Philosophy of Feminism PDF

Philosophy of feminism  Out of 193 member states of the United Nations, only 15 countries have women as head of states and 16 as Head of the Governments. Women make 22.8 percent of cabinet members. In General Election of 2024, only 27 women succeeded on general seats in Pakistan out of 2...

Philosophy of feminism  Out of 193 member states of the United Nations, only 15 countries have women as head of states and 16 as Head of the Governments. Women make 22.8 percent of cabinet members. In General Election of 2024, only 27 women succeeded on general seats in Pakistan out of 266 constituencies of National Assembly.  Globally, approximately 51,100 women and girls were killed by their intimate partners or other family members during 2023. Women and girls everywhere continue to be affected by this extreme form of gender-based violence and no region is excluded. With an estimated 21,700 victims of intimate partner/family member femicide in 2023, Africa is the region with the highest number of victims in aggregate terms Mary Wollstonecraft 1759–1797, ENGLISH Wollstonecraft became a pioneering thinker of the British Enlightenment, producing a landmark text of feminist philosophy that paved the way for the suffragette and women’s movements. A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN This is the title page from the first (1792) American edition of Wollstonecraft’s text. Its publication marked the origins of feminist philosophy and positioned the author as one of the major thinkers of the Enlightenment in Britain. Waves of feminism The evolution of the feminist struggle with elapse of time is often referred to as „waves‟ of change. The global civilization has already passed three waves of feminism and forth wave is running since 2012. First wave The term “The First Wave of Feminism” was coined in March 1968, by journalist Martha Weinman Lear. It is categorized as focusing on the fight for women’s political power. It takes place mainly in the USA and the UK from the 1820s to 1940s when women being treated as second rate citizens in male-dominated societies and is represented by the liberal feminism. Its primary goal is to gain equal rights for women and for the securing voting rights. The 19th amendment to the US constitution passes in the Senate on June 4, 1919. Within the 1950s women of the most European countries and colonies get partial/full voting rights. Women of most of the European countries, such as Russia, Germany, Austria and the UK receive the right to vote in 1918, Belgium in 1919, US and Canada in 1920, Ireland in 1928, and Spain in 1931, etc. Second Wave Feminism French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir writes in her book The Second Sex that throughout history, the standard measure of what we take to be human both in philosophy and in society at large has been a peculiarly male view. One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman": This famous quote encapsulates Beauvoir’s argument that gender is not innate but socially constructed. She distinguishes between biological sex and gender, a groundbreaking concept for her time. The duration of second wave feminism starts in the 1960s and ends after a period of three decades, in the 1990s. Sexuality and reproductive rights are dominant issues in this movement. After the naming the first wave of feminism, Martha Lear also coins the term “second wave feminism”. The movement emerges in the wake of World War II when many women enter the labor force, and challenge current notions of the  It extends many other matters, such as equal education opportunities, equal employment opportunities, equal pay in workplaces, paid maternity leave, birth control and abortion rights, the establishment of adequate childcare facilities, rights of equal access to political and economic positions, and women and children’s safety. It also focuses against domestic violence issues, marital rape issues, sexual harassment and rape, misogyny, official legal inequalities, pornography and prostitution, and the sexual objectification of women’ s bodies. It also wants to create rape-crisis centers and women’ s shelters, and to bring changes in custody laws and divorce law. It takes various attempts to eliminate gender inequality from the society Third wave feminism The third wave feminism is represented by diverse modes of thoughts and extents from the 1990s to 2000s. It brings to light issues of heteronormativity and body positivity. The term “third wave feminism” is coined by American writer, feminist, and activist Rebecca Walker, daughter of feminist Alice Walker, in her famous article “Becoming the Third Wave” in 1992 It is led by the scholars and activists of Generation X, who born in the 1960s and 1970s in the developed world. Actually, many of the third-wave feminists are second wavers‟ daughters. Responded to critiques of the second wave's focus on middle-class white women, emphasizing diversity, race, LGBTQ+ issues, and global perspectives. Intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, became a central framework. Embraced individuality, gender fluidity, and reclaiming traditionally "feminine" traits Fourth wave feminism The world has faced the fourth wave feminism since 2012, which is based on online technology. Activists and writers of Generations Y (Millennials), who born from 1981 to 1996, and Generations Z, who born in the mid to late 1990s to 2010s, are the feminists of fourth wave feminism. Feminism that is originated from social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, considers as the fourth wave feminism It is forms of interaction and contacts among women, which mainly take place online. During this movement, social