Speedrun Feminism in One Post! 50,000 Chinese Characters of Highlights—Save This Collection

How do you speedrun these key feminist concepts in one post—50,000 Chinese characters long?

Liberal feminism, socialist feminism, radical feminism, existentialism, intersectionality, the third wave, poststructuralism and postmodernism and queer & trans theory, postcolonial and global feminisms, film theory & the male gaze…

Source books:

• Reading Feminist Theory: From Modernity to Postmodernity, edited by Susan Archer Mann and Ashly Suzanne Patterson (Oxford University Press, 2016).
• Feminist Film Theory and Pretty Woman, by Mari Ruti (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).

About this compilation: Compiled and translated into Chinese by 茶话会班委会 (Chahuahui Banweihui), this selection retains the anthology’s reading numbers, chapter references, historical perspective, and editorial “we.” Its poststructuralist, queer, and trans introduction is by Jane Ward and Susan Mann. The concluding film discussion is drawn from Mari Ruti’s book; its “I” is Ruti’s. Ellipses mark the compilation’s excerpt boundaries.

Liberal Feminism

The “Woman Question” and Enlightenment Thought

Liberal feminism’s deepest theoretical roots lie in Enlightenment thought—a body of ideas that shook the foundations of social life in Europe and the American colonies during the eighteenth century. The term “Enlightenment” expressed the conviction that this new social thought could lead the world out of an age of darkness and ignorance into a world of science and reason. These ideas, radical in their time, supplied the ideology and slogans of the eighteenth century’s great revolutions: the French Revolution and the American War of Independence. To establish a government, citizens should have a written contract setting out the rights and responsibilities of both government and citizens. Citizens could not be governed without their consent; they could even overthrow a government that abandoned its responsibilities or violated their rights. Enlightenment thinkers also insisted that citizens possessed “natural and inalienable rights,” such as freedom of speech and assembly.

Yet on the “woman question,” many Enlightenment thinkers were far less progressive than their critical ideas might suggest. This is clear in Reading 8, the correspondence between Abigail Adams and her husband John on the eve of the American Revolution. As American independence approached, Abigail asked him to “remember the ladies.” John replied, “I cannot but laugh,” calling her proposed code of laws “extraordinary” and Abigail herself “saucy.” His views on suffrage were typical of Enlightenment thinkers and reveal how gender, class, and race intersected in their refusal to give women the vote. Like many other male Enlightenment thinkers, John Adams made property ownership a qualification for voting. In a letter to James Sullivan, he described people without property as “too dependent upon other Men to have a Will of their own.” Thus, although Enlightenment ideas were radical in their day, many people remained excluded from the rights the Enlightenment so proudly proclaimed.

The Rise of the US Women’s Movement in Early Modernity

Married women’s inability to own property or control their earnings and wealth arose from coverture, the doctrine that dominated marriage law across much of the United States. Under this doctrine, once a man and woman married, they counted as one person before the law. That “one” was the man: he controlled the family’s property and income and had the legal right to discipline and punish his wife and children. Reading 16, Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” depicts the constraints of coverture and the freedom the story’s wife feels when she believes her husband has died in a train accident.

Abolitionism was a crucial catalyst for the nineteenth-century US women’s movement. In Reading 10, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1837), the prominent feminist and abolitionist Sarah Grimké combines a feminist critique of free women’s “miserably deficient” education with a powerful account of the tyranny and sexual violence suffered by enslaved women. Grimké asks: “Can any American woman look at these scenes of shocking licentiousness and cruelty, and fold her hands in apathy, and say, ‘I have nothing to do with slavery’? She cannot and be guiltless.”

Women learned important political and organizational skills in the abolitionist movement. They also learned that they could not participate on equal terms with male abolitionists. Women were barred from some abolitionist organizations and had to fight for the mere right to speak in public. One major theme some white liberal feminists used to advance their demands was the similarity between their own lack of freedom and that of enslaved people. This appears in Reading 15, “On Being Arrested for Voting Illegally,” Susan B. Anthony’s speech during the trial that followed her arrest, along with fifteen other women, for attempting to vote in a presidential election. Anthony discusses how neither free women nor enslaved people could own property, control their earnings, keep their names, or retain custody of their children. As discussed in Chapter 5, many African American women disliked this comparison, given the stark differences between the lives of enslaved people and those of white, middle-class suffragists.

The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments

The first women’s rights convention in US history took place in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Its demands were expressed in the famous Declaration of Sentiments, reproduced in Reading 11. Drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and modeled on the Declaration of Independence, it emphasized the contradiction between the rights the earlier declaration upheld and women’s exclusion from them. The Declaration of Sentiments listed ways in which men exercised “tyranny” over women: denying women their “inalienable right to the elective franchise,” taking “all right in property, even to the wages she earns,” and making a married woman “in the eye of the law, civilly dead.” Women also had to fight for custody of their children, since men received custody in the rare divorces of the period.

These demands challenged the era’s dominant discourse, usually called the “cult of domesticity” or the “cult of true womanhood,” which romanticized women’s roles as wives, homemakers, and mothers. It was supported by the doctrine of “separate spheres”—also described here as gender binarism—which held that the private sphere of the home belonged to women and the public sphere outside it to men. Of course, how far women’s lives could conform to this ideal depended on their social position: enslaved women and most poor and working-class women had to work outside the home. Although the cult of domesticity distinguished class-privileged “ladies” from other women, it still restricted middle-class women’s lives.

Early-Modern Liberal Feminists on Love, Marriage, and Sex

Because England was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, British feminists wrote some of liberal feminism’s earliest works. Reading 9 comes from the introduction to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft argued that women gained only superficial standing by claiming beauty, purity, and delicacy as their natural attributes. She emphasized the need for cultural, educational, and economic reforms that would enable women to develop their abilities and give importance to reason and self-realization. In these ways, Wollstonecraft offered a visionary feminist critique of the social construction of gender in her day.

Half a century later, the British writers Harriet Taylor Mill and John Stuart Mill echoed these liberal ideas, emphasizing how existing marriage laws trapped women in violent and oppressive relationships. Reading 12 is from Harriet Taylor Mill’s “The Enfranchisement of Women,” and Reading 13 from John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women. Both wrote extensively about the importance of reforming marriage, divorce, and child-custody laws, and Enlightenment ideals of reason and self-determination permeate their work. By presenting sexual violence as a symptom of the larger problem of unequal gender relations, these advocates of sexual reform laid important foundations for later feminist analyses of domestic violence and sexual assault.

First-Wave Environmental Activism

Unlike moderate liberal feminists, who worked mainly with members of their own social class, many middle-class, left-liberal suffragists engaged in environmental activism in this period. They worked in settlement houses or mutual-aid associations, and/or experimented with collective arrangements such as communal kitchens and childcare. Because settlement houses and mutual-aid associations were rooted in neighborhoods, these social reformers worked among poor and working-class communities and gained an intimate understanding of the ravages of poverty and squalor. The best-known settlement, Jane Addams’s Hull House in Chicago, provided healthcare, childcare, and adult education for poor and working-class families and advocated workers’ trade-union rights.

Hull House women were deeply involved in tackling environmental problems. Under the banner of municipal housekeeping, they emphasized how directly these problems affected the safety of their homes and families. Thousands of women mobilized to address environmental problems arising from modernization and industrialization: air and water pollution, sanitation, food sales, and occupational safety. Reading 18 excerpts Jane Addams’s writings on municipal housekeeping. Addams pointed not only to women’s traditional responsibility for health and sanitation but also to their right to vote on matters that so profoundly affected their families and communities.

Existing ecofeminist literature often overlooks African American feminists’ substantial contribution to municipal housekeeping, usually through Black women’s clubs and/or mutual-aid associations they established. Overall, the Black women’s club movement faced more severe problems than its white counterparts. Health conditions in segregated Black shantytowns and slums were dangerous, while issues such as childcare were more urgent for the overwhelming majority of Black women. Indeed, the social problems these women addressed spanned the whole life cycle, from nurseries to homes for the elderly. Their work helped compensate for the underfunding of Black schools, hospitals, and clinics.

Winning the Vote

In 1890, the two major US women’s suffrage organizations merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), which devoted its energies to winning the vote. By the early twentieth century, a new and more militant generation of liberal suffragists had come of age. Led by Alice Paul, they formed the Woman’s Party. Working specifically for a federal women’s suffrage amendment, they used a wider range of tactics than NAWSA—tactics Paul had learned through her encounters with militant British suffragists. They protested outside the White House and even went on hunger strike. All of these activities were considered radical at the time, and the women were arrested and imprisoned on several occasions.

The variety of liberal activism devoted to winning the vote was impressive, and the struggle was long. Seventy years elapsed between Seneca Falls and the victory of women’s suffrage with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Former NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt estimated that the effort involved (as recounted in Woman Suffrage and Politics, written with Nettie Rogers Shuler):

fifty-six campaigns of referenda to male voters; 480 campaigns to urge Legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters; 47 campaigns to induce State constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into State constitutions; 277 campaigns to persuade State party conventions to include woman suffrage planks; 30 campaigns to urge presidential party conventions to adopt woman suffrage planks in party platforms, and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses.

After the Nineteenth Amendment passed, Alice Paul called for a new campaign for an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. The amendment stated succinctly that neither the United States nor any state could deny or abridge equality of rights under the law on account of sex. By 1920, however, so much energy had gone into winning the vote that the exhausted women’s movement subsided. More than forty years would pass before a second mass movement initiated by US feminists reached its height in the 1960s.

Advances and Setbacks Between the Waves

Although mass activism lost momentum after the Nineteenth Amendment passed, US women made significant advances between 1920 and 1930, particularly in education. In 1930, women received 40 percent of college degrees—a striking figure, double the proportion in 1900. Traditional fields of women’s employment, such as nursing and teaching, largely accounted for the expansion of women’s professional roles between the waves. At the advanced-degree level, psychology and anthropology were the most welcoming fields.

