ) and to appreciate their cultural specificity and partiality (McEwan 2003 :409). For Spivak ( 1990 ), this entails “unlearning … one's privilege” in relation to the “much larger female constituency in the world” so that:

not only does one become able to listen to that other constituency, but one learns to speak in such a way that one will be taken seriously by that other constituency. And furthermore, to recognize that the position of the speaking subject within theory can be an historically powerful position when it wants the other to be able to answer back. (Spivak 1990 :42)

The scholarship of women of color and ethnicity and of postcolonial feminists has been paramount in gaining greater recognition of the need to decenter the feminisms produced in the global North – “to reorient western feminisms, such that they are perceived no longer as exclusive and dominant but as part of a plurality of feminisms, each with a specific history and set of political objectives” (McEwan 2003 :407). Their insights have also led to greater awareness of the diverse histories of women's struggles and feminist activism throughout history and across the globe, drawing attention to a multitude of campaigns, strategies, and forms of organization utilized by women in a variety of historically and locationally specific sociocultural contexts to advance specific interests and improve the circumstances of their lives (Basu 1999 ). As a result of such analyses, the formation of women's identities and interests within particular structural, political, and cultural contexts has been brought into greater focus – highlighting not only the complex conditions in which women become mobilized but also the temporal and spatial specificity of local discourses and practices of gender which work to obstruct or facilitate women's and feminist movements (Ray and Korteweg 1999 ).

Contributions of Liberal Feminists: The Politics of Multiculturalism

As noted above, feminists of color and ethnicity have problematized the tendency of second wave theories to deny differences among women in ways that overlook intersecting forms of subordination and discrimination, while postcolonial feminist scholars have critiqued “Western” feminism's propensity to emphasize difference (Jaggar 2005b :187) through practices of knowing, interpreting, and speaking about gendered and racialized “others” in ways that divest (post-)colonial subjects of both subjectivity and agency, thereby perpetuating (neo)colonial forms of domination (Spivak 1988 :272). Liberal feminists, on the other hand, have expressed concerns that moves within multicultural liberal states to recognize cultural difference and to formally accommodate the customs, norms, beliefs, and practices of cultural minorities may clash with the goal of achieving gender justice and equality (e.g., Okin 1994 , 1995 , 1998a , 1998b , 1999 , 2005 ; Shachar 2001 ). Susan Moller Okin ( 1999 ), for example, has argued that multiculturalism may be “bad for women” because the liberal feminist goal of protecting the fundamental rights and freedoms of women is often relegated by liberal states in favor of accommodating the claims of cultural minorities to group rights and protections. She asserts that “group rights are potentially, and in many cases actually, antifeminist” because “they substantially limit the capacities of women and girls of that culture to live with human dignity equal to that of men, and to live as freely chosen lives as [men] can” ( 1999 :12). In her view, those advocating group rights for cultural minorities within liberal states firstly fail to recognize that such groups, like the wider societies in which they exist, “are themselves gendered , with substantial differences in power and advantage between men and women,” and secondly do not pay adequate attention to the forms of gendered inequality and discrimination that emanate from the private sphere of domestic and family life ( 1999 :12), thereby enabling “culturally endorsed practices that are oppressive to women … [to] remain hidden … [and] perceived as private family concerns” (1998b:680). Listing a number of culturally or religiously sanctioned practices such as polygamy, clitoridechtomy, child marriages, and forced marriages ( 1999 :24) which she regards as violations of women's human rights, Okin questions the idea that feminist and multiculturalist goals are compatible. While acknowledging that “Western cultures … still practice many forms of sex discrimination,” and that “virtually all of the world's cultures have distinctly patriarchal pasts,” she nevertheless claims that some, mostly liberal, cultures “have departed far further from [these pasts] than others” ( 1999 :16). Consequently, she asserts that women in “a more patriarchal minority culture” may “be much better off if the culture into which they were born were either to become extinct … or … encouraged to alter itself so as to reinforce the equality of women” ( 1999 :22–3; for critical responses to this controversial claim see in particular Volpp 2001 ; Benhabib 2002 ).

This question of how feminists in the global North should respond to cases where the claims of cultural minorities to recognition and protection conflict with the liberal feminist principle of gender equality has generated a substantial level of debate (for critiques of Okin see especially Norton 2001 ; Shachar 2001 ; Volpp 2001 ; Benhabib 2002 ). Many feminists would endorse Okin's view that “we need to strive toward … a form of multiculturalism that gives the issues of gender and other intragroup inequalities their due – that is to say, a multiculturalism that effectively treats all persons as each other's moral equals” (Okin, quoted in Phillips 2010 :2). However, diverging opinions have surfaced regarding the most appropriate strategies for feminists to adopt. One strategy has been to identify certain nonnegotiable rights or equalities that must be upheld and which set limits to the claims that can rightly be accommodated within multicultural societies (Phillips 2010 :2–3). In this vein, Martha Nussbaum ( 2002 ), drawing on the work of Amartya Sen, has advocated a “capabilities approach” to gender justice, outlining “basic constitutional principles that should be respected and implemented by the governments of all nations, as a bare minimum of what respect for human dignity requires” ( 2002 :49). She identifies a list of “necessary elements of truly human functioning” ( 2002 :59) that are cross-culturally applicable, including:

bodily health;

bodily integrity;

ability to use the senses, imagination, to think and reason;

emotional development;

practical reason;

the ability to engage in a variety of forms of affiliation, whether social or political;

the ability to live with concern for and in relation to other species;

the ability to play and enjoy recreational activities; and

the ability to exert control over one's political and material environment ( 2002 :60–2; see also Nussbaum 1988 , 1992 , 1995 , 1997 , 2000 ; Nussbaum and Sen 1993 ; Nussbaum and Glover 1995 ).

Nussbaum deploys the concept of capabilities to counter the “politically correct,” anti-essentialist strands of feminism which in her view rationalize “ancient religious taboos, the luxury of the pampered husband, ill health, ignorance, and death” and other forms of injustice experienced by women across the globe (Nussbaum, quoted in Jaggar 2005a :58). Similarly, Anne Phillips has identified three guiding principles which can help societies to classify cultural practices as in accordance with or violation of principles of gender equality. Practices are not defensible when they (1) inflict grievous and irreversible harms to a person's well-being or self-esteem; (2) violate the principle of equality, e.g., by discriminating against women; and (3) do not provide individuals with the substantive conditions (political and civil freedoms, educational and employment opportunities) required for genuine consent.

Another approach is to divide jurisdictional authority for contested issues (such as family law) between national governments and cultural minorities in order to balance respect for cultural difference with the protection of individual rights, and to force both states and minority groups to compete for women's allegiance by promoting policies and practices geared toward gender equality (Phillips 2010 :4; Shachar 2001 ). Ayelet Shachar ( 2001 ), for example, advocates a system of “joint governance” to foster “ongoing interactions between different sources of authority, as a means of eventually improving the situation of traditionally vulnerable insiders, without forcing them into an ‘either/or’ choice between their culture and their rights” ( 2001 :13). She promotes transformative accommodation as the “most optimistically practical” form of joint governance because it aims “to encourage group authorities themselves to reduce discriminatory internal restrictions” on the choices and actions of group members ( 2001 :14) by convincing them to enact three principles: (1) the allocation of jurisdictional authority along the lines of “sub-matters,” e.g., separable legal components such as education, family law, immigration (119–20); (2) the “no monopoly rule” which states that neither the state nor the minority can acquire exclusive authority over a contested issue that affects individuals both as citizens and as group members (120–2); and (3) the establishment of clearly delineated options which allow individuals to choose between the jurisdiction of the state and the group (122–6).

A third approach is to look to democratic deliberation and intercultural dialogue to resolve conflicts between multicultural and feminist goals (Phillips 2010 :4; for examples see Young 2000 ; Benhabib 2002 ; Deveaux 2006 ; Song 2007 ). Accordingly, Seyla Benhabib has proposed a “complex multicultural dialogue” ( 2002 :101) that enables individuals to engage in “processes of cultural communication, contestation, and resignification … within civil society” ( 2002 :81). Similarly, Monique Deveaux has argued for a deliberative democratic approach which ensures that women from cultural minorities “have a voice in evaluating and deciding the fate of their communities' customs, both by including women in formal decision-making processes and developing new, more inclusive, forums for mediating cultural disputes” ( 2006 :5). In addition, Nancy Fraser's “ critical theory of recognition, one that identifies and defends only those versions of the cultural politics of difference that can be coherently combined with the social politics of equality” ( 1997 :12), highlights the importance of public contestation and deliberation, and promotes the idea that all affected parties should be enabled to fully and freely participate in public debate on questions of justice (Fraser and Honneth 2003 :43). The recognition of cultural difference, in Fraser's view, should be treated as an issue of social status where “what requires recognition is not group-specific identity but the status of individual group members as full partners in social interaction” ( 2000 :113). Fraser's conception of justice thus centers on the principle of “participatory parity” – a norm of social justice that “requires social arrangements that permit all (adult) members of society to interact with one another as peers” (Fraser and Honneth 2003 :36). Participatory parity depends on two conditions: the “objective condition” of a distribution of material resources such as to ensure “participants' independence and ‘voice’;” and the “intersubjective condition” of “institutionalized patterns of cultural value [which] express equal respect … and ensure equal opportunity for achieving social esteem” ( 2003 :36). This norm provides a justificatory standard against which claims by individuals and groups for recognition and/or redistribution, as well as the proposed remedies for injustice, can be evaluated at both the intergroup and intragroup levels. By requiring that claimants in struggles for cultural recognition demonstrate not only that present economic arrangements and/or institutionalized patterns of cultural value prevent them from participating on a par with others in social life, but also that the social changes they advocate will promote rather than impede parity of participation, legitimate claims and remedies can be distinguished from false or pernicious ones ( 2003 :38–42).

This stress on using democratic deliberation and intercultural dialogue to resolve conflicts of “multiculturalism vs. feminism” (Okin 1998b ) or “multicultural accommodation vs. women's rights” (Shachar 2001 ) contrasts with Okin's investment in John Rawls's ( 1999 , 2001 ) concept of the “original position” in which individuals engage in hypothetical dialogue behind a “veil of ignorance” in order to formulate rational and objective principles of justice within society. Okin worries that “interactive” or “dialogical” approaches may not be up to the task of achieving gender justice because, in her view, many oppressed people internalize their oppression and are “likely to rationalize the cruelties” they suffer, meaning that “ committed outsiders can often be better analysts and critics of social injustice than those who live within the relevant culture” ( 1994 :19). Yet speaking for others in this way is dangerous. As Linda Alcoff notes, it entails “the possibility of misrepresentation, expanding one's own authority and privilege, and a generally imperialist speaking ritual,” dangers that may be reduced by instead speaking with and to others (Alcoff 1991–2 :23). In an era in which debates on women's rights are often used to reinforce cultural stereotypes (e.g., the idea that certain cultural minorities are particularly prone to sexism), to construct hierarchical binaries between “Western” and “non-Western” values (e.g., rational/irrational, traditional/modern, backward/progressive, civilized/barbaric), and to rationalize and make possible the global “war on/of terror” (Masters 2009 ; see also Ferguson 2005 ; Hunt and Rygiel 2006 ; Nayak 2006 ; Shepherd 2006 ), speaking for others may reinforce rather than challenge racialized orders (both global and local) in which proclamations of adherence to “progressive” and “liberal” policies on gender equality and the treatment of women have become both markers and sources of superiority, domination, and privilege (Phillips 2010 :3–4, 14). Moreover, the exclusive attention paid to the oppression suffered by women in the global South or by female members of cultural minorities in the global North also deflects attention from the fact that women in the most “developed,” “progressive” societies continue to be politically, economically, and socially marginalized, and suffer from myriad forms of gender-based violence and discrimination (Phillips 2010 :25; Volpp 2001 ). A myopic focus on “cultural” explanations for the suffering experienced only by “Third World” and “minority” women is problematic because it not only masks the relevance of culture in explaining/understanding the violence and injustice experienced by “Western” and “majority” women, but also obscures the ways in which “Third World” and “minority” women articulate agency and subjectivity even in the most constraining and coercive circumstances (Volpp 2001 ), e.g., by depicting them in dehumanizing and infantilized terms as objects at risk of “death by culture” (Narayan 1997 ). It also blinds us to the ways in which citizens in the global North are implicated in many of the injustices suffered by Southern and minority women, for example due to the legacies of Western colonialism, or contemporary forms of injustice generated by neoliberal globalization (Jaggar 2005a , 2005b ).

Contributions of Poststructural Feminist Theory

The process of destabilizing the universalizing claims and unitary concepts of “second wave” feminisms has been a key concern of poststructural feminism – also termed postmodernist, deconstructionist, linguistic, or French theory – as articulated by scholars such as Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigary, and influenced by the psychoanalytic and linguistic theories of male writers such as Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan. However, in contrast to the theories and practices promoted by women of color and ethnicity, poststructural feminists, like postcolonial feminists, call into question attempts to mobilize around unitary categories such as race, ethnicity, class, or sexual orientation, arguing that identity groups are made up of individuals with heterogeneous rather than shared or essential experiences (Mann and Huffman 2005 :62). Rejecting “metanarratives” or all-encompassing theories that claim to be capable of explaining women's subordination or oppression across historical and geographical contexts, poststructural feminists have problematized feminist attempts to build theories about “woman”/“women,” arguing that when women are defined, characterized, or “spoken for” they continue to be naturalized, essentialized, or normalized as a category, thereby reinvoking a key mechanism of gender oppression (Alcoff 1988 ). The task, as Alcoff asserts, is to replace theories of gender or sexual difference with “a plurality of difference where gender loses its position of significance” (Alcoff 1988 :407). Non-universalist feminist theories have therefore been proposed which are inimical to essentialism through their unequivocal insistence of historical and cultural specificity – as such poststructural feminists “replace unitary notions of ‘woman’ and ‘feminine gender identity’ with plural and complexly constructed conceptions of social identity, treating gender as one relevant strand among others, attending also to class, race, ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation” (Fraser and Nicholson 1989 :101). In doing so, poststructural feminists strive to uphold an ideal of political inclusiveness, rejecting any search for first principles or ultimate causes of women's oppression as totalizing and dangerously prone to marginalizing women whose perspectives and experiences differ from our own (Flax 1990 ). As Gayatri Spivak ( 1990 ) has argued, “We cannot but narrate … [but] when a narrative is constructed, something is left out. When an end is defined, other ends are rejected, and one might not know what those ends are” (18–19).

A key focus of poststructural feminist theorizing is on the processes of gendered subjectification – the “historically [and culturally] specific processes whereby one is subjected to the discursive regimes and regulatory frameworks [and] through which gendered individuals and their social contexts are … constructed” (Davies and Gannon 2005 :318; see also Foucault 1980 ; Butler 1990 , 1992 , 1993 ). The subject is conceived in these analyses not as transcendental (as a stable, coherent self that exists before and beyond the social realm) but rather as culturally constituted and discursively produced by “relations of power” (Foucault 1980 :118) within a given society. As Mouffe ( 1992 ) asserts, the subject is:

… constituted by an ensemble of “subject positions” that can never be totally fixed in a closed system of differences, constructed by a diversity of discourses among which there is no necessary relation but a constant movement of overdetermination and displacement. The identity of such a multiple and contradictory subject is therefore always contingent and precarious, temporarily fixed at the intersection of those subject positions and dependent on specific forms of identification . ( 1992 :372; my emphasis)

This “multiply constituted subject” is understood as having multiple identities which are constituted through discourse in relation to difference and achieved “through the inscription of boundaries that serve to demarcate an ‘inside’ from an ‘outside,’ a ‘self’ from an ‘other,’ a ‘domestic’ from a ‘foreign’” (Campbell 1998 :9) As Connolly argues, “identity is established in relation to a series of differences that have become socially recognized … [and] are essential to its being … its distinctiveness and solidity” ( 2002 :64). Consequently, poststructural feminists have noted the importance of oppositional binarisms in the construction and reproduction of gender identities – masculinity as a fluid, relational , and contextualized construction is defined in binary opposition to femininity, with connections to other modern dichotomies such as rationality/emotion, active/passive, war/peace, culture/nature, objective/subjective, competitive/caring, and order/anarchy, and with the first “masculine” term in each pair often being valued above the second “feminine” term (Hooper 1998 :31–2). These “masculine” and “feminine” characteristics play a crucial regulatory and disciplinary role – they denote an “ideal” or “hegemonic” type of masculinity or femininity which not only defines what men and women ought to be, but also supports male power and female subordination and reinforces the power of dominant groups due to the hierarchy of masculinities in which gender interacts with race, class, and other social divisions (Tickner 2001 :16; Connell 1995 ; Hooper 1998 ; Schippers 2007 ). As a result, the multiple models of masculinity and femininity that exist across time and space do so in relations of hierarchy, hegemony, and exclusion (Connell 2001 :57; see also Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994 ; Hooper 1998 ; Lloyd 1999 ; Kimmel and Messner 2001 ; Whitehead and Barrett 2001 ; Schippers 2007 ).

