13
Introduction to Feminist Concepts and Issues
1.3
Oppression
Marilyn Frye
It is a fundamental claim of feminism that women are oppressed. The word
"oppression” is a strong word. It repels and attracts. It is dangerous and dangerously
fashionable and endangered. It is much misused, and sometimes not innocently.
The statement that women are oppressed is frequently met with the claim that
men are oppressed too. We hear that oppressing is oppressive to those who oppress
as well as to those they oppress. Some men cite as evidence of their oppression their
much-advertised inability to cry. It is tough, we are told, to be masculine. When the
stresses and frustrations of being a man are cited as evidence that oppressors are
oppressed by their oppressing, the word “oppression” is being stretched to mean-
inglessness: it is treated as though its scope includes any and all human experience
of limitation or suffering, no matter the cause, degree or consequence. Once such
usage has been put over on us, then if ever we deny that any person or group is op-
pressed, we seem to imply that we think they never suffer and have no feelings. We
are accused of insensitivity; even of bigotry. For women, such accusation is partic-
ularly intimidating, since sensitivity is one of the few virtues that has been assigned
to us. If we are found insensitive, we may fear we have no redeeming traits at all and
perhaps are not real women. Thus are we silenced before we begin: the name of our
situation drained of meaning and our guilt mechanisms tripped.
But this is nonsense. Human beings can be miserable without being oppressed,
and it is perfectly consistent to deny that a person or group is oppressed without
denying that they have feelings or that they suffer.
The root of the word “oppression” is the element “press.” The press of the crowd;
pressed into military service; to press a pair of pants; printing press; press the button.
Presses are used to mold things or flatten them or reduce them in bulk, sometimes
to reduce them by squeezing out the gasses or liquids in them. Something pressed is
something caught between or among forces and barriers which are so related to each
other that jointly they restrain, restrict or prevent the thing's motion or mobility.
Mold. Immobilize. Reduce.
The mundane experience of the oppressed provides another clue. One of the most
characteristic and ubiquitous features of the world as experienced by oppressed peo-
ple is the double bind – situations in which options are reduced to a very few and
all of them expose one to penalty, censure or deprivation. For example, it is often a
requirement upon oppressed people that we smile and be cheerful. If we comply,
we signal our docility and our acquiescence in our situation. We need not, then,
be taken note of. We acquiesce in being made invisible, in our occupying no space.
We participate in our own erasure. On the other hand, anything but the sunniest
countenance exposes us to being perceived as mean, bitter, angry or dangerous. This
14
Introduction to Feminist Concepts and Issues
catch one be
It is the exp
booby trapp
Cages. C
you cannot
means, at the least, that we may be found “difficult” or unpleasant to work with,
which is enough to cost one one's livelihood; at worst, being seen as mean, bitter,
angry or dangerous has been known to result in rape, arrest, beating and murder.
One can only choose to risk one's preferred form and rate of annihilation.
Another example: it is common in the United States that women, especially youn-
ger women, are in a bind where neither sexual activity nor sexual inactivity is all
right. If she is heterosexually active, a woman is open to censure and punishment for
being loose, unprincipled or a whore. The “punishment” comes in the form of criti-
cism, snide and embarrassing remarks, being treated as an easy lay by men, scorn
from her more restrained female friends. She may have to lie and hide her behavior
from her parents. She must juggle the risks of unwanted pregnancy and dangerous
contraceptives. On the other hand, if she refrains from heterosexual activity, she is
fairly constantly harassed by men who try to persuade her into it and pressure her to
“relax” and “let her hair down”; she is threatened with labels like “frigid,” “uptight,”
“man-hater," “bitch” and “cocktease.” The same parents who would be disapproving
of her sexual activity may be worried by her inactivity because it suggests she is not
or will not be popular, or is not sexually normal. She may be charged with lesbian-
ism. If a woman is raped, then if she has been heterosexually active she is subject
to the presumption that she liked it (since her activity is presumed to show that she
likes sex), and if she has not been heterosexually active, she is subject to the pre-
sumption that she liked it (since she is supposedly “repressed and frustrated”). Both
heterosexual activity and heterosexual non-activity are likely to be taken as proof
that
you wanted to be raped, and hence, of course, weren't really raped at all. You
can't win. You are caught in a bind, caught between systematically related pressures.