The British novelist Virginia Woolf was another important influence on feminist thought between the waves. In the excerpt from A Room of One’s Own in Reading 19, Woolf introduces “Shakespeare’s sister,” a poet who “never wrote a word” and lies “buried at the crossroads,” without fame or fortune, precisely because women in her day could neither obtain an education nor write. Yet Woolf believes that Shakespeare’s sister still lives in you and me. From there she raises a call for women to take up their pens, make their voices heard, and write their own history. In Reading 20, from the same book and titled “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf considers why mothers have no wealth to leave their daughters and how women’s confinement to raising children and doing housework places severe obstacles in the way of earning an income and producing literature. She concludes that £500—financial independence—and a place of our own, free from the interruptions and demands of everyday life, are prerequisites for women’s writing.

Liberal Feminism in Late Modernity

The Second World War not only rescued the US economy from the depths of the Great Depression but also brought large numbers of women into the wartime economy and occupations traditionally held by men. When soldiers returned home, however, private and public employment policies often forced married or pregnant women out of their jobs and into men’s arms.

Indeed, the book often credited with sparking the second wave, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), took direct aim at the cult of domesticity. Friedan focused on white, middle-class women who had achieved what was then considered women’s “American dream”: becoming housewives and stay-at-home mothers, with breadwinning husbands, homes of their own, and enough disposable income to live respectably. As Reading 22 shows, Friedan documented the deep and persistent depression many housewives experienced. She called it “the problem that has no name” and attributed it to the lack of fulfillment associated with being a housewife and mother. Later feminist writers criticized her neglect of racial and class differences among women: she did not ask whether “being a maid, a nanny, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute was more fulfilling than being a housewife of the leisure class.” Nevertheless, Friedan’s analysis spoke to the concerns of many women at the time, since postwar prosperity and high male wages had brought the number of stay-at-home mothers in the United States to one of its highest points.

Friedan also contrasted women’s struggle for higher education a century earlier with their attendance at college in the 1950s to “find a husband.” She lamented that young women were taught to pity women who wanted to be poets, doctors, or presidents as “not feminine enough.” In postwar America, “truly feminine” women supposedly wanted neither careers nor higher education, political rights, or the opportunities first-wave women had fought for. Friedan called this enfeebling conception of femininity the feminine mystique: it reduced women’s aspirations to the size of a casserole dish. She blamed the systematic, gendered worldview at the heart of American social norms and called on women to fight for equality in the world beyond the home.

In 1966, Friedan and other women who shared these views founded NOW, the National Organization for Women; its first “Statement of Purpose” appears in Reading 23. Other major liberal feminist organizations fighting for equality during this period included the League of Women Voters, the Women’s Equity Action League, and Federally Employed Women. A major liberal organization focused on constitutional rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, frequently provided legal services to feminists and fought their battles in court. The ACLU helped secure a major second-wave victory: the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, recognizing a privacy-based constitutional right to choose abortion—a victory for women’s right to control their own bodies and for legal abortion. [English edition note: Roe was overturned in 2022 by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.]

Liberal feminists also spearheaded the long, arduous fight to pass the ERA. Its defeat in 1982 was a heavy blow to the second wave. By the late 1970s, however, the political climate had changed dramatically. The conservative Moral Majority’s “family values” movement occupied the national spotlight, and Republicans began enjoying sweeping electoral victories. These right-wing successes largely resulted from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign and the STOP-ERA movement bringing evangelical Christians together with secular conservatives.

Radical Feminism

Of all the feminist perspectives that emerged during the second wave of the US women’s movement, radical feminism was the most woman-centered. It also made the greatest strides in connecting the personal with the political. Radical feminists were at the forefront of the second wave, insisting that women’s liberation required women to understand, protect, and control their own bodies. They also confronted forms of oppression previously relegated to the private sphere of interpersonal life, such as rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment. Whether they emphasized the dangers or the pleasures associated with sex, radical feminists exposed and analyzed matters once shut away or hidden in the home.

The Personal Is Political

The slogan “the personal is political,” associated with radical feminist Carol Hanisch’s 1969 essay, became a mantra of the second wave. On the one hand, it stressed that many gender-related “private” problems, such as domestic violence, should not be solved individually but addressed collectively as problems rooted in social and political institutions. On the other, it demanded that feminists practice their politics in daily life and live what they preached. These two dimensions made “the personal is political” a powerful combination. They connected society’s macro and micro levels, social structures and human agency. Above all, they called for a feminism that could transform both individuals and society.

[English edition note: Hanisch’s essay appeared in 1970 under a title she attributes, to the best of her knowledge, to its editors, Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt. See her retrospective introduction.]

The Dialectic of Sex

Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970) was one of radical feminism’s most influential statements. An excerpt from its concluding chapter appears in Reading 28, “The Demands of Revolution.” Firestone argued that women’s oppression was the earliest and most fundamental form of oppression, supplying the model for every subsequent form, including oppression based on class, race, or sexual orientation. Unlike most feminist approaches, which located women’s oppression in social and historical conditions, Firestone blamed biology. For most of human history, she argued, women had been at the mercy of “menstruation, menstrual irregularities, and ‘female ailments’; constant, painful childbirth, breastfeeding, and infant care forced them to depend on men for survival.” In her view, the sexual division of labor simply reflected these biological differences.

Locating women’s oppression in biology leaves almost no room for social change. For Firestone, women would have to wait for new reproductive technologies enabling reproduction outside the womb before they could attain ultimate liberation, making “human reproductive differences culturally insignificant.” Heterosexual sex would then cease to be as important for reproduction, and people could experience diverse forms of sexuality, which she called “pansexuality.” Unlike Friedan, Firestone considered any vision that “integrates women into the male world rather than completely abolishing sex-class distinctions” part of an “Orwellian nightmare.” She did not want a society in which “women become like men and are diminished in the same ways.” Instead, she called for androgyny.

Firestone was an important activist in founding New York Radical Women (NYRW). Its 1968 protest against the Miss America pageant was the first second-wave feminist demonstration to make the front pages of the national press. At the protest, a sheep was crowned Miss America, and a “Freedom Trash Can” was provided for women to throw away “female garbage,” including “bras, girdles, hair curlers, false eyelashes, and wigs.” This event probably contributed to the legendary label of second-wave feminists as “bra burners,” although no actual bra burning was ever documented.

Lesbianism, Feminist Separatism, and the Woman-Identified Woman

Only with the second wave of the US women’s movement do we begin to see major radical feminist statements on the relationship between lesbianism and feminism. In Reading 30, for example, Charlotte Bunch’s “Lesbians in Revolt” discusses a woman-identified woman who commits herself to other women for political, emotional, physical, and economic support. Bunch contrasts the woman-identified woman with women whose primary commitments are to men. In her view, “supporting and loving men more than women perpetuates the system that oppresses her.”

Bunch argues that heterosexuality divides women, forces them to compete for men, and encourages them to define themselves through men. She also identifies the privileges heterosexual women receive as compensation for lost freedom: respect as mothers, social acceptance as wives or lovers, and some economic security. These privileges give heterosexual women a political interest in maintaining the status quo and may lead them to “betray their sisters, especially lesbian sisters who do not receive these benefits.” Thus “woman-identified lesbianism is not simply a sexual preference; it is also a political act.” Bunch and other radical feminists who shared her views called for feminist separatism: women’s conscious and voluntary separation from various forms of patriarchal control, including living apart from men in woman-identified, woman-controlled communities.

Similar views appear in Reading 29, “The Woman Identified Woman” (1970), written by the Radicalesbians. This group arose from New York’s Lavender Menace protest against the absence of lesbianism from the women’s movement—Chinese compiler-translator’s note: as an issue—and particularly against NOW’s refusal to address lesbian concerns. “Lavender Menace” drew on Betty Friedan’s comment describing lesbianism as a “lavender herring” that would distract the movement from more serious and widespread women’s issues. Only after radical feminists such as the Radicalesbians staged a series of protests at national women’s conventions did NOW finally agree, in 1971, to address lesbian issues.

Bridging the Second Wave’s Lesbian/Heterosexual Divide

Perhaps the radical feminist most successful in bridging the lesbian/heterosexual divide during the second wave was Adrienne Rich, internationally known for her poetry and prose. Reading 35 excerpts her widely circulated “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980), in which Rich calls for heterosexual and lesbian women to unite. Her concept of woman-identification encompasses a broad range of relationships among women. Although she calls it a “lesbian continuum,” these relationships extend from sexual intimacy between women to mother–daughter relationships, sisterhood, and close friendship. It thus includes all the relationships women have had, or might have, with other women.

Although Rich was herself a lesbian, she believed gender mattered more than sexual orientation and urged lesbians to ally politically with heterosexual feminists rather than gay men. She emphasized privileges shared by heterosexual and homosexual men, including higher incomes and earning power. She pointed to differences in the character of male and female relationships, citing men’s greater involvement in anonymous sex and women’s greater emphasis on relationships. She criticized the justification of pederasty among gay men and pronounced ageism in gay male standards of sexual attractiveness. [English edition note: The Chinese compilation uses “pedophilia” and also names sadomasochism here. Rich’s 1980 essay, pp. 649–650, says “pederasty” and does not include sadomasochism in this passage.] For Rich, being a lesbian was a profoundly female experience; equating lesbian existence with male homosexuality simply because both were stigmatized erased women’s actual circumstances. Indeed, she argued that the term “gay” could obscure distinctions crucial to feminism and to women’s freedom as a group. Many of Rich’s views would face harsh criticism from feminist queer theorists in the 1990s. In the early 1980s, however, they eased some of the tensions and antagonisms within the second wave of the US women’s movement.