An appreciation of the diversity, complexity, and multiplicity of gender identity, together with a more complex understanding of power has led poststructural feminists to challenge long-standing assumptions that sex is a stable category upon which gendered identities are constructed (Squires and Weldes 2007 :186). Butler's extension of the Foucauldian notion of power as performative, for example, leads her to argue that gender is both a material effect of the way in which power takes hold of the body, and an ideological effect of the way power “conditions” the mind (Squires and Weldes 2007 :187). Gender is thus not something humans acquire , but something we do (Lloyd 1999 :195; Butler 1990 , 1992 , 1993 ); it exists only so far as it is ritualistically and repetitively performed “through a stylized repetition of acts ” (Butler 1990 :140; see also Stone 2005 ). The performative nature of gender leads Butler to argue that

[g]ender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pre-given sex; gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or a “natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture. (Butler 1997 , cited in Squires and Weldes 2007 :187)

As a result, essentialist appeals to the existence of a true gender identity can be viewed as part of the strategy that conceals gender's performative character and the result of regulatory practices that seek not only to render gender identity uniform through compulsory heterosexuality, but to restrict performative possibilities for alternative gender configurations (Butler 1990 ; Kantola 2007 :278). Furthermore, understanding how the category of “woman”/“women” is produced and restrained through structures of power, using methods such as genealogy, deconstruction, intertextual readings, and the exploration of “subjugated knowledges,” allows for the possibility of subversive agency through which gender norms can be transgressed (Stone 2005 ). As Scott ( 2005 ) argues, treating subjects as discursively constituted does not result in linguistic determinism, given that there are contradictions within and among discursive systems and a multitude of possible meanings for the subject positions they deploy ( 2005 :212). Indeed, the “subject is neither a ground nor a product, but the permanent possibility of a certain resignifying process” (Butler 1992 :13). Nor does rejecting Enlightenment conceptions of subjects as stable, autonomous individuals exercising free will deprive individuals of agency. Rather, their agency is “created through situations and statuses conferred upon them” (Scott 2005 :212). As Butler asserts, “the constituted character of the subject is the very precondition of its agency” ( 1992 :12). Consequently, poststructural feminist analyses explore how individuals negotiate, resist, embrace, and potentially transform the multiple and conflicting discourses through which they are constituted as subjects and subjected to relations of power, noting the ways in which agency is articulated vis-à-vis discourses of enablement and constraint.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center in New York, and the Pentagon, and the subsequent US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, have thrown debates on cultural difference, division, diversity, and differentiation into sharp relief (Brah and Phoenix 2004 ). In the aftermath of 9/11, many policy makers and ordinary citizens alike turned to Samuel Huntington's ( 1996 ) “clash of civilisations” thesis to make sense of the traumatic events, interpreting the attacks in essentialist terms as a clash between Islamic and Western cultures, and as proof of Huntington's claim that “the most pervasive, important and dangerous conflicts will not be between social classes, rich and poor, or other economically defined groups, but between people belonging to different cultural entities” ( 1996 :28). The wars that followed have posed grave dilemmas for feminist scholars and activists who found feminist discourse on women's human rights being strategically coopted by the Bush administration to legitimize violence directed at racialized “others” in Afghanistan and Iraq (Ferguson 2005 ; Moghadam 2009 ) with disastrous effects on the well-being of many women, men, and children living in these societies (see Al-Ali and Pratt 2009 ). The conceptual frameworks and methodological tools provided by women of color and ethnicity, by postcolonial feminists, and by poststructural feminists, and the debates between liberal feminists and their critics on the gender politics of multiculturalism have helped feminist IR scholars to untangle and problematize the ways in which discourses of gender, race, class, sexuality, and culture are part a product of and part productive of these practices of violence. By pointing to historical and contemporary connections between the “woman question” and (neo)colonialism, highlighting the intersection of gender with other constructions of identity, spotlighting the role of language and representational practices in constructing “self” and “others” in orientalist terms and the politics of speaking for and claiming rights on behalf of others, adopting a skeptical stance vis-à-vis totalizing metanarratives of “civilization,” “progress,” and “development,” and by recovering the agency and subjectivity of those marginalized and/or oppressed (see Agathangelou and Ling 2004b ; Farrell and McDermott 2005 ; Ferguson 2005 ; Hunt and Rygiel 2006 ; Nayak 2006 ; Shepherd 2006 ), feminists have worked to contest the depoliticizing discourses of “muscular humanitarianism” (Orford 1999 ). One of the greatest challenges for feminists, as Vivienne Jabri ( 2004 ) asserts, is to “reclaim the political in feminism” in resistance to “a hegemonic neoliberal order and a matrix of war” – by adopting a feminism of “dissension and contestation” rather than “complicity … [or] cooptation into the discourses of the powerful” ( 2004 : 265; see also Jabri 1999 ). The conceptual, theoretical, and methodological tools deployed by third wave feminists to highlight the politics of difference provide, in my view, an excellent starting point for problematizing the seductively liberal theories and policies of academic and policy-making elites and for reinvigorating the feminist movement's sustained campaign for gender justice and positive peace.

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Links to Digital Materials

African Feminist Forum (AFF). At www.africanfeministforum.com , accessed October 2011. AFF is a biennial conference that draws together African feminists to discuss key issues affecting the advancement of women's rights on the African continent.

Amnesty International (AI) – Stop Violence Against Women Campaign. At www.amnesty.org/en/campaigns/stop-violence-against-women , accessed October 2011. AI is an international human rights organization. AI campaigns to end violence against women, to remove laws that discriminate against women, and to push for the enactment and implementation of laws that protect women's human rights and guarantee women access to justice and services for survivors of gender-based violence.

Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID). At www.awid.org , accessed October 2011. AWID is an international feminist organization composed of researchers, academics, students, educators, activists, policy makers, development practitioners, donors, and others. It aims to advance gender equality, sustainable development, and women's human rights around the world. One of its key initiatives focuses on resisting and challenging religious fundamentalisms and their impact on women's rights across regions and religions.

Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). At www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cedaw/ , accessed October 2011. CEDAW is the body of independent experts on women's rights that monitors the implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights. At http://genderandsecurity.umb.edu , accessed October 2011. The Consortium specializes in building knowledge of gender, conflict, and security, and aims to contribute toward ending violent conflict and building sustainable peace. The website includes a bibliography of feminist academic work in international relations.

Human Rights Watch (HRW). At www.hrw.org , accessed October 2011. HRW focuses on defending and protecting human rights around the world, including women's rights and LGBT rights.

OpenDemocracy. At www.opendemocracy.net , accessed October 2011. “The Dignity of Women” section of openDemocracy publishes articles highlighting the voices of women working to end violence against women in the Arab region and to promote women's rights. At www.opendemocracy.net/50-50-tags/arab-region-the-dignity-of-women , accessed October 2011. The “Religion Gender Politics” section examines the prospects for gender equality and women's human rights in the context of a resurgence of religion in public life across the world and multiculturalist claims to difference. At www.opendemocracy.net/5050/religion-gender-politics , accessed October 2011.

United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women). At www.unwomen.org , accessed October 2011. UN Women was created by the UN General Assembly in July 2010. UN Women promotes the elimination of discrimination against women and girls, the empowerment of women and gender equality via development, human rights, humanitarian action, and peace and security interventions.

United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). At www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Women/SRWomen/Pages/SRWomenIndex.aspx , accessed October 2011. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights appointed in March 1994 a Special Rapporteur on violence against women, including its causes and consequences.

Violence is Not Our Culture (VNC). At www.stop-stoning.org , accessed October 2011. VNC is a global campaign to stop violence against women that is justified in the name of culture or religion. Arguing that violence against women manifests itself in all cultures in diverse forms, the campaign challenges and opposes the legitimacy given to legal, religious, and cultural systems that promote or aid discrimination and violence against women and girls.

Women Human Rights Defenders International Coalition (WHRDIC). At www.defendingwomen-defendingrights.org , accessed October 2011. WHRDIC is an international resource and advocacy network that provides protection and support to women human rights defenders worldwide, including women activists, men who defend women's rights, and LGBT defenders and groups committed to the advancement of women's human rights.

Acknowledgments

Research for this essay was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/G013993/1). Thanks are due to Laura Sjoberg and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and to Vivienne Jabri for encouraging the author to take on this essay. All errors, of course, remain the author's sole responsibility.

1. Alcoff cites Mary Daly ( 1978 ) and Adrienne Rich ( 1977 , 1979 ) as influential proponents of radical (or “cultural”) feminism given their tendency to invoke universalizing and essentialist conceptions of “woman.” Echols also names Susan Griffin, Kathleen Barry, Janice Raymond, Florence Rush, Susan Brownmiller, and Robin Morgan.

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Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender

Feminism is said to be the movement to end women’s oppression (hooks 2000, 26). One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various biological and anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (being a woman or a man), although most ordinary language users appear to treat the two interchangeably. In feminist philosophy, this distinction has generated a lively debate. Central questions include: What does it mean for gender to be distinct from sex, if anything at all? How should we understand the claim that gender depends on social and/or cultural factors? What does it mean to be gendered woman, man, or genderqueer? This entry outlines and discusses distinctly feminist debates on sex and gender considering both historical and more contemporary positions.

1.1 Biological determinism

1.2 gender terminology, 2.1 gender socialisation, 2.2 gender as feminine and masculine personality, 2.3 gender as feminine and masculine sexuality, 3.1.1 particularity argument, 3.1.2 normativity argument, 3.2 is sex classification solely a matter of biology, 3.3 are sex and gender distinct, 3.4 is the sex/gender distinction useful, 4.1.1 gendered social series, 4.1.2 resemblance nominalism, 4.2.1 social subordination and gender, 4.2.2 gender uniessentialism, 4.2.3 gender as positionality, 5. beyond the binary, 6. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the sex/gender distinction..

The terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ mean different things to different feminist theorists and neither are easy or straightforward to characterise. Sketching out some feminist history of the terms provides a helpful starting point.

Most people ordinarily seem to think that sex and gender are coextensive: women are human females, men are human males. Many feminists have historically disagreed and have endorsed the sex/ gender distinction. Provisionally: ‘sex’ denotes human females and males depending on biological features (chromosomes, sex organs, hormones and other physical features); ‘gender’ denotes women and men depending on social factors (social role, position, behaviour or identity). The main feminist motivation for making this distinction was to counter biological determinism or the view that biology is destiny.

A typical example of a biological determinist view is that of Geddes and Thompson who, in 1889, argued that social, psychological and behavioural traits were caused by metabolic state. Women supposedly conserve energy (being ‘anabolic’) and this makes them passive, conservative, sluggish, stable and uninterested in politics. Men expend their surplus energy (being ‘katabolic’) and this makes them eager, energetic, passionate, variable and, thereby, interested in political and social matters. These biological ‘facts’ about metabolic states were used not only to explain behavioural differences between women and men but also to justify what our social and political arrangements ought to be. More specifically, they were used to argue for withholding from women political rights accorded to men because (according to Geddes and Thompson) “what was decided among the prehistoric Protozoa cannot be annulled by Act of Parliament” (quoted from Moi 1999, 18). It would be inappropriate to grant women political rights, as they are simply not suited to have those rights; it would also be futile since women (due to their biology) would simply not be interested in exercising their political rights. To counter this kind of biological determinism, feminists have argued that behavioural and psychological differences have social, rather than biological, causes. For instance, Simone de Beauvoir famously claimed that one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, and that “social discrimination produces in women moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to be caused by nature” (Beauvoir 1972 [original 1949], 18; for more, see the entry on Simone de Beauvoir ). Commonly observed behavioural traits associated with women and men, then, are not caused by anatomy or chromosomes. Rather, they are culturally learned or acquired.

Although biological determinism of the kind endorsed by Geddes and Thompson is nowadays uncommon, the idea that behavioural and psychological differences between women and men have biological causes has not disappeared. In the 1970s, sex differences were used to argue that women should not become airline pilots since they will be hormonally unstable once a month and, therefore, unable to perform their duties as well as men (Rogers 1999, 11). More recently, differences in male and female brains have been said to explain behavioural differences; in particular, the anatomy of corpus callosum, a bundle of nerves that connects the right and left cerebral hemispheres, is thought to be responsible for various psychological and behavioural differences. For instance, in 1992, a Time magazine article surveyed then prominent biological explanations of differences between women and men claiming that women’s thicker corpus callosums could explain what ‘women’s intuition’ is based on and impair women’s ability to perform some specialised visual-spatial skills, like reading maps (Gorman 1992). Anne Fausto-Sterling has questioned the idea that differences in corpus callosums cause behavioural and psychological differences. First, the corpus callosum is a highly variable piece of anatomy; as a result, generalisations about its size, shape and thickness that hold for women and men in general should be viewed with caution. Second, differences in adult human corpus callosums are not found in infants; this may suggest that physical brain differences actually develop as responses to differential treatment. Third, given that visual-spatial skills (like map reading) can be improved by practice, even if women and men’s corpus callosums differ, this does not make the resulting behavioural differences immutable. (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, chapter 5).

In order to distinguish biological differences from social/psychological ones and to talk about the latter, feminists appropriated the term ‘gender’. Psychologists writing on transsexuality were the first to employ gender terminology in this sense. Until the 1960s, ‘gender’ was often used to refer to masculine and feminine words, like le and la in French. However, in order to explain why some people felt that they were ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’, the psychologist Robert Stoller (1968) began using the terms ‘sex’ to pick out biological traits and ‘gender’ to pick out the amount of femininity and masculinity a person exhibited. Although (by and large) a person’s sex and gender complemented each other, separating out these terms seemed to make theoretical sense allowing Stoller to explain the phenomenon of transsexuality: transsexuals’ sex and gender simply don’t match.

Along with psychologists like Stoller, feminists found it useful to distinguish sex and gender. This enabled them to argue that many differences between women and men were socially produced and, therefore, changeable. Gayle Rubin (for instance) uses the phrase ‘sex/gender system’ in order to describe “a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention” (1975, 165). Rubin employed this system to articulate that “part of social life which is the locus of the oppression of women” (1975, 159) describing gender as the “socially imposed division of the sexes” (1975, 179). Rubin’s thought was that although biological differences are fixed, gender differences are the oppressive results of social interventions that dictate how women and men should behave. Women are oppressed as women and “by having to be women” (Rubin 1975, 204). However, since gender is social, it is thought to be mutable and alterable by political and social reform that would ultimately bring an end to women’s subordination. Feminism should aim to create a “genderless (though not sexless) society, in which one’s sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love” (Rubin 1975, 204).

In some earlier interpretations, like Rubin’s, sex and gender were thought to complement one another. The slogan ‘Gender is the social interpretation of sex’ captures this view. Nicholson calls this ‘the coat-rack view’ of gender: our sexed bodies are like coat racks and “provide the site upon which gender [is] constructed” (1994, 81). Gender conceived of as masculinity and femininity is superimposed upon the ‘coat-rack’ of sex as each society imposes on sexed bodies their cultural conceptions of how males and females should behave. This socially constructs gender differences – or the amount of femininity/masculinity of a person – upon our sexed bodies. That is, according to this interpretation, all humans are either male or female; their sex is fixed. But cultures interpret sexed bodies differently and project different norms on those bodies thereby creating feminine and masculine persons. Distinguishing sex and gender, however, also enables the two to come apart: they are separable in that one can be sexed male and yet be gendered a woman, or vice versa (Haslanger 2000b; Stoljar 1995).

So, this group of feminist arguments against biological determinism suggested that gender differences result from cultural practices and social expectations. Nowadays it is more common to denote this by saying that gender is socially constructed. This means that genders (women and men) and gendered traits (like being nurturing or ambitious) are the “intended or unintended product[s] of a social practice” (Haslanger 1995, 97). But which social practices construct gender, what social construction is and what being of a certain gender amounts to are major feminist controversies. There is no consensus on these issues. (See the entry on intersections between analytic and continental feminism for more on different ways to understand gender.)

2. Gender as socially constructed

One way to interpret Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman is to take it as a claim about gender socialisation: females become women through a process whereby they acquire feminine traits and learn feminine behaviour. Masculinity and femininity are thought to be products of nurture or how individuals are brought up. They are causally constructed (Haslanger 1995, 98): social forces either have a causal role in bringing gendered individuals into existence or (to some substantial sense) shape the way we are qua women and men. And the mechanism of construction is social learning. For instance, Kate Millett takes gender differences to have “essentially cultural, rather than biological bases” that result from differential treatment (1971, 28–9). For her, gender is “the sum total of the parents’, the peers’, and the culture’s notions of what is appropriate to each gender by way of temperament, character, interests, status, worth, gesture, and expression” (Millett 1971, 31). Feminine and masculine gender-norms, however, are problematic in that gendered behaviour conveniently fits with and reinforces women’s subordination so that women are socialised into subordinate social roles: they learn to be passive, ignorant, docile, emotional helpmeets for men (Millett 1971, 26). However, since these roles are simply learned, we can create more equal societies by ‘unlearning’ social roles. That is, feminists should aim to diminish the influence of socialisation.

Social learning theorists hold that a huge array of different influences socialise us as women and men. This being the case, it is extremely difficult to counter gender socialisation. For instance, parents often unconsciously treat their female and male children differently. When parents have been asked to describe their 24- hour old infants, they have done so using gender-stereotypic language: boys are describes as strong, alert and coordinated and girls as tiny, soft and delicate. Parents’ treatment of their infants further reflects these descriptions whether they are aware of this or not (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 32). Some socialisation is more overt: children are often dressed in gender stereotypical clothes and colours (boys are dressed in blue, girls in pink) and parents tend to buy their children gender stereotypical toys. They also (intentionally or not) tend to reinforce certain ‘appropriate’ behaviours. While the precise form of gender socialization has changed since the onset of second-wave feminism, even today girls are discouraged from playing sports like football or from playing ‘rough and tumble’ games and are more likely than boys to be given dolls or cooking toys to play with; boys are told not to ‘cry like a baby’ and are more likely to be given masculine toys like trucks and guns (for more, see Kimmel 2000, 122–126). [ 1 ]

According to social learning theorists, children are also influenced by what they observe in the world around them. This, again, makes countering gender socialisation difficult. For one, children’s books have portrayed males and females in blatantly stereotypical ways: for instance, males as adventurers and leaders, and females as helpers and followers. One way to address gender stereotyping in children’s books has been to portray females in independent roles and males as non-aggressive and nurturing (Renzetti & Curran 1992, 35). Some publishers have attempted an alternative approach by making their characters, for instance, gender-neutral animals or genderless imaginary creatures (like TV’s Teletubbies). However, parents reading books with gender-neutral or genderless characters often undermine the publishers’ efforts by reading them to their children in ways that depict the characters as either feminine or masculine. According to Renzetti and Curran, parents labelled the overwhelming majority of gender-neutral characters masculine whereas those characters that fit feminine gender stereotypes (for instance, by being helpful and caring) were labelled feminine (1992, 35). Socialising influences like these are still thought to send implicit messages regarding how females and males should act and are expected to act shaping us into feminine and masculine persons.

