Global Women Writers Terms Dictionary

Binary

Two terms which are opposites. For example, rational/irrational, white/black, man/woman. These binaries in turn produce hierarchies of meaning which are then socially institutionalized. Binaries (also known as dichotomies) are common in Western social and political thought and reflect the fundamental dichotomy male/female. The first term in any binary (‘man’) is usually seen as positive and superior to the other term (‘woman’) but to depend on the second term for its meaning: for example, male/female, culture/nature, active/passive.

A critique of binary opposites is central to the work of Jacques Derrida (1967, 1978). Briefly, he argues that presence or identity is constructed only by an absence; women are women only because they are not men and presence is therefore illusory. Derrida deconstructs these binary opposites and problematises the view that identity and truth need to be represented in oppositional terms. Feminists also challenge the hierarchies implied in binary opposites.

Helene Cixous, the creative writer and philosopher, argues that social representations depend upon gendered binaries. In opposition, Cixous creates a positive feminine in a discourse which she calls ecriture feminine. See Cixous (1976). Other feminist writers argue that binaries could be reversed to privilege women’s qualities (Daly 1978 and Rich 1976, 1980).

The rational/irrational binary structuring male-based sciences is attacked by Sandra Harding (1991). She argues that this binary needs to be superseded by more plural, experiential and feminist knowledge.

Systems of thought dominated by binary opposites are also often racist. For example, Patricia Hill Collins points out:

One must either be Black or white in such thought systems – persons of ambiguous racial

and ethnic identity constantly battle with questions such as ‘What are you anyway?’ This

emphasis on quantification and categorization occurs in conjunction with the belief that

either/or categories must be ranked. The search for certainty of this sort requires that one

side of a dichotomy be privileged while its other is denigrated. (Collins 1990, p. 225)

Biology

The study of human and physical life. Questions of biology are central to feminism because women’s oppression is deeply determined by our ability to give birth. Feminist theory has always explicitly recognized the importance, for women, of freedom from reproductive control although de Beauvoir, Juliet Mitchell, Firestone, Griffin, Rich, and others describe different paths to freedom.

Feminist research is investigating how women’s bodies function within the context of our lives and argues that our biology develops in reciprocal and dialectical relationship with the ways in which we live. See Lowe and Hubbard (1983).

Some feminist theorists argue that reconstructions of women’s ‘intrinsic’ biological nature are scientifically meaningless and are usually politically or ideologically motivated. Sociobiology in particular is attacked by feminist theorists because it renders the biological as more important than the social origins of women’s roles. See Bleier (1984). All feminists agree that feminist theory must dispel naturalistic explanations which provide biological justifications for women’s economic and social limitations.

Capitalist patriarchy

A historically specific form of patriarchy in which patriarchy operates through class and productive relations. The subordination of women is shaped by specific modes of production. One instance of the collaboration between capitalism and patriarchy, which has been a focus of discussion among feminist scholars, is the combination of protective legislation and women’s exclusion from male dominated trade unions. See Hartmann (1976).

Colonialisation

A system of domination over subject countries. Feminist theorists argue that this process is analogous to women’s experience of oppression in patriarchy.

In the absence of external colonies women become ‘a last colony’ (Werlhof et al. 1983).

The colonial process ‘naturalized’ colonized women as the counterpart of the ‘civilizing’ of European women. The two processes are causally linked because of the creation of ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’ women and the polarization between the two is an organizing structural principle of patriarchal capitalism. The colonizers used a diametrically opposed value system vis-à-vis the women of the subjugated peoples as that used to their ‘own’ women. See Reddock (1984).

In Sexual Politics (1970) Kate Millett was the first to point out to the colonialisation of women in contemporary patriarchy. This colonialisation, Millett claims, functions by a mechanism of the ‘interior colonialisation’ in women of male values. Robin Morgan adds the dimension of sexuality to Millett’s argument, by describing women’s bodies as the ‘land’ of male colonizers. See Morgan (1977).

Dalla Costa claims that the family and household are a colony. Adrienne Rich draws on Fanon’s theory that colonialisation is a metaphor never an explanation, to argue that women’s oppression as mothers is a form of colonialisation because men define and appropriate motherhood.

Dichotomy

The difference between the ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ of research. In traditional research, a researcher is in opposition to, and above the particular and lived experience of his ‘objects’. Liz Stanley and Sue Wise argue that rejecting the scientist/person dichotomy will dismantle the power relationship which exists between researchers and researched. See Stanley and Wise (1983). The alternative to dichotomy is a dialectic woman-centered theory.

Barbara Du Bois argues that dichotomy is not, in any case, a property of nature but of a learned mode of thought, a way of seeing and knowing that turns reality into rigid, oppositional and hierarchical categories. She says that the challenge for feminist science will be to see and describe without recreating these dichotomies, without falling into the old pattern of objectifying experience. See Du Bois (1983).

Difference

A necessary polarity between women and men and between women. Feminists define difference politically, not simply in terms of sexual categories.

Defining difference has been the single greatest contribution of second wave feminism to theory. Difference has two senses in feminism. A primary meaning is that women have a different voice, a different psychology and a different experience of love, work and the family from men. Difference also means a negative category which includes the exclusion and subordination of women.

Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone express the view that women’s differences from men are the chief mechanism of women’s oppression. ‘Difference’ is an artifact of patriarchy and male and female are really two different cultures.