justice campaigns have erupted on social media, such as #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. Ealasaid Munro has called it “Hashtag Feminism”, which is started around 2008 based on the “culture of callout” that creates hubs for women as “consciousness-raising groups. The sex/gender binary During the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, the theories put forward by biologists, medical researchers and psychologists dominated understandings of gender. These early accounts were mainly concerned with establishing ‘natural’ or ‘biological’ explanations for human behavior. Researchers sought to discover underlying ‘sex differences’ which they believed produced different psychological and behavioral dispositions in males and females. They spoke of sex, not gender, and did not distinguish between the two as we often do today. Within these naturalistic approaches, sex is conceptualized in terms of binaries: male/female; man/ woman; masculine/feminine  Few within the social sciences questioned these ‘scientific’ theories about sexual difference. Classical sociology both drew on and contributed to understandings of sex, gender and sexuality as binary categories ordained by nature. However, this was to change dramatically in the second part of the twentieth century as debates about how we conceptualize gender steadily grew. In the 1960s and 1970s, a new way of thinking about gender began to emerge that critiqued earlier ‘essentialist’ frameworks, signaling a shift away from biologically based accounts of gender and towards social analysis. This shift from naturalizing to social constructionist accounts, although not necessarily denying the role of biology, emphasized the importance of social and cultural factors in defining gender. The term ‘sex’ referred to the biological differences between females and males, differences defined in terms of the anatomy and physiology of the body; gender referred to the social meanings and value attached to being female or male in any given society, expressed in terms of the concepts femininity and masculinity. This distinction between sex (biological) and gender (cultural) is what is termed the sex/gender binary. Sex as a social construction Since the 1990s, a different understanding of sex and its relationship to gender has emerged. The distinction between sex and gender has been challenged by arguments that sex is just as much a social construction as gender. Rather than thinking about sex and gender as separate from each other (sex being the foundation upon which gender is superimposed), gender has increasingly been used to refer to any social construction having to do with the female/male binary, including male and female bodies. This has led to debates about whether it is useful any more to differentiate between sex and gender. For example, both Christine Delphy ( and Judith Butler ( 2006) have argued that the body is not free from social interpretation but is itself a socially constructed phenomenon (see also Woodward in this volume). It is through understandings of gender that we interpret and establish meanings for bodily differences that are termed sexual difference. Feminist gender theory Feminists have critiqued essentialist understandings of gender and sex and have played an important role in establishing a body of research and theory that supports social constructionist approaches. However, the main concern in feminist theories of gender is not simply to describe the ways in which gender is socially and culturally defined in any given society – for instance, whether ‘being a woman’ is associated with having the responsibility of childcare or whether ‘being a man’ is associated with being the principle breadwinner in a family structure. Gender roles The main focus of work on gender carried out during the 1970s and 1980s was on exploring the production of masculinity and femininity. Many feminist writers, as I stated in the previous section, argued that gender is culturally determined and that we become differently gendered through socialisation into gender roles or, as it was often termed then, ‘sex roles’. Gender role theory, drawing on the principles of social learning theory, claimed that through various learning processes (for example, observation, imitation, modelling, differential reinforcement) and agencies of socialisation (for example parents, teachers, peers, the media) children learn the social meanings, values, norms and expectations associated with ‘being a girl’ or ‘being a boy’ and to develop ways of behaving and personality characteristics considered appropriate (or not) for a woman or man. Gender labelling: Attributing gendered terms like boy, girl, woman, man to self and others. acquisition of gender knowledge: Learning historically and culturally specific knowledge about gender. „„ Universality of gender: The idea that all human beings ‘have’ a gender. „„ Gender constancy: The idea that gender is unchanging. Gender as hierarchy These early socialisation theories of gender appear to us now as rather naïve and far too simplistic. From thinking about gender roles in terms of either masculinity or femininity, we now recognise that there are multiple genders and many patterns of masculinities and femininities – what some refer to as gender pluralism or gender diversity For example, in her paper One Is Not Born a Woman, echoing Simone de Beauvoir, Wittig (1981, 1992) argues that gender is an imaginary foundation, the outcome of a social hierarchy in which one class of people (men) have power and privilege over another class of people (women). The categories ‘woman’ and ‘man’ are relative, defined by a specific social and economic position in society. Gender