Rich’s approach to radical feminism also differed markedly from Firestone’s. Rich took a social-constructionist approach to gender and sexuality rather than the biological determinism driving Firestone’s work. For Rich, heterosexuality was not a natural emotional and sensual inclination but something “imposed on women by force and subliminally.” Compulsory heterosexuality refers to heterosexuality created and strictly enforced through institutions, ideologies, and norms, subordinating women to men through emotional and erotic allegiance. Rich notes that throughout history women have resisted heterosexuality at enormous cost: imprisonment, physical torture, psychosurgery, social exclusion, and poverty. If heterosexuality is so natural, she asks, why does society need such violent restraints to enforce it?

In Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), Rich approaches childbirth and motherhood differently from Firestone. She emphasizes the trials and tribulations, as well as the sheer joy, of pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, and raising children. This warm, emotional, social approach to motherhood contrasts sharply with Firestone’s cool, analytical, and impersonal call for women to free themselves from the chains of biological reproduction—a freedom unlikely to appeal to many women, feminists included. Rich also distinguishes motherhood as experience, or any woman’s “potential relationship” to her reproductive capacities and children, from motherhood as a “patriarchal institution” designed to keep that potential relationship under male control. Rich makes clear that her target is the patriarchal institution; she is not calling for women to cease bearing children.

By contrast, early radical feminists directed their attacks at men rather than patriarchy. The 1969 “Redstockings Manifesto,” in Reading 27, takes this position. Redstockings was a radical feminist group that reclaimed the nineteenth-century derogatory label “bluestocking” for educated women, substituting red to signal its radical politics. Its members held that all men benefited from women’s oppression and that all men were oppressors. They even argued that shifting responsibility from men to the system was an evasion, letting men off the hook for their oppressive behavior. Men were the ones who needed to change.

Such starkly opposed positions within radical feminism also surfaced in another controversy that divided the second wave: the so-called “sex wars.”

The “Sex Wars”

The term “sex wars” encompasses the fierce debates within US second-wave feminism from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s. They concerned the implications of different sexual practices for women’s liberation. Feminists argued about erotica, sex work, censorship, sadomasochism, and other erotic practices, asking what constituted nonpatriarchal forms of sexuality—or whether there should be such a concept at all. On one side, “pro-sex” feminists opposed censorship and other restrictions on sexual practices in the interests of sexual openness and freedom. Their opponents, now often called “victim feminists,” emphasized the violence and danger associated with certain sexual practices and held definite views about what distinguished patriarchal from nonpatriarchal sexuality.

Sex as a Realm of Pleasure

As noted above, Firestone took a pro-sex position in calling for freedom of sexual expression and saw pansexuality as part of women’s liberation. Gayle Rubin was another important voice in the pro-sex chorus, arguing that ending sexual repression was central to ending women’s oppression. In her widely circulated “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” (1984), Rubin attacked all ideologies of sexual repression, whether they came from the Left, the Right, or feminists themselves. Examining hierarchies of sexual value in religion, medicine, psychiatry, and popular discourses, she found an imperative to draw an imaginary line between good and bad sex—a line between sexual order and chaos.

Rubin firmly opposed any ideology that described sex in terms of “sin, disease, neurosis, pathology, decadence, pollution, or the decline of empires.” Convinced that sexual repression was one of civilization’s most irrational methods of controlling human behavior, she considered sexual permissiveness to be in everyone’s best interests. In Reading 37, “Thinking Sex,” Rubin discusses how wrong feminists are to prescribe which kinds of sex are patriarchal and which are liberating. For her, sexual repression is repression, whoever makes the rules. Her position shares much with later queer theory.

Sex as a Realm of Danger

Second-wave radical feminists who described certain sexual practices as violent and/or patriarchal wanted to end unequal power relations and violence against women. They were not, as some contemporary feminists claim, resentful victim feminists invested in women’s passivity or weakness in the face of sexual violence. 2* Rather, by naming certain sexual practices as violent and/or patriarchal and exposing their injustice, they enabled women to refuse victimization. Two principal questions divided the second wave and created deep rifts within radical feminism: (1) should feminists seek legislation defining certain sexual practices as patriarchal and/or violent? And (2) should feminists censor violent and degrading images, or concern themselves only with violent acts and behavior?

Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon were the most outspoken feminists on pornography in the 1980s. These radical feminists placed pornography “at the center of the cycle of abuse” and regarded it as a “central constitutive practice” that institutionalized and legitimized sexual inequality by creating a social climate tolerant of sexual aggression and abuse. They argued that pornography was not merely fantasy, imitation, or an idea. It was a concrete, discriminatory social practice that institutionalized one group’s inferiority and subordination to another. They demanded laws to address that discrimination. Reading 38 excerpts their jointly written “Model Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance.” Although often misunderstood as advocating censorship of pornography, the ordinance merely allowed people who could demonstrate injury from pornography to bring civil discrimination suits.

Responses were, in fact, diverse. Robin Morgan made a bolder intervention in her famous statement in Reading 31: “Pornography is the theory; rape is the practice.” Some antipornography feminists, such as Ms. magazine founder Gloria Steinem, distinguished “erotica” from “pornography.” The former depicts mutually pleasurable sexual exchange between equal, consenting subjects; the latter objectifies women and represents sex as violent, degrading, or dehumanizing. Reading 34, “Mandra, II,” provides an example of erotica, excerpted from a story in Little Birds: Erotica by Anaïs Nin, acclaimed as one of the twentieth century’s finest women writers of erotic literature. To counter the stereotype of radical feminists as humorless, politically correct, solemn women, we have also included Gloria Steinem’s “If Men Could Menstruate” as Reading 36.

Radical Feminist Responses to Queer Theory

Because radical feminism was one of the major second-wave perspectives drawing attention to lesbian issues, it is essential to understand how it differs from the queer theory that emerged in the 1990s. In Reading 39, “From Here to Queer: Radical Feminism, Postmodernism, and the Lesbian Menace,” Suzanna Danuta Walters identifies major differences between radical feminism’s approach to lesbian theory and politics and queer theory’s basic assumptions. Although she applauds some advances made by queer theorists, she considers queer theory and politics generally well-intentioned but “misguided” and “theoretically dubious.” She believes not only that queer theorists unfairly portray feminism as rigid, homophobic, and asexual, but also that queer theory erases lesbian specificity and the enormous differences gender makes in people’s lives. It thus “eliminates feminism’s significance.” Walters laments that the images and signifiers of gender transcendence are “suspiciously male”: notions such as “going fag” or imitating gay male sexual practices are claimed as empowering by many contemporary queer women. She is also dismayed that today’s sexual “bad girls” rebel against their feminist predecessors as much as against male power. She even asks whether their “genderless, nonnormative vision is a goal worth pursuing.”

Walters further argues that deconstructing and destabilizing gender by exposing its social construction is not the same as overthrowing its power. For her, the theme of gender performance embraced by queer theorists is empty unless systematically linked to an understanding of complex sociopolitical realities. Mere rhetoric of performance is ultimately ahistorical, “depoliticized academic homework.” She condemns the “relentless narcissism and individualism” of queer theoretical narratives as an “obsessive preoccupation with the self”: instead of the personal becoming political, the political becomes personal. Finally, because queer theorists position themselves at the margins as permanent critics of normativity, Walters worries that they “romanticize the margins” and ignore the actual psychological and material costs of marginality.

In short, radical feminists of many kinds exposed oppressions previously treated as personal problems—rape, incest, domestic violence, and sexual harassment—as political problems requiring collective action. They also empowered women by celebrating women’s bodies and cultures, and women’s relationships with other women. Even their essentialist slogans, such as “sisterhood is powerful” and “sisterhood is global,” contributed greatly to building community and collectivity during the second wave of the US women’s movement.

Socialist Feminism

The Origins of Women’s Oppression

Few male theorists discussed women’s oppression in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Apart from John Stuart Mill, discussed in Chapter 2, the male theorists who made the most significant contributions in this period were Marxists. One of the most influential works was Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. As Reading 41 shows, Engels located the roots of women’s oppression not in biology but in sociohistorical development. He argued that the earliest human societies—hunting and gathering societies—had no established systems of class or gender stratification. Rather, they were organized into matrilineal clans in which both men and women played important roles in economic subsistence. Because hunting and gathering involved risks and difficulty adapting to nature’s unpredictability, they required more sharing or mutual aid than later modes of production. His analysis drew on the available cultural anthropology, including Lewis Henry Morgan’s studies of Native American tribes. As Chapter 8 discusses, some US feminists knew Morgan’s work and were interested in the greater gender equality established in these societies.

Engels argued that gender and class oppression arose together in ancient agricultural societies based on private ownership of land and enslaved people, where property rights and patriarchal domination underpinned the power of the city-state. Reproducing class across generations required private property to pass to one’s own descendants. This required patriarchal institutions to control women’s sexuality: the confinement of propertied women to the home, for example, and laws punishing women but not men for adultery. Patriarchy—institutionalized male domination over women and children, and women’s subordination within the family—thus arose initially to protect private property rights and class privilege. In this way Engels linked the origins of women’s oppression to those of class oppression. The Marxist path to women’s liberation required a socialist revolution to abolish private property and overthrow patriarchal elements in the family and the laws of the state.

Women’s Domestic Labor

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898) offered the nineteenth century’s most substantial feminist analysis of housework and childcare. Gilman attributed women’s oppression primarily to their confinement to these tasks. Many of her writings called for more centralized provision of childcare, cooking, and cleaning so that women could fulfill themselves in other kinds of work. Reading 42 excerpts her most widely anthologized work, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). This feminist story emphasizes the depression some women experience when confined to the home with little opportunity for self-realization—the phenomenon Betty Friedan would call “the problem that has no name” half a century later.