Women are caught like this, too, by networks of forces and barriers that expose
one to penalty, loss or contempt whether one works outside the home or not, is on
welfare or not, bears children or not, raises children or not, marries or not, stays
married or not, is heterosexual, lesbian, both or neither. Economic necessity; con-
finement to racial and/or sexual job ghettos; sexual harassment; sex discrimination;
pressures of competing expectations and judgments about women, wives and mothers
(in the society at large, in racial and ethnic subcultures and in one's own mind);
dependence (full or partial) on husbands, parents or the state; commitment to
political ideas; loyalties to racial or ethnic or other “minority groups; the demands
of self-respect and responsibilities to others. Each of these factors exists in complex
tension with every other, penalizing or prohibiting all of the apparently available
options. And nipping at one's heels, always, is the endless pack of little things. If one
dresses one way, one is subject to the assumption that one is advertising one's sexual
availability; if one dresses another way, one appears to “not care about oneself” or to
be "unfeminine.” If one uses “strong language," one invites categorization as a whore
or slut; if one does not, one invites categorization as a “lady” – one too delicately
constituted to cope with robust speech or the realities to which it presumably refers.
The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one's life is confined
and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and
hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to
mined by tl
of it, and b
wanted to
inspected
the wires t
the closest
harmed b
looking at
whole cag
see it in a
obvious t1
no one a
relations
It is no
and reco
and som
seeing o
people t
are shap
The a
that abo
across C
do not
The ma
while t
them.
oppres
But ea
One h
The
This c
sense.
wome
and jo
conve
noiso
pract
world
ful a
Introduction to Feminist Concepts and Issues
15
s
Es
ot
catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction.
It is the experience of being caged in: all avenues, in every direction, are blocked or
booby trapped.
Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage,
you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is deter-
mined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length
of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it
wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically
inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past
the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that
the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or
harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop
looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the
whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will
see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly
obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers,
no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their
relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.
It is now possible to grasp one of the reasons why oppression can be hard to see
and recognize: one can study the elements of an oppressive structure with great care
and some good will without seeing the structure as a whole, and hence without
seeing or being able to understand that one is looking at a cage and that there are
people there who are caged, whose motion and mobility are restricted, whose lives
are shaped and reduced.
The arresting of vision at a microscopic level yields such common confusion as
that about the male door-opening ritual. This ritual, which is remarkably widespread
across classes and races, puzzles many people, some of whom do and some of whom
do not find it offensive. Look at the scene of the two people approaching a door.
The male steps slightly ahead and opens the door. The male holds the door open
while the female glides through. Then the male goes through. The door closes after
them. “Now how one innocently asks, “can those crazy womenslibbers say that is
oppressive? The guy removed a barrier to the lady's smooth and unruffled progress.”
But each repetition of this ritual has a place in a pattern, in fact in several patterns.
One has to shift the level of one's perception in order to see the whole picture.
The door-opening pretends to be a helpful service, but the helpfulness is false.
This can be seen by noting that it will be done whether or not it makes any practical
sense. Infirm men and men burdened with packages will open doors for able-bodied
women who are free of physical burdens. Men will impose themselves awkwardly
and jostle everyone in order to get to the door first. The act is not determined by
convenience or grace. Furthermore, these very numerous acts of unneeded or even
noisome "help" occur in counterpoint to a pattern of men not being helpful in many
practical ways in which women might welcome help. What women experience is a
world in which gallant princes charming commonly make a fuss about being help-
ful and providing small services when help and services are of little or no use, but
"This bod
Women
long-tern
politics
of wome
16
Introduction to Feminist Concepts and Issues
Courses
This maja
Women's
the inclus
with multi
and diffe
Gender
reproduct
the future
historical
the fresh
pedagog
in which there are rarely ingenious and adroit princes at hand when substantial
assistance is really wanted either in mundane affairs or in situations of threat, assault
or terror. There is no help with the (his) laundry; no help typing a report at 4 a.m.;
no help in mediating disputes among relatives or children. There is nothing but
advice that women should stay indoors after dark, be chaperoned by a man, or when
it comes down to it, “lie back and enjoy it."