Much of the theoretical writing of the 1970’s focused on gender difference and therefore on psychological rather than on political, economic or social issues. For example, Nancy Chodorow argued that gender difference stemmed from childhood psychosocial affiliations. Audre Lorde and more contemporary theorists attack the false universalism in feminist analysis as a form of neo-colonialism or neo-imperialism. They point to crucial differences between Black and white women for example, to the enormous differential of power. ‘Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged’ (Lorde 1984b, pp. 111-12).

French theorists locate the meaning of difference in power relations. Monique Wittig argues that the ideology of sexual difference functions as a form of censorship because it masks as ‘natural’ the social opposition between men and women. Masculine/feminine, male/female are categories which serve to conceal the fact that social differences always belong to an economic, political, and ideological world. See Wittig (1982). Colette Guillaumin adds that difference is quite simply the statement of the effects of a power relationship. Difference is a fact of dependence and a fact of domination. See Guillaumin (1982). Jacques Derrida uses la difference meaning both to differ (in space) and defer (postpone) as an antidote to totalitarianism. See Derrida (1967).

Radical feminism defines difference as a great positive. Mary Daly claims that to simplify differences would be to settle for a less than dreadful judgement of the multiple horrors of gynocide. Adrienne Rich suggests that an epistemological revolution can stem from the different physiology of women. A new revolution of consciousness comes from women’s unique capacity to nurture.

Discourse

The relation between language and social reality.

Sheila Rowbotham argues that discourse is the instrument of patriarchal domination and that struggle for power within discourses is an issue of political importance for the women’s movement. See Rowbotham (1973b). Ros Coward argues that in order to understand the construction of gender differences we need to look at the contexts, transformations and definitions of sexuality in several discourses and how these are produced. See Coward (1978). Jean Elshtain suggests that the nature and meaning of feminist discourse itself must be a subject for critical enquiry. She defines feminist discourse as a political discourse directed towards the construction of new meanings. See Elshtain (1981).

Sara Ruddick has called ‘maternal thinking’ a feminist discourse which is imbedded with maternal values and ways of seeing. See Ruddick (1984).

Equality

The term incorporates several meanings. In sum, equality is based on the idea that no individual should be less equal in opportunity or in human rights than any other. Liberal feminism campaigns for the granting of full equality of formal rights to women as the solution to women’s subjection. Equality, like equal rights, would also to liberal feminists be part of a progressive rationalization of human society. Harriet Taylor in The Enfranchisement if Women (1851) pointed out that female inequality became a custom and tradition solely through men’s superior strength. See Mill and Mill (1970).

One problem with liberal feminism is that even with the granting of equality to women in public life, women’s domestic labor will always be unequal to that of men. More subtly, the hidden patriarchal agendas of public institutions can subvert the apparent equality of legal rights (see Education).

Contemporary American theorists argue that the principle of equality cannot be initiated in a meritocracy. Sandra Harding suggests that where standards of merit are more or less universally shared and uncontroversial the equality of opportunity principle might function, but that it is a reactionary device at times when social relations, structured by institutions, need deep changes. See Harding (1978-9).

Essentialism

The belief that differences between women and men are essences – that there are unique male and female natures – rather than the view that differences are socially/experientially constructed. If differences are essential then they are assumed to be universal, ‘natural’ and derive from biology. Essentialism has many meanings in feminist theory including French essentialism and strategic essentialism. Feminists continually debate issues of essentialism but because most feminist critiques are written by and as women, the key issue is whether there are essential or innate differences between men and women and whether these are biological or constructed. Constructionist beliefs (for example, de Beauvoir’s concept ‘One is not born but rather becomes a woman’) are more common in feminist theory (de Beauvoir1953). Indeed ‘essentialism’ is often a derogatory label used to dismiss those feminists believing in marked gender differences. Currently feminist theory is clarifying the term and distinguishing between essentialism as a universal essence, essentialism as a commonality and essentialism as a particular historical formation (Brah 1991). Brah calls for a non-essentialist universalism; that is, a universalism which is historically produced.

Feminist theorists who focus on essentialism include Luce Irigaray who suggests that there is an essential feminine difference deriving from biological differences and that this difference is repressed by patriarchy (Irigaray 1974a). By describing a plural feminine, Irigaray escapes the risk of biological essentialism. Teresa de Lauretis argues that feminists should ‘risk’ essentialism since this is what distinguishes feminist from non-feminist thinking (de Lauretis 1991). For example, Italian feminism draws on the notion of women’s essential and originary difference which is maternal (Bono and Kemp 1991). Cultural and French feminists agree that the maternal is an essential actual or potential female experience (Rich 1976; Kristeva 1980).

Anti-essentialist feminists are concerned that theories of essential gender difference are too biological or too conservative. Deconstructionists attack any fixed binaries (men/women) (Moi 1985). Following Lacan, psychoanalysts argue that sexuality is constructed by language rather than biology and that the subject of feminism is not ‘a woman’ since this would be essentialist (Mitchell and Rose 1982). Postmodernists challenge notions of universality within mass culture. In addition Black feminists challenge racist paradigms of an essential Black identity. For example, bell hooks attacks essentialism by drawing attention to the interaction of class and gender with Black identities (hooks 1991). Finally bodily essentialism is challenged by Judith Butler’s poststructuralist concept that gender is a ‘performance’ (Butler 1990).