The central character in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is an upper-class woman whose efforts to write are thwarted by her physician husband and the medical establishment of her day. The story criticizes not only women’s lack of work options but also late-nineteenth-century medical practices in which doctors prescribed a “rest cure” for women suffering from nervous disorders or “hysteria”—a word ultimately derived from the Greek hystera, “womb.” Under this treatment, which Gilman herself underwent, women were forbidden to do any work. Gilman believed it only worsened women’s depression. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the wife is confined not merely to the house but to a former nursery with barred windows, symbolizing the way her husband makes a child of his wife. The wallpaper’s elaborate design appears to her as a maze imprisoning women’s desire for freedom. It thus becomes a metaphor for the ways domesticity and decorative femininity stifle women’s creativity and self-realization.

Class Differences in Women’s Lives and Work

Many first-wave Marxist, socialist, and anarchist feminists were labor organizers whose writings addressed the plight of working-class and poor women. Reading 44, “The Girl Slaves of the Milwaukee Breweries,” is by Mary Harris Jones, known as Mother Jones, a founder of the anarchist Industrial Workers of the World and a community activist fighting to end child labor. Reading 48, “Working Woman and Mother,” is by Alexandra Kollontai, a Marxist feminist and key figure in the creation of the Soviet Union. Although their writings describe conditions more than they speculate theoretically, both powerfully emphasize the enormous class differences among women in the early twentieth century. These feminist labor organizers called for policies to assist working-class women, including protective legislation for pregnant workers, maternity insurance, and state-subsidized childcare.

Crystal Eastman was a labor lawyer, socialist, suffragist, and one of four drafters of the Equal Rights Amendment when it was first introduced in the 1920s. She also drafted New York’s first workers’ compensation law, enacted in 1910, which became a model for other states. In Reading 49, from On Women and Revolution, Eastman argues that socialist revolution is not enough to end women’s oppression. She challenges Marxist feminists’ prioritization of class over gender oppression. Like some later socialist feminists, Eastman demands equal consideration for gender and class.

Some of the US women’s movement’s best-known images originated in working-class women’s first-wave struggles. An international women’s day, commemorating women workers’ struggles, was proposed in 1910; March 8 became its annual date later. The proposal came from the German socialist feminist Clara Zetkin, renowned across Europe for her advocacy of women’s rights. “Bread and Roses,” first published as a poem by James Oppenheim in 1911, subsequently became an anthem for working women’s rights. It is usually associated with the 1912 strike of women textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, also known as the Bread and Roses Strike. The first stanza of this celebrated anthem appears in Reading 46.

Love, Marriage, and Sexual Practices in Early Modernity

Marxist, socialist, and anarchist feminists called for “free love” or “sex-love,” which at the time meant people’s right to have sex with and marry the person they loved. They also argued that women, with few opportunities for economic independence, were compelled to marry for financial security. For this reason, some of these left-wing feminists compared conventional marriage to prostitution.

Reading 45, Emma Goldman’s “The Traffic in Women,” from Anarchism and Other Essays, was one of the first wave’s most incisive works on prostitution. Goldman sharply criticized contemporary prostitution laws. She discussed how poor and working-class women often fell victim to these laws while the wealthy men who paid for sex went free. She also condemned the wives of these wealthy men for looking down on prostitutes while congratulating themselves on their hypocritically cherished virtue. By locating prostitution’s roots in poverty, women’s impoverishment, and their employment options, Goldman connected gender oppression with class oppression.

Anarchist/communist feminists were among the first US feminists to advocate women’s rights to birth control and abortion. At the time, the vast majority of liberal feminists supported only voluntary motherhood, or the right to refuse sex with one’s husband. The period’s best-known birth-control advocate, Margaret Sanger, was a socialist feminist who worked as a nurse among poor and working-class women. As Reading 50, “My Fight for Birth Control,” reveals, Sanger witnessed women dying in childbirth and saw how uncontrolled childbearing endangered these women and their families. During this period, even married couples could not legally use contraception except in emergencies. Disseminating information about contraception was also illegal because it was classified as pornography. Nevertheless, Sanger published The Woman Rebel, a magazine teaching birth control, and was arrested for opening a clinic that provided examinations and birth-control pamphlets to poor and working-class women. Many years later, she founded what became known as Planned Parenthood.

Because many anarchist/communist feminists were directly involved in labor organizing, they were among the earliest activists to address workplace hazards. Environmental problems in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were diverse: air and water pollution, garbage and sanitation, food safety, and industrial health and safety. Although these problems affected everyone, they fell most heavily on poor and working-class people living near factories and in overcrowded urban areas. Because Marxist and socialist feminists’ municipal housekeeping focused on the concerns of working-class and poor people, they were disparaged as “sewer socialists” and became targets of the persecution of the Left during the Red Scare of 1919–1920.

Radicalism in the 1930s focused on unemployment and, in the later 1930s, on the threat of fascism, to the virtual exclusion of all other issues. The postwar years, 1946–1960, were a period of US economic expansion and world dominance, but also of Cold War and superpatriotism enforced by McCarthyite witch hunts. All radical and liberal groups were repressed; the possible cause of women’s liberation… was strangled along with the others.

One of the most influential feminist works written between the waves was Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which developed her socialist existentialist feminism. Its most famous assertion is that women are not destined by birth to be women but are shaped into them. This clarifies not only the social construction of gender but also the way woman is defined and differentiated in relation to man, rather than man in relation to woman: woman is incidental, inessential as against the essential. For Beauvoir, otherness is a fundamental category of human thought affecting all subordinated groups.

A basic existentialist premise is that people are defined by what they do and how they act. Reality and existence are expressed through action and engagement. For Beauvoir, the gender-divided world of the household diminishes women’s ability to act and engage in the world. Reading 52, from The Second Sex, illustrates the existential effects of housework’s cyclical, repetitive, invisible character. Beauvoir’s prose captures both the rhythm of this work and the frustration and monotony housewives experience in daily life. A distinctive feature of her work is its articulation of the embodied and situated character of human consciousness: “experience and perception are never entirely detached from the flesh-and-blood bodies in which human subjects are involved, nor, indeed, from the material circumstances in which they occur.”

Women’s Work in Late Modernity

A major contribution of Marxist and socialist feminisms is their analysis of women’s work inside and outside the home. In late modernity, they supplied detailed historical evidence of workplace gender inequality and laid theoretical foundations for feminist issues such as equal pay for equal work and occupational sex segregation. Seeing women’s domestic labor as a major obstacle to their liberation, they devoted considerable attention to analyzing women’s work “hidden in the home.”

Margaret Benston’s “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation” (1969) exemplifies a characteristic second-wave Marxist feminist approach (see Reading 53). According to Benston, men and women stand in different relations to the means of production because women have historically been assigned primary responsibility for housework and childcare. Central to this difference is Marx’s distinction between production for use and production for exchange. Work outside the home is production for exchange: such labor produces commodities while earning a direct income in wages. By contrast, housework and childcare performed without paid childcare or domestic workers are production for use—labor for direct consumption rather than purchase and sale. Benston sees this distinction as a necessary condition of women’s inequality in modern society, because production for use is unpaid and does nothing to advance women’s economic independence. Even for employed women, the additional burden of childcare and housework inevitably limits, interrupts, and reduces both their concentration on paid work and the time available for it, disadvantaging them relative to men in earning power.

Benston contrasts work inside and outside the home. Factory workers, for example, work together within a highly specialized division of labor, whereas housewives work in relative isolation, making political organization more difficult. Because domestic labor lacks specialization in this sense, women are commonly treated as all-purpose superwomen—cooks, cleaners, nurses, and nannies—rather than recognized specialists. Moreover, with no fixed working hours, housewives are often on call to care for sick family members or feed hungry infants. Benston sees unpaid domestic labor as serving primarily the bourgeoisie. Rather than emphasizing how it serves all men, she emphasizes its various services to the bourgeoisie, such as supplying a cheap reserve labor force that can be called upon during labor shortages or wars—while housework and childcare go unpaid.

Socialist feminist Heidi Hartmann criticizes Marxist feminists of Benston’s kind in “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union” (1979). As Reading 55 shows, Hartmann invokes coverture, arguing that a forced marriage binding Marxism and feminism together must be an “unhappy marriage”: feminism is subordinated to Marxism, losing its independent voice. Like Eastman before her, Hartmann argues that the bourgeoisie is not the sole beneficiary of women’s marginalization into housewifery. All men, including working-class men, benefit. Marxists who ignore these gendered realities are simply choosing not to see the elephant in the room.

Hartmann’s theory of “patriarchal capitalism” balances the scales between gender and class. It requires examining two spheres of social life: production, the basis of capitalist domination, and reproduction, the basis of patriarchal domination. Her account of the reproduction of social labor power has two dimensions. The first is the daily work of housework and childcare, which lets people working for a living patch up their emotional defenses and recover their strength at home—ready for overtime, day after day. The second is the transmission, expansion, and reproduction of labor power between generations through childbirth and childrearing. Every society’s functioning rests on both dimensions.

Feminist Existential Phenomenology

Political philosopher Iris Marion Young combines Beauvoir’s existential insights with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach, focusing on how human consciousness is situated in the lived body. Reading 56 comes from her celebrated “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality” (1980). Echoing Beauvoir, Young discusses how the constraints of gender and femininity define women as “Other,” restricting their subjectivity, autonomy, and creativity as human beings. She examines how women’s actual bodily movements exhibit the tension between being active, creative subjects and being mere objects for others.

Young uses “throwing like a girl” to illustrate constraints on feminine bodily comportment and movement. She argues that, unlike men, women often fail to engage their whole bodies in directed movement. Women lack trust in their bodies and frequently approach tasks with “timidity, immobility, uncertainty.” They also restrict their use of space; they wait and respond rather than act. Young makes clear that these patterns are socially constructed, “rooted in the particular situation of women’s sexist oppression in contemporary society.” For her, the source of the problem “lies in women living their bodies as both objects and subjects.” She describes how this objectification appears in women’s fear of bodily invasion, such as rape, and in “the threat of being seen,” given the importance of beauty and appearance in women’s lives. Thus “women in a sexist society are physically handicapped.”