Nancy Chodorow (1978; 1995) has criticised social learning theory as too simplistic to explain gender differences (see also Deaux & Major 1990; Gatens 1996). Instead, she holds that gender is a matter of having feminine and masculine personalities that develop in early infancy as responses to prevalent parenting practices. In particular, gendered personalities develop because women tend to be the primary caretakers of small children. Chodorow holds that because mothers (or other prominent females) tend to care for infants, infant male and female psychic development differs. Crudely put: the mother-daughter relationship differs from the mother-son relationship because mothers are more likely to identify with their daughters than their sons. This unconsciously prompts the mother to encourage her son to psychologically individuate himself from her thereby prompting him to develop well defined and rigid ego boundaries. However, the mother unconsciously discourages the daughter from individuating herself thereby prompting the daughter to develop flexible and blurry ego boundaries. Childhood gender socialisation further builds on and reinforces these unconsciously developed ego boundaries finally producing feminine and masculine persons (1995, 202–206). This perspective has its roots in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, although Chodorow’s approach differs in many ways from Freud’s.

Gendered personalities are supposedly manifested in common gender stereotypical behaviour. Take emotional dependency. Women are stereotypically more emotional and emotionally dependent upon others around them, supposedly finding it difficult to distinguish their own interests and wellbeing from the interests and wellbeing of their children and partners. This is said to be because of their blurry and (somewhat) confused ego boundaries: women find it hard to distinguish their own needs from the needs of those around them because they cannot sufficiently individuate themselves from those close to them. By contrast, men are stereotypically emotionally detached, preferring a career where dispassionate and distanced thinking are virtues. These traits are said to result from men’s well-defined ego boundaries that enable them to prioritise their own needs and interests sometimes at the expense of others’ needs and interests.

Chodorow thinks that these gender differences should and can be changed. Feminine and masculine personalities play a crucial role in women’s oppression since they make females overly attentive to the needs of others and males emotionally deficient. In order to correct the situation, both male and female parents should be equally involved in parenting (Chodorow 1995, 214). This would help in ensuring that children develop sufficiently individuated senses of selves without becoming overly detached, which in turn helps to eradicate common gender stereotypical behaviours.

Catharine MacKinnon develops her theory of gender as a theory of sexuality. Very roughly: the social meaning of sex (gender) is created by sexual objectification of women whereby women are viewed and treated as objects for satisfying men’s desires (MacKinnon 1989). Masculinity is defined as sexual dominance, femininity as sexual submissiveness: genders are “created through the eroticization of dominance and submission. The man/woman difference and the dominance/submission dynamic define each other. This is the social meaning of sex” (MacKinnon 1989, 113). For MacKinnon, gender is constitutively constructed : in defining genders (or masculinity and femininity) we must make reference to social factors (see Haslanger 1995, 98). In particular, we must make reference to the position one occupies in the sexualised dominance/submission dynamic: men occupy the sexually dominant position, women the sexually submissive one. As a result, genders are by definition hierarchical and this hierarchy is fundamentally tied to sexualised power relations. The notion of ‘gender equality’, then, does not make sense to MacKinnon. If sexuality ceased to be a manifestation of dominance, hierarchical genders (that are defined in terms of sexuality) would cease to exist.

So, gender difference for MacKinnon is not a matter of having a particular psychological orientation or behavioural pattern; rather, it is a function of sexuality that is hierarchal in patriarchal societies. This is not to say that men are naturally disposed to sexually objectify women or that women are naturally submissive. Instead, male and female sexualities are socially conditioned: men have been conditioned to find women’s subordination sexy and women have been conditioned to find a particular male version of female sexuality as erotic – one in which it is erotic to be sexually submissive. For MacKinnon, both female and male sexual desires are defined from a male point of view that is conditioned by pornography (MacKinnon 1989, chapter 7). Bluntly put: pornography portrays a false picture of ‘what women want’ suggesting that women in actual fact are and want to be submissive. This conditions men’s sexuality so that they view women’s submission as sexy. And male dominance enforces this male version of sexuality onto women, sometimes by force. MacKinnon’s thought is not that male dominance is a result of social learning (see 2.1.); rather, socialization is an expression of power. That is, socialized differences in masculine and feminine traits, behaviour, and roles are not responsible for power inequalities. Females and males (roughly put) are socialised differently because there are underlying power inequalities. As MacKinnon puts it, ‘dominance’ (power relations) is prior to ‘difference’ (traits, behaviour and roles) (see, MacKinnon 1989, chapter 12). MacKinnon, then, sees legal restrictions on pornography as paramount to ending women’s subordinate status that stems from their gender.

3. Problems with the sex/gender distinction

3.1 is gender uniform.

The positions outlined above share an underlying metaphysical perspective on gender: gender realism . [ 2 ] That is, women as a group are assumed to share some characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines their gender and the possession of which makes some individuals women (as opposed to, say, men). All women are thought to differ from all men in this respect (or respects). For example, MacKinnon thought that being treated in sexually objectifying ways is the common condition that defines women’s gender and what women as women share. All women differ from all men in this respect. Further, pointing out females who are not sexually objectified does not provide a counterexample to MacKinnon’s view. Being sexually objectified is constitutive of being a woman; a female who escapes sexual objectification, then, would not count as a woman.

One may want to critique the three accounts outlined by rejecting the particular details of each account. (For instance, see Spelman [1988, chapter 4] for a critique of the details of Chodorow’s view.) A more thoroughgoing critique has been levelled at the general metaphysical perspective of gender realism that underlies these positions. It has come under sustained attack on two grounds: first, that it fails to take into account racial, cultural and class differences between women (particularity argument); second, that it posits a normative ideal of womanhood (normativity argument).

Elizabeth Spelman (1988) has influentially argued against gender realism with her particularity argument. Roughly: gender realists mistakenly assume that gender is constructed independently of race, class, ethnicity and nationality. If gender were separable from, for example, race and class in this manner, all women would experience womanhood in the same way. And this is clearly false. For instance, Harris (1993) and Stone (2007) criticise MacKinnon’s view, that sexual objectification is the common condition that defines women’s gender, for failing to take into account differences in women’s backgrounds that shape their sexuality. The history of racist oppression illustrates that during slavery black women were ‘hypersexualised’ and thought to be always sexually available whereas white women were thought to be pure and sexually virtuous. In fact, the rape of a black woman was thought to be impossible (Harris 1993). So, (the argument goes) sexual objectification cannot serve as the common condition for womanhood since it varies considerably depending on one’s race and class. [ 3 ]

For Spelman, the perspective of ‘white solipsism’ underlies gender realists’ mistake. They assumed that all women share some “golden nugget of womanness” (Spelman 1988, 159) and that the features constitutive of such a nugget are the same for all women regardless of their particular cultural backgrounds. Next, white Western middle-class feminists accounted for the shared features simply by reflecting on the cultural features that condition their gender as women thus supposing that “the womanness underneath the Black woman’s skin is a white woman’s, and deep down inside the Latina woman is an Anglo woman waiting to burst through an obscuring cultural shroud” (Spelman 1988, 13). In so doing, Spelman claims, white middle-class Western feminists passed off their particular view of gender as “a metaphysical truth” (1988, 180) thereby privileging some women while marginalising others. In failing to see the importance of race and class in gender construction, white middle-class Western feminists conflated “the condition of one group of women with the condition of all” (Spelman 1988, 3).

Betty Friedan’s (1963) well-known work is a case in point of white solipsism. [ 4 ] Friedan saw domesticity as the main vehicle of gender oppression and called upon women in general to find jobs outside the home. But she failed to realize that women from less privileged backgrounds, often poor and non-white, already worked outside the home to support their families. Friedan’s suggestion, then, was applicable only to a particular sub-group of women (white middle-class Western housewives). But it was mistakenly taken to apply to all women’s lives — a mistake that was generated by Friedan’s failure to take women’s racial and class differences into account (hooks 2000, 1–3).

Spelman further holds that since social conditioning creates femininity and societies (and sub-groups) that condition it differ from one another, femininity must be differently conditioned in different societies. For her, “females become not simply women but particular kinds of women” (Spelman 1988, 113): white working-class women, black middle-class women, poor Jewish women, wealthy aristocratic European women, and so on.

This line of thought has been extremely influential in feminist philosophy. For instance, Young holds that Spelman has definitively shown that gender realism is untenable (1997, 13). Mikkola (2006) argues that this isn’t so. The arguments Spelman makes do not undermine the idea that there is some characteristic feature, experience, common condition or criterion that defines women’s gender; they simply point out that some particular ways of cashing out what defines womanhood are misguided. So, although Spelman is right to reject those accounts that falsely take the feature that conditions white middle-class Western feminists’ gender to condition women’s gender in general, this leaves open the possibility that women qua women do share something that defines their gender. (See also Haslanger [2000a] for a discussion of why gender realism is not necessarily untenable, and Stoljar [2011] for a discussion of Mikkola’s critique of Spelman.)

Judith Butler critiques the sex/gender distinction on two grounds. They critique gender realism with their normativity argument (1999 [original 1990], chapter 1); they also hold that the sex/gender distinction is unintelligible (this will be discussed in section 3.3.). Butler’s normativity argument is not straightforwardly directed at the metaphysical perspective of gender realism, but rather at its political counterpart: identity politics. This is a form of political mobilization based on membership in some group (e.g. racial, ethnic, cultural, gender) and group membership is thought to be delimited by some common experiences, conditions or features that define the group (Heyes 2000, 58; see also the entry on Identity Politics ). Feminist identity politics, then, presupposes gender realism in that feminist politics is said to be mobilized around women as a group (or category) where membership in this group is fixed by some condition, experience or feature that women supposedly share and that defines their gender.

Butler’s normativity argument makes two claims. The first is akin to Spelman’s particularity argument: unitary gender notions fail to take differences amongst women into account thus failing to recognise “the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of ‘women’ are constructed” (Butler 1999, 19–20). In their attempt to undercut biologically deterministic ways of defining what it means to be a woman, feminists inadvertently created new socially constructed accounts of supposedly shared femininity. Butler’s second claim is that such false gender realist accounts are normative. That is, in their attempt to fix feminism’s subject matter, feminists unwittingly defined the term ‘woman’ in a way that implies there is some correct way to be gendered a woman (Butler 1999, 5). That the definition of the term ‘woman’ is fixed supposedly “operates as a policing force which generates and legitimizes certain practices, experiences, etc., and curtails and delegitimizes others” (Nicholson 1998, 293). Following this line of thought, one could say that, for instance, Chodorow’s view of gender suggests that ‘real’ women have feminine personalities and that these are the women feminism should be concerned about. If one does not exhibit a distinctly feminine personality, the implication is that one is not ‘really’ a member of women’s category nor does one properly qualify for feminist political representation.

Butler’s second claim is based on their view that“[i]dentity categories [like that of women] are never merely descriptive, but always normative, and as such, exclusionary” (Butler 1991, 160). That is, the mistake of those feminists Butler critiques was not that they provided the incorrect definition of ‘woman’. Rather, (the argument goes) their mistake was to attempt to define the term ‘woman’ at all. Butler’s view is that ‘woman’ can never be defined in a way that does not prescribe some “unspoken normative requirements” (like having a feminine personality) that women should conform to (Butler 1999, 9). Butler takes this to be a feature of terms like ‘woman’ that purport to pick out (what they call) ‘identity categories’. They seem to assume that ‘woman’ can never be used in a non-ideological way (Moi 1999, 43) and that it will always encode conditions that are not satisfied by everyone we think of as women. Some explanation for this comes from Butler’s view that all processes of drawing categorical distinctions involve evaluative and normative commitments; these in turn involve the exercise of power and reflect the conditions of those who are socially powerful (Witt 1995).

In order to better understand Butler’s critique, consider their account of gender performativity. For them, standard feminist accounts take gendered individuals to have some essential properties qua gendered individuals or a gender core by virtue of which one is either a man or a woman. This view assumes that women and men, qua women and men, are bearers of various essential and accidental attributes where the former secure gendered persons’ persistence through time as so gendered. But according to Butler this view is false: (i) there are no such essential properties, and (ii) gender is an illusion maintained by prevalent power structures. First, feminists are said to think that genders are socially constructed in that they have the following essential attributes (Butler 1999, 24): women are females with feminine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is directed at men; men are males with masculine behavioural traits, being heterosexuals whose desire is directed at women. These are the attributes necessary for gendered individuals and those that enable women and men to persist through time as women and men. Individuals have “intelligible genders” (Butler 1999, 23) if they exhibit this sequence of traits in a coherent manner (where sexual desire follows from sexual orientation that in turn follows from feminine/ masculine behaviours thought to follow from biological sex). Social forces in general deem individuals who exhibit in coherent gender sequences (like lesbians) to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ and they actively discourage such sequencing of traits, for instance, via name-calling and overt homophobic discrimination. Think back to what was said above: having a certain conception of what women are like that mirrors the conditions of socially powerful (white, middle-class, heterosexual, Western) women functions to marginalize and police those who do not fit this conception.

These gender cores, supposedly encoding the above traits, however, are nothing more than illusions created by ideals and practices that seek to render gender uniform through heterosexism, the view that heterosexuality is natural and homosexuality is deviant (Butler 1999, 42). Gender cores are constructed as if they somehow naturally belong to women and men thereby creating gender dimorphism or the belief that one must be either a masculine male or a feminine female. But gender dimorphism only serves a heterosexist social order by implying that since women and men are sharply opposed, it is natural to sexually desire the opposite sex or gender.

Further, being feminine and desiring men (for instance) are standardly assumed to be expressions of one’s gender as a woman. Butler denies this and holds that gender is really performative. It is not “a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is … instituted … through a stylized repetition of [habitual] acts ” (Butler 1999, 179): through wearing certain gender-coded clothing, walking and sitting in certain gender-coded ways, styling one’s hair in gender-coded manner and so on. Gender is not something one is, it is something one does; it is a sequence of acts, a doing rather than a being. And repeatedly engaging in ‘feminising’ and ‘masculinising’ acts congeals gender thereby making people falsely think of gender as something they naturally are . Gender only comes into being through these gendering acts: a female who has sex with men does not express her gender as a woman. This activity (amongst others) makes her gendered a woman.

The constitutive acts that gender individuals create genders as “compelling illusion[s]” (Butler 1990, 271). Our gendered classification scheme is a strong pragmatic construction : social factors wholly determine our use of the scheme and the scheme fails to represent accurately any ‘facts of the matter’ (Haslanger 1995, 100). People think that there are true and real genders, and those deemed to be doing their gender ‘wrong’ are not socially sanctioned. But, genders are true and real only to the extent that they are performed (Butler 1990, 278–9). It does not make sense, then, to say of a male-to-female trans person that s/he is really a man who only appears to be a woman. Instead, males dressing up and acting in ways that are associated with femininity “show that [as Butler suggests] ‘being’ feminine is just a matter of doing certain activities” (Stone 2007, 64). As a result, the trans person’s gender is just as real or true as anyone else’s who is a ‘traditionally’ feminine female or masculine male (Butler 1990, 278). [ 5 ] Without heterosexism that compels people to engage in certain gendering acts, there would not be any genders at all. And ultimately the aim should be to abolish norms that compel people to act in these gendering ways.

For Butler, given that gender is performative, the appropriate response to feminist identity politics involves two things. First, feminists should understand ‘woman’ as open-ended and “a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or end … it is open to intervention and resignification” (Butler 1999, 43). That is, feminists should not try to define ‘woman’ at all. Second, the category of women “ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics” (Butler 1999, 9). Rather, feminists should focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement.

Many people, including many feminists, have ordinarily taken sex ascriptions to be solely a matter of biology with no social or cultural dimension. It is commonplace to think that there are only two sexes and that biological sex classifications are utterly unproblematic. By contrast, some feminists have argued that sex classifications are not unproblematic and that they are not solely a matter of biology. In order to make sense of this, it is helpful to distinguish object- and idea-construction (see Haslanger 2003b for more): social forces can be said to construct certain kinds of objects (e.g. sexed bodies or gendered individuals) and certain kinds of ideas (e.g. sex or gender concepts). First, take the object-construction of sexed bodies. Secondary sex characteristics, or the physiological and biological features commonly associated with males and females, are affected by social practices. In some societies, females’ lower social status has meant that they have been fed less and so, the lack of nutrition has had the effect of making them smaller in size (Jaggar 1983, 37). Uniformity in muscular shape, size and strength within sex categories is not caused entirely by biological factors, but depends heavily on exercise opportunities: if males and females were allowed the same exercise opportunities and equal encouragement to exercise, it is thought that bodily dimorphism would diminish (Fausto-Sterling 1993a, 218). A number of medical phenomena involving bones (like osteoporosis) have social causes directly related to expectations about gender, women’s diet and their exercise opportunities (Fausto-Sterling 2005). These examples suggest that physiological features thought to be sex-specific traits not affected by social and cultural factors are, after all, to some extent products of social conditioning. Social conditioning, then, shapes our biology.

Second, take the idea-construction of sex concepts. Our concept of sex is said to be a product of social forces in the sense that what counts as sex is shaped by social meanings. Standardly, those with XX-chromosomes, ovaries that produce large egg cells, female genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘female’ hormones, and other secondary sex characteristics (relatively small body size, less body hair) count as biologically female. Those with XY-chromosomes, testes that produce small sperm cells, male genitalia, a relatively high proportion of ‘male’ hormones and other secondary sex traits (relatively large body size, significant amounts of body hair) count as male. This understanding is fairly recent. The prevalent scientific view from Ancient Greeks until the late 18 th century, did not consider female and male sexes to be distinct categories with specific traits; instead, a ‘one-sex model’ held that males and females were members of the same sex category. Females’ genitals were thought to be the same as males’ but simply directed inside the body; ovaries and testes (for instance) were referred to by the same term and whether the term referred to the former or the latter was made clear by the context (Laqueur 1990, 4). It was not until the late 1700s that scientists began to think of female and male anatomies as radically different moving away from the ‘one-sex model’ of a single sex spectrum to the (nowadays prevalent) ‘two-sex model’ of sexual dimorphism. (For an alternative view, see King 2013.)

Fausto-Sterling has argued that this ‘two-sex model’ isn’t straightforward either (1993b; 2000a; 2000b). Based on a meta-study of empirical medical research, she estimates that 1.7% of population fail to neatly fall within the usual sex classifications possessing various combinations of different sex characteristics (Fausto-Sterling 2000a, 20). In her earlier work, she claimed that intersex individuals make up (at least) three further sex classes: ‘herms’ who possess one testis and one ovary; ‘merms’ who possess testes, some aspects of female genitalia but no ovaries; and ‘ferms’ who have ovaries, some aspects of male genitalia but no testes (Fausto-Sterling 1993b, 21). (In her [2000a], Fausto-Sterling notes that these labels were put forward tongue–in–cheek.) Recognition of intersex people suggests that feminists (and society at large) are wrong to think that humans are either female or male.