Debates about essentialism are complex. Most feminists hold onto the idea that critiques of essentialism need not betray the authority of experience. One good example is Gayatri Spivak’s idea of ‘strategic’ essentialism or historical moments of essentialism. Spivak claims that if strategic essentialism is practiced by the dispossessed themselves then essentialism can be powerfully disruptive (Spivak 1987).

Ethnicity

In anthropology ethnicity characterizes the culture of a distinctive, sometimes racially distinct, group. Feminist anthropologists are concerned about the arbitrariness of race categories and that, whatever the system of classification, women often remain a ‘muted’ group. See Ardener (1981).

Feminists point, too, to how sociology has pathologised and problematised ethnic communities in Britain and America. These analyses have had an impact on Euro-American contemporary feminist thought by linking feminist theory to colonial experiences. Black feminists propose we engage with the contradictions, not with the similarities which shape our roles as women, and not be trapped by false universalism. For example, bell hooks describes how women’s communities are not a new feminist experience for Black women but have a long-term history. See hooks (1987).

Other feminists argue that we should see ethnicity not as a cultural problem but in the broader context of state harassment and the double oppression of Black women. See Amos and Parmar (1984).

Eurocentric

A way of thinking which is unable to see differences and which universalises all values and ideas from the subject’s experience of her own white ethnic group. Eurocentricity creates models which leave no room for validating the actual struggles and experiences of Black Third World women. An example would be the image of an Asian woman as ‘passively’ subject to oppressive family practices or to think that the strength of Afra-Caribbean women is located only in motherhood. Audre Lorde argues that white feminism’s failure to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. See Lorde (1984).

Experience

Women’s private awareness and knowledge drawn from participation in social life. The experience of women is often denied as ‘real’ or important and our difficulty in accepting the validity of our experience is part of our cultural heritage and perpetuated in schooling. Feminists draw attention to the gap between women’s experience of the world and the theoretical schemes we have available in which to think about experience. See Smith (1974).

The challenge is to convert women’s private concerns into shared public concerns. This occurs in consciousness-raising groups and also in the revaluation of women’s experience as a part of social science methodology and theory. Feminism argues that personal, lived experience is intensely political and immensely important politically. See Stanley and Wise (1983).

One hallmark of contemporary feminist research in any field is the investigator’s continual testing of the plausibility of the work against her own experience. See Parlee (1979). Reversing a longstanding tradition of relying on (or being expected to rely on) the advice of male experts gives women an ‘authority' of experience’. See Diamond and Edwards (1977). Socio-historians argue that to study the history of women, especially as it is recorded through the consciousness of women themselves, is to discover how one’s life experiences are joined to those of other women. Marcia Westkott calls this ‘experiences of consciousness-in-history’. See Westkott (1983). Indeed, women researchers have to begin with personal experience since traditional disciplines do not often utilize women students’ personal or emotional experiences. For women an emotional reaction is, however, often the foundation of critical thought and more astute theory. See Rutenberg (1983).

It is precisely the rich and varied experiences of contemporary feminism which contribute to the variety of its theories. Anthropologists argue that feminism theory must look for variety both in the experiences of women in other societies and in the experiences of women of different classes, races and nationalities in contemporary industrial society. The claim to a diversity of experience is an important part of the Black radical critiques of Audre Lorde and Angela Davis. As Gerda Lerner pointed out: if women’s experience is the norm, men will become the Other.

Feminisms

The definition incorporates both a doctrine of equal rights for women (the organized movement to attain women’s rights) and an ideology of social transformation aiming to create a world for women beyond simple social equality. Gerda Lerner argues that feminism must distinguish for itself between women’s rights and women’s emancipation. See Lerner (1978).

In general, feminism is the ideology of women’s liberation since intrinsic in all its approaches is the belief that women suffer injustice because of our sex. Under this broad umbrella various feminisms offer differing analyses of the causes, or agents, of female oppression.

Marxist feminists identify mainly the sexual division of labor as a cause of oppression and Marxist feminism is then an agenda of economic change. Catharine MacKinnon on the other hand identifies sexuality as the primary social sphere of male power. She argues that feminist political theory must centre on the construction and social determination of sexuality, since to feminism the personal is epistemologically the political, and its epistemology is its politics. See MacKinnon (1982).

Feminism also incorporates various methods of analysis and theory, if feminism is taken to be the theory of the woman’s point of view. Consciousness-raising is the quintessential method of feminism, and since feminism means knowledge of existing things in a new light it needs a distinctive account of the relation of method to theory.

Feminism’s method recapitulates as theory the reality it tries to describe. For example, feminism challenges universalisms and uses the pursuit of consciousness itself as a form of political theory and practice. See Hartsock (1979).

Indeed some French theorists have abandoned the use of the word ‘feminism’ altogether on the grounds that it is one more ism. See Makward (1980).

Definitions of feminism by feminists tend to be shaped by their training, ideology or race. So, for example, Marxist and socialist feminists stress the interaction within feminism of class with gender and focus on social distinctions between men and women. See Mitchell and Oakley (1976). Black feminists argue much more for an integrated analysis which can unlock the multiple systems of oppression. See B. Smith (1981). (The different political theories of feminism are entered as individual categories: see, for example, Anarchist feminism or Marxist feminism.)