Socialist Feminist Standpoint Theory

Reading 58 comes from Dorothy E. Smith’s The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (1987). One distinctive feature of Smith’s work is its weaving together of Marxism, feminism, and ethnomethodology. Smith emphasizes how beginning inquiry from the standpoint and practices of everyday life departs from conventional social-scientific procedures, or what she calls “objectified forms of knowledge.” She stresses that the knowledge people possess through their concrete everyday experiences is the simplest “tacit knowledge”: knowing what we do, how we do it, how to get things done—where to shop, how to catch a bus, wash dishes, or bend down to sweep a floor. Such knowledge, she argues, is rarely articulated as discourse because it is considered uninteresting, insignificant, or merely routine.

Smith analytically distinguishes the “extralocal” world from the world of “everyday life.” The latter is subordinated, suppressed, and neglected, even though it provides the social foundation for the world above it—the taken-for-granted background of society. Starting from women’s everyday lives reveals how they are assigned the work of caring for the bodies of men, children, the elderly, and themselves. They are also made responsible for the place where these activities occur: the home. Not only does women’s everyday work free men from these tasks; the more successfully women perform this concrete work, the more invisible it becomes to men as a distinct form of social labor (D. E. Smith, 1990: 19). Traditional, male-created forms of knowledge cannot comprehend either women’s standpoint or the world of everyday life. Smith calls her work institutional ethnography because it examines how everyday settings are woven into broader forms of social organization, from daily household practices through neighborhood and school routines to larger bureaucracies and the state.

Because standpoint theory and postmodern epistemology are often conflated, one thread common to socialist feminist standpoint approaches is their critique of postmodern epistemology’s judgmental relativism. In “Telling the Truth after Postmodernism” (1996) and “High Noon in Textland” (1993), Dorothy Smith mocks postmodern relativism’s political impotence. She argues that if knowledge is to have political consequences, there must be a real possibility of one account invalidating another.

Marxist, Socialist, and Anarchist Ecofeminisms

Marxist and socialist ecofeminists locate environmental problems in a particular mode of production: capitalism. They see capitalism’s insatiable pursuit of private profit as the main source of environmental degradation. This does not mean there was no environmental plunder before industrialization. Yet premodern environmental problems pale beside the massive destruction of the centuries since industrial capitalism emerged.

Anarchist feminists, by contrast, argue that socialist societies suffer environmental degradation just as capitalist societies do, pointing to ecological disasters such as the Chernobyl nuclear accident. They generally favor small, decentralized, democratic forms of social organization centered on local and community politics, considering large, centralized bureaucracies incompatible with their aims. Slogans such as “small is beautiful” and “live simply” resonate strongly with them.

Marxist and socialist ecofeminists counter this anarchist preference for the small-scale and local by arguing that the vast majority of economic, social, and ecological problems cannot adequately be addressed locally. Pollution spills across local, regional, and national boundaries, they point out; problems such as acid rain, ozone depletion, nuclear disaster, and global warming simply cannot be solved by small-scale local measures.

Socialist feminist Donna Haraway sharply criticizes spiritual ecofeminist myths. Reading 60, “The Cyborg Manifesto and Fractured Identities,” comes from Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991). Haraway calls for a socialist feminism capable of analyzing the transition from modern industrial society to the new postindustrial information society brought about by digital technologies. Her “cyborg” is a mythical creature, part human and part machine. The cyborg is a metaphor for the technocratic approach that wrongly assumes science can solve every environmental problem. Haraway contrasts this approach with spiritual ecofeminists’ vision that women should save the earth by embracing goddess worship and rejecting science, technology, and industry. She considers both paths dangerous for women and the environment. Forced to choose, however, she regards the irrational, antiscientific path of spiritual ecofeminists as even more politically reactionary and ineffectual.

Intersectionality

This chapter focuses on the feminist perspective called “intersectionality,” described as “one of the most important contributions to women’s studies to date.” It was developed by women of color living in the United States who felt existing feminisms had failed to address their concerns adequately. Born of necessity and neglect, it rests on the profound recognition that no one but themselves could adequately address those concerns.

Precursors of Intersectional Analysis in Early Modernity

The nineteenth-century cult of domesticity and the doctrine of separate spheres on which it rested held that women needed protection from the male-dominated public world. Yet poor and working-class women of every race were excluded from this insulated universe of privileged white womanhood. Class-privileged white women were taught the importance of chastity, purity, and being a great mother, while women of color and all poor women were subjected to various forms of sexual violence and social control.

In Reading 61, formerly enslaved Sojourner Truth’s famous speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” exposes patriarchal capitalism’s harsh demands on enslaved labor. She delivered this impromptu speech at a women’s rights convention where men in the audience challenged white women speakers, claiming that women had no reason to complain given the reverence men showed them. Truth quickly pierced this myth, describing how she labored as hard as any man while seeing her children “sold into slavery” ([1851]). Her insistent, repeated challenge, “Ain’t I a woman?,” exposed femininity’s racial and class construction. [English edition note: This familiar refrain comes from Frances Dana Gage’s 1863 recollection, not Marius Robinson’s contemporary report of the 1851 speech. See the Library of Congress comparison.]

Early-twentieth-century African American feminist writer Ida B. Wells-Barnett was internationally renowned for her campaign against lynching and her militant advocacy of women’s rights. Reading 65, from her speech “Lynch Law in America” (1900), provides detailed documentation of lynching. Because the rape of white women was frequently invoked to justify lynching, white women often condemned this violence less forcefully. Exposing the racist myth of the Black rapist, Wells-Barnett also revealed the irony of the insistence that “white women must be protected from Black monsters”: white men who raped women of color often went unpunished.

This Bridge Called My Back

The 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of new social movements organized around race, ethnicity, and identity politics. Second-wave feminists often entered politics through these multiracial struggles against white supremacy, fighting for Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow power and forming, in practice and symbolically, a new common front of “Third World peoples” within the United States. Disappointed by persistent sexism in these multiracial struggles and racism in the white women’s movement, however, many second-wave women of color developed their own political organizations and theoretical analyses. One such group was the Combahee River Collective, whose signature work, “A Black Feminist Statement” (1977), appears in Reading 68. It was also one of the second wave’s most influential political statements. The compilation describes this group of Black socialist lesbians as using the term “horizontal oppression” for differences among women based on gender identity, race, class, and/or sexual orientation. They also identified the interlocking character of multiple oppressions, exemplified by their own specific experiences as Black lesbians. This focus on simultaneous and multiple oppressions would become the heart of intersectionality.

Unlike feminists who tried to construct a unified mass movement, such as the women’s movement, around a single identity or oppression, the Combahee River Collective called for a multiaxial identity politics grounded in intersecting social locations—race, class, gender identity, and sexual orientation. From these locations, coalition could connect many differently identified groups and foster mass collective action. Identity was understood as a starting point for politics, a motivation for action, and a basis for defining political concerns. They wrote in their statement: “This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.”

Intersectional theorists’ critique of the second wave’s “essentialist woman” also emphasized its neglect of marginalized women. Essentialism is the belief in innate, inherent, or indispensable attributes defining the core characteristics of a particular entity or group. Such attributes can distinguish a group from others—women from men, for example—and unite its members in collective political practice. Second-wave feminists often invoked “sisterhood” to mobilize women politically and express their common concerns. Yet whether women’s shared attributes were theorized as biological, psychological, or social, essentialism diminished the differences in their experiences. In Inessential Woman (1988), Elizabeth V. Spelman saw essentialism as “the Trojan horse of feminist ethnocentrism,” a painful source of divisions within the US women’s movement.

In Sister Outsider (1984), Audre Lorde argued that using “woman” as a generalization about women was often mistaken. She offered many examples of white feminists ignoring differences among women. Addressing her white feminist comrades, she says: “You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.” [English edition note: The Chinese compilation adds children being “pinned to the ground” and “suffocated” to the violence described in Lorde’s passage.]

Reading 67, from Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), also emphasizes internalized oppression. Its account of an African American child ashamed of her dark skin shows how socially marginalized groups internalize dominant groups’ values and beliefs, undermining their own self-esteem and sense of empowerment. In Reading 69, “Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster” (1979), Mitsuye Yamada discusses how negative stereotypes of Asian Americans made her feel invisible, and how her own actions and thoughts sometimes helped those stereotypes flourish.

Simultaneous and Multiple Oppressions

Reading 74, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” (1989), is legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s landmark article coining “intersectionality.” Here she examines how theoretical frameworks addressing only a “single axis” of oppression obscure the many dimensions of women of color’s experiences. Her point of departure is the title of one of the era’s most influential women-of-color anthologies: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies.

In DeGraffenreid v. General Motors (1976), for example, five Black women sued the company, claiming that its seniority system perpetuated the effects of past discrimination against Black women. General Motors had hired no Black women before 1964, and all the Black women hired after 1970 lost their jobs in seniority-based layoffs. Yet the court treated race and sex as separate claims. Because the company had previously hired “women”—white women—it rejected the sex-discrimination claim. It dismissed the race-discrimination complaint, recommending consolidation with another race-discrimination case rather than hearing a claim specific to Black women. The separate categories of “women” and “Black people” thus failed to capture their experience. In this way, Crenshaw’s account shows how intersecting oppressions are “greater than the sum of racism and sexism.” Any analysis that ignores intersectionality cannot adequately address the multiple forms of oppression women of color experience.

From Margin to Center

Although intersectional theorists embrace standpoint theory, their approach differs from the “women’s standpoint” discussed in the previous chapter. As noted earlier, rather than taking a single-axis approach, intersectionality adopts multiple axes of standpoint to grasp simultaneous oppressions such as race, class, and gender, all of which shape people’s vantage points on reality. To capture this multiplicity, these theorists often speak of margins and centers in the plural rather than of a gender standpoint.

