In a Nutshell
The thing is, even though the word “feminist” gets thrown around like props at a pool party, it can refer to tons of different kinds of activism, politics, media, art, and critical theory. It’s usually not about whether you want to send your undergarments up in flames, but it does have a lot to do with trying to understand why a lot of the world operates in a way that’s pretty freakin’ contrary to people whodohave a tendency for pyromania with over-the-shoulder boulder holders. And sometimes—even with our pal Miley—that leads to trying to change the stereotypes and discrimination that are built into many social norms.
So feminism’s about way more than equality for women. The focus can be on how women’s bodies aredigitally altered, the waysexual assault is talked about (ornottalked about), whetherBeyoncé is a feminist and what kind, howrace or sexuality affects women’s lives, or ifour furry friends can be feminists too. The point is, the questions are about who’s getting the short end of the stick, what societal forces are making the stick that way, and whether using a stick metaphor is an example of our society emphasizing thephallicover theyonic.
And, in case you haven’t guessed it already, there’s plenty to debate in the world of feminism. And some kinds of feminism just don’t mix well with others. When the stakes are high—and feminists know they are—disagreements can get as hot as the fire underthat first bra at the Miss America Pageant of 1968.
So what gives? Why can’t feminists just get along? Whatever happened to sisterhood and sit-ins, to the pageant-protesting Amazons and man-haters who marched in days of yore? And, for that matter, isn’t all of this hubbub kind of passé? Hasn’t equality (more or less) been won?
One thing that most feminists can agree on is that the answer to that last question is definitely “no.” In fact, make that a resounding “nope,” “no way,” and/or “you’ve gotta be kidding me.”
See, feminists aren’t just interested in being able to vote: they also want to know how sexism makes society tick. They want to know why it is that most of history’s “greatest” authors (so we’re told) are men. They want to understand why so many books and movies are full of the same one-dimensional female characters who appear again and again: like the virgin and the skank, the beautiful princess and the evil queen, the bookish nerd and the sexy cheerleader, and all those girls next door who want to get the guy but mope around in a dumpy sweater instead. But what if we kind oflikethe sweater? And why does it have to be about the guy, anyway?
This is where feminist theory comes in! It’s got all kinds of tools to help us understand why gender matters in the books we read, the movies we watch, and the marketing campaigns we see around us every day.
Plus, feminism is more than just an outdated protest or a type of lit theory: in the academic world, it’s also a major part of cultural studies, and feminist thinkers have their fingers in just about every other pie you can imagine too.
So, despite the fact that plenty of haters have called feminism confusing and shrill, it’s got to do with a lot more than burning chest-slings and hating on dudes. Unlike some other critical schools you might encounter (*cough*New Criticism*cough*), feminist theory is always evolving and adapting to new cultural and academic environments. Most importantly, it’s fighting the good fight with all the tools it can muster—razor sharp tiaras, lassos, and loaded literary terms included.
Big Concepts from Big Minds
Patriarchy
Patriarchy is to feminism as Mayor Wilkins was to Buffy Summers. It's powerful, it's pervasive, it has institutional clout, and it's devising a master plan to become a giant immortal snake monster. No wonder Buffy blew it up.
Literally, a patriarchy is any social system where family names and property pass from father to son.
More broadly, it's any social system where men hold more power and value than women. Which usually means pretty much most places in the world. Feeling mopey yet? Just wait, we see an empowerment at the end of the tunnel!
Liberal Feminism
Liberal feminism has been one of the most visible and popular kinds of feminism, particularly in the USA. Sheryl Sandberg'sLean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Leadis a really awesome, up-to-date, easily mockable example of this school.
For liberal feminists, winning equality between women and men is the end goal. Women in patriarchal societies (which is basically all of them) have limited access to financial resources and political influence, and liberal feminists work hard to bust down doors and break through theglass ceiling. In general, they're not interested in changing the basic ways society functions: what they want is for everyone to acknowledge that women are just as capable of getting the job done.
Basically, they want the freedom to grab a better slice of the pie. And sure, that's hard to argue with. But there are some other branches that ask whether we're even in the right bakery.
Radical Feminism
Unlike liberal feminists, radical feminists don't just want a better slice of the pie. Instead, they want to dump the pie into the compost bin and serve up a whole new dish. Preferably one that they don't have to be in the kitchen to make.