Feminist

Like feminism, there is not, nor could be, a single definition of feminist since feminists have many differing affinities – of sexual preference, class and race. In short, a feminist is a woman who recognizes herself, and is recognized by others, as a feminist. That awareness depends on a woman having experienced consciousness-raising, knowledge of women’s oppression, and a recognition of women’s differences and communalities.

Some feminists argue for a definition that is future orientated – that a feminist must have a concept of social transformation. See Eisenstein (1984). Others argue for a definition that recognizes the validity of women’s contemporary experiences. See Duelli Klein (1983). ‘I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute’ (West 1982, p. 219). But all feminists share a commitment to, and enjoyment of, a woman-centered perspective.

Gender

A culturally shaped group of attributes and behaviors given to the female or to the male. Contemporary feminist theory is careful to distinguish between sex and gender. Building on the work of Margaret Mead in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), such theory takes the view that sex is biological and that gender behavior is a social construction.

Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone radicalized contemporary thinking about gender. In The Dialectic of Sex Firestone argues that gender distinctions structure every aspect of our lives by constituting the unquestioned framework in terms of which society views women and men. Gender difference, she claims, is an elaborate system of male domination. The theoretical task of feminism is to understand that system. The political task of feminism is to end it.

Polarity is essential to gender construction since each gender is constructed as the opposite of the other. Simone de Beauvoir was first to describe ‘woman’ as Other or ‘not man’. This concept of Otherness underlies categories of contrasting characteristics labeled feminine and masculine, for example ‘hysterical’ or ‘angry’ which reflect gender related expectations.

Traditional sex difference studies are designed to prove that these characteristics are not socially constructed but derive from biological differences. Feminists criticize pro-gender biological evidence as being fallacious. See Maccoby and Jacklin (1974). Feminist sociologists are able to show that attributes that Western society considers ‘natural’ for women are usually created by social pressures or conditioning. The internalization of these attributes is called gendering. See Oakley (1972).

Feminist anthropologists ask us to study the significance of gender for the organization of social life so that we can conceptualize a future society without traditional categories. See Rosaldo (1980). Gayle Rubin argues that gender is a product of the social relations of sexuality because kinship systems rest upon marriage. Every gender system exhibits an ideology or cognitive system that relies on repression in order to present gender categories as being fixed. See Rubin (1975).

This focus on gender as a locus of power relations set the terms of debate for much theoretical writing of the 1970s. The great strength of contemporary feminism lies in its dissection of the mythology surrounding gender. Psychoanalysts argue that the gender division of labor in the modern nuclear family, which gives exclusive responsibilities for early childcare to the mother, produces gender-differentiated people with desires and capacities to continue the gender division of labor. Basing her theory on gender differences observable in the ‘preoedipal’ period of development, Nancy Chodorow claims that only a transformation of the social organization of gender can lead to the disappearance of sexual inequality. See Chodorow (1978). Dorothy Dinnerstein felt that symbiotic gender arrangements were leading to a planetary crisis affecting human future. Less apocalyptically, Carol Gilligan relies on Chodorow’s view of female gender identity to argue that this identity formation makes women relational, unlike male gender identity which stems from separatism and autonomy. See Gilligan (1982).

The analysis which Millett and Firestone began and which was extended and deepened by Adrienne Rich and Nancy Chodorow shifted feminist theory from a focus on sex roles to a woman-centred perspective. As Catharine MacKinnon argues, sexuality is the linchpin of gender inequality because gender is based on an ideology that attributes its learned qualities to nature. See MacKinnon (1982).

Heterosexism

This term refers to the unconscious or explicit assumption that heterosexuality is the only ‘normal’ mode of sexual and social relations. Feminist theorists agree that heterosexuality, as an institution and as an ideology, is a cornerstone of patriarchy. For example, heterosexism implies the suppression and denial of homosexuality and assumes that everyone is, or should be, heterosexual. Second, heterosexism relies on the fallacious superiority of the dominant male, passive female pattern. See Darty and Potter (1984).

Other critics point out that heterosexist values and norms legitimize the sexual division of labor. See Ferguson et al. (1982).

A feminist sensitivity to homophobia is part of the ongoing attempt to free women’s studies from heterosexism. The assumption of heterosexuality both reflects and reinforces ignorance about lesbian perspectives. Writers Adrienne Rich and Elly Bulkin, in particular, are making feminist theory more truly inclusive from a lesbian perspective.

Hidden Women

A term used by feminist historians to describe the virtual exclusion of women, their lives, work and struggle from research. Although women’s contribution to history is now being recorded, women’s contribution to historical science is still not acknowledged. See Lerner (1978).

Identity

Feminist theories of identity have moved on from neo-Freudian psychoanalysis and current poststructuralist theory. Feminists argue that identity is not the goal but rather the point of departure of any process of self-consciousness. They suggest that women’s understanding of identity is multiple and even self-contradictory. See Bulkin et al. (1984).

The contemporary debate about identity politics was initiated by feminist psychoanalysts who described sources of female identity other than penis envy. For example, Nancy Chodorow suggests that the first task of individuation women undertake is the discovery of the ego boundaries between ourselves and our mothers. See Chodorow (1978). Feminists have gone on to argue that a rejection of the mother, and hence of a true identity, is responsible for the anti-feminism of some adult women. See Flax (1980).