To illustrate further the idea-construction of sex, consider the case of the athlete Maria Patiño. Patiño has female genitalia, has always considered herself to be female and was considered so by others. However, she was discovered to have XY chromosomes and was barred from competing in women’s sports (Fausto-Sterling 2000b, 1–3). Patiño’s genitalia were at odds with her chromosomes and the latter were taken to determine her sex. Patiño successfully fought to be recognised as a female athlete arguing that her chromosomes alone were not sufficient to not make her female. Intersex people, like Patiño, illustrate that our understandings of sex differ and suggest that there is no immediately obvious way to settle what sex amounts to purely biologically or scientifically. Deciding what sex is involves evaluative judgements that are influenced by social factors.

Insofar as our cultural conceptions affect our understandings of sex, feminists must be much more careful about sex classifications and rethink what sex amounts to (Stone 2007, chapter 1). More specifically, intersex people illustrate that sex traits associated with females and males need not always go together and that individuals can have some mixture of these traits. This suggests to Stone that sex is a cluster concept: it is sufficient to satisfy enough of the sex features that tend to cluster together in order to count as being of a particular sex. But, one need not satisfy all of those features or some arbitrarily chosen supposedly necessary sex feature, like chromosomes (Stone 2007, 44). This makes sex a matter of degree and sex classifications should take place on a spectrum: one can be more or less female/male but there is no sharp distinction between the two. Further, intersex people (along with trans people) are located at the centre of the sex spectrum and in many cases their sex will be indeterminate (Stone 2007).

More recently, Ayala and Vasilyeva (2015) have argued for an inclusive and extended conception of sex: just as certain tools can be seen to extend our minds beyond the limits of our brains (e.g. white canes), other tools (like dildos) can extend our sex beyond our bodily boundaries. This view aims to motivate the idea that what counts as sex should not be determined by looking inwards at genitalia or other anatomical features. In a different vein, Ásta (2018) argues that sex is a conferred social property. This follows her more general conferralist framework to analyse all social properties: properties that are conferred by others thereby generating a social status that consists in contextually specific constraints and enablements on individual behaviour. The general schema for conferred properties is as follows (Ásta 2018, 8):

Conferred property: what property is conferred. Who: who the subjects are. What: what attitude, state, or action of the subjects matter. When: under what conditions the conferral takes place. Base property: what the subjects are attempting to track (consciously or not), if anything.

With being of a certain sex (e.g. male, female) in mind, Ásta holds that it is a conferred property that merely aims to track physical features. Hence sex is a social – or in fact, an institutional – property rather than a natural one. The schema for sex goes as follows (72):

Conferred property: being female, male. Who: legal authorities, drawing on the expert opinion of doctors, other medical personnel. What: “the recording of a sex in official documents ... The judgment of the doctors (and others) as to what sex role might be the most fitting, given the biological characteristics present.” When: at birth or after surgery/ hormonal treatment. Base property: “the aim is to track as many sex-stereotypical characteristics as possible, and doctors perform surgery in cases where that might help bring the physical characteristics more in line with the stereotype of male and female.”

This (among other things) offers a debunking analysis of sex: it may appear to be a natural property, but on the conferralist analysis is better understood as a conferred legal status. Ásta holds that gender too is a conferred property, but contra the discussion in the following section, she does not think that this collapses the distinction between sex and gender: sex and gender are differently conferred albeit both satisfying the general schema noted above. Nonetheless, on the conferralist framework what underlies both sex and gender is the idea of social construction as social significance: sex-stereotypical characteristics are taken to be socially significant context specifically, whereby they become the basis for conferring sex onto individuals and this brings with it various constraints and enablements on individuals and their behaviour. This fits object- and idea-constructions introduced above, although offers a different general framework to analyse the matter at hand.

In addition to arguing against identity politics and for gender performativity, Butler holds that distinguishing biological sex from social gender is unintelligible. For them, both are socially constructed:

If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all. (Butler 1999, 10–11)

(Butler is not alone in claiming that there are no tenable distinctions between nature/culture, biology/construction and sex/gender. See also: Antony 1998; Gatens 1996; Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999.) Butler makes two different claims in the passage cited: that sex is a social construction, and that sex is gender. To unpack their view, consider the two claims in turn. First, the idea that sex is a social construct, for Butler, boils down to the view that our sexed bodies are also performative and, so, they have “no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute [their] reality” (1999, 173). Prima facie , this implausibly implies that female and male bodies do not have independent existence and that if gendering activities ceased, so would physical bodies. This is not Butler’s claim; rather, their position is that bodies viewed as the material foundations on which gender is constructed, are themselves constructed as if they provide such material foundations (Butler 1993). Cultural conceptions about gender figure in “the very apparatus of production whereby sexes themselves are established” (Butler 1999, 11).

For Butler, sexed bodies never exist outside social meanings and how we understand gender shapes how we understand sex (1999, 139). Sexed bodies are not empty matter on which gender is constructed and sex categories are not picked out on the basis of objective features of the world. Instead, our sexed bodies are themselves discursively constructed : they are the way they are, at least to a substantial extent, because of what is attributed to sexed bodies and how they are classified (for discursive construction, see Haslanger 1995, 99). Sex assignment (calling someone female or male) is normative (Butler 1993, 1). [ 6 ] When the doctor calls a newly born infant a girl or a boy, s/he is not making a descriptive claim, but a normative one. In fact, the doctor is performing an illocutionary speech act (see the entry on Speech Acts ). In effect, the doctor’s utterance makes infants into girls or boys. We, then, engage in activities that make it seem as if sexes naturally come in two and that being female or male is an objective feature of the world, rather than being a consequence of certain constitutive acts (that is, rather than being performative). And this is what Butler means in saying that physical bodies never exist outside cultural and social meanings, and that sex is as socially constructed as gender. They do not deny that physical bodies exist. But, they take our understanding of this existence to be a product of social conditioning: social conditioning makes the existence of physical bodies intelligible to us by discursively constructing sexed bodies through certain constitutive acts. (For a helpful introduction to Butler’s views, see Salih 2002.)

For Butler, sex assignment is always in some sense oppressive. Again, this appears to be because of Butler’s general suspicion of classification: sex classification can never be merely descriptive but always has a normative element reflecting evaluative claims of those who are powerful. Conducting a feminist genealogy of the body (or examining why sexed bodies are thought to come naturally as female and male), then, should ground feminist practice (Butler 1993, 28–9). Feminists should examine and uncover ways in which social construction and certain acts that constitute sex shape our understandings of sexed bodies, what kinds of meanings bodies acquire and which practices and illocutionary speech acts ‘make’ our bodies into sexes. Doing so enables feminists to identity how sexed bodies are socially constructed in order to resist such construction.

However, given what was said above, it is far from obvious what we should make of Butler’s claim that sex “was always already gender” (1999, 11). Stone (2007) takes this to mean that sex is gender but goes on to question it arguing that the social construction of both sex and gender does not make sex identical to gender. According to Stone, it would be more accurate for Butler to say that claims about sex imply gender norms. That is, many claims about sex traits (like ‘females are physically weaker than males’) actually carry implications about how women and men are expected to behave. To some extent the claim describes certain facts. But, it also implies that females are not expected to do much heavy lifting and that they would probably not be good at it. So, claims about sex are not identical to claims about gender; rather, they imply claims about gender norms (Stone 2007, 70).

Some feminists hold that the sex/gender distinction is not useful. For a start, it is thought to reflect politically problematic dualistic thinking that undercuts feminist aims: the distinction is taken to reflect and replicate androcentric oppositions between (for instance) mind/body, culture/nature and reason/emotion that have been used to justify women’s oppression (e.g. Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The thought is that in oppositions like these, one term is always superior to the other and that the devalued term is usually associated with women (Lloyd 1993). For instance, human subjectivity and agency are identified with the mind but since women are usually identified with their bodies, they are devalued as human subjects and agents. The opposition between mind and body is said to further map on to other distinctions, like reason/emotion, culture/nature, rational/irrational, where one side of each distinction is devalued (one’s bodily features are usually valued less that one’s mind, rationality is usually valued more than irrationality) and women are associated with the devalued terms: they are thought to be closer to bodily features and nature than men, to be irrational, emotional and so on. This is said to be evident (for instance) in job interviews. Men are treated as gender-neutral persons and not asked whether they are planning to take time off to have a family. By contrast, that women face such queries illustrates that they are associated more closely than men with bodily features to do with procreation (Prokhovnik 1999, 126). The opposition between mind and body, then, is thought to map onto the opposition between men and women.

Now, the mind/body dualism is also said to map onto the sex/gender distinction (Grosz 1994; Prokhovnik 1999). The idea is that gender maps onto mind, sex onto body. Although not used by those endorsing this view, the basic idea can be summed by the slogan ‘Gender is between the ears, sex is between the legs’: the implication is that, while sex is immutable, gender is something individuals have control over – it is something we can alter and change through individual choices. However, since women are said to be more closely associated with biological features (and so, to map onto the body side of the mind/body distinction) and men are treated as gender-neutral persons (mapping onto the mind side), the implication is that “man equals gender, which is associated with mind and choice, freedom from body, autonomy, and with the public real; while woman equals sex, associated with the body, reproduction, ‘natural’ rhythms and the private realm” (Prokhovnik 1999, 103). This is said to render the sex/gender distinction inherently repressive and to drain it of any potential for emancipation: rather than facilitating gender role choice for women, it “actually functions to reinforce their association with body, sex, and involuntary ‘natural’ rhythms” (Prokhovnik 1999, 103). Contrary to what feminists like Rubin argued, the sex/gender distinction cannot be used as a theoretical tool that dissociates conceptions of womanhood from biological and reproductive features.

Moi has further argued that the sex/gender distinction is useless given certain theoretical goals (1999, chapter 1). This is not to say that it is utterly worthless; according to Moi, the sex/gender distinction worked well to show that the historically prevalent biological determinism was false. However, for her, the distinction does no useful work “when it comes to producing a good theory of subjectivity” (1999, 6) and “a concrete, historical understanding of what it means to be a woman (or a man) in a given society” (1999, 4–5). That is, the 1960s distinction understood sex as fixed by biology without any cultural or historical dimensions. This understanding, however, ignores lived experiences and embodiment as aspects of womanhood (and manhood) by separating sex from gender and insisting that womanhood is to do with the latter. Rather, embodiment must be included in one’s theory that tries to figure out what it is to be a woman (or a man).

Mikkola (2011) argues that the sex/gender distinction, which underlies views like Rubin’s and MacKinnon’s, has certain unintuitive and undesirable ontological commitments that render the distinction politically unhelpful. First, claiming that gender is socially constructed implies that the existence of women and men is a mind-dependent matter. This suggests that we can do away with women and men simply by altering some social practices, conventions or conditions on which gender depends (whatever those are). However, ordinary social agents find this unintuitive given that (ordinarily) sex and gender are not distinguished. Second, claiming that gender is a product of oppressive social forces suggests that doing away with women and men should be feminism’s political goal. But this harbours ontologically undesirable commitments since many ordinary social agents view their gender to be a source of positive value. So, feminism seems to want to do away with something that should not be done away with, which is unlikely to motivate social agents to act in ways that aim at gender justice. Given these problems, Mikkola argues that feminists should give up the distinction on practical political grounds.

Tomas Bogardus (2020) has argued in an even more radical sense against the sex/gender distinction: as things stand, he holds, feminist philosophers have merely assumed and asserted that the distinction exists, instead of having offered good arguments for the distinction. In other words, feminist philosophers allegedly have yet to offer good reasons to think that ‘woman’ does not simply pick out adult human females. Alex Byrne (2020) argues in a similar vein: the term ‘woman’ does not pick out a social kind as feminist philosophers have “assumed”. Instead, “women are adult human females–nothing more, and nothing less” (2020, 3801). Byrne offers six considerations to ground this AHF (adult, human, female) conception.

• It reproduces the dictionary definition of ‘woman’.
• One would expect English to have a word that picks out the category adult human female, and ‘woman’ is the only candidate.
• AHF explains how we sometimes know that an individual is a woman, despite knowing nothing else relevant about her other than the fact that she is an adult human female.
• AHF stands or falls with the analogous thesis for girls, which can be supported independently.
• AHF predicts the correct verdict in cases of gender role reversal.
• AHF is supported by the fact that ‘woman’ and ‘female’ are often appropriately used as stylistic variants of each other, even in hyperintensional contexts.

Robin Dembroff (2021) responds to Byrne and highlights various problems with Byrne’s argument. First, framing: Byrne assumes from the start that gender terms like ‘woman’ have a single invariant meaning thereby failing to discuss the possibility of terms like ‘woman’ having multiple meanings – something that is a familiar claim made by feminist theorists from various disciplines. Moreover, Byrne (according to Dembroff) assumes without argument that there is a single, universal category of woman – again, something that has been extensively discussed and critiqued by feminist philosophers and theorists. Second, Byrne’s conception of the ‘dominant’ meaning of woman is said to be cherry-picked and it ignores a wealth of contexts outside of philosophy (like the media and the law) where ‘woman’ has a meaning other than AHF . Third, Byrne’s own distinction between biological and social categories fails to establish what he intended to establish: namely, that ‘woman’ picks out a biological rather than a social kind. Hence, Dembroff holds, Byrne’s case fails by its own lights. Byrne (2021) responds to Dembroff’s critique.

Others such as ‘gender critical feminists’ also hold views about the sex/gender distinction in a spirit similar to Bogardus and Byrne. For example, Holly Lawford-Smith (2021) takes the prevalent sex/gender distinction, where ‘female’/‘male’ are used as sex terms and ‘woman’/’man’ as gender terms, not to be helpful. Instead, she takes all of these to be sex terms and holds that (the norms of) femininity/masculinity refer to gender normativity. Because much of the gender critical feminists’ discussion that philosophers have engaged in has taken place in social media, public fora, and other sources outside academic philosophy, this entry will not focus on these discussions.

4. Women as a group

The various critiques of the sex/gender distinction have called into question the viability of the category women . Feminism is the movement to end the oppression women as a group face. But, how should the category of women be understood if feminists accept the above arguments that gender construction is not uniform, that a sharp distinction between biological sex and social gender is false or (at least) not useful, and that various features associated with women play a role in what it is to be a woman, none of which are individually necessary and jointly sufficient (like a variety of social roles, positions, behaviours, traits, bodily features and experiences)? Feminists must be able to address cultural and social differences in gender construction if feminism is to be a genuinely inclusive movement and be careful not to posit commonalities that mask important ways in which women qua women differ. These concerns (among others) have generated a situation where (as Linda Alcoff puts it) feminists aim to speak and make political demands in the name of women, at the same time rejecting the idea that there is a unified category of women (2006, 152). If feminist critiques of the category women are successful, then what (if anything) binds women together, what is it to be a woman, and what kinds of demands can feminists make on behalf of women?

Many have found the fragmentation of the category of women problematic for political reasons (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Bach 2012; Benhabib 1992; Frye 1996; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Martin 1994; Mikkola 2007; Stoljar 1995; Stone 2004; Tanesini 1996; Young 1997; Zack 2005). For instance, Young holds that accounts like Spelman’s reduce the category of women to a gerrymandered collection of individuals with nothing to bind them together (1997, 20). Black women differ from white women but members of both groups also differ from one another with respect to nationality, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation and economic position; that is, wealthy white women differ from working-class white women due to their economic and class positions. These sub-groups are themselves diverse: for instance, some working-class white women in Northern Ireland are starkly divided along religious lines. So if we accept Spelman’s position, we risk ending up with individual women and nothing to bind them together. And this is problematic: in order to respond to oppression of women in general, feminists must understand them as a category in some sense. Young writes that without doing so “it is not possible to conceptualize oppression as a systematic, structured, institutional process” (1997, 17). Some, then, take the articulation of an inclusive category of women to be the prerequisite for effective feminist politics and a rich literature has emerged that aims to conceptualise women as a group or a collective (e.g. Alcoff 2006; Ásta 2011; Frye 1996; 2011; Haslanger 2000b; Heyes 2000; Stoljar 1995, 2011; Young 1997; Zack 2005). Articulations of this category can be divided into those that are: (a) gender nominalist — positions that deny there is something women qua women share and that seek to unify women’s social kind by appealing to something external to women; and (b) gender realist — positions that take there to be something women qua women share (although these realist positions differ significantly from those outlined in Section 2). Below we will review some influential gender nominalist and gender realist positions. Before doing so, it is worth noting that not everyone is convinced that attempts to articulate an inclusive category of women can succeed or that worries about what it is to be a woman are in need of being resolved. Mikkola (2016) argues that feminist politics need not rely on overcoming (what she calls) the ‘gender controversy’: that feminists must settle the meaning of gender concepts and articulate a way to ground women’s social kind membership. As she sees it, disputes about ‘what it is to be a woman’ have become theoretically bankrupt and intractable, which has generated an analytical impasse that looks unsurpassable. Instead, Mikkola argues for giving up the quest, which in any case in her view poses no serious political obstacles.

Elizabeth Barnes (2020) responds to the need to offer an inclusive conception of gender somewhat differently, although she endorses the need for feminism to be inclusive particularly of trans people. Barnes holds that typically philosophical theories of gender aim to offer an account of what it is to be a woman (or man, genderqueer, etc.), where such an account is presumed to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for being a woman or an account of our gender terms’ extensions. But, she holds, it is a mistake to expect our theories of gender to do so. For Barnes, a project that offers a metaphysics of gender “should be understood as the project of theorizing what it is —if anything— about the social world that ultimately explains gender” (2020, 706). This project is not equivalent to one that aims to define gender terms or elucidate the application conditions for natural language gender terms though.