The gallant gestures have no practical meaning. Their meaning is symbolic. The
door-opening and similar services provided are services which really are needed by
people who are for one reason or another incapacitated - unwell, burdened with
parcels, etc. So the message is that women are incapable. The detachment of the
acts from the concrete realities of what women need and do not need is a vehicle
for the message that women's actual needs and interests are unimportant or irrel-
evant. Finally, these gestures imitate the behavior of servants toward masters and
thus mock women, who are in most respects the servants and caretakers of men.
The message of the false helpfulness of male gallantry is female dependence, the
invisibility or insignificance of women, and contempt for women.
One cannot see the meanings of these rituals if one's focus is riveted upon the
individual event in all its particularity, including the particularity of the individual
man's present conscious intentions and motives and the individual woman's con-
scious perception of the event in the moment. It seems sometimes that people take a
deliberately myopic view and fill their eyes with things seen microscopically in order
not to see macroscopically. At any rate, whether it is deliberate or not, people can
and do fail to see the oppression of women because they fail to see macroscopically
and hence fail to see the various elements of the situation as systematically related
in larger schemes.
As the cageness of the birdcage is a macroscopic phenomenon, the oppressiveness
of the situations in which women live our various and different lives is a macro-
scopic phenomenon. Neither can be seen from a microscopic perspective. But when
you look macroscopically you can see it - a network of forces and barriers which
are systematically related and which conspire to the immobilization, reduction and
molding of women and the lives we live.
Bonnie
the autho
two-volun
editor of
Woolf an
Susan E
of Wash
Gauze: V
author of
Babe: The
Healing i
Anne DI
author of
Studies (v
Djebar (2
works of
1.4
Irene La
She has a
and Indig
Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women
Redefining Difference
Audre Lorde
web
with
80
www.wiley
Much of Western European history conditions us to see human differences in sim-
plistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down,
superior/inferior. In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather
than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who
WU
2
Introduction to Feminist Concepts and Issues
Intro
1.5 Womanist
Alice Walker
1.6 Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of
Gender Identity
Michael S. Kimmel
1.7 Abandon Your Tedious Search: The Rulebook Has Been Found!
Kate Bornstein
1.8 Feminists Theorize Colonial/Postcolonial
Rosemary Marangoly George
Feminism has many different definitions and facets. A popular definition of feminism is
"the radical notion that women are people." The Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary
defines it as "1: the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes; 2:
organized activity on behalf of women's rights and interests."Feminism thus includes both
scholarship and activism. African American public intellectual bell hooks takes issue with
a narrow definition of feminism that focuses only on seeking equality with men. She
importantly asks, to which men do which women seek to be equal, given that not all men
are equal? She highlights the extent to which this narrow definition of feminism only
focuses on gender issues and therefore applies best to the situation of white, middle-class
women. She goes on to redefine feminism more broadly and radically: "Feminism as a
movement to end sexist oppression directs our attention to systems of domination and
the inter-relatedness of sex, race, and class oppression"("Feminism"31). The most complete
definition of feminism is probably that of Black lesbian writer-activist Barbara Smith:
"Feminism is the political theory and practice that struggles 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. Anything less than this
vision of total freedom is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement" (25).