Ideology

A feminist ideology is a body of ideas which describes the sexism of any particular society and describes a future society in which sexist contradictions would be eradicated. Sexist ideologies of domesticity are those most attacked by feminist theorists since these ideas depict a static and conservative image of women’s societal condition. By accounting for ways in which women’s social conditions evolved historically and how male-defined social ideologies perpetuate women’s inferiority, historians can recommend prescriptions for change. See Cott and Pleck (1979).

Marxist critics argue that the economic function of a social institution, like the family, needs to interact with an ideological function in order to produce a stable patriarchal unit. The task of sexist ideology, they argue, is to capture and preserve the institution across changes in economic production. Ideology has, then, an autonomy from economic formations. See Barrett (1980). The task of feminism is to expose the contradiction between the two.

Other definitions of ideology – for example, Althusser’s concept of ideology as the way we live in the world – have encouraged feminist theorists to explore psychoanalysis. Juliet Mitchell describes how this concept of ideology helped her understand the family from within, and therefore understand its relative autonomy in the ideological superstructure of society. See Mitchell (1971).

A consistent theme in all feminist writing about ideology is that the values and goals of women’s ideal social condition must form the basis of any feminist ideology. Some feminists, however, are concerned about the project of theorizing ideology itself. Susan Griffin argues that no matter what feminist ideology is constructed, it will always presume the idea of the Other and hence the possibility of domination. See Griffin (1982b).

Imperialism

Usually the control of one state or country by another, or the economic and ideological control of Black people by white. bell hooks argues that this condition applies internally in America, which was colonized by white patriarchal men who institutionalized an imperialistic social order in America not just in the Third World. See hooks (1981). Black feminists have identified ways in which a particular white Eurocentric and Western view established itself in all theory, including that of feminism. See Amos and Parmar (1984).

Knowledge

The traditional organization of ideas which is attacked by feminists in all disciplines. See Spender (1981). Feminist theory pays attention to women’s different ideas especially the way in which feminist knowledge is constructed through the interaction of the self and the natural world. See Stanley and Wise (1983). Within feminism social knowledge and self-knowledge become mutually informing and Marcia Westkott suggests that feminist knowledge begins with an awareness of our relationship to the historical context in which we live. See Westkott (1983).

Socialist feminism characterizes knowledge as a practical construct shaped by its social origins. Many feminists working in the sociology of knowledge argue that disciplines are social phenomena with male-defined objectives and male-defined environments. See Bernard (1975). Other feminists argue that the methods of sociology itself, its conceptual schemes and theories, are built up within a male social universe. See D. Smith (1974). Mary Belenky’s Women’s Ways of Knowing (1986) argues that women acquire knowledge through a different process than do men and, thus, that the learning process demanded by academic institutions place women at a major disadvantage.

Radical feminism argues that knowledge does not grow in a linear way through the accumulation of facts and the application of the hypothetico-deductive method but resembles ‘an upward spiral’. Mary Daly uses the image of spiraling to describe the growth of women’s knowledge and recommends that feminists spin a new web of ideas like a spiral net. See Daly (1978). In this way radical feminism has been able to create its own epistemological standards, and argues that women have sources of special knowledge; for example, in Susan Griffin’s concepts of nature. Radical feminism sees the world as a structure of relations in process, a reality constantly in evolution. See Hartsock (1975).

Language

Feminist theory takes language to be an index of patriarchal attitudes, and the sexual distribution of social roles and status. See McConnell-Ginet (1980). The relationship between language and cultural categories was an issue in the sociology of knowledge before contemporary feminism. For example, Basil Bernstein relates variations in language to class, status and education codes. However, language, its uses and powers, has been of foremost concern to feminists. As early as 1946 the feminist historian Mary Beard declared that the ambiguity of the generic masculine was a fundamental social problem. Dale Spender thinks that the power of language is basic to patriarchy and Shirley Ardener argues that ‘women’s speech’ exists because men have labelled it ‘women’s’. The debates about language characterize contemporary debates in social and political theory: Sheila Rowbotham, for example, argues that language is so much a part of political and ideological power that its meanings need to be changed and cannot simply be annexed. See Rowbotham (1973b).

Feminist theory first analyses the several forms taken by sexism in language. These include the male generic, terms of address, and idioms. It aims to reinvent language. Barbara Du Bois suggests that poetic prose can be one of the ways in which writers withdraw consent from a patriarchal construction of reality (Du Bois 1983). The problem is both one of concept formation within an existing male-constructed framework of thought and one of creating a language which can articulate an authentic understanding of the world. Radical feminism, understanding that language is a weapon which diminishes the range of women’s thought, argues that the liberation of women is rooted in the liberation of language. Mary Daly in particular creates a feminist vocabulary (Daly 1978).

Toril Moi claims that this Anglo-American criticism depoliticises theoretical paradigms. See Moi (1985). The issue of re-creation involves some feminists in rejecting the language of theory altogether and others in investigating women’s body language. See Henley (1977). Even if staying within a definition of language which involves verbal communication, some feminists (for example, Helene Cixous) argue for an essentially feminine mode which arises from women’s sexual difference. Linguists – for example, Robin Lakoff – define language difference as one of semantic usage in women’s ‘genderlects’. All theories agree, however, that some language is specifically, if not essentially, characteristic of women and that feminist theory must move beyond the examination of domination in language to the emancipation of women through language.