In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), bell hooks argues that a marginal social location offers a more critical vantage point for understanding social life. Subordinated groups must often move between two worlds—their own and that of the dominant group—to work, shop, and go about everyday life, whereas dominant groups have less reason to enter marginal worlds. Because marginalized people know both the margins and the center, she argues that moving their voices to the center of feminist discourse will strengthen feminist theory.

Not all intersectional theorists privilege subordinated groups’ knowledge, however. Patricia Hill Collins, for example, is more cautious: such critical insights are only a possibility. For her, oppressed people’s perspectives are neither innocent nor exempt from critical reexamination. Collins recognizes that oppression can deny people important opportunities to deepen their understanding of the social world, such as good schools or better health. Postcolonial theorist Uma Narayan shares this view in Reading 7 in Chapter 1, where she discusses “the dark side of double vision.”

Decentering and Difference

For the past half century, reproductive freedom and rights to birth control, sex education, and abortion have been intensely contested in the United States. These issues are major targets for conservatives and antifeminists. Within the US women’s movement, however, women of color have repeatedly stressed that their primary concern is reproductive justice: not only the freedom to limit births, but also the freedom to have children, keep their children, and remain free from compulsory contraception—freedoms that class-privileged white women have long enjoyed.

Reading 77 is Angela Davis’s “Outcast Mothers and Surrogates: Racism and Reproductive Politics in the Nineties.” In the 1980s and 1990s, new reproductive technologies developed for infertile couples, along with surrogacy, sparked heated public and feminist debates about motherhood and childbirth. As Nancy Lublin notes in Pandora’s Box: Feminism Confronts Reproductive Technology (1998), these issues divided the second wave. Feminists disagreed, for example, about whose rights should prevail when a surrogate changed her mind after giving birth. These debates deconstructed the meaning of motherhood, especially by questioning whether pregnancy and childbirth or childrearing mattered most.

Davis points out that concern with the deconstruction of motherhood is hardly new: motherhood’s meaning had already been deconstructed along racial and class lines. She discusses how US slavery effectively deprived African American women of many aspects of motherhood, as children were torn from their arms and bought and sold cheaply in slave markets. In turn, women of color were considered suitable surrogate caregivers—and still are—when serving as wet nurses and nannies to the children of the privileged, yet were judged unfit to raise their own children. Davis also describes how working-class and poor women of every race were “thrown into the industrial proletariat just like their male counterparts,” where the demands of their jobs often conflicted with their ability to mother. She further notes that twentieth-century compulsory sterilization fell especially heavily on poor women, women of color, and disabled people.

For Davis, it is revealing that the deconstruction of motherhood became a prominent concern for white feminists only when it directly affected more privileged women. Debates generated by new reproductive technologies centered on the reproductive problems of affluent, older, infertile women, while reproductive problems most often associated with poor women of color concerned the supposed overproduction of children by young, single women. Ironically, restrictions on Medicaid funding for abortion denied the latter affordable abortions even though the federal government was willing to pay for their sterilization. For Davis, all these examples show how women of color’s bodies “bear the evidence of colonization.”

Integrating Disability Studies and Intersectionality

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is a leading feminist scholar integrating disability studies with intersectionality. In Reading 79, she notes that disability studies sorely lacks feminist analysis, just as feminist studies rarely discusses disability. She praises intersectionality as one of the few feminist approaches that considers disability alongside gender, race, class, and sexuality.

Garland-Thomson identifies various parallels between the social positions of gender and disability. She points out how Western thought has historically associated women with disability—as less rational, less intelligent, and more hysterical than men. She also discusses how the twin ideologies of beauty and normality make women’s and disabled people’s bodies objects of scrutiny and pliable bodies to be shaped to fit norms and cultural standards. Bodies subordinated through race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability, she argues, have historically been described as “defective or degenerate.” They have been targeted for control and elimination through infanticide, compulsory sterilization, segregation, and normalizing surgery. Garland-Thomson makes a compelling case for integrating disability studies with intersectionality to deepen our understanding of how these systems of oppression intersect and constitute one another.

Poststructuralism and Postmodernism, Queer & Trans Theory

One distinguishing feature of postmodernism and poststructuralism is their critique of the essentialism characteristic of much modern thought. Modern thinkers often use group concepts such as the working class or women without hesitation. Postmodernists and poststructuralists, by contrast, argue that all group categories can and should be deconstructed as essentialist. As Judith Grant puts it, groups are not “cut from a single piece of cloth”; they do not have “one desire or vision of reality,” but consist of people with different experiences. This has major implications for many earlier feminist approaches. Intersectional theorists, for example, question the essentialist category “women” for neglecting differences of race, social position, and sexual orientation, but their own group concepts, such as “Black women” or “Asian women,” are open to similar criticism.

Queer theorist Steven Seidman discusses how invoking “a Black, middle-class, American, lesbian identity silences differences of religion, region, age, and education within that category.” He argues that group categories such as race, class, and gender, and the identities based upon them, always silence or exclude differences. For these reasons, poststructuralists and queer theorists oppose identity politics, sharing Foucault’s vision of freedom as “living on the pleasurable boundaries of nonidentity.”

Postmodernists and poststructuralists also argue that discourse does not represent or reflect reality but creates and directs our sense of reality. Group concepts and identities, they contend, are social constructions or even social fictions used to regulate conduct and exclude outsiders. They belong to a larger symbolic order of signs and symbols that constructs our understanding of social reality. In this sense, social reality depends on discourse. Their aim is to deconstruct these fictions and thereby disrupt hegemonic discourses.

Power and Discourse

Modern theories of power and inequality often conceptualize power as something individuals or groups possess or lack—material, political, or institutional resources, for example. Despite their differences, modern feminisms share these hierarchical, binary, top-down conceptions of power. Poststructuralists instead call for an end to dualistic and binary thinking, advocating a more dispersed, multidirectional conception of power. Reading 80 comes from Volume 1 of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. Although Foucault recognizes macro-level forms of power, he argues that power “comes from everywhere,” even “from below.” The production of sexual discourses, he contends, must be understood in terms of “multiple, shifting relations of power.”

Reading 87, from Riki Wilchins’s GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary (2002), weaves Foucault’s insights into power together with her personal narrative of life as a male-to-female trans person and the categorical rejection she encountered, not only from the public but also from feminists. Discursive power over bodies, sex, and gender pervades her daily interactions, even innocuous activities such as buying a newspaper or sitting on a bus. She describes this as “small powers exercised in hundreds of everyday transactions.”

The Instruments of Power in Modernity

Foucault challenges the Enlightenment-inspired belief that history progresses steadily toward human freedom. He points out that with the rise of democratic republics, subtler forms of power, domination, and discipline gained ascendancy over the overt repression and absolutism of premodern societies. Feminists have been particularly interested in the way Foucault brings the body into discussions of power. In Discipline and Punish, he describes how premodern torture became a public spectacle displaying power’s action on the bodies of the governed. Hangings and guillotines were not just public spectacles: these punishments inscribed power directly upon the body. Torture marked the body, branding its victim with infamy either through the scars it left or through the spectacle of suffering. In modernity, such public executions gave way to subtler, more effective forms of discipline that not only constrained and oppressed bodies but produced “docile bodies.” He calls this new administration of life processes “biopower”: regulating the governed through an explosion of diverse punitive techniques to control bodies and populations.

In Reading 83, from Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Susan Bordo argues that Foucault’s analysis of power operating “from below” is particularly useful for understanding femininity, because women seem eager to accept—and even strive to conform to—standards of idealized femininity. She examines a series of gender-related bodily and psychological disorders historically considered specifically female: hysteria in the late nineteenth century, agoraphobia after the Second World War, and anorexia in more recent decades. Bordo exposes the connections between these disorders and “normal” practices of femininity. Anorexia’s emaciation, for example, presents itself as “a caricature of contemporary women’s pursuit of extreme slenderness.” Her analysis shows the contradictions in the social construction of femininity—in striving to conform to socially constructed standards—and how women themselves help produce both these contradictions and the domination they entail.

Discussing medical responses to women’s disorders, Bordo uses Foucault’s analysis to show how nineteenth-century scientific advances gave rise to subtler, more modern techniques of power. Modern medicine and the social sciences, for example, defined which bodies were normal or abnormal, which minds sane or insane. For Foucault, these new discourses “cast a net of surveillance and control in the name of science.” He therefore describes modern society as a “disciplinary” or “surveillance” society.

The Panopticon was a prison model devised by Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. A few guards occupied a circular structure at its center, invisible to prisoners but able to observe them and their activities from every angle. Whether or not the guards were actually present, the intended effect was to make prisoners constantly aware that they could be watched, ensuring that power operated automatically, making everyone their own prisoner. For Foucault, the Panopticon is a metaphor for self-surveillance and control within normalizing structures.

In Reading 81, from “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power,” Sandra Lee Bartky uses Foucault’s Panopticon to examine how women internalize standards of femininity and beauty. Through disciplines such as dieting, body-shaping exercise, and cosmetic surgery, women not only monitor themselves but collude with other women in their subordination. She writes: “In contemporary patriarchal culture, a panoptical male connoisseur resides within the consciousness of most women: they stand perpetually before his gaze and under his judgment.” Like Foucault, she sees patriarchy not as a binary form of oppression but as dispersed, ubiquitous, decentralized forces. The disciplinary power inscribing femininity on women’s bodies is everywhere and nowhere: “the disciplinarian is everyone and yet no one in particular.” Indeed, the sources of disciplinary power over ideal femininity and beauty are many and varied: magazines, billboards, films, television—virtually every media outlet. We also learn ideal expressions of femininity and beauty from parents, friends, lovers, and even strangers.

The distinction between sex and gender is characteristic of modernist feminism. Poststructuralists go further, arguing that both sex and gender are socially constructed, including through the gendered assumptions of medical authorities.