(Sandoval), "multiple co
Intersectionality can be tr
Truth and Anna Julia Coc
connections between so
orientation, race and class
sexual orientation as pro
contribution to scholarsh
the interrelatedness of ra
1972; Mitsuye Yamada in
gender, class, and sexua
Cherrie Moraga and Glor
nialism, race, class, and
around the 1990s, schola
gender, race, and nationa
Yuval-Davis) and among
Wendell) and gender, ra
Morris) have made impo
identity had been added
queer, questioning, and i
oppression and identity.
lesson feminists have le
tional approaches is that
sense of our life experier
location (the time and p
access, as well as the s
belonging).
The readings in this int
above. Chicana creative w
novel The House on Man
character of young Espera
ficulties of having multip
you to be only one thing,
Her first name, Spanish fo
meaning reflects her sen
cultures - and her hope
strong woman in her line
meaning of her name - b
in your lineage and cultur
your place in society. Her
awareness of the different
States - her "silver"-sound
in English
In her book The Politi
"Oppression" is excerpted
a critical definition of op
Intersectional Feminism
Smith's and hooks's definitions are intersectional, a term that means that they do not
only focus on one issue such as gender but broaden the analysis to encompass other
vectors of identity and of human domination such as race and racism, social class and
classism, sexual orientation, colonialism and imperialism, disability, national origin, reli-
gion, and age. This wide-ranging approach, which has created a paradigm shift in
Women's Studies, Ethnic Studies, and other fields, has come to be known as intersection-
ality (Crenshaw) but is also variously termed “Black feminist thought" (Collins), "multiracial
feminism" (Zinn and Dill), "multicultural feminism" (Shohat), "US Third-World feminism"
Original publication details: 1.7 Kate Bornstein, “Abandon Your Tedious Search: The Rulebook
Has Been Found!” from Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us, pp. 45–52. New York:
Routledge, 1994. Reproduced with permission of Taylor & Francis Group LLC. 1.8 Rosemary Marangoly
George, “Feminists Theorize Colonial/Postcolonial” from Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary
Theory, ed. Ellen Rooney, pp. 211-16; 220-23, 227–31. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2006. Reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press.
13
Introduction to Feminist Concepts and Issues
1.3
Oppression
Marilyn Frye
It is a fundamental claim of feminism that women are oppressed. The word
"oppression” is a strong word. It repels and attracts. It is dangerous and dangerously
fashionable and endangered. It is much misused, and sometimes not innocently.
The statement that women are oppressed is frequently met with the claim that
men are oppressed too. We hear that oppressing is oppressive to those who oppress
as well as to those they oppress. Some men cite as evidence of their oppression their
much-advertised inability to cry. It is tough, we are told, to be masculine. When the
stresses and frustrations of being a man are cited as evidence that oppressors are
oppressed by their oppressing, the word “oppression” is being stretched to mean-
inglessness: it is treated as though its scope includes any and all human experience
of limitation or suffering, no matter the cause, degree or consequence. Once such
usage has been put over on us, then if ever we deny that any person or group is op-
pressed, we seem to imply that we think they never suffer and have no feelings. We
are accused of insensitivity; even of bigotry. For women, such accusation is partic-
ularly intimidating, since sensitivity is one of the few virtues that has been assigned
to us. If we are found insensitive, we may fear we have no redeeming traits at all and
perhaps are not real women. Thus are we silenced before we begin: the name of our
situation drained of meaning and our guilt mechanisms tripped.
But this is nonsense. Human beings can be miserable without being oppressed,
and it is perfectly consistent to deny that a person or group is oppressed without
denying that they have feelings or that they suffer.
The root of the word “oppression” is the element “press.” The press of the crowd;
pressed into military service; to press a pair of pants; printing press; press the button.
Presses are used to mold things or flatten them or reduce them in bulk, sometimes
to reduce them by squeezing out the gasses or liquids in them. Something pressed is
something caught between or among forces and barriers which are so related to each
other that jointly they restrain, restrict or prevent the thing's motion or mobility.
Mold. Immobilize. Reduce.