is commonly thought to be the cause of one’s social and economic position (a). In Wittig’s analysis gender derives from one’s place in the social hierarchies that exist in society (b). In other words, gender is the mark of one’s subordination as a woman rather than its basis. (a) One’s gender as ‘woman’ leads to social subordination. (b) Patriarchal hierarchies define one as a ‘woman’. Intersectionality Intersectionality has its roots in anti-racist feminism in the United States. The term has been attributed to Kimberle Crenshaw, quoted above, but work of other black feminists – such as Patricia Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought (1990) and bell hooks in her book Ain’t I a Woman ( 2015) – raised similar issues about the need to understand how gender intersects with race, even before the term intersectionality was coined. Postmodern theories of gender The work of Judith Butler ( 2006, 2011) in particular is associated with postmodern theories of gender. Her book Gender Trouble, first published in 1990, has been enormously influential in conceptualizing gender and the development of queer theory. In this work Butler: proposes a new understanding of gender as performativity; questions the usefulness of the sex/gender binary; and suggests heterosexuality is an effect of gender. Butler argues that gender is performatively enacted. In her early work she used drag to convey what she means by this. Typically, drag is understood as impersonation: a drag queen is a ‘real’ man giving a performance as a woman. Butler argues that there are parallels between drag and the performance of gender in everyday life: gender is a kind of impersonation that passes for real. Gender is constituted out of attempts to compel belief in others that we are ‘really’ a woman or a man. For Butler, there is no ‘real’ gender of which drag is an impersonation. She claims that ‘there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender’, arguing instead that identity is constituted by ‘the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’. Feminist perspectives: radical, Marxist, dual systems theory and liberal feminism Radical Feminism The concept of ‘patriarchy’, which denotes the systematic male dominance of women by men, lay at the heart of radical feminism. Patriarchy was seen to be universal in that it existed across all cultures and historical periods, though taking different forms according to time and place. The family and reproduction were highlighted as key sites of women’s oppression. Women, it was argued, were exploited by virtue of their sex through, for example, unpaid domestic labour in the home, which, in turn, restricted their ability to gain positions of power in society. Reproduction was identified as central to these processes of inequality as through reproductive practices, women become materially and emotionally dependent upon men. Shulamith Firestone (1971), for example, argued that the abolition of the family was intrinsic to women’s liberation. Male sexual violence towards women was also stressed as a major source of women’s oppression and, here, rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment and pornography were positioned as integral to patriarchy’s systematic subjugation of women. From a radical feminist perspective, women’s liberation is only achievable if patriarchy is overthrown.  Marxist Feminism While radical feminism positioned patriarchy as an overarching structure of women’s oppression, Marxist feminists argued that the system of capitalism structured gender inequality. From this perspective, economic class relations lay at the root of the subordination of women. Power imbalances within this perspective are maintained as a result of women’s unequal position in the labour market, and the subordinated role of domestic labour. Gender inequality is therefore a system of class inequality, which is maintained to serve the interests of the ruling class. From a Marxist feminist perspective, women’s oppression is only achievable if capitalism is overthrown Dual Systems Feminist Theory Alternatively known as ‘socialist feminism’, this approach points to the ways in which women are disadvantaged as a result of their dual roles in the home and the workplace. Employers, it is argued, exploit women by paying them lower wages than men, while women are additionally exploited at home through the unpaid labour attached to childcare and housework. From a dual systems, or socialist, feminist perspective, women’s oppression is only achievable if these two variables are mutually addressed. Liberal Feminism Rather than focus upon an overriding cause of women’s inequality (for example, patriarchy or capitalism), liberal feminists tended to highlight issues such as cultural gender stereotyping, and gender divisions in the home and employment. These aspects of gender inequality, liberal feminists argued, can be erased through equal opportunities legislation and other democratic measures. From a liberal feminist perspective, women’s oppression is only achievable through processes of social, policy and legal reform. Catherine Rottenberg (2017) has recently explored the resurgence of what she critically terms ‘neo-liberal’ feminism, which centres on individual rights and foregrounds notions of ‘choice’. Neo-liberal feminism, Rottenberg argues, represents a current strain of popular feminism, which is reproduced through the media and is evident in the highprofile campaigns of politicians such as Hilary Clinton. Though this perspective shows the millennium appeal of feminist values such as autonomy and choice, it is, argues Rottenberg, overly individualistic and without a deeper political critique of women’s oppression