4.1 Gender nominalism

Iris Young argues that unless there is “some sense in which ‘woman’ is the name of a social collective [that feminism represents], there is nothing specific to feminist politics” (1997, 13). In order to make the category women intelligible, she argues that women make up a series: a particular kind of social collective “whose members are unified passively by the objects their actions are oriented around and/or by the objectified results of the material effects of the actions of the other” (Young 1997, 23). A series is distinct from a group in that, whereas members of groups are thought to self-consciously share certain goals, projects, traits and/ or self-conceptions, members of series pursue their own individual ends without necessarily having anything at all in common. Young holds that women are not bound together by a shared feature or experience (or set of features and experiences) since she takes Spelman’s particularity argument to have established definitely that no such feature exists (1997, 13; see also: Frye 1996; Heyes 2000). Instead, women’s category is unified by certain practico-inert realities or the ways in which women’s lives and their actions are oriented around certain objects and everyday realities (Young 1997, 23–4). For example, bus commuters make up a series unified through their individual actions being organised around the same practico-inert objects of the bus and the practice of public transport. Women make up a series unified through women’s lives and actions being organised around certain practico-inert objects and realities that position them as women .

Young identifies two broad groups of such practico-inert objects and realities. First, phenomena associated with female bodies (physical facts), biological processes that take place in female bodies (menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth) and social rules associated with these biological processes (social rules of menstruation, for instance). Second, gender-coded objects and practices: pronouns, verbal and visual representations of gender, gender-coded artefacts and social spaces, clothes, cosmetics, tools and furniture. So, women make up a series since their lives and actions are organised around female bodies and certain gender-coded objects. Their series is bound together passively and the unity is “not one that arises from the individuals called women” (Young 1997, 32).

Although Young’s proposal purports to be a response to Spelman’s worries, Stone has questioned whether it is, after all, susceptible to the particularity argument: ultimately, on Young’s view, something women as women share (their practico-inert realities) binds them together (Stone 2004).

Natalie Stoljar holds that unless the category of women is unified, feminist action on behalf of women cannot be justified (1995, 282). Stoljar too is persuaded by the thought that women qua women do not share anything unitary. This prompts her to argue for resemblance nominalism. This is the view that a certain kind of resemblance relation holds between entities of a particular type (for more on resemblance nominalism, see Armstrong 1989, 39–58). Stoljar is not alone in arguing for resemblance relations to make sense of women as a category; others have also done so, usually appealing to Wittgenstein’s ‘family resemblance’ relations (Alcoff 1988; Green & Radford Curry 1991; Heyes 2000; Munro 2006). Stoljar relies more on Price’s resemblance nominalism whereby x is a member of some type F only if x resembles some paradigm or exemplar of F sufficiently closely (Price 1953, 20). For instance, the type of red entities is unified by some chosen red paradigms so that only those entities that sufficiently resemble the paradigms count as red. The type (or category) of women, then, is unified by some chosen woman paradigms so that those who sufficiently resemble the woman paradigms count as women (Stoljar 1995, 284).

Semantic considerations about the concept woman suggest to Stoljar that resemblance nominalism should be endorsed (Stoljar 2000, 28). It seems unlikely that the concept is applied on the basis of some single social feature all and only women possess. By contrast, woman is a cluster concept and our attributions of womanhood pick out “different arrangements of features in different individuals” (Stoljar 2000, 27). More specifically, they pick out the following clusters of features: (a) Female sex; (b) Phenomenological features: menstruation, female sexual experience, child-birth, breast-feeding, fear of walking on the streets at night or fear of rape; (c) Certain roles: wearing typically female clothing, being oppressed on the basis of one’s sex or undertaking care-work; (d) Gender attribution: “calling oneself a woman, being called a woman” (Stoljar 1995, 283–4). For Stoljar, attributions of womanhood are to do with a variety of traits and experiences: those that feminists have historically termed ‘gender traits’ (like social, behavioural, psychological traits) and those termed ‘sex traits’. Nonetheless, she holds that since the concept woman applies to (at least some) trans persons, one can be a woman without being female (Stoljar 1995, 282).

The cluster concept woman does not, however, straightforwardly provide the criterion for picking out the category of women. Rather, the four clusters of features that the concept picks out help single out woman paradigms that in turn help single out the category of women. First, any individual who possesses a feature from at least three of the four clusters mentioned will count as an exemplar of the category. For instance, an African-American with primary and secondary female sex characteristics, who describes herself as a woman and is oppressed on the basis of her sex, along with a white European hermaphrodite brought up ‘as a girl’, who engages in female roles and has female phenomenological features despite lacking female sex characteristics, will count as woman paradigms (Stoljar 1995, 284). [ 7 ] Second, any individual who resembles “any of the paradigms sufficiently closely (on Price’s account, as closely as [the paradigms] resemble each other) will be a member of the resemblance class ‘woman’” (Stoljar 1995, 284). That is, what delimits membership in the category of women is that one resembles sufficiently a woman paradigm.

4.2 Neo-gender realism

In a series of articles collected in her 2012 book, Sally Haslanger argues for a way to define the concept woman that is politically useful, serving as a tool in feminist fights against sexism, and that shows woman to be a social (not a biological) notion. More specifically, Haslanger argues that gender is a matter of occupying either a subordinate or a privileged social position. In some articles, Haslanger is arguing for a revisionary analysis of the concept woman (2000b; 2003a; 2003b). Elsewhere she suggests that her analysis may not be that revisionary after all (2005; 2006). Consider the former argument first. Haslanger’s analysis is, in her terms, ameliorative: it aims to elucidate which gender concepts best help feminists achieve their legitimate purposes thereby elucidating those concepts feminists should be using (Haslanger 2000b, 33). [ 8 ] Now, feminists need gender terminology in order to fight sexist injustices (Haslanger 2000b, 36). In particular, they need gender terms to identify, explain and talk about persistent social inequalities between males and females. Haslanger’s analysis of gender begins with the recognition that females and males differ in two respects: physically and in their social positions. Societies in general tend to “privilege individuals with male bodies” (Haslanger 2000b, 38) so that the social positions they subsequently occupy are better than the social positions of those with female bodies. And this generates persistent sexist injustices. With this in mind, Haslanger specifies how she understands genders:

S is a woman iff [by definition] S is systematically subordinated along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a female’s biological role in reproduction.

S is a man iff [by definition] S is systematically privileged along some dimension (economic, political, legal, social, etc.), and S is ‘marked’ as a target for this treatment by observed or imagined bodily features presumed to be evidence of a male’s biological role in reproduction. (2003a, 6–7)

These are constitutive of being a woman and a man: what makes calling S a woman apt, is that S is oppressed on sex-marked grounds; what makes calling S a man apt, is that S is privileged on sex-marked grounds.

Haslanger’s ameliorative analysis is counterintuitive in that females who are not sex-marked for oppression, do not count as women. At least arguably, the Queen of England is not oppressed on sex-marked grounds and so, would not count as a woman on Haslanger’s definition. And, similarly, all males who are not privileged would not count as men. This might suggest that Haslanger’s analysis should be rejected in that it does not capture what language users have in mind when applying gender terms. However, Haslanger argues that this is not a reason to reject the definitions, which she takes to be revisionary: they are not meant to capture our intuitive gender terms. In response, Mikkola (2009) has argued that revisionary analyses of gender concepts, like Haslanger’s, are both politically unhelpful and philosophically unnecessary.

Note also that Haslanger’s proposal is eliminativist: gender justice would eradicate gender, since it would abolish those sexist social structures responsible for sex-marked oppression and privilege. If sexist oppression were to cease, women and men would no longer exist (although there would still be males and females). Not all feminists endorse such an eliminativist view though. Stone holds that Haslanger does not leave any room for positively revaluing what it is to be a woman: since Haslanger defines woman in terms of subordination,

any woman who challenges her subordinate status must by definition be challenging her status as a woman, even if she does not intend to … positive change to our gender norms would involve getting rid of the (necessarily subordinate) feminine gender. (Stone 2007, 160)

But according to Stone this is not only undesirable – one should be able to challenge subordination without having to challenge one’s status as a woman. It is also false: “because norms of femininity can be and constantly are being revised, women can be women without thereby being subordinate” (Stone 2007, 162; Mikkola [2016] too argues that Haslanger’s eliminativism is troublesome).

Theodore Bach holds that Haslanger’s eliminativism is undesirable on other grounds, and that Haslanger’s position faces another more serious problem. Feminism faces the following worries (among others):

Representation problem : “if there is no real group of ‘women’, then it is incoherent to make moral claims and advance political policies on behalf of women” (Bach 2012, 234). Commonality problems : (1) There is no feature that all women cross-culturally and transhistorically share. (2) Delimiting women’s social kind with the help of some essential property privileges those who possess it, and marginalizes those who do not (Bach 2012, 235).

According to Bach, Haslanger’s strategy to resolve these problems appeals to ‘social objectivism’. First, we define women “according to a suitably abstract relational property” (Bach 2012, 236), which avoids the commonality problems. Second, Haslanger employs “an ontologically thin notion of ‘objectivity’” (Bach 2012, 236) that answers the representation problem. Haslanger’s solution (Bach holds) is specifically to argue that women make up an objective type because women are objectively similar to one another, and not simply classified together given our background conceptual schemes. Bach claims though that Haslanger’s account is not objective enough, and we should on political grounds “provide a stronger ontological characterization of the genders men and women according to which they are natural kinds with explanatory essences” (Bach 2012, 238). He thus proposes that women make up a natural kind with a historical essence:

The essential property of women, in virtue of which an individual is a member of the kind ‘women,’ is participation in a lineage of women. In order to exemplify this relational property, an individual must be a reproduction of ancestral women, in which case she must have undergone the ontogenetic processes through which a historical gender system replicates women. (Bach 2012, 271)

In short, one is not a woman due to shared surface properties with other women (like occupying a subordinate social position). Rather, one is a woman because one has the right history: one has undergone the ubiquitous ontogenetic process of gender socialization. Thinking about gender in this way supposedly provides a stronger kind unity than Haslanger’s that simply appeals to shared surface properties.

Not everyone agrees; Mikkola (2020) argues that Bach’s metaphysical picture has internal tensions that render it puzzling and that Bach’s metaphysics does not provide good responses to the commonality and presentation problems. The historically essentialist view also has anti-trans implications. After all, trans women who have not undergone female gender socialization won’t count as women on his view (Mikkola [2016, 2020] develops this line of critique in more detail). More worryingly, trans women will count as men contrary to their self-identification. Both Bettcher (2013) and Jenkins (2016) consider the importance of gender self-identification. Bettcher argues that there is more than one ‘correct’ way to understand womanhood: at the very least, the dominant (mainstream), and the resistant (trans) conceptions. Dominant views like that of Bach’s tend to erase trans people’s experiences and to marginalize trans women within feminist movements. Rather than trans women having to defend their self-identifying claims, these claims should be taken at face value right from the start. And so, Bettcher holds, “in analyzing the meaning of terms such as ‘woman,’ it is inappropriate to dismiss alternative ways in which those terms are actually used in trans subcultures; such usage needs to be taken into consideration as part of the analysis” (2013, 235).

Specifically with Haslanger in mind and in a similar vein, Jenkins (2016) discusses how Haslanger’s revisionary approach unduly excludes some trans women from women’s social kind. On Jenkins’s view, Haslanger’s ameliorative methodology in fact yields more than one satisfying target concept: one that “corresponds to Haslanger’s proposed concept and captures the sense of gender as an imposed social class”; another that “captures the sense of gender as a lived identity” (Jenkins 2016, 397). The latter of these allows us to include trans women into women’s social kind, who on Haslanger’s social class approach to gender would inappropriately have been excluded. (See Andler 2017 for the view that Jenkins’s purportedly inclusive conception of gender is still not fully inclusive. Jenkins 2018 responds to this charge and develops the notion of gender identity still further.)

In addition to her revisionary argument, Haslanger has suggested that her ameliorative analysis of woman may not be as revisionary as it first seems (2005, 2006). Although successful in their reference fixing, ordinary language users do not always know precisely what they are talking about. Our language use may be skewed by oppressive ideologies that can “mislead us about the content of our own thoughts” (Haslanger 2005, 12). Although her gender terminology is not intuitive, this could simply be because oppressive ideologies mislead us about the meanings of our gender terms. Our everyday gender terminology might mean something utterly different from what we think it means; and we could be entirely ignorant of this. Perhaps Haslanger’s analysis, then, has captured our everyday gender vocabulary revealing to us the terms that we actually employ: we may be applying ‘woman’ in our everyday language on the basis of sex-marked subordination whether we take ourselves to be doing so or not. If this is so, Haslanger’s gender terminology is not radically revisionist.

Saul (2006) argues that, despite it being possible that we unknowingly apply ‘woman’ on the basis of social subordination, it is extremely difficult to show that this is the case. This would require showing that the gender terminology we in fact employ is Haslanger’s proposed gender terminology. But discovering the grounds on which we apply everyday gender terms is extremely difficult precisely because they are applied in various and idiosyncratic ways (Saul 2006, 129). Haslanger, then, needs to do more in order to show that her analysis is non-revisionary.

Charlotte Witt (2011a; 2011b) argues for a particular sort of gender essentialism, which Witt terms ‘uniessentialism’. Her motivation and starting point is the following: many ordinary social agents report gender being essential to them and claim that they would be a different person were they of a different sex/gender. Uniessentialism attempts to understand and articulate this. However, Witt’s work departs in important respects from the earlier (so-called) essentialist or gender realist positions discussed in Section 2: Witt does not posit some essential property of womanhood of the kind discussed above, which failed to take women’s differences into account. Further, uniessentialism differs significantly from those position developed in response to the problem of how we should conceive of women’s social kind. It is not about solving the standard dispute between gender nominalists and gender realists, or about articulating some supposedly shared property that binds women together and provides a theoretical ground for feminist political solidarity. Rather, uniessentialism aims to make good the widely held belief that gender is constitutive of who we are. [ 9 ]

Uniessentialism is a sort of individual essentialism. Traditionally philosophers distinguish between kind and individual essentialisms: the former examines what binds members of a kind together and what do all members of some kind have in common qua members of that kind. The latter asks: what makes an individual the individual it is. We can further distinguish two sorts of individual essentialisms: Kripkean identity essentialism and Aristotelian uniessentialism. The former asks: what makes an individual that individual? The latter, however, asks a slightly different question: what explains the unity of individuals? What explains that an individual entity exists over and above the sum total of its constituent parts? (The standard feminist debate over gender nominalism and gender realism has largely been about kind essentialism. Being about individual essentialism, Witt’s uniessentialism departs in an important way from the standard debate.) From the two individual essentialisms, Witt endorses the Aristotelian one. On this view, certain functional essences have a unifying role: these essences are responsible for the fact that material parts constitute a new individual, rather than just a lump of stuff or a collection of particles. Witt’s example is of a house: the essential house-functional property (what the entity is for, what its purpose is) unifies the different material parts of a house so that there is a house, and not just a collection of house-constituting particles (2011a, 6). Gender (being a woman/a man) functions in a similar fashion and provides “the principle of normative unity” that organizes, unifies and determines the roles of social individuals (Witt 2011a, 73). Due to this, gender is a uniessential property of social individuals.

It is important to clarify the notions of gender and social individuality that Witt employs. First, gender is a social position that “cluster[s] around the engendering function … women conceive and bear … men beget” (Witt 2011a, 40). These are women and men’s socially mediated reproductive functions (Witt 2011a, 29) and they differ from the biological function of reproduction, which roughly corresponds to sex on the standard sex/gender distinction. Witt writes: “to be a woman is to be recognized to have a particular function in engendering, to be a man is to be recognized to have a different function in engendering” (2011a, 39). Second, Witt distinguishes persons (those who possess self-consciousness), human beings (those who are biologically human) and social individuals (those who occupy social positions synchronically and diachronically). These ontological categories are not equivalent in that they possess different persistence and identity conditions. Social individuals are bound by social normativity, human beings by biological normativity. These normativities differ in two respects: first, social norms differ from one culture to the next whereas biological norms do not; second, unlike biological normativity, social normativity requires “the recognition by others that an agent is both responsive to and evaluable under a social norm” (Witt 2011a, 19). Thus, being a social individual is not equivalent to being a human being. Further, Witt takes personhood to be defined in terms of intrinsic psychological states of self-awareness and self-consciousness. However, social individuality is defined in terms of the extrinsic feature of occupying a social position, which depends for its existence on a social world. So, the two are not equivalent: personhood is essentially about intrinsic features and could exist without a social world, whereas social individuality is essentially about extrinsic features that could not exist without a social world.

Witt’s gender essentialist argument crucially pertains to social individuals , not to persons or human beings: saying that persons or human beings are gendered would be a category mistake. But why is gender essential to social individuals? For Witt, social individuals are those who occupy positions in social reality. Further, “social positions have norms or social roles associated with them; a social role is what an individual who occupies a given social position is responsive to and evaluable under” (Witt 2011a, 59). However, qua social individuals, we occupy multiple social positions at once and over time: we can be women, mothers, immigrants, sisters, academics, wives, community organisers and team-sport coaches synchronically and diachronically. Now, the issue for Witt is what unifies these positions so that a social individual is constituted. After all, a bundle of social position occupancies does not make for an individual (just as a bundle of properties like being white , cube-shaped and sweet do not make for a sugar cube). For Witt, this unifying role is undertaken by gender (being a woman or a man): it is

a pervasive and fundamental social position that unifies and determines all other social positions both synchronically and diachronically. It unifies them not physically, but by providing a principle of normative unity. (2011a, 19–20)

By ‘normative unity’, Witt means the following: given our social roles and social position occupancies, we are responsive to various sets of social norms. These norms are “complex patterns of behaviour and practices that constitute what one ought to do in a situation given one’s social position(s) and one’s social context” (Witt 2011a, 82). The sets of norms can conflict: the norms of motherhood can (and do) conflict with the norms of being an academic philosopher. However, in order for this conflict to exist, the norms must be binding on a single social individual. Witt, then, asks: what explains the existence and unity of the social individual who is subject to conflicting social norms? The answer is gender.