Masculinity

Abstract masculinity, according to Nancy Hartsock, is a mode of conceptualization that emphasizes mutually exclusive dualities. She suggests that this accounts for hierarchical dualisms in social institutions which underpin gender domination. See Hartsock (1981). Masculinity is not constructed on the basis of man’s real identity and difference but on an ideal difference constituted most essentially in the cultural differentiation of Man from his Other. Nancy Chodorow describes these aspects of masculinity in Western culture. She offers a plausible psychoanalytic explanation for the male characterization of woman as ‘Other’. This occurs, Chodorow argues, because men learn to define themselves as not woman, not the mother, so that masculinity is inevitably negative identity. Chodorow claims that there could be a conscious break in the construction of masculinity (and femininity) if patterns of mothering changed. See Chodorow (1978).

Marxist feminists argue that the ideology of masculinity has played a crucial role in the division of labor as it has developed historically, and that definitions of masculinity (and femininity) that pervade our culture are pre-eminently constructed within the ideology of the family. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English talk of a transition from patriarchy to what they call ‘masculinism’. They characterize patriarchy as a pre-capitalist social order organized around household production and ‘masculinism’ as the industrial capitalist system itself. Feminist theorists believe that these concepts can highlight the complex importance of gender in differentiating public and private spheres of activity. See Interrante and Lasser (1979).

A particular focus of feminist analysis is on the educational processes by which masculinity is defined and constructed. See Deem (1978). For example, feminist critiques of science point to the fallacious congruence between rationality, knowledge and masculinity. Evelyn Fox Keller suggests that masculine connotes autonomy, separation, distance and particularly objectivity. Hence, she argues, masculinity in science is located in the very concepts of science and also in the way science separates subjects from objects. See Keller.

In addition, feminists have often described utopias as matriarchies. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for example, incorporated powerful visions of matriarchy into her fiction and essays.

Memory

Given the particular forms of repression in Western culture which women experience, feminist psychoanalysis has a special interest in investigating how memory structures concepts of the self. It argues that memory preferences are gendered. For example, Mary Jacobus claims that women’s memory is a revision or representation of an ultimately irretrievable past – our memories of our mothers (Jacobus 1987).

Feminist historians read the memories recorded in women’s diaries in order to reclaim the personal and communal histories of women. See Smith-Rosenberg, 1985. Because much of Black history comes through an oral tradition, memory plays a pivotal role in Black culture enabling Black women to be both subjects and sources in their own worlds. The memories of rural Black women are changing scholarship. See Darling (1987).

Many women artists are constructing an aesthetic of memory. The writer Maxine Hong Kingston describes ‘reverse memory’ which is a memory of the future not the past and the artist Mary Kelly made her Post Partum Document an archaeology of memories of family life.

A feminist politics of memory would prevent women denying aspects of female experience and would be, what Adrienne Rich calls, a feminist Re-vision.

Muted groups

The theory which explains the discordance between what men expect women’s behavior to be and what women actually do is called the theory of muted groups. According to Shirley and Edwin Ardener every society has a dominant ideology which describes all social behavior. That dominant ideology shapes thinking about social norms and expectations, supplies the vocabulary used by, and reflects the image of reality held by, the dominant group. Suppressed subgroups who have different views may lack the language to express their views or conceptualize their differences. According to the theory of muted groups the dominant male perception may provide a model of the world whose existence and pervasiveness impede the creation of alternative models. See Ardener (1981).

Women who are trained in academic disciplines whose theoretical models correspond to a male perception of reality may also find it difficult to discover a conceptual framework and vocabulary which expresses our own perception of reality. See Smith (1974).

Objectification

Sexual objectification is the primary form of the subjection of women, Catherine MacKinnin argues. It is the male epistemological stance. There is no distinction, for women, between objectification and alienation. See MacKinnon (1982).

The objectification of women in art and literature goes along with our objectification in pornography, claim feminist critics, since pornography is merely a simplified version of general objectification. Within culture, women are a generic object whose subject is the male gender. Culture is itself predicted upon the aestheticisation and objectification of women. See Kappeler (1986).

Women have a double objectification in pornography where we are the objects of men’s action in scenarios and the object of representation with no correspondence to, or reference to, any real objects. MacKinnon argues that this process is hard to refute empirically because it acts as a barrier to consciousness. When women experience objectification we can evolve feminist methods which in turn can overthrow the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. MacKinnon thinks that sexual objectification has its own periods, forms and technology but that it might, potentially, have its own revolutions.

Objectivity

The apparently value-free or neutral detachment of a researcher from a subject. It is normally polarized to subjectivity. It is a contentious concept of feminist research. Many feminists argue that objectivity is the method of traditional disciplines because they all deny the personal experience and emotions of women. The quest for objectivity and the tendency towards isolation are now part of a masculine professionalisation because the rhetoric of objectivity has influenced concepts of professionalisation and academic style. See Furner (1975). Others argue that since no research can be objective, feminists can use the appearance of objectivity as a powerful tool for changing public opinion. For example, a good research method can be objective while the researcher can still subjectively identify with her topic. See Jayaratne (1983).