So radical feminists say that the patriarchy underlies the whole way society is structured. Forms of male supremacy are so ingrained that most people don't question how they function and oppress women—and this ranges from obvious forms like men who think they have the right to a bigger paycheck than the ladies, to things like students being more likely to trust a male professor than a female one lecturing about the same thing.
Where the radical comes in is the way this group of feminists suggests we go about dealing with the patriarchal system. Is it by lobbying to change laws, politely reminding people that women are just as good as the menfolk, and writing books about bending your body in certain ways? (No, not a sex joke—we're just making fun ofLean Inagain.)
You best believe it ain't. Radical feminism is about how the system is flawed, so no change is about to happen within the system. Protest, revolution, full-on cultural change—now we're talkin'.
Don't get us wrong: radical feminists don't indiscriminately hate all men (well,some of them might), they just hate the way society has been structured over millennia to usually favor men. Their goal is to undermine patriarchy and change the hierarchical structures that maintain it—whether that's bysaying that all men should be destroyedorjoking about drinking male tears to be stronger. Hey, either one's gonna make you think about sexism a tad differently.
Separatist Feminists
This is one important group that gets associated with the radical school who said their piece during the 1970s and '80s. That was a time when lots of mainstream feminists thought of feminism as a "ladies only" kind of deal. Separatists thought that social relationships between women and men were always gonna be unhealthy: history showed that men were just naturally given to violent and oppressive behavior.
Since women and children are the ones who pay the price, separatists argued that they should overthrow the patriarchy by swearing off men altogether. That meant choosing to be "woman-identified" rather than "male-identified"—in other words, choosing deep friendships and even romantic relationships with other women instead of men. Yup, that's where jokes aboutall feminists being lesbianscome from. Which hopefully you can tell by now isn't quite the case.
Womanism
This term was coined by the African-American poet, novelist, and critic Alice Walker, who used it to name black women's unique brand of feminism. In her famous essay collectionIn Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Womanist Prose(1983), Walker says that womanism refers to "serious," confident, and "grown-up" behavior.
Doesn't sound like fun? Don't let all the "grown-up" stuff throw you off. She wasn't a separatist, but she presents womanism as a way of celebrating women who love other women. This is something that's at the heart of all feminism, in Walker's view. As she puts it: "[w]omanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender."
ÉcritureFéminine
In English, this phrase could be translated as "women's writing" or "feminine writing." But it's not around to refer to justanythingthat's been written by a lady-identified lady. The phrase comes to us from the work of the French feministHélène Cixous, who encouraged women to take pleasure (like, full-on naughty pleasure) in their bodies and their writing, and to let that pleasure come out loud and clear in their work.
For her,écritureféminineis writing that revels in "woman-ness." It doesn't shy away from exploring women's needs, desires, and life experiences: it's writing that welcomes radical experimentation in language and self-expression.
Essentialism
This is one of the dirty words for feminists, and not in a nice sexy consensual way. Essentialism is a way of understanding a group of people based on their similarities rather than their differences. So for feminist theory, essentialism is the view that women have certain basic qualities that make them different from men by their very essence, or basis, or nature.Allugly words to a feminist.
Although essentialist perspectives are occasionally productive (think theSuffragette Movement), they can only be taken so far. Imagine a farmer and mother of seven in Uganda. An executive who says to lean in.A Chinese lesbian vs. a Chinese-American one. A student in India, or a student in Texas. All women in the biological sense, but totally different in terms of their experiences and ways of viewing the world.
So there's kind of a big resounding "duh" when someone says that not all women experience what it means tobea woman in the same way. Factors like race, nationality, class, sexuality, and gender expression all have huge bearing on how individual women experience their "woman-ness." And erasing those differences can have really bad results.
Compulsory Heterosexuality
Yikes, that sounds a lot rougher than the sort of compulsory climb-the-rope sort of thing in elementary school gym class. This term comes to us from the work of the American poet and scholarAdrienne Rich. A lot of Rich's writings emerged in a time of civil war in feminist politics. Opposing groups of activists and thinkers were heatedly debating the ins and outs of human sexuality, and issues like pornography, kink,butch/femme roles, andsadomasochismwere hot hothot topics of the day.
Rich was a lesbian feminist who analyzed the power dynamics of intimate relationships and argued for greater compassion among women, whatever their sexuality. She argued that patriarchy enforces cultural norms that make heterosexualityseemlike the only plausible choice, when really it isn't "natural" at all: it's enforced by powerful social institutions that make it hard for women to imagine any alternative.