Gender is not just a social role that unifies social individuals. Witt takes it to be the social role — as she puts it, it is the mega social role that unifies social agents. First, gender is a mega social role if it satisfies two conditions (and Witt claims that it does): (1) if it provides the principle of synchronic and diachronic unity of social individuals, and (2) if it inflects and defines a broad range of other social roles. Gender satisfies the first in usually being a life-long social position: a social individual persists just as long as their gendered social position persists. Further, Witt maintains, trans people are not counterexamples to this claim: transitioning entails that the old social individual has ceased to exist and a new one has come into being. And this is consistent with the same person persisting and undergoing social individual change via transitioning. Gender satisfies the second condition too. It inflects other social roles, like being a parent or a professional. The expectations attached to these social roles differ depending on the agent’s gender, since gender imposes different social norms to govern the execution of the further social roles. Now, gender — as opposed to some other social category, like race — is not just a mega social role; it is the unifying mega social role. Cross-cultural and trans-historical considerations support this view. Witt claims that patriarchy is a social universal (2011a, 98). By contrast, racial categorisation varies historically and cross-culturally, and racial oppression is not a universal feature of human cultures. Thus, gender has a better claim to being the social role that is uniessential to social individuals. This account of gender essentialism not only explains social agents’ connectedness to their gender, but it also provides a helpful way to conceive of women’s agency — something that is central to feminist politics.

Linda Alcoff holds that feminism faces an identity crisis: the category of women is feminism’s starting point, but various critiques about gender have fragmented the category and it is not clear how feminists should understand what it is to be a woman (2006, chapter 5). In response, Alcoff develops an account of gender as positionality whereby “gender is, among other things, a position one occupies and from which one can act politically” (2006, 148). In particular, she takes one’s social position to foster the development of specifically gendered identities (or self-conceptions): “The very subjectivity (or subjective experience of being a woman) and the very identity of women are constituted by women’s position” (Alcoff 2006, 148). Alcoff holds that there is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals on the grounds of (actual or expected) reproductive roles:

Women and men are differentiated by virtue of their different relationship of possibility to biological reproduction, with biological reproduction referring to conceiving, giving birth, and breast-feeding, involving one’s body . (Alcoff 2006, 172, italics in original)

The thought is that those standardly classified as biologically female, although they may not actually be able to reproduce, will encounter “a different set of practices, expectations, and feelings in regard to reproduction” than those standardly classified as male (Alcoff 2006, 172). Further, this differential relation to the possibility of reproduction is used as the basis for many cultural and social phenomena that position women and men: it can be

the basis of a variety of social segregations, it can engender the development of differential forms of embodiment experienced throughout life, and it can generate a wide variety of affective responses, from pride, delight, shame, guilt, regret, or great relief from having successfully avoided reproduction. (Alcoff 2006, 172)

Reproduction, then, is an objective basis for distinguishing individuals that takes on a cultural dimension in that it positions women and men differently: depending on the kind of body one has, one’s lived experience will differ. And this fosters the construction of gendered social identities: one’s role in reproduction helps configure how one is socially positioned and this conditions the development of specifically gendered social identities.

Since women are socially positioned in various different contexts, “there is no gender essence all women share” (Alcoff 2006, 147–8). Nonetheless, Alcoff acknowledges that her account is akin to the original 1960s sex/gender distinction insofar as sex difference (understood in terms of the objective division of reproductive labour) provides the foundation for certain cultural arrangements (the development of a gendered social identity). But, with the benefit of hindsight

we can see that maintaining a distinction between the objective category of sexed identity and the varied and culturally contingent practices of gender does not presume an absolute distinction of the old-fashioned sort between culture and a reified nature. (Alcoff 2006, 175)

That is, her view avoids the implausible claim that sex is exclusively to do with nature and gender with culture. Rather, the distinction on the basis of reproductive possibilities shapes and is shaped by the sorts of cultural and social phenomena (like varieties of social segregation) these possibilities gives rise to. For instance, technological interventions can alter sex differences illustrating that this is the case (Alcoff 2006, 175). Women’s specifically gendered social identities that are constituted by their context dependent positions, then, provide the starting point for feminist politics.

Recently Robin Dembroff (2020) has argued that existing metaphysical accounts of gender fail to address non-binary gender identities. This generates two concerns. First, metaphysical accounts of gender (like the ones outlined in previous sections) are insufficient for capturing those who reject binary gender categorisation where people are either men or women. In so doing, these accounts are not satisfying as explanations of gender understood in a more expansive sense that goes beyond the binary. Second, the failure to understand non-binary gender identities contributes to a form of epistemic injustice called ‘hermeneutical injustice’: it feeds into a collective failure to comprehend and analyse concepts and practices that undergird non-binary classification schemes, thereby impeding on one’s ability to fully understand themselves. To overcome these problems, Dembroff suggests an account of genderqueer that they call ‘critical gender kind’:

a kind whose members collectively destabilize one or more elements of dominant gender ideology. Genderqueer, on my proposed model, is a category whose members collectively destabilize the binary axis, or the idea that the only possible genders are the exclusive and exhaustive kinds men and women. (2020, 2)

Note that Dembroff’s position is not to be confused with ‘gender critical feminist’ positions like those noted above, which are critical of the prevalent feminist focus on gender, as opposed to sex, kinds. Dembroff understands genderqueer as a gender kind, but one that is critical of dominant binary understandings of gender.

Dembroff identifies two modes of destabilising the gender binary: principled and existential. Principled destabilising “stems from or otherwise expresses individuals’ social or political commitments regarding gender norms, practices, and structures”, while existential destabilising “stems from or otherwise expresses individuals’ felt or desired gender roles, embodiment, and/or categorization” (2020, 13). These modes are not mutually exclusive, and they can help us understand the difference between allies and members of genderqueer kinds: “While both resist dominant gender ideology, members of [genderqueer] kinds resist (at least in part) due to felt or desired gender categorization that deviates from dominant expectations, norms, and assumptions” (2020, 14). These modes of destabilisation also enable us to formulate an understanding of non-critical gender kinds that binary understandings of women and men’s kinds exemplify. Dembroff defines these kinds as follows:

For a given kind X , X is a non-critical gender kind relative to a given society iff X ’s members collectively restabilize one or more elements of the dominant gender ideology in that society. (2020, 14)

Dembroff’s understanding of critical and non-critical gender kinds importantly makes gender kind membership something more and other than a mere psychological phenomenon. To engage in collectively destabilising or restabilising dominant gender normativity and ideology, we need more than mere attitudes or mental states – resisting or maintaining such normativity requires action as well. In so doing, Dembroff puts their position forward as an alternative to two existing internalist positions about gender. First, to Jennifer McKitrick’s (2015) view whereby gender is dispositional: in a context where someone is disposed to behave in ways that would be taken by others to be indicative of (e.g.) womanhood, the person has a woman’s gender identity. Second, to Jenkin’s (2016, 2018) position that takes an individual’s gender identity to be dependent on which gender-specific norms the person experiences as being relevant to them. On this view, someone is a woman if the person experiences norms associated with women to be relevant to the person in the particular social context that they are in. Neither of these positions well-captures non-binary identities, Dembroff argues, which motivates the account of genderqueer identities as critical gender kinds.

As Dembroff acknowledges, substantive philosophical work on non-binary gender identities is still developing. However, it is important to note that analytic philosophers are beginning to engage in gender metaphysics that goes beyond the binary.

This entry first looked at feminist objections to biological determinism and the claim that gender is socially constructed. Next, it examined feminist critiques of prevalent understandings of gender and sex, and the distinction itself. In response to these concerns, the entry looked at how a unified women’s category could be articulated for feminist political purposes. This illustrated that gender metaphysics — or what it is to be a woman or a man or a genderqueer person — is still very much a live issue. And although contemporary feminist philosophical debates have questioned some of the tenets and details of the original 1960s sex/gender distinction, most still hold onto the view that gender is about social factors and that it is (in some sense) distinct from biological sex. The jury is still out on what the best, the most useful, or (even) the correct definition of gender is.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• The Feminist Philosophers Blog
• QueerTheory.com , from the Internet Archive
• World Wide Web Review: Webs of Transgender
• What is Judith Butler’s Theory of Gender Performativity? (Perlego, open access study guide/ introduction)

Beauvoir, Simone de | feminist philosophy, approaches: intersections between analytic and continental philosophy | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on reproduction and the family | feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on the self | homosexuality | identity politics | speech acts

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Tuukka Asplund, Jenny Saul, Alison Stone and Nancy Tuana for their extremely helpful and detailed comments when writing this entry.

Copyright © 2022 by Mari Mikkola < m . mikkola @ uva . nl >

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ReviseSociology

A level sociology revision – education, families, research methods, crime and deviance and more!

Feminist Theory: A Summary for A-Level Sociology

This post summarises the differences between Liberal, Marxist, Radical and Difference (Postmodern) Feminists. It covers what they believe the causes of gender inequalities to be and what should be done to tackle these inequalities and male power in society.

Table of Contents

Last Updated on March 9, 2023 by Karl Thompson

This post summarises the key ideas of Radical, Liberal, Marxist and Difference Feminisms and includes criticisms of each perspective.

Introduction – Feminism: The Basics

• Inequality between men and women is universal and the most significant form of inequality.
• Gender norms are socially constructed not determined by biology and can thus be changed.
• Patriarchy is the main cause of gender inequality: women are subordinate because men have more power.
• Feminism is a political movement; it exists to rectify sexual inequalities, although strategies for social change vary enormously.
• There are four types of Feminism – Radical, Marxist, Liberal, and Difference.

Radical Feminism

• Society is patriarchal – it is dominated and ruled by men – men are the ruling class, and women the subject class.
• Blames the exploitation of women on men. It is primarily men who have benefitted from the subordination of women. Women are ‘an oppressed group.
• Rape, violence and pornography are methods through which men have secured and maintained their power over women. Andrea Dworkin (1981)
• Radical feminists have often been actively involved in setting up and running refuges for women who are the victims of male violence.
• Rosemarie Tong (1998) distinguishes between two groups of radical feminist:
• Radical-libertarian feminists believe that it is both possible and desirable for gender differences to be eradicated, or at least greatly reduced, and aim for a state of androgyny in which men and women are not significantly different.
• Radical-cultural feminists believe in the superiority of the feminine. According to Tong radical cultural feminists celebrate characteristics associated with femininity such as emotion, and are hostile to those characteristics associated with masculinity such as hierarchy.
• Some alternatives suggested by Radical Feminists include separatism – women only communes, and Matrifocal households . Some also practise political Lesbianism and political celibacy as they view heterosexual relationships as “sleeping with the enemy.”

Criticisms of Radical Feminism

• The concept of patriarchy has been criticised for ignoring variations in the experience of oppression.
• It focuses too much on the negative experiences of women, failing to recognise that some women can have happy marriages for example.
• It tends to portray women as universally good and men as universally bad, It has been accused of man hating, not trusting all men.

Marxist Feminism

• Capitalism rather than patriarchy is the principal source of women’s oppression , and capitalists are the main beneficiaries.
• The disadvantaged position of women is because of the emergence of private property and the fact that women do not own the means of production.
• Under Capitalism the nuclear family becomes even more oppressive to women and women’s subordination plays a number of important functions for capitalism:
• (1) Women reproduce the labour force for free (socialisation is done for free)
• (2) Women absorb anger – women keep the husbands going.
• (3) Because the husband has to support his wife and children, he is more dependent on his job and less likely to demand wage increases.
• The traditional nuclear family also performs the function of ‘ideological conditioning’ – it teaches the ideas that the Capitalist class require for their future workers to be passive.
• Marxist Feminists are more sensitive to differences between women who belong to the ruling class and proletarian families. They believe there is considerable scope for co-operation between working class women and men to work together for social change.
• The primary goal is the eradication of capitalism. In a communist society gender inequalities should disappear.

Criticisms of Marxist Feminism

• Radical Feminists – ignores other sources of inequality such as sexual violence.
• Patriarchal systems existed before capitalism, in tribal societies for example.
• The experience of women has not been particularly happy under communism.

Liberal Feminism

• Nobody benefits from existing inequalities: both men and women are harmed
• The explanation for gender inequality lies not so much in structures and institutions of society but in its culture and values.
• Socialisation into gender roles has the consequence of producing rigid, inflexible expectations of men and women.
• Discrimination prevents women from having equal opportunities.
• Liberal Feminists do not seek revolutionary changes: they want changes to take place within the existing structure.
• The creation of equal opportunities through policy is the main aim of liberal feminists – e.g. the Sex Discrimination Act and the Equal Pay Act.
• Liberal feminists try to eradicate sexism from the children’s books and the media.
• Liberal Feminist ideas have probably had the most impact on women’s lives – e.g. mainstreaming has taken place.

Criticisms of Liberal Feminism

• Based upon male assumptions and norms such as individualism and competition, and encourages women to be more like men and therefor denies the value of qualities traditionally associated with women such as empathy.
• Liberalism is accused of emphasising public life at the expense of private life.
• Radical and Marxist Feminists – it fails to take account of deeper structural inequalities.
• Difference Feminists argue it is an ethnocentric perspective – based mostly on the experiences of middle class, educated women.

Difference Feminism/ Postmodern Feminism

• Do not see women as a single homogenous group.
• There are differences in the experiences of working class and middle class women, women from different backgrounds and women of different sexualities.
• Criticise preceding feminist theory for claiming a ‘false universality’ (white, western heterosexual, middle class)
• Criticise preceding Feminists theory of being essentialist.
• Critique preceding Feminist theory as being part of the masculinist Enlightenment Project .
• Postmodern Feminism is concerned with language (discourses) and the relationship between power and knowledge rather than ‘politics and opportunities’.
• Helene Cixoux is an example of a postmodern/ destabilising theorist.

Criticisms of Difference Feminism

• Walby argues that women are still oppressed by objective social structures, namely Patriarchy.
• Dividing women into sub-groups weakens the movement for change.

Frequently Asked Questions about Feminism

Feminism is a diverse body of social theory which seeks to better understand the nature, extent and causes of gender inequalities. Some Feminists are also political activists who actively campaign for greater gender equality.

The main types of Feminism are Liberal, Marxist, Radical and Difference or Postmodern Feminisms. (Although many Feminists themselves may not recognise these ‘types’ because they oversimplify Feminist theory.

The goals of Feminists vary from person to person but a general shared aim is to reduce the amount of sexism and gender oppression in societies.

Yes. The majority of countries on earth still have fewer women in politics, women are still paid less than men on average, and are more likely to be subject to domestic abuse than men. And if we look at sexuality inequalities there is still overt oppression of gay and trans people in many countries.

Related Posts/ Find out More…

Feminism runs across the whole A-level Sociology course, and is especially relevant to the sociology of the family .

Other related posts include…

• An Introduction to Sex, Gender and Gender Identity (from my ‘introblock’).
• Feminist Perspectives on the Family – includes links to more in-depth posts.
• Radical Feminist Perspectives on Religion – includes links to more in-depth posts.
• Global Gender Inequalities – an overview of statistics
• How Equal are Men and Women in the UK …?

Sources Used to Write this Post 

• Haralambos and Holborn (2013) – Sociology Themes and Perspectives, Eighth Edition, Collins. ISBN-10: 0007597479
• Chapman et al (2016) – A Level Sociology Student Book Two [Fourth Edition] Collins. ISBN-10: 0007597495
• Robb Webb et al (2016) AQA A Level Sociology Book 2, Napier Press. ISBN-10: 0954007921

A-Level Sociology Knowledge Disclaimer : This post has been written specifically for students revising for their A-level Sociology exams. The knowledge has been adapted from various A-level Sociology text books. These text books may mis-label or misunderstand aspects of Feminist theory and probably oversimplify them.

The knowledge above (labels used/ interpretations) is what students are assessed on in A-level Sociology, I make no claim that these representations are the same as the interpretations the theorists represented in said text books (and thus above) may make of their own theories. It may well be the case that for degree level students and beyond the theorists and theories above may be ‘correctly’ represented differently in those ”higher levels’ of academic realities”.

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3 thoughts on “Feminist Theory: A Summary for A-Level Sociology”

Explained in a lucid way😍😍

Great post. Simplifies the whole issue a lot. Thanks.

very educative

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Friday essay: a sex-positive feminist takes up the ‘unfinished revolution’ her mother began – but it’s complicated

Senior Lecturer, School of Humanities, UNSW Sydney

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Bad Sex – like Bad Feminist (the title of the essay collection that launched Roxane Gay to literary stardom back in 2014) – is an enticing title for a book. Who hasn’t had bad sex at some time or other, including those of us who identify as feminists?

Bad sex, variously defined and experienced, continues to be depressingly common, even though sex “has never been more normalised, feminism has never been more popular” and “romantic love has never been more malleable”.

Or, so argues Nona Willis Aronowitz, in her genre-defying first book, Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure and the Unfinished Revolution .

Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure and an Unfinished Revolution – Nona Willis Aronowitz (Plume).

Aronowitz’s regular writing gigs include a love and sex advice column for Teen Vogue. But in taking “bad sex” as her subject, she’s less concerned with offering remedies than in the “broader question of what cultural forces interfere with our pleasure, desire and relationship satisfaction”.

What has changed, what remains

In her cleverly constructed investigation, Aronowitz makes this a personal and historical question, as well as a feminist dilemma. Across 11 chapters, she blends memoir, social history, feminist analysis and cultural commentary in a highly readable, often insightful – and occasionally self-indulgent – fashion.

Hers is a very US-centric story: the backdrop to her investigations is the election of Donald Trump and his term in office, which heightened the chaos of her personal world, and her feminist framework is almost exclusively US-based. But Bad Sex has wider resonance and appeal.

The starting point is Aronowitz’s own compulsion to understand and move beyond the “bad sex” that eroded her otherwise satisfying (though ultimately short-lived) marriage. Through her “zig zag pursuit of sexual liberation”, Aronowitz ranges across the contemporary sexual landscape – dating apps, ethical non-monogamy, sexual and gender fluidity – while also looking back to feminist and gender history to contemplate what has changed, and what perennials remain.

These include the murky edges of consent (a conversation, she reminds us, that started well before #MeToo), everyday forms of sexual coercion, and the “woke misogynist” – a contemporary type with antecedents like “men’s libbers”.

Yet despite what the title might suggest, sexual harm is not her main concern and Bad Sex is not a #MeToo book. Aronowitz wants to bring both pleasure and nuance back to the centre of feminist sexual politics, including by way of telling the truth about how difficult it can be for women to pursue (or even identify) their desires in an enduringly patriarchal world.

