week 13: Contemporary Feminist Theory

Feminist theory develops a system of ideas about human life that features women as objects and subjects, doers, and knowers. Feminism has a history as long as women’s subordination—and women have been subordinated almost always and everywhere. Until the late 1700s, feminist writing survived as a thin but persistent trickle of protest; from that time to the present, feminist writing has become a growing tide of critical work. While the production of feminist theory has typically expanded and contracted with societal swings between reform and retrenchment, the contemporary stage of feminist scholarship shows a self-sustaining expansion despite new conservative societal trends.

Although feminist theoretical production has occurred in the same time frame as the development of sociology, the feminist theory remained on the margins of sociology, ignored by the central male formulators of the discipline until the 1970s. Since the 1970s, a growing presence of women in sociology and the momentum of the women’s movement have established feminist theory as a new sociological paradigm that inspires much sociological scholarship and research.

Feminist scholarship is guided by four basic questions: And what about the women? Why is women’s situation as it is? How can we change and improve the 

social world? and What about differences among women? Answers to these questions produce the varieties of feminist theory. This chapter patterns this variety to show four major groupings of feminist theory. Theories of gender difference see women’s situation as different from men’s, explaining this difference in terms of two distinct and enduring ways of being, male and female, or institutional roles and social interaction, or ontological constructions of woman as “other.” Theories of gender inequality, notably by liberal feminists, emphasize women’s claim to a fundamental right of equality and describe the unequal opportunity structures created by sexism. Gender oppression theories include feminist psychoanalytic theory and radical feminism. The former explains the oppression of women in terms of psychoanalytic descriptions of the male psychic drive to dominate; the latter, in terms of men’s ability and willingness to use violence to subjugate women. Structural oppression theories include socialist feminism and intersectionality theory; socialist feminism describes oppression as arising from a patriarchal and a capitalist attempt to control social production and reproduction; intersectionality theories trace the consequences of class, race, gender, affectional preference, and global location for lived experience, group standpoints, and relations among women.

The feminist theory offers five key propositions as a basis for the revision of standard sociological theories. First, the practice of sociological theory must be based in a sociology of knowledge that recognizes the partiality of all knowledge, the knower as embodied and socially located, and the function of power in effecting what becomes knowledge. Second, macro-social structures are based on processes controlled by dominants acting in their own interests and executed by subordinates whose work is made largely invisible and undervalued even to themselves by the dominant ideology. Thus, dominants appropriate and control the productive work of society, including not only economic production but also women’s work of social reproduction. Third, micro-interactional processes in society are enactments of these dominant-subordinate power arrangements, enactments very differently interpreted by powerful actors and subordinate actors. Fourth, these conditions create in women’s subjectivity a bifurcated consciousness along the line of fault caused by the juxtaposition of patriarchal ideology and women’s experience of the actualities of their lives. Fifth, what has been said for women may be applicable to all subordinate peoples in some parallel, though not identical, form.