For example, little girls are taught from early on that falling in love with a man/handsome prince is the most natural, wonderful thing any girl could want, which is why ladies learn to compete with each other for men's attention instead of working together to overthrow oppression. According to Rich, that's a big reason ladies sometimes find it so hard to get along. Why wait for a knight in shining armor when you can ride the horse yourself?
Social Constructionism
Social constructionists are people who argue that our personal identity develops because we're conditioned by society, instead of being something that's fixed at birth. So, while some feminists argue that women are "essentially" different from men, social constructionists disagree.
These folks argue that sex and gender aren't hard-and-fast categories: what it means to be a "woman" and what it means to be a "man" have everything do with how social factors like science, religion, law, and popular culture have talked about masculinity and femininity over hundreds of years. In the words ofJudith Butler, gender identity isn't a given: it'sperformed. And the things we perform? The product of beingconstructed.
Performativity
When you see this term crop up in feminist theory, it usually means that your author's got Judith Butler on the brain. Butler is famous for arguing that there's no such thing as "true" sex or gender: according to her, social forces subtly push us to make our bodies and identities conform to norms that have been built up over centuries.
In Butler's view, sex and gender aren't "essential" parts of our identities: we "perform" them daily, and our repeated acts are what add up to be viewed as "identity." Basically if you put enough words in quotation marks you'll see how nothing's "natural" "in" "the" "first" "place." If you ain't questioning everything by now, feminism isn't doing its job.
Materialist Feminism
Like social constructionists, materialist feminists don't buy the idea of essential "woman-ness." As the French feminist thinkerMonique Wittigtells us in her 1981 essay "One Is Not Born A Woman," materialist feminists want to track how the "myth of woman" gets played out in real life.
One of the coolest things about this branch is that they think of women as a social class. Drawing from a long history of feminist responses toMarxist thought, materialist feminists want to talk about how women's oppression is shaped by capitalism. Like liberal feminists, they're interested in women's access to resources. But, unlike the liberals, they don't think that winning equal power should be feminism's end goal.
Instead, they want to expose how capitalist societies depend on oppression in order to function, and, like their radical feminist friends, they'd like to shut the system down. Now there's some material for action!
Cyborg
Whenever you encounter the word "cyborg" in feminist theory, it's bound to have something to do withDonna Haraway's notion of the term. In her famous "Manifesto for Cyborgs" (1985), Haraway uses the sci-fi figure as a metaphor for radical political thinking.
What's so great about thinking like a cyborg? Well, for one thing, cyborgs represent broken-down boundaries between humans, animals, and machines, and they don't rank human life above other forms of it. Questioning hierarchies and power structures, and using kooky metaphors to do it? Sounds pretty feminist to us.
FEMINIST THEORY ANALYSIS -JANE EYREBY CHARLOTTE BRONTË (1847)
Intro
In case you haven't read this classic, or seen any of its zillion movie adaptations, let's recap. The heroine and namesake ofJane Eyreis a young orphan girl who grows up with a cranky aunt and gets packed off to boarding school. Fast-forward and she's out in the world as a governess (glorified babysitter) looking after a little French girl at a mansion called Thornfield, where she falls in love with her grouchy boss, Edward Rochester. Eventually they're set to tie the knot when it turns out he's married to a crazy lady who runs around on all fours in the attic. Not your typical bridal shower.
All of this sounds pretty conventional, right? (Until the four-legged-former-wife part, we mean). Are you wondering what's so feminist about a marriage plot? No worries, dear reader:Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubarare gonna help us figure this one out.
Quote
"I tell you I must go!" I retorted, roused to something like passion. "Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?—You think wrong!—I have as much soul as you,—and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh:—it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal,—as we are!"
Analysis
Listen to that firebrand go! As you may have guessed, Jane, being the narrator of the whole book, is the one speaking here. That fact, which gets readers to know her deepest thoughts throughout the book, was a pretty incredible thing in Charlotte Brontë's day, so far as feminist reading goes. It wasn't all that often that female characters got to have a voice of their own.
This oh-so-famous passage highlights one important fact: Jane thinks of herself as Edward's equal. In 1847, that was a pretty mindboggingly big deal. In fact, it's downright revolutionary for Jane to put herself on equal footing with the man she loves—and to his credit, this is exactly why Edward loves Jane so much: he knows she's his equal too. If you forget the imprisoned lunatic wife, that's pretty cool for a rich white dude in 1847.