Sometimes this involves poking gentle fun at herself and the whole concept of “feminist sex”. (“I wanted my hook-ups to be both fulfilling and morally sound”.) But there’s no doubting her commitment to the task – which includes knowing her history.

Feminist sexual revolutions and sex wars

The “unfinished revolution” of the subtitle is the explicitly feminist sexual revolution launched by women’s liberationists like Anne Koedt, whose essay The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm was first published in 1968.

By harking back to it, Aronowitz offers an updated telling of the heady and horny history of early radical feminism – as captured in Jane Gerhard’s Desiring Revolution: Second-Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of Twentieth-Century American Thought, 1920 to 1982 (2001), and before that, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975 (1989) by Alice Echols.

In this century, “radical feminism” has ossified into a catch-all for what many see as the most negative and obstinate manifestations of feminism – among them transphobia, anti-porn and anti-sex work, gender essentialism, and an agenda dominated by white, middle-class women.

But Gerhard and Echols, among many others, have recuperated a vibrant and multi-faceted lineage of radical feminism in which good sex was integral to liberatory feminist politics.

The points at which those earlier histories conclude are significant. Echols stops in 1975. She says that’s when “cultural feminism” became the dominant strain of feminism in the US, marked by separatism and a female counterculture that alienated many heterosexual and bisexual women – not to mention lesbians who were turned off by what they saw as the policing of their sexual desires.

Gerhard continues to 1982, the year of the historic Scholar and the Feminist Conference at Barnard College. Entitled “Towards a Politics of Sexuality”, the conference was convened by feminists eager to return to (and extend) feminism’s earlier focus on sexual pleasure – much to the consternation of anti-porn feminists. They protested outside, wearing T-shirts with “For a Feminist Sexuality” on one side, and “Against S/M” on the other.

The Barnard Conference did not launch the “Feminist Sex Wars” – with “pro-sex” feminists on one side and the so-called “anti-sex” feminists on the other. It certainly galvanised them, though. And it has been heavily dissected and narrated ever since, including by those who were there.

Anthropologist Gayle S. Rubin, part of the West Coast lesbian sadomasochism scene, was still a graduate student when she presented an early version of her since much-anthologised essay, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” , at the conference.

In her essay, Rubin lamented the “temporary hegemony” of the anti-pornography movement, defended pro-sex feminism as part of a longer tradition of sex radicalism, and provocatively challenged the “assumption that feminism is or should be the privileged site of a theory of sexuality”. This last point partly accounts for why Rubin’s essay is as canonical to queer theory as it is to feminist thought.

In a lecture delivered earlier this year, Rubin noted a resurgence of interest in the Feminist Sex Wars, post-#MeToo. It’s evident in a surge of books released in 2021. There were two dedicated revisionist histories: Lorna Bracewell’s Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era and Brenda Croswell’s The New Sex Wars: Sexual Harm in the #MeToo Era .

And those Feminist Sex Wars were part of philosopher Amia Srinivisan’s lauded essay collection The Right to Sex . Srinivisan also wrote an essay for The New Yorker on the Sex Wars, extending its preoccupations to the British context.

Each of these books is markedly different in its emphasis. Bracewell spotlights the participation of queer women of colour. Croswell contemplates the limits of the law for addressing sexual assault. And Srinivisan re-evaluates anti-porn feminism in light of contemporary concerns. All three, however – like Aronowitz – see the feminist politics of sex as unfinished business, with the Feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s offering both guidance and a cautionary tale.

For Rubin, however, the new literature on the Sex Wars – some of it tainted with errors of fact – is not so much history as a reiteration of myths and recycled narratives. These books reflect what she sees as a “growing tendency to pontificate on these earlier conflicts without actually knowing what was going on in them”, nor the context in which they unfolded (notably – the Reagan administration, the rise of the Christian right and the onset of the AIDS crisis).

Rubin recalls the Sex Wars as traumatic for many reasons, including because they eclipsed an earlier, more wide-ranging and libidinous feminist sexual agenda. Early radical feminists and women’s liberationists, says Rubin, were “incredibly concerned with sex, sexuality, women’s sexual pleasure, along with violence, rape and battery, and a whole lot of other things”.

One of the most prominent was Ellen Willis , author of “Towards a Feminist Sexual Revolution” (published in 1982), among other key essays. Two years later, her daughter (with activist and scholar Stanley Aronowitz ) was born: Nona Willis Aronowitz.

Read more: Is the #MeToo era a reckoning, a revolution, or something else?

Like mother, like daughter?

Like many millennial women, Aronowitz came of age with “pro-sex” feminism on the ascent. But though she was literally raised by one of the recognised progenitors of that feminism, she says while she was growing up, her mother “didn’t pry or even offer” counsel on puberty or sex.

Willis died in 2006, when Aronowitz was in her early 20s. It’s primarily through her mother’s writings that she’s absorbed her views on sex and relationships, including as editor of the posthumous collection The Essential Ellen Willis (2014).

In Bad Sex she digs deeper, reading through her mother’s letters and personal papers to piece together her sexual experiences and past relationships – including with Aronowitz’s father. Some of what she finds is confronting (especially about her dad’s first marriage). But there’s also solace, wisdom and solidarity to be found in her mother’s life and writing, and those of others like her, who have made (or continue to make) “good sex” central to their feminism.

Willis began her writing career as a rock critic. She was initially wary of the version of women’s liberation she found in Notes from the First Year (1968), a collection of writings from New York radical women.

“Sexuality,” writes Aronowitz, “was all over Notes” – including Koedt’s advocacy for the clitoris and call to “redefine our sexuality”, and Shulamith Firestone’s transcription of one of the group’s meetings on sex, a somewhat damning indictment of the sexual revolution.

Willis wrote at the time that “the tone strikes me as frighteningly bitter” – but within months of meeting the New York women, she was a total convert. She formed the breakaway group Redstockings with Firestone, who went on to write the feminist classic The Dialectic of Sex (1970). Willis also re-evaluated her relationship with her boyfriend in the light of what consciousness-raising had exposed, and went on to spend much of her thirties single.

By the end of the 1970s, Willis was an eloquent critic of the then-emerging anti-pornography feminism. She warned in a landmark 1979 essay that if

feminists define pornography, per se, as the enemy, the result will be to make a lot of women afraid of their sexual feelings and afraid to be honest about them.

In the same essay, Willis shared that “over the years I’ve enjoyed various pieces of pornography […] and so have most women I know”. A couple of years later, in “Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex?” (1981), Willis surveyed the flashpoints.

She concluded that both “self-proclaimed arbiters of feminist morals” and “sexual libertarians who often evade honest discussion by refusing to make judgements at all” were obstacles to “a feminist understanding of sex”. By her lights, that involved recognising that “our sexual desires are never just arbitrary tastes”.

Read more: Shulamith Firestone: why the radical feminist who wanted to abolish pregnancy remains relevant

A candid narrator

Aronowitz is clearly indebted to her mother’s style of feminism. Her description of Willis’s particular niche (in the introduction to The Essential Ellen Willis) could well describe her own. She was intellectual, but not academic. She was a journalist, but not primarily an “objective” reporter; she “poached from her life and detailed her thought processes”.

Like her mother, Aronowitz is alert to the grey areas between utopian feminist visions of sexual liberation and the tricky realities of heterosexuality – or in Aronowitz’s case, heteroflexibility. “Reconciling personal desire with political conviction,” she writes, “is frankly, a tall order,” but nevertheless “essential”.

Yet while Willis stopped short of memoir, Aronowitz – reared on social media as much as feminism – is a candid narrator. It’s hard not to bristle with sympathy for her now ex-husband Aaron when she describes their sex towards the end as “metastasizing in the worst way”, or her own experience of it as “some putrid combination of bored, irritable, and disassociated”.

Elsewhere, Aronowitz describes her sexual encounters when her marriage is opened up, while she’s separated and as she moves into a new relationship – in enough detail to possibly tip over into too-much-information territory for some readers.

What stops Bad Sex from descending into an extended confessional is that her truth-telling (which is different to tell-all) is not a solipsistic exercise. Aronowitz knows the limits of extrapolating from one’s own experience – especially if, like her, you’re a white, middle-class feminist with a big platform – and that the best way to do it is to be honest and to share the stage.

She reveals she enjoyed the social capital accrued from getting married and was terrified of being thirtysomething and single. And how she violated the rules of ethical non-monogamy (crossing over into a far less progressive “affair”), and largely went through the motions of queer experimentation.

Aronowitz indicts herself as much as she does her own generation of so-proclaimed sexual renegades. But hers is not a satirical gaze; her quest to understand what makes sex “good” or “bad” – and why it matters – is genuine.

Aronowitz typically launches each chapter with a personal experience: either her own, or from someone who offers a different perspective. Like her friend Lulu, a Black, queer woman, whose personal and family histories preface a larger discussion of the distinctive trajectories of black feminist sexual thought.

Readers with prior knowledge will be familiar with some of the key works and figures Aronowitz showcases (for instance, Audre Lorde’s classic 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” ). She weaves these classics together with contemporary literature and activism (like adrienne moore browne’s 2019 book Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good ). And so, she provides entry points for different potential audiences: readers seeking a historical primer, and readers who are after an update.

The gap between theory and practice – or the challenge of what Sara Ahmed calls living a feminist life – is of special interest to Aronowitz. She manages to both capture the power of polemic in feminist history and to get behind the scenes.

For instance, Aronowitz reminds us, even Emma Goldman, the defiant anarchist who inspired women’s liberationists with her proclamations of free love, was hardly immune to romantic despair.

Elsewhere, she revisits essays by radical feminists Dana Densmore and Roxanne Dunbar on celibacy and asexuality as essential and invigorating aspects of second-wave feminist sexual thought.

When Densmore later tells her there wasn’t anyone in their militant group, Cell 16, who was actually celibate, Aronowitz isn’t surprised or judgemental. Instead, she heeds what Densmore saw as the most important sentence of her essay – one Aronowitz had originally overlooked:

This is not a call for celibacy but for an acceptance of celibacy as an honourable alternative, one preferable to the degradation of most male-female sexual relationships.

Sex, Densmore tells her, was “really bad in 1968”. In the early phase of the sexual revolution, when feminism had yet to happen, “it felt important to tell women they could walk away from bad relationships.”

Read more: Friday essay: 'with men I feel like a very sharp, glittering blade' – when 5 liberated women spoke the truth

Over 50 years later, Aronowitz has a lot to share with readers about sex. But her book is no polemic. In thinking about sex – her own and in general – feminism has clearly been an enormous and generative influence, but Aronowitz also acknowledges its limits and shares her frustrations. “I felt grateful”, she writes, “for the radical feminism that encouraged shame-free sexual exploration but I resented its high bar too.”

Crucially, however, Aronowitz does not disavow feminism or make grand claims about what sex should or should not be. That phase, Aronowitz suggests, was necessary once, but is now over.

This sets Bad Sex productively apart from other recent books, such as Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century (2022). Perry’s somewhat unrelenting diatribe against sex-positive feminism concludes with motherly advice to her readers, including “don’t use dating apps” and “only have sex with a man if you think he would make a good father to your children”.

For Aronowitz, ultimately the “unsteady conclusions of liberationists” – including those of her mother – were more inspirational “than any righteous slogan”. Bad Sex offers a rich compendium of these teachings, but its value is more elusive and greater than this.

In sharing her doubts, reflections and vulnerabilities, Aronowitz pushes feminist sexual politics beyond the binaries it is sometimes reduced to: pleasure/danger, positive/negative, pro/anti. Instead, she pushes it towards the complex engagement that Ellen Willis, among others, had encouraged all along.

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✍️Essay on Feminism for Students: Samples 150, 250 Words

• Updated on  
• Nov 2, 2023

In a society, men and women should be considered equal in every aspect. This thought is advocated by a social and political movement i.e. feminism . The word feminism was coined by the French Philosopher Charles Fourier in 1837. He was known for his strong belief in equal rights for women as men in every sector, be it the right to vote, right to work, right to decide, right to participate in public life, right to own property, etc. Feminism advocates the rights of women with respect to the equality of gender . There are different types of feminism i.e. liberal, radical, Marxist, cultural, and eco-feminism. Stay tuned and have a look at the following sample essay on feminism!

Also Read: Popular Struggles and Movements

Essay on Feminism 150 Words

India is a land of diversity of which 52.2% are women as per an estimate for the year 2023. This doesn’t mean that every woman is getting basic fundamental rights in society. We should not neglect the rights of women and treat them as a weaker sex. Women are equally strong and capable as men. To advocate this thought a movement called Feminism came into existence in 1837. Feminism is a movement that advocates the equality of women in social, political, and economic areas. 

India is up eight notches in #WorldEconomicForum ’s annual gender ranking. And Iceland is #1 for women, again, for the 14th year in a row. @namitabhandare ’s newsletter, #HTMindtheGap looks at why. Plus the week’s other gender stories https://t.co/9Fen6TaEnb Subscribe here… pic.twitter.com/r6XfFMINO0 — Hindustan Times (@htTweets) June 25, 2023

Traditionally, women were believed to stay at home and there were severe restrictions imposed on them. They were not allowed to go out, study, work, vote, own property, etc. However, with the passage of time, people are becoming aware of the objective of feminism. Any person who supports feminism and is a proponent of equal human rights for women is considered a feminist. 

Feminism is a challenge to the patriarchal systems existing in society. Despite this strong movement burning in high flames to burn the orthodox and dominant culture, there are still some parts of the world that are facing gender inequality. So, it is our duty to make a world free of any discrimination. 

Essay on Feminism 250 Words

Talking about feminism in a broader sense, then, it is not restricted only to women. It refers to the equality of every sex or gender. Some people feel offended by the concept of feminism as they take it in the wrong way. There is a misconception that only women are feminists. But this is not the case. Feminists can be anyone who supports the noble cause of supporting the concept of providing equal rights to women.

Feminism is not restricted to single-sex i.e. women, but it advocates for every person irrespective of caste, creed, colour, sex, or gender. As an individual, it is our duty to help every person achieve equal status in society and eradicate any kind of gender discrimination . 

Equality helps people to live freely without any traditional restrictions. At present, the Government of India is also contributing to providing equal rights to the female sector through various Government schemes like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, Pradhan Mantri Mahila Shakti Kendra, One Stop Center, and many more. 

Apart from these Government policies, campaigns like reproductive rights or abortion of unwanted pregnancy also give women the right to choose and lead their life without any external authority of a male. 

Feminism has also supported the LGBTIQA+ community so that people belonging to this community could come out and reveal their identity without any shame. The concept of feminism also helped them to ask for equal rights as men and women. Thus, it could be concluded that feminism is for all genders and a true feminist will support every person to achieve equal rights and hold a respectable position in society.

Check Out: Women Equality Day

Also Read: National Safe Motherhood Day

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Feminism is a movement which has gained momentum to advocate against gender discrimination. It supports the thought that women should get equal rights as men in society.

The five main principles of feminism are gender equality, elimination of sex discrimination, speaking against sexual violence against women, increasing human choice and promoting sexual freedom.

The main point of feminism is that there should be collective efforts to end sexism and raise our voices against female sex exploitation. It is crucial to attain complete gender equality and remove any restrictions on the female sex.

For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay writing page and follow Leverage Edu .

Kajal Thareja

Hi, I am Kajal, a pharmacy graduate, currently pursuing management and is an experienced content writer. I have 2-years of writing experience in Ed-tech (digital marketing) company. I am passionate towards writing blogs and am on the path of discovering true potential professionally in the field of content marketing. I am engaged in writing creative content for students which is simple yet creative and engaging and leaves an impact on the reader's mind.

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In China, Ruled by Men, Women Quietly Find a Powerful Voice

Women in Shanghai gather in bars, salons and bookstores to reclaim their identities as the country’s leader calls for China to adopt a “childbearing culture.”

By Alexandra Stevenson

Reporting from Shanghai

In bars tucked away in alleys and at salons and bookstores around Shanghai, women are debating their place in a country where men make the laws.

Some wore wedding gowns to take public vows of commitment to themselves. Others gathered to watch films made by women about women. The bookish flocked to female bookshops to read titles like “The Woman Destroyed” and “Living a Feminist Life.”

Women in Shanghai, and some of China’s other biggest cities, are negotiating the fragile terms of public expression at a politically precarious moment. China’s ruling Communist Party has identified feminism as a threat to its authority. Female rights activists have been jailed . Concerns about harassment and violence against women are ignored or outright silenced .

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has diminished the role of women at work and in public office . There are no female members of Mr. Xi’s inner circle or the Politburo, the executive policymaking body. He has invoked more traditional roles for women, as caretakers and mothers, in planning a new “ childbearing culture ” to address a shrinking population.

But groups of women around China are quietly reclaiming their own identities. Many are from a generation that grew up with more freedom than their mothers. Women in Shanghai, profoundly shaken by a two-month Covid lockdown in 2022, are being driven by a need to build community.

“I think everyone living in this city seems to have reached this stage that they want to explore more about the power of women,” said Du Wen, the founder of Her, a bar that hosts salon discussions.

Frustrated by the increasingly narrow understanding of women by the public, Nong He, a film and theater student, held a screening of three documentaries about women by female Chinese directors.

“I think we should have a broader space for women to create,” Ms. He said. “We hope to organize such an event to let people know what our life is like, what the life of other women is like, and with that understanding, we can connect and provide some help to each other.”

At quietly advertised events, women question misogynistic tropes in Chinese culture. “Why are lonely ghosts always female?” one woman recently asked, referring to Chinese literature’s depiction of homeless women after death. They share tips for beginners to feminism. Start with history, said Tang Shuang, the owner of Paper Moon, which sells books by female authors. “This is like the basement of the structure.”

There are few reliable statistics about gender violence and sexual harassment in China, but incidents of violence against women have occurred with greater frequency, according to researchers and social workers. Stories have circulated widely online of women being physically maimed or brutally murdered for trying to leave their husbands, or savagely beaten for resisting unwanted attention from men. The discovery of a woman who was chained inside a doorless shack in the eastern province of Jiangsu became one of the most debated topics online in years.

With each case, the reactions have been highly divisive. Many people denounced the attackers and called out sexism in society. Many others blamed the victims.