The mundane experience of the oppressed provides another clue. One of the most
characteristic and ubiquitous features of the world as experienced by oppressed peo-
ple is the double bind – situations in which options are reduced to a very few and
all of them expose one to penalty, censure or deprivation. For example, it is often a
requirement upon oppressed people that we smile and be cheerful. If we comply,
we signal our docility and our acquiescence in our situation. We need not, then,
be taken note of. We acquiesce in being made invisible, in our occupying no space.
We participate in our own erasure. On the other hand, anything but the sunniest
countenance exposes us to being perceived as mean, bitter, angry or dangerous. This
14
Introduction to Feminist Concepts and Issues
catch one be
It is the exp
booby trapp
Cages. C
you cannot
means, at the least, that we may be found “difficult” or unpleasant to work with,
which is enough to cost one one's livelihood; at worst, being seen as mean, bitter,
angry or dangerous has been known to result in rape, arrest, beating and murder.
One can only choose to risk one's preferred form and rate of annihilation.
Another example: it is common in the United States that women, especially youn-
ger women, are in a bind where neither sexual activity nor sexual inactivity is all
right. If she is heterosexually active, a woman is open to censure and punishment for
being loose, unprincipled or a whore. The “punishment” comes in the form of criti-
cism, snide and embarrassing remarks, being treated as an easy lay by men, scorn
from her more restrained female friends. She may have to lie and hide her behavior
from her parents. She must juggle the risks of unwanted pregnancy and dangerous
contraceptives. On the other hand, if she refrains from heterosexual activity, she is
fairly constantly harassed by men who try to persuade her into it and pressure her to
“relax” and “let her hair down”; she is threatened with labels like “frigid,” “uptight,”
“man-hater," “bitch” and “cocktease.” The same parents who would be disapproving
of her sexual activity may be worried by her inactivity because it suggests she is not
or will not be popular, or is not sexually normal. She may be charged with lesbian-
ism. If a woman is raped, then if she has been heterosexually active she is subject
to the presumption that she liked it (since her activity is presumed to show that she
likes sex), and if she has not been heterosexually active, she is subject to the pre-
sumption that she liked it (since she is supposedly “repressed and frustrated”). Both
heterosexual activity and heterosexual non-activity are likely to be taken as proof
that
you wanted to be raped, and hence, of course, weren't really raped at all. You
can't win. You are caught in a bind, caught between systematically related pressures.
Women are caught like this, too, by networks of forces and barriers that expose
one to penalty, loss or contempt whether one works outside the home or not, is on
welfare or not, bears children or not, raises children or not, marries or not, stays
married or not, is heterosexual, lesbian, both or neither. Economic necessity; con-
finement to racial and/or sexual job ghettos; sexual harassment; sex discrimination;
pressures of competing expectations and judgments about women, wives and mothers
(in the society at large, in racial and ethnic subcultures and in one's own mind);
dependence (full or partial) on husbands, parents or the state; commitment to
political ideas; loyalties to racial or ethnic or other “minority groups; the demands
of self-respect and responsibilities to others. Each of these factors exists in complex
tension with every other, penalizing or prohibiting all of the apparently available
options. And nipping at one's heels, always, is the endless pack of little things. If one
dresses one way, one is subject to the assumption that one is advertising one's sexual
availability; if one dresses another way, one appears to “not care about oneself” or to
be "unfeminine.” If one uses “strong language," one invites categorization as a whore
or slut; if one does not, one invites categorization as a “lady” – one too delicately
constituted to cope with robust speech or the realities to which it presumably refers.
The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one's life is confined
and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and
hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to
mined by tl
of it, and b
wanted to
inspected
the wires t
the closest
harmed b
looking at
whole cag
see it in a
obvious t1
no one a
relations
It is no
and reco
and som
seeing o
people t
are shap
The a
that abo
across C
do not
The ma
while t
them.
oppres
But ea
One h
The
This c
sense.
wome
and jo
conve
noiso
pract
world
ful a
Introduction to Feminist Concepts and Issues
15
s
Es
ot
catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction.