Overall, Foucault’s insistence on challenging many cherished assumptions about society—particularly his exposure of apparently natural categories as social constructions—is considered one of his greatest contributions. His hostility toward the “truths” of the human sciences, which seek to construct identities and define the “normal” and “natural,” draws attention to the dangers of privileged discourses and fosters a healthy skepticism: the social world could be otherwise.

Queer Theory

Like feminist theory, queer theory is profoundly political. It begins from the conviction that we must recognize, celebrate, and defend sexual and gender differences. Just as feminist theory is inspired by and influences feminist movements, queer theory develops in reciprocal relation with LGBT radical activism.

Perhaps the most important thing to understand about “queer” is that it is not a synonym for LGBT identities or nonstraight populations. Rather, “queer” criticizes everything that transmits oppression by promoting the “normal.” In the 1993 anthology Fear of a Queer Planet, Michael Warner declares that queer “refuses… simply to represent a political interest, choosing instead a more thoroughgoing resistance to institutions that promote normalization,” and “defines itself against the normal rather than against the heterosexual.” In other words, queer does not oppose heterosexual desire, nor does it mean becoming ordinary, respectable gay citizens living like heterosexual citizens. It means resisting cultures and institutions that seek to make everyone conform to a “normal” order. This is a central premise of queer theory.

Reading 88, from Judith (Jack) Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place, focuses on a critique of “normativity,” or “conventional forms of association, belonging, and identification.” Following Foucault’s argument that homosexuality threatens as a “way of life,” not merely as a way of having sex, Halberstam argues that “queer” is not a category defined by same-sex activity but one describing life on the margins of family security and sexual and gender respectability. Normative demands, by contrast, rely on rigid ideas about gender and sexuality, including organizing our days around monogamous marriage, the nuclear family, and a gendered division of labor. Queer cultures celebrate alternative ways of life, often centered on local bars, public performances, performance art, activist productions, collective sexual exploration, and extended communities. Queer adults thus continue to participate in activities heterosexual adults consider childish, self-indulgent, or fanciful—drag performances, punk bands, or organizing street marches, for example—activities adults are encouraged to abandon to appear more dependable. Queer time therefore resists the social norms associated with heteronormative adulthood, while queer spaces are places where queer subcultures can survive.

Another premise of queer theory is that gender and sexual identities—identifying as male or female, heterosexual or homosexual—are imposed and unstable. Queer theorist Judith Butler’s well-known argument is presented here as follows: although most people regard gender and sexual identities as innate and central to their sense of self, gender is more accurately understood as a creation of social context and history, long used to classify, rank, and order people. As the title of Reading 82, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” indicates, Butler rejects the notion that gender expresses an inner self or an internal truth of sex. Gender is more like a performance: individuals’ ritualized acts construct the social fiction of an inner psychological identity. For Butler, an act need not originate with one person, while every person’s acts are dynamically shaped by what countless others do. She uses performance to explain how gendered acts emerge from discourses of gender passed down through generations, like a part’s script handed from one actor to the next. Like a script, gender performance requires individual actors to enact and repeat it, bringing it into reality. This script, which one cannot freely determine yet must repeatedly perform, continually shows how to be a woman, a man, heterosexual, or queer. It is never finished. Through this ritualized disciplinary process of performing gender and sexuality, our apparently coherent, natural “selves” come into being. This is why Butler describes gender as a copy without an original.

A third major premise of queer theory is that in most cultural settings, gender regulations form a distinctive hierarchy, including but not limited to hierarchies of gender and sexual orientation. Within such a hierarchy, society seems to need a line between “good sex” and “bad sex,” separating “sexual order and chaos.” Queer theorists firmly reject attempts to classify sex in terms of “sin, disease, psychological disorder, pathology, decadence, pollution, or the decline of empires.” The argument is that dominant, morally sanctioned sexual orientations regulate everyone, including people with minority genders and sexualities, racial positions, and economic resources.

Heteronormativity—the taken-for-granted assumption that heterosexuality is natural, normal, and right—is a particularly far-reaching component of a sexual hierarchy rooted in discrimination against gay men and lesbians. Queer theory argues that heteronormativity is central to the construction of woman, man, masculinity, femininity, romance, sex, adulthood, morality, marriage, childrearing, and aging.

Trans Theory

At the heart of trans studies is a critique of the gender binary: the biological determinism that divides human beings into exclusively male or female. The binary assigns people gender roles, regulates them, persuades them that their gender is a natural position, and polices any crossing of the male/female boundary. Women’s oppression is a widespread and persistent result of this binary order, but it is not its only troubling effect. Queer people, trans people, and anyone whose body or gender expression does not fit the male/female binary are disciplined by a society that believes in only two opposite sexes. Indeed, because we all inevitably fail to fulfill our cultures’ stereotypical gender ideals, the binary oppresses everyone.

These rigid ideals are especially difficult for some people to meet. In the United States, for example, nearly 2 percent of children are born intersex, with some combination of the bodily and/or chromosomal characteristics usually used to distinguish males from females. Although this occurs naturally, the Western conviction that people must be entirely male or entirely female led US doctors, for decades, to operate on intersex children, altering their bodies to ensure they fitted one category or the other. Recognizing “female” and “male” as evolving, malleable, contested categories is instead central to trans theory, which examines how gendered personhood is mapped onto bodies. Feminist studies generally focuses on the effects of that mapping; trans studies asks how and why gender assignment occurs in the first place, and what happens when our assignments are questioned or denied.

Another central concern of trans studies is misrecognition. Because sex and gender carry so much meaning, we all learn to shape gendered bodies to fit social situations or elicit responses from others. Although everyone presents their body in gendered ways, trans theorists and activists want us to attend to this process. They argue that everyone must be able to shape a body that elicits the forms of recognition they most seek, especially in such a gender-obsessed world. This includes transitioning—claiming a gender different from the one assigned at birth—and being able to alter one’s body to be recognized in one’s desired gender.

Reading 89, Julia Serano’s “Trans Woman Manifesto” (dated 2009 in the anthology), comes from Whipping Girl, first published in 2007. It takes the form of a political manifesto. Serano emphasizes the particular discrimination trans women face and even calls for many feminists to be held to account for complicity with transphobia and transmisogyny. Specifically, she identifies feminists who delimit a category of cisgender women—women who were assigned female at birth and identify as women—and exclude trans women from their activities.

The Third Wave of Feminism

In the 1990s, the US women’s movement witnessed a resurgence of feminist activism and scholarship among a new generation of young feminists. So sudden and extensive was it that some called it a “genderquake.” This surge in third-wave activism was partly a response to media pronouncements, dating as far back as 1982, that feminism was dead or no longer relevant. Magazines labeled women in their teens and twenties a “postfeminist” generation. Even the New York Times, often regarded as the last bastion of liberal journalism, joined the dirge with a magazine cover story opening, “The women’s movement is over….” When Rebecca Walker declared in Ms. in 1992, “I am not a postfeminist. I am the third wave,” she was defying these mourners for feminism, these lofty writers of its obituary.

Historical Foundations of the Third Wave

As third-wavers came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, they encountered a world radically different from that of their second-wave predecessors. Politically, they faced a highly mobilized conservative backlash led by the New Right, a faction enormously influential during the Reagan/George W. Bush years. Its rise largely resulted from Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign and the STOP-ERA movement uniting evangelical Christians with more secular conservatives. The second wave, by contrast, emerged amid powerful liberal and left-wing social movements, including civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War.

Economically, third-wave feminists confronted the worst job market since the Second World War and were the first postwar generation expected to fare worse than their parents. With globalization contributing to the decline of US manufacturing and the growth of low-wage service work, third-wave feminist Michelle Sidler called this bleak economic period “living in McDonald’s.” She discusses how high college tuition left her contemporaries deeply in debt, while well-paid jobs were scarce even for those fortunate enough to obtain degrees.

The third wave also grew up amid a “new information society” and global “technoculture” generated by emerging electronic and digital technologies. Third-wavers’ lives were saturated with a popular culture celebrating consumerism and advertising, with voices circulating through news media and the internet. It is therefore unsurprising that the new wave made popular culture one of its principal sites of struggle.

The Third Wave’s Ambivalent Relationship with Intersectionality

Many third-wave writers, whatever their racial or ethnic backgrounds, trace their genealogy to the second-wave women of color who pioneered intersectionality. In Third Wave Agenda, for example, editors Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake write that US Third World feminism fashioned the language and principles through which they could explain life at the turn of the century. Astrid Henry, author of Not My Mother’s Sister, regards insight into the simultaneous, interwoven character of multiple oppressions as one of the richest lessons for third-wave women to savor in learning from the second wave. Many third-wave writers combine an acute awareness of differences among women with a critique of essentialism.

Women of color and mixed-race women in key leadership positions made this the first wave of US feminism led by women of color. Attention to multiple, interlocking oppressions led third-wave feminists to embrace broader conceptions of inequality and justice: rather than bringing activists into the women’s movement, they would bring feminism to activists.

The selection from Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake’s “It’s All About the Benjamins: Economic Determinants of Third Wave Feminism in the United States”—“Benjamins” means hundred-dollar bills—further explains the third wave’s characteristic activism of everyone fighting on their own front. Heywood and Drake argue that, having grown up in a multicultural environment, third-wave feminists are more likely to join other social-justice movements in keeping with their commitment to intersectional differences. Rather than identity politics, however, third-wavers favor “localized,” “radically dispersed” forms of creating their own media sites and online studios, better able to resist “co-optation by global technoculture.”

Conversely, they argue that a focus on women’s issues or “patriarchal oppression” is useful to their generation “only in certain contexts.” They discuss how globalization and deindustrialization have produced downward class mobility for most Americans while bringing the earnings of men and women in their generation closer together. Because “it’s all about the economics,” third-wave feminists thus have “more in common with the men of their generation.” For these reasons, third-wave feminism has become “less visible” as a political movement, but “more widely dispersed, reaching further into people’s lives.”