The way these discussions polarize society unnerved Ms. Tang, an entrepreneur and former deputy publisher of Vogue China. Events in her own life unsettled her, too. As female friends shared feelings of shame and worthlessness for not getting married, Ms. Tang searched for a framework to articulate what she was feeling.

“Then I found out, you know, even myself, I don’t have very clear thoughts about these things,” she said. “People are eager to talk, but they don’t know what they are talking about.” Ms. Tang decided to open Paper Moon, a store for intellectually curious readers like herself.

The bookstore is divided into an academic section that features feminist history and social studies, as well as literature and poetry. There is an area for biographies. “You need to have some real stories to encourage women,” Ms. Tang said.

Anxiety about attracting the wrong kind of attention is always present.

When Ms. Tang opened her store, she placed a sign in the door describing it as a feminist bookstore that welcomed all genders, as well as pets. “But my friend warned me to take it out because, you know, I could cause trouble by using the word feminism.”

Wang Xia, the owner of Xin Chao Bookstore, has chosen to stay away from the “F” word altogether. Instead she described her bookstore as “woman-themed.” When she opened it in 2020, the store was a sprawling space with nooks to foster private conversations and six study rooms named after famous female authors like Simone de Beauvoir.

Xin Chao Bookstore served more than 50,000 people through events, workshops and online lectures, Ms. Wang said. It had more than 20,000 books about art, literature and self-improvement — books about women and books for women. The store became so prominent that state-owned media wrote about it and the Shanghai government posted the article on its website.

Still, Ms. Wang was careful to steer clear of making a political statement. “My ambition is not to develop feminism,” she said.

For Ms. Du, the Her founder, empowering women is at the heart of her motivation. She was jolted into action by the isolation of the pandemic: Shanghai ordered its residents to stay in their apartments under lockdown for two months, and her world narrowed to the walls of her apartment.

For years she dreamed of opening a place where she could elevate the voices of women, and now it seemed more urgent than ever. After the lockdown, she opened Her, a place where women could strike friendships and debate the social expectations that society had placed on them.

On International Women’s Day in March, Her held an event it called Marry Me, in which women took vows to themselves. The bar has also hosted a salon where women acted out the roles of mothers and daughters. Many younger women described a reluctance to be treated the way their mothers were treated and said they did not know how to talk to them, Ms. Du said.

The authorities have met with Ms. Du and indicated that as long as the events at Her didn’t become too popular, there was a place for it in Shanghai, she said.

But in China, there is always the possibility that officials will crack down. “They never tell you clearly what is forbidden,” Ms. Tang of Paper Moon said.

Ms. Wang recently moved Xin Chao Bookstore into Shanghai Book City, a famous store with large atriums and long columns of bookcases. A four-volume collection of Mr. Xi’s writings is prominently displayed in several languages.

Book City is huge. The space for Xin Chao Bookstore is not, Ms. Wang said, with several shelves inside and around a small room that may eventually hold about only 3,000 books.

“It’s a small cell of the city, a cultural cell,” Ms. Wang said.

Still, it stands out in China.

“Not every city has a woman’s bookstore,” she said. “There are many cities that do not have such cultural soil.”

Li You contributed to research.

An earlier version of this article misstated Tang Shuang’s former role at Vogue China. She was a deputy publisher, not a deputy editor. 

How we handle corrections

Alexandra Stevenson is the Shanghai bureau chief for The Times, reporting on China’s economy and society. More about Alexandra Stevenson

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It’s Weird Times to Be a Happy Mother

Some reasons why i’ll rarely admit this in public..

I recently published a book about caregiving that is, in part, a rigorously researched explanation of why I love motherhood, despite living in a country that gives parents so little support. One might imagine that constructing and then promoting my arguments as to why caring for others can be meaningful and emotionally enriching, even when it’s challenging, may have led me to feel comfortable saying I like being a mom in casual social settings. It hasn’t. When I am with friends or acquaintances, or connecting with others online, the admission gets stuck in my throat, where it remains with all the other things that are better left unsaid.

It’s a feeling that traces all the way back to the time when my first son was born. I became a mom in 2012, which I unscientifically suspect was right around the time negative messages about motherhood became more common than positive ones. Or at least it certainly felt like this, in the liberal, largely coastal circles I inhabited online and in real life. To voice any delight about my relationship with my son felt a mix of tone-deaf, out of style, and potentially alienating to others.

Over a decade into motherhood, I now see that there are concentric circles to my hesitation to voice positive feelings, layers of potential relational, political, and personal harm I would fear I would unleash if I came clean. I worry about making others who struggle with motherhood feel bad; I worry about undermining the fight to get mothers and other caregivers more systemic support; I worry about turning back the clock on feminism; and I worry about outing myself as sentimental, and therefore intellectually unserious and uncool. Making it all the harder is that this fear doesn’t feel like a product of my tendency to second-guess things, but rather pretty realistic.

When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others

By Elissa Straus. Simon & Schuster.

Slate receives a commission when you purchase items using the links on this page. Thank you for your support.

The relational piece is the most immediate. When a close friend admits to me that she is struggling with motherhood, the feeling tends to come coated with a heavy dose of physical and emotional exhaustion, shame, maybe even regret. For so long, motherhood was locked up in easy metaphors of goodliness and saintliness. To deviate from this one-note portrayal and refuse to meet unrealistic expectations, to not want to be endlessly giving and enthusiastic about it, was, in this formula, to be a bad person. Ambivalence about either one’s children, or about how motherhood changes the way one can experience the world, was not seen as a healthy part of a huge life undertaking, but a sign that one was not dedicated enough. Even though we have let go of these simplified and unrealistic definitions of a “good mom,” particularly in online discourse, those old-fashioned notions can still get under the skin for those having a hard time. To be in that state, and to hear that I am loving motherhood—a matter of personal disposition as much as it is luck in having children with milder temperaments—might, very understandably, only make things worse.

On a more public level, I fear that me, or anyone, saying I like motherhood, even though it can be tough, has the potential to undermine political efforts to get necessary and overdue support for parents from the government and workplaces. In our current system, moms are suffering because they are moms, which makes managing a job or affording a (not terribly indulgent!) life pretty difficult. For those in the laptop class, they may have scheduling flexibility at work, but that tends to come with an expectation to always be available. Or, for those who work onsite, there is often little flexibility and, too often, very little advance notice of weekly schedules, giving moms a tight 24 hours to figure out caregiving support for the week. We lack universal paid leave, we lack universal and affordable child care and elder care—a one-two punch for all those sandwich-generation parents out there. To say you are having a good time can feel like you are dismissing all the unnecessary suffering that moms experience in the United States because of a lack of societal support. Inversely, to complain about being emotionally spent has become a message of solidarity, a protest chant against everything that makes life so impossible for moms.

Cutting deeper than the threat to pro-mom activism is the threat to feminism. So much of late-20 th -century feminism—though, as I learned when researching my book, mostly white feminism—was about allowing women to have other identities outside of motherhood. To insist on motherhood as a path to meaning, purpose, let alone joy, can feel like I am doing the bidding of conservative forces in our culture, who don’t just advocate for embracing motherhood, but a return to a patriarchal domestic structure in which Dad is on top. What I’d like to do is see what embracing care could look like outside the patriarchy, to look inside the homes women like Betty Friedan encouraged us to escape, and see what is worth appreciating there. With the erosion of reproductive rights and the new popularity of tradwives on social media, pointing out all that is worth celebrating in motherhood can feel dangerous, for people with my politics. And yet, if we don’t do it, what vision of feminism are we promoting for the next generation? Another one in which care is sidelined, marginalized—left to underpaid working-class women, mostly women of color, while wealthier, mostly white women leave the home and do the big, important stuff? I don’t want that either—and yet, still, how to express this?

This disquiet lingers even in solitude, particularly when I am reading smart writing by a smart woman in which motherhood is presented as something that limits or subtracts. It’s not that I have a problem with them feeling that way, or writing about it. I don’t expect anyone to feel the same as I do about this relationship or any of my other relationships, including my relationship with my parents or my husband. The problem isn’t that I feel unseen, so much as I often detect an unspoken assessment that intelligence and motherhood are incompatible. Or, as is the case in many fictional portraits of maternal ambivalence, a feeling that being honest about one’s desires and seeking them out can’t happen in the context of caring for one’s kids. To like motherhood makes me dumb and repressed, I temporarily conclude, cheeks on fire even though nobody is watching.

Because, even when I believe loving motherhood makes me tragically unhip, or when I hesitate to discuss my experience with it with others, my affection for it never wavers. This is the point in the essay when I tell you why. I, like so many women, went into motherhood with a defensive posture. I had no ambivalence about becoming a mom, and am fortunate enough to have a pretty easy time connecting with my children. My big fear was not exactly the act of parenting itself, but how becoming a parent would stop me from living an otherwise interesting and meaningful life.

As it happened, my relationship with my kids has been as philosophically, spiritually, or intellectually vital as anything else I’ve done, leading to the kind of realizations we’ve long wanted to seek elsewhere, away from the home, away from the family. Through them, I’ve cultivated a healthy relationship with uncertainty, with attention, with  feeling closer to the source of life, whatever it is, with all its wonder and fragility—all moments of revelation that came by way of a mix of stress, rupture, wholeness, and ease. If I had let motherhood stay small, confined to the sidelines, then those stressful moments would have felt like forces holding me back on my way to an interesting and meaningful life. But by letting motherhood become big, those challenges—and yes, my kids annoy me sometimes, and yes, I appreciate working and other time I spend away from them—became part of a larger narrative arc.

I really do want to be able to say all this in the company of others—and not just in writing but during unscripted, person-to-person exchanges. While I am so glad moms feel liberated to talk about the hard parts of parenting, I worry that only talking about the hard parts make it so the experience of taking care of our children is kept small, devalued, something not worthy of our curiosity, nor our collective investment. I often long for a whole new language, a whole new vocabulary and even context for discussing motherhood, but I haven’t figured it out yet. Whereas once, we diminished motherhood by easy praise, we now often diminish it with easy complaint. Is there a way to think more expansively and holistically in our conversations about motherhood? To be open to the ways in which the good and the bad are not oppositional, but essential, inevitable parts of a rich, friction-filled experience we may not always like but can love and grow from? I’m still working on it.

Empowering Working Women Through Maternity Benefit Law

Gender inequality in the labour market has been persistent across several dimensions such as low labour force participation, inequality in wages, occupational segregation, a high burden of unpaid care work, and many other forms of discrimination. Such inequality in women’s participation in labour market is contingent upon various factors, via , biological, economic, social, or cultural, which result in gender inequality in the family as well as in the economic and political system.

Historically, maternity has been treated as a state of inability in women workers from undertaking any work during the few weeks immediately preceding and following childbirth.

Historically, maternity has been treated as a state of inability in women workers from undertaking any work during the few weeks immediately preceding and following childbirth. With the advent of the system of wage labour, which became the predominant form of labour market with the rise of capitalism, many employers incline to terminate the women workers when they find that maternity affects performance of the women workers. Therefore, many women workers have to either go on leave without pay or have to bear the strain to maintain their efficiency during the periods of pregnancy to retain their employment. 

Gender inequality in the labour market has repercussions on the degree to which women reap benefits from the economic growth of a country, which in turn affects women’s empowerment. To alleviate this problem, a country needs empowerment schemes to remove the barriers preventing women’s labour force participation. This has been recognised in the Constitution of India pursuant to which various legislations have been passed in India to reduce gender inequalities. The focus of the present article is one such important piece of legislation passed for the welfare and benefit of working women in India i.e., the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 (‘ Act ’).

Important provisions of the Maternity Benefit Act

The Act extends to the whole of India and applies to every establishment, factory, mine, plantation, and circus industry including any such establishment belonging to the government. The Maternity Benefit Act does not apply to the establishments covered under the provisions of the Employees State Insurance Act, 1948, except as otherwise provided in Sections 5A and 5B of the Act. The Act has been amended from time to time. The latest amendment was made in 2017 which extended the benefits for women employees available under the Act.

The Maternity Benefit Act is a social legislation to ensure that mothers’ ability to participate in the workforce is not hindered because of childbearing and child-rearing responsibilities. Section 4 of the Maternity Benefit Act inter alia provides that no employer shall knowingly employ a woman in any establishment during the six weeks immediately following the day of her delivery. Moreover, no pregnant woman shall be required by her employer to do any work which is of an arduous nature that in any way is likely to interfere with her pregnancy during the one month immediately preceding the six weeks before the date of her expected delivery.

The Maternity Benefit Act is a social legislation to ensure that mothers’ ability to participate in the workforce is not hindered because of childbearing and child-rearing responsibilities.

As provided in Section 5 of the Maternity Benefit Act, every woman shall be entitled to, and her employer shall be liable for, the payment of Maternity benefits at the rate of the average daily wage for the period of her actual absence immediately preceding and including the day of her delivery and for the six weeks immediately following that day.

To be eligible for the maternity benefit, a woman has to work in an establishment of the employer from whom she claims maternity benefit, for not less than 80 days in the twelve months immediately preceding the date of her expected delivery. The maximum period for which any woman shall be entitled to maternity benefit shall be 26 weeks of which not more than 8 weeks shall precede the date of her expected delivery. An entitled women employee can take the entire 26 weeks of leave after the delivery. Also, if a woman employee wishes, she can claim the benefit for a smaller period. 

The jurisprudence established by the judgements of Hon’ble Supreme Court and High Courts have made it clear that the provisions of the Maternity Benefit Act do not discriminate between a permanent employee and a contractual employee, or even a daily wage worker. Moreover, in case of a contract/ad-hoc employee, maternity benefit cannot be linked to the tenure of women’s employment. Thus, an ad-hoc employee will be entitled to avail maternity benefits under the Act beyond the tenure of the contract, given that her pregnancy occurs during the tenure of the employment. 

As per Section 27(2) of the Act, the employer may provide enhanced maternity benefits to eligible women employees. In a few States, the respective State Governments have also relaxed the period of maternity leave for State Government employees. For example, the State of Tamil Nadu has recently announced 12 months of maternity leave for its employees. Whereas many other State Government including Bihar provides 6 months of maternity leave to their employees.

The Maternity Benefit Act also extends maternity benefits to adoptive mothers, commissioning mothers, and to women undergoing a tubectomy operation.

The Maternity Benefit Act also extends maternity benefits to adoptive mothers, commissioning mothers, and to women undergoing a tubectomy operation. The adoptive mothers are eligible for 12 weeks’ leave starting from the day of adoption for the baby below 3 months of age. In case of commissioning mother, the biological mother who imparts her egg to create an embryo which is then planted in another woman is eligible for 12 weeks’ leave. Whereas in case of tubectomy, a woman can opt for 2 weeks’ leave, from the date of the tubectomy operation.

Recent amendments in the Act

The latest amendment of 2017 introduces a provision in Section 5(5) of the Maternity Benefit Act which provides that an employer may permit a woman to work from home where the nature of work assigned to a woman is such that she can work from home.  As per this Section of the Act, the employer may allow the women employee to do so after availing of the maternity benefit for such period and on such conditions as the employer and the woman may mutually agree.

The aforementioned amendment in the Maternity Benefit Act also included Section 11 (A) in this Act which requires every establishment with 50 or more employees to provide crèche facilities within a prescribed distance. The woman will be allowed four visits to the crèche in a day.  This will include her interval for rest. Every woman who has delivered a child and has returned to duty after such delivery shall, in addition to the interval for rest allowed to her, be allowed in the course of her daily work two breaks of the prescribed duration for nursing the child until the child attains the age of fifteen months.

Further, the aforesaid amendment in the Maternity Benefit Act also added a new provision in Section 11 of the Act, which mandates employers to educate every female employee about the benefits available under the Maternity Benefit Act at the time of their initial employment. This provision is significant because awareness about any Act are fundamental elements for ensuring compliance with it. 

In addition to maternity benefits provided under the aforementioned act, as recommended by the sixth pay commission, the central government introduced the provision of Child Care Leaves (CCL) for its employees in the year 2008. Under the CCL rule, a woman Government servant having minor children below the age of eighteen years may be granted child care leave for a maximum period of two years, i.e .730 days during the entire service for taking care of up to two children. This rule has been adopted by many States Governments such as Bihar for their respective employees. 

If any employer fails to provide maternity benefits to a woman entitled under the Maternity Benefit Act or discharges or dismisses such woman during or on account of her absence from work, the employer shall be punishable with imprisonment which shall not be less than three months but which may extend to one year and with fine which shall not be less than two thousand rupees but which may extend to five thousand rupees.

The Maternity Benefit Act has now been merged along with fourteen other central labour laws to form a Code on Social Security, 2019 which is yet to be enforced by the Government of India. The Chapter VI of the Code deals with ‘ Maternity Benefits ’ which includes all the major provisions of the Act.

It is relevant to mention here that the Central Civil Services (Leave) Rules , 1972 (CCSL Rules) governs the rules concerning leave entitlements for central civil services personnel which is also followed by several autonomous organisations and state organisations. These rules are subject to periodic amendments in accordance with changes in relevant laws concerning leave and other employment benefits. Section 43 of the CCSL Rules provides the rules as per the provisions of Maternity Benefit Act, 1961.

Women employees deserve equal opportunity in the workplace, regardless of their family responsibilities. They should not be discriminated against, terminated, or hindered in their career advancement due to these family obligations. Articles 14 to 16 of Constitution of India, serves as a safeguard against such discrimination which guarantee equality before the law and prohibit discrimination based on sex. The Maternity Benefit Act, 1961 translates the principle of equality into tangible support for working mothers by providing them with specific benefits and protections during pregnancy and after childbirth.

Maternity leave is vital for employees as it prioritises the health of pregnant workers, allowing them necessary time off before and after childbirth for health care and preparation.

Maternity leave is vital for employees as it prioritises the health of pregnant workers, allowing them necessary time off before and after childbirth for health care and preparation. Whereas, child care leave promotes a more balanced and inclusive work culture, recognising the importance of supporting employees in managing their caregiving responsibilities alongside their professional roles. Thus, it offers financial security, time for recovery and childcare, and legal protection against discrimination, promoting a healthy work environment for both mothers and their babies.

Dr. Sweety Supriya is Assistant Professor (Electronics) at L.S.College, B.R.A. Bihar University, Muzaffarpur.

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