The most thoroughgoing critique of objectivity has been made by feminist critics of science. They argue the need for objectivity, which is the need to dominate, has shaped the form of scientific research and is part of scientific culture. The association of science with objectivity, Evelyn Fox Keller argues, is based on its association with maleness. She defines the separation of subject and object and the objectification of nature as a masculine mode because part of the ways boys acquire their gender identity is by objectifying their mothers. Keller attacks the arguments which assert an eternal opposition between (male) objectivity and (female) subjectivity as being nihilistic. She claims that if the mythological connection between (male) gender and science is dissolved, this will benefit both the practice of science and social attitudes toward maleness and femaleness. See Keller (1982). Chodrow, Dinnerstein and Keller echo males writers of the 1960’s like Marcuse who similarly questioned the apotheosis of scientific objectivity, but what their feminist perspectives contribute is the realization that objectivity is linked to patriarchy not just to capitalism.

Ontology

A description of the nature of existence. A feminist ontology has at its core a conception of a self-other relation that is significantly different from the self-other opposition in traditional Western thought. A feminist ontology is a society organized around the practice of mutual realization whose paradigms come from mother-child relations and the practice of mothering and family living.

Radical feminism – for example, in the writing of Adrienne Rich, Sara Ruddick and Carol Gilligan – claims that ontology and epistemology imply each other. A radical feminist ontology is one where everything is connected to everything else. See Whitbeck (1983). Nancy Hartsock claims that women’s relationally defined existence, experience of boundary challenges and activity of transforming both physical objects and human beings would result in a world-view in which dichotomies would be foreign. See Hartsock (1981).

It is the standpoint of women which generates an ontology of relations and of continual process.

Oppression

Women’s oppression is the experience of sexism as a system of domination. Christine Delphy makes the point that the use of the term oppression is crucial to feminist theory because it places feminist struggle in a radical political framework. See Delphy (1980).

Contemporary feminists are united in opposition to women’s oppression, but differ not only in their views of how to combat that oppression, but also in their ideas of what constitutes women’s oppression in contemporary society. Liberal feminists believe that women are oppressed because we suffer discrimination; Marxists believe that women are oppressed in production, while socialist feminists characterize women’s oppression in the home as similar to the oppressive experience of wage labor. Distinctions between the so-called public and private spheres obscure the fact that the subordination of women is part of the foundation of society. The apparent universality of women’s oppression has encouraged radical feminism to conclude that this is the primary or fundamental form of domination. As Ti-Grace Atkinson pointed out, the oppression of women has not changed significantly over time or place. Susan Griffin, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Brownmiller, Robin Morgan and Shulamith Firestone all agree that women’s oppression is primarily due to a universal male control of women’s bodies and sexuality. Firestone’s distinctive, biologically based theory, influenced by Marxism, attempts to provide an account of women’s oppression that is both historical and materialist. Firestone argues that biological imperatives are overlaid by social institutions. For example, sexual and child rearing practices reinforce male dominance (Firestone, 1970).

Radical feminism argues that since only patriarchy defines women by their sexuality, women’s oppression must be located in the institutional practices of sexuality. For example, motherhood and rape reinforce the innate and unchanging oppression of women by men. See Koedt (1973). In other words, where idealist definitions of women’s oppression involved the idea that patriarchy was an ideology negotiated through interactions, feminists now think women’s oppression is derived from phallocentrism. See Stanley and Wise (1983).

Adrienne Rich argues that when women both take oppression as an object of understanding (that is, reflect on its history), and feel oppression in a deeply personal way, we can assert ourselves against it. See Rich (1976).

Other, The

A crucial concept developed by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1953) to explain how, in patriarchal culture, woman is set up as the negative, the inessential, the abnormal to the male. Women are Other because they are defined by men as inferior. De Beauvoir adopted a notion from Sartre about the basic conflictual nature of human relations, arguing that woman as Other was a metaphysical idea, a myth on which men had built society. The concept is pervasive, de Beauvoir reveals, because woman accepts her Otherness, her inferiority. In her later writings de Beauvoir expressed second thoughts about her formulation of this theme but not about her articulation of feminism in terms of existentialism.

In French theory the concept has two meanings: ‘Other’ as in relation to a speaking subject and ‘Otherness’ as outside the conceptual system. Lacan, for example, describes the unconscious of the subject as the discourse of the Other. By being a conscious ‘Other’, woman affirms man in his manhood. See Lacan (1966). The feminist critics, Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, argue that Otherness, if defined as the feminine, opens up new possibilities for women because by celebrating difference women achieve immanence.

Patriarchy

A system of male authority which oppresses women through its social, political and economic institutions. In any of the historical forms that patriarchal society takes, whether it is feudal, capitalist or socialist, a sex-gender system and a system of economic discrimination operate simultaneously. Patriarchy has power from men’s greater access to, and mediation of, the resources and rewards of authority structures inside and outside the home.

The concept ‘patriarchy’ is crucial to contemporary feminism because feminism needed a term by which the totality of oppressive and exploitative relations which affect women could be expressed. Over and above this particular characterization, each feminist theory finds that a different feature of patriarchy defines women’s subordination. The two ends of the feminist continuum might be represented on the one hand by Gayle Rubin who argues that if we use the term sex-gender system patriarchy would be only one form, a male dominant one, of a sex-gender system. See Rubin (1975). The other approach is that of Kate Millett or Shulamith Firestone. Millett argues that patriarchy is analytically independent of capitalist or other modes of production and Firestone defines patriarchy in terms of male control of women’s reproduction.