It is the experience of being caged in: all avenues, in every direction, are blocked or
booby trapped.
Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage,
you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is deter-
mined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length
of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it
wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically
inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past
the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that
the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or
harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop
looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the
whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will
see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly
obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers,
no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their
relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.
It is now possible to grasp one of the reasons why oppression can be hard to see
and recognize: one can study the elements of an oppressive structure with great care
and some good will without seeing the structure as a whole, and hence without
seeing or being able to understand that one is looking at a cage and that there are
people there who are caged, whose motion and mobility are restricted, whose lives
are shaped and reduced.
The arresting of vision at a microscopic level yields such common confusion as
that about the male door-opening ritual. This ritual, which is remarkably widespread
across classes and races, puzzles many people, some of whom do and some of whom
do not find it offensive. Look at the scene of the two people approaching a door.
The male steps slightly ahead and opens the door. The male holds the door open
while the female glides through. Then the male goes through. The door closes after
them. “Now how one innocently asks, “can those crazy womenslibbers say that is
oppressive? The guy removed a barrier to the lady's smooth and unruffled progress.”
But each repetition of this ritual has a place in a pattern, in fact in several patterns.
One has to shift the level of one's perception in order to see the whole picture.
The door-opening pretends to be a helpful service, but the helpfulness is false.
This can be seen by noting that it will be done whether or not it makes any practical
sense. Infirm men and men burdened with packages will open doors for able-bodied
women who are free of physical burdens. Men will impose themselves awkwardly
and jostle everyone in order to get to the door first. The act is not determined by
convenience or grace. Furthermore, these very numerous acts of unneeded or even
noisome "help" occur in counterpoint to a pattern of men not being helpful in many
practical ways in which women might welcome help. What women experience is a
world in which gallant princes charming commonly make a fuss about being help-
ful and providing small services when help and services are of little or no use, but
"This bod
Women
long-tern
politics
of wome
16
Introduction to Feminist Concepts and Issues
Courses
This maja
Women's
the inclus
with multi
and diffe
Gender
reproduct
the future
historical
the fresh
pedagog
in which there are rarely ingenious and adroit princes at hand when substantial
assistance is really wanted either in mundane affairs or in situations of threat, assault
or terror. There is no help with the (his) laundry; no help typing a report at 4 a.m.;
no help in mediating disputes among relatives or children. There is nothing but
advice that women should stay indoors after dark, be chaperoned by a man, or when
it comes down to it, “lie back and enjoy it."
The gallant gestures have no practical meaning. Their meaning is symbolic. The
door-opening and similar services provided are services which really are needed by
people who are for one reason or another incapacitated - unwell, burdened with
parcels, etc. So the message is that women are incapable. The detachment of the
acts from the concrete realities of what women need and do not need is a vehicle
for the message that women's actual needs and interests are unimportant or irrel-
evant. Finally, these gestures imitate the behavior of servants toward masters and
thus mock women, who are in most respects the servants and caretakers of men.
The message of the false helpfulness of male gallantry is female dependence, the
invisibility or insignificance of women, and contempt for women.
One cannot see the meanings of these rituals if one's focus is riveted upon the
individual event in all its particularity, including the particularity of the individual
man's present conscious intentions and motives and the individual woman's con-
scious perception of the event in the moment. It seems sometimes that people take a
deliberately myopic view and fill their eyes with things seen microscopically in order
not to see macroscopically. At any rate, whether it is deliberate or not, people can
and do fail to see the oppression of women because they fail to see macroscopically
and hence fail to see the various elements of the situation as systematically related
in larger schemes.
As the cageness of the birdcage is a macroscopic phenomenon, the oppressiveness
of the situations in which women live our various and different lives is a macro-
scopic phenomenon. Neither can be seen from a microscopic perspective. But when
you look macroscopically you can see it - a network of forces and barriers which
are systematically related and which conspire to the immobilization, reduction and
molding of women and the lives we live.