Socialist or Marxist feminists prefer to locate patriarchy in a materialist context. They argue that the capitalist mode of production is structured by a patriarchal sexual division of labor. Capitalist class relations and the sexual division of labor are mutually self-enforcing. For example, Heidi Hartmann defines patriarchy as a set of social relations with a material base operating on a system of male hierarchical relations and male solidarity. She denies that patriarchy is universal and unchanging and claims that its intensity changes over time. See Hartmann (1976). Zillah Eisenstein suggests that an erosion in patriarchy begins to occur with structural changes in the market place and changes in wage structures. Such conflicts between capitalism and patriarchy, she claims, will undermine liberalism and the Welfare State. See Eisenstein (1982). Still within this materialist perspective, Ann Ferguson argues, more positively, that the weakening of the patriarchal family during capitalism created the material conditions for the growth of lesbianism. See Ferguson et al. (1982). Ferguson builds on the economic theories of Mirra Komarovsky who describes the distinction in economic theory between masculine privilege (sanctioned advantage) and patriarchal authority (sanctioned domination) in different segments of the class structure. See Komarovsky (1964).

Radical feminism, on the other hand, equates patriarchy with male domination. It is a system of social relations in which the class ‘men’ have power over the class ‘women’ because women are sexually devalued. Radical feminism is sometimes attacked as being ahistorical because it argues that patriarchy cannot be periodised like the Marxist modes of production. For example, Mary Daly argues that patriarchy is itself the prevailing religion of the entire planet. Radical feminism relies on feminist psychoanalysis to provide explanations for this construction of patriarchy. The psychoanalyst Dorothy Dinnerstein claims that patriarchy, or women’s exclusion from history, stems from the gender formation of males and females and the double standard that this entails.

Phallocentric

A term in feminist theory used to describe the way society regards the phallus or penis as a symbol of power, and believes that attributes of masculinity are the norm for cultural definitions. The phallocentric fallacy in disciplines is the assumption that ‘person’ stands for male and therefore that women’s experience has made no contribution to disciplinary methods or content. This perspective (sometimes known as androcentric) makes women unknowable. See Du Bois (1983). Feminists argue that phallocentrism is a source of women’s oppression in education. See Stanley and Wise (1983). Feminist literary critics also draw attention to how phallocentrism in literature establishes the idea that artistic creativity is a masculine quality. See Gilbert and Gubar (1979).

Phallogocentrism

A concept devised by Jacques Derrida to describe the meeting of phallocentrism with logocentrism. Phallogocentrism is how patriarchy models its thought and language. Because phallogocentrism is the name of the everyday discursive world, French feminists are determined to replace this ideology with an alternative women’s language, or ecriture feminine. The writings of Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, in particular, contain new forms of expression using attributes of female sexuality (of jouissance and multiple pleasure) to replace phallocentric (male) pleasure which is singular (the phallus). See Cixous (1981) and Irigaray (1977b).

Postcolonialism

The term dates from the late 1950s although the break up of colonial empires began immediately after the Second World War. The prefix ‘post’ suggests that ‘postcolonialism’ describes cultures after independence but a postcolonial can be both a migrant ‘ethnic minority’ as well as a national citizen, and postcolonial often describes any culture shaped by imperialism. For these reasons postcolonial theory focuses on several issues: identity in relation to nationalisms and imperialism; the role of the state; and conflicts between traditional and contemporary cultures. Beginning with Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and continuing in Edward Said’s Orientalism, through to the feminist theories of Gayatri Spivak, Rey Chow and others, the central attack is on Western ethnocentrism. Other key features of postcolonial theory are: a hybrid mixture of histories, languages and issues, both indigenous and Western; a questioning of European discourse – its universalism and its genres; and a struggle between place and displacement and language.

There are strong connections between postcolonial and feminist theory in the way that both wish to give a voice to historically marginalised people; see, for example, the work of Alice Walker (Walker 1983). Those theorists making a particular study of ‘Otherness’ in imperial and postcolonial writing are called colonial discourse critics. They claim that literary and cultural representations relate to material aggressions where the violence of literary stereotypes matches economic exploitations (Minh-ha 1989, Mohanty 1985). Rey Chow argues that Western theory denies Eastern writing a complexity, a subjectivity and its own cross-cultural appropriation of the West (Chow 1990).

Gayatri Spivak is a leading postcolonial critic who wishes to give the subaltern a voice in history rather than to speak for Third World women (Spivak 1987). Subaltern studies involves the analysis of South Asian history and culture by a group under the editorship of Ranajit Guha. Subalternity, Spivak argues, is a major allegory of the displacement of the gendered, colonized subaltern subject by imperialism and materialism. In her accounts of this double burden of colonized women, Spivak focuses on practices of ‘comprador’ or imperialist languages, showing how Western figures of speech often obliterate the viewpoints of Others. In opposition, postcolonial criticism describes the specific formations of collective ‘identities-in-resistance’.

Representation Feminism, alongside semiology and Marxism, has made a complex appraisal of representation, or the construction of images. The term ‘representa

Binary	Masculinity
Biology	Memory
Capitalist Patriarchy	Muted groups
Colonialisation	Objectification
Dichotomy	Objectivity
Difference	Ontology
Discourse	Oppression
Equality	The Other
Essentialism	Patriarchy
Ethnicity	Phallocentric
Eurocentric	Phallogocentrism
Experience	Postcolonialism
Feminist	Representation
Feminisms	Sexism
Gender	Sex Roles
Heterosexism	Subject
HiddenWoman	Subordination
Identity	Symbolic
Ideology	Theory
Imperialism	Third World
Knowledge	Universalism
Language