Bonnie
the autho
two-volun
editor of
Woolf an
Susan E
of Wash
Gauze: V
author of
Babe: The
Healing i
Anne DI
author of
Studies (v
Djebar (2
works of
1.4
Irene La
She has a
and Indig
Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women
Redefining Difference
Audre Lorde
web
with
80
www.wiley
Much of Western European history conditions us to see human differences in sim-
plistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down,
superior/inferior. In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather
than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who
WU
2
Introduction to Feminist Concepts and Issues
Intro
1.5 Womanist
Alice Walker
1.6 Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of
Gender Identity
Michael S. Kimmel
1.7 Abandon Your Tedious Search: The Rulebook Has Been Found!
Kate Bornstein
1.8 Feminists Theorize Colonial/Postcolonial
Rosemary Marangoly George
Feminism has many different definitions and facets. A popular definition of feminism is
"the radical notion that women are people." The Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary
defines it as "1: the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes; 2:
organized activity on behalf of women's rights and interests."Feminism thus includes both
scholarship and activism. African American public intellectual bell hooks takes issue with
a narrow definition of feminism that focuses only on seeking equality with men. She
importantly asks, to which men do which women seek to be equal, given that not all men
are equal? She highlights the extent to which this narrow definition of feminism only
focuses on gender issues and therefore applies best to the situation of white, middle-class
women. She goes on to redefine feminism more broadly and radically: "Feminism as a
movement to end sexist oppression directs our attention to systems of domination and
the inter-relatedness of sex, race, and class oppression"("Feminism"31). The most complete
definition of feminism is probably that of Black lesbian writer-activist Barbara Smith:
"Feminism is the political theory and practice that struggles 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. Anything less than this
vision of total freedom is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement" (25).
(Sandoval), "multiple co
Intersectionality can be tr
Truth and Anna Julia Coc
connections between so
orientation, race and class
sexual orientation as pro
contribution to scholarsh
the interrelatedness of ra
1972; Mitsuye Yamada in
gender, class, and sexua
Cherrie Moraga and Glor
nialism, race, class, and
around the 1990s, schola
gender, race, and nationa
Yuval-Davis) and among
Wendell) and gender, ra
Morris) have made impo
identity had been added
queer, questioning, and i
oppression and identity.
lesson feminists have le
tional approaches is that
sense of our life experier
location (the time and p
access, as well as the s
belonging).
The readings in this int
above. Chicana creative w
novel The House on Man
character of young Espera
ficulties of having multip
you to be only one thing,
Her first name, Spanish fo
meaning reflects her sen
cultures - and her hope
strong woman in her line
meaning of her name - b
in your lineage and cultur
your place in society. Her
awareness of the different
States - her "silver"-sound
in English
In her book The Politi
"Oppression" is excerpted
a critical definition of op
Intersectional Feminism
Smith's and hooks's definitions are intersectional, a term that means that they do not
only focus on one issue such as gender but broaden the analysis to encompass other
vectors of identity and of human domination such as race and racism, social class and
classism, sexual orientation, colonialism and imperialism, disability, national origin, reli-
gion, and age. This wide-ranging approach, which has created a paradigm shift in
Women's Studies, Ethnic Studies, and other fields, has come to be known as intersection-
ality (Crenshaw) but is also variously termed “Black feminist thought" (Collins), "multiracial
feminism" (Zinn and Dill), "multicultural feminism" (Shohat), "US Third-World feminism"
Original publication details: 1.7 Kate Bornstein, “Abandon Your Tedious Search: The Rulebook
Has Been Found!” from Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us, pp. 45–52. New York:
Routledge, 1994. Reproduced with permission of Taylor & Francis Group LLC. 1.8 Rosemary Marangoly
George, “Feminists Theorize Colonial/Postcolonial” from Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary
Theory, ed. Ellen Rooney, pp. 211-16; 220-23, 227–31. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2006. Reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press.
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