Like intersectional theorists, third-wave writers call for a broader account of the many sites, inside and outside academia, where theory is produced, and of the activities conventionally called theorizing. In particular, they share intersectional theorists’ deep experience of knowledge embedded in social life, evident in their fluent use of small narratives from their own lives to make arguments. Analysts of third-wave texts note that “most third-wave feminists are quick to define themselves as nonacademic.”

Third-wave writers Veronica Chambers and Joan Morgan, for example, distinguish the knowledge of social life they draw from everyday experience from the academic knowledge acquired in women’s studies classes. Both criticize “academic feminism” for frequently presenting itself as the only knowledge authorized to wear the crown of feminism with a capital F. In her classic hip-hop work When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, Morgan calls for a feminism that, like hip-hop, can speak to young Black women. She worries that “if feminism is to connect with the vast majority of Black women… it must rescue itself from the academy’s ivory tower.” Morgan also analyzes hip-hop’s pervasive racial, class, and gender contradictions and explains how she negotiates the conflict between her love of hip-hop and its misogyny.

Such political engagement with popular culture is particularly prominent and widespread in the third wave. Inspired by riot grrrl, many third-wave feminists created space and safety for women in punk rock by making their own music and zines and developing their own record labels. Riot grrrl’s do-it-yourself ethos was embraced by many third-wavers, who often describe the empowerment they experienced through making zines and creating online discussion groups to spread their political messages. Reading 90 is a cover of the zine Bikini Kill, dating from around 1991 and now reproduced in The Riot Grrrl Collection. Bikini Kill was a punk band comprising Kathleen Hanna, Billy Karren, Kathi Wilcox, and Tobi Vail, regarded as a pioneer of the riot grrrl movement. Zines like this demonstrate the creativity released by these many forms of theorizing.

Tracing the Third Wave’s Relationships with Poststructuralism and Queer Theory

Alongside popular culture, sexuality is another major site of third-wave activism. Its treatment of sexual practices clearly shows the influence of poststructuralism and queer theory. Like poststructuralists and queer theorists, third-wavers focus on transgressive acts that challenge and subvert the status quo, cherishing the image of the “feminist badass.” Queer theoretical assumptions pervade third-wave writings, which embrace a wide array of gendered subjects and take a lusty, “leave no sexual pleasure unexplored” approach to sexual practices. As one writer puts it, “the word ‘queer’ marks this new generation of feminists’ new political imagination.”

Third-wavers also follow poststructuralists and queer theorists in rejecting identity politics. Rebecca Walker writes: “We worry that identity will dominate and regulate our lives, instantly put us at odds with someone, force us to choose a fixed position: women against men, Black against white, oppressed against oppressor, good against bad.” Similarly, Danzy Senna argues that “breaking free of identity politics” enabled her to “recognize the complexity and ambiguity of the world we inherited.” The third wave’s desire for more fluid identities has been affectionately described as its “vibrant messiness.”

Barbara Findlen, editor of Listen Up, describes her peers’ assumption that “if something is attractive, fun, or popular, it cannot be feminist.” The cliché of second-wavers as their frumpy, plain, “far-too-serious sisters” resonates widely among other third-wave writers. By contrast, many third-wave writings and political practices deftly weave in humor and contradiction, as Reading 92, from Susan Jane Gilman’s contribution to Adios, Barbie, illustrates.

Reading 91, from Rebecca Walker’s To Be Real, offers a more serious and severe account of second-wave feminism’s disciplinary character. In the Chinese rendering:

A year before I began writing this book, my life was like a crucible of femininity. Every decision I made, every person I spent time with, every word I spoke had to occupy the right moral and political position, had to conform to my image of womanhood and my conception of women’s empowerment. Everything had a gendered explanation; whatever did not fit my conception of feminism was “bad, immoral, and problematic.”

In her afterword to To Be Real, second-wave intersectional theorist Angela Davis expresses surprise that so many contributors felt feminism had “imprisoned their individuality—their desires, goals, and sexual practices.” Davis argues that third-wavers’ portrayal of feminism as ascetic and disciplinary is an “imagined feminist condition.”

An extended discussion of tensions between second- and third-wave feminists appears in Reading 94, from Cathryn Bailey’s “Unpacking the Mother/Daughter Baggage”:

Many young women see themselves as struggling to refuse a kind of feminist once deemed “ideal.” They may therefore be expressing resistance directed not at actual feminists but at a governing force internal to the feminist herself—the “panoptic feminist police.”

Bailey illustrates failures of communication between second- and third-wave feminists and suggests ways to ease their tensions. She also opposes the relativism of postmodern epistemology embraced by many third-wave writers. Her example is Donna Minkowitz’s contribution to Rebecca Walker’s To Be Real, in which Minkowitz describes finding a fantasy of raping a teenager with a baseball bat erotic and wanting to be free to express that feeling. Walker praises all her contributors for being “real,” for “courageously reflecting” on supposedly “counterrevolutionary behavior” that most second-wave writers would criticize.

Indeed, second-wave feminist Gloria Steinem, who wrote the foreword to Walker’s collection, did criticize Minkowitz’s account. Bailey is likewise troubled by Minkowitz’s relativist notions of freedom and being true to oneself. Simply believing one’s conduct to be subversive or conducive to freedom and resistance is not enough, she argues: “there must be a balance between the subject’s own interpretation and the interpretations of others.” Here Bailey carefully examines the problem of postmodern relativism troubling much third-wave writing.

Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier, editors of Catching a Wave, also address relativism’s hold on third-wave writing. In their view, the absence of boundaries around what feminism means “hollows out feminism’s core values and agenda,” creating an “open-door feminism” in which people with any views or practices can count as feminists. They consider this the “worst possible reading” of intersectional theorist bell hooks’s maxim “feminism is for everybody.”

Sisterhood: Sharing a Bed, Dreaming Different Dreams?

In Reading 98, “Solitary Sisterhood: Individualism Meets Collectivity in Feminism’s Third Wave” (2005), Astrid Henry examines the pronounced individualism of much third-wave writing. Describing these texts as “filled with personal definitions of feminism,” she locates this individualism in their preference for small-scale personal narratives. Like diaries or journals, these accounts emphasize the contradictions, uncertainties, and dilemmas encountered in individual everyday lives. Second-wave feminists rarely wrote in such an individualized way. They instead believed analysis should move from personal, individual responses to collective, mass-political responses. Some second-wave writers have specifically attacked the third wave’s style. One critic calls the contributors to Listen Up! “amateur memoirists” who confuse “feeling bad” with oppression and assume their everyday lives possess greater inherent significance for strangers than they actually do.

Henry is less harsh. She recognizes that the third wave’s individualist approach reflects its resistance to abuses of essentialism, to the second wave’s collective “we,” and to speaking for other women. Clearly, this is a welcome critical stance learned from poststructuralism and intersectionality. Yet Henry argues that it is time for third-wave feminists to move beyond personal narratives, engage larger political and theoretical questions, and shift from the individual to the collective. Although she appreciates how third-wave writers have made feminism appealing to more women and men, she argues that when feminism becomes whatever an individual wants it to be, it “loses its critical political perspective” and turns into a “meaningless bumper sticker announcing ‘girl power’ to the drivers behind.”

Henry worries that this individualist conception of feminism fits all too comfortably with the conservative realities of twenty-first-century US politics, which emphasize individual solutions to collective social problems. She laments the loss of shared struggles, definable political goals, and identifiable adversaries. Her conclusion is that, by establishing common political objectives, the third wave can move from being merely “a singular generational position adopted by individuals to a critical political perspective that recognizes feminism’s diversity and differences while emphasizing the need for collective action to affect society.”

Feminism, Anti-Imperialism, Opposition to War, and Postcolonialism

Rosa Luxemburg on Imperialism and the Woman Question

In “Women’s Suffrage and Class Struggle” (1912), Luxemburg argues that bourgeois governments deny women the vote chiefly because they fear working-class women will win elections and vote against laws benefiting big business. Her contempt for bourgeois women is also evident in this reading: she regards them as parasites living off other people’s labor.

In her major work on imperialism, The Accumulation of Capital, she examines the economic factors forcing capitalist enterprises to expand abroad. For Luxemburg, imperialism’s destruction of natural economies exemplifies primitive accumulation: the use of brute force and violence to conquer premodern peoples, seize and privatize their land, and transform premodern subsistence economies into market economies. Militarism is therefore integral to modern imperialism’s logic. Reading 107, “Militarism as a Province of Accumulation” (1913), is the final chapter of The Accumulation of Capital. It discusses how militarism drains tax revenue that could serve more humane purposes and how imperial governments’ endless demand for newer, more technologically advanced weapons fills the coffers of capitalist arms industries. Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism thus recognized the rise of a permanent arms economy and a military-industrial complex—insights other neo-Marxists would develop more clumsily decades later.

Few Marxists of her time matched Luxemburg’s profound concern over Western imperialism’s destruction of premodern social relations. Contrary to the prevailing view, she did not keep emphasizing the backwardness of these forms of organization but concentrated on their remarkable tenacity, resilience, and adaptability. She particularly stressed how European imperialism destroyed the world’s remaining Indigenous social organizations, which “provided the most productive labor processes and the best guarantees of their continuity and development.”

The Movement Against the Vietnam War

The Vietnam War directly affected second-wave feminists as their husbands, lovers, brothers, and friends were drafted into the US armed forces. This direct impact heightened their attention to global issues and to the US military and CIA’s overt and covert troublemaking abroad. Many second-wave feminists participated in the antiwar movement, learning important political and organizational skills and immersing themselves in the theories and political practices of the Old and New Left. Yet just as first-wave activists discovered their inferior status as women within abolitionism, many second-wave activists turned to feminism because of sexism in the New Left and the anti–Vietnam War movement. Radical feminist Robin Morgan describes that sexism:

Thinking about our part in the struggle to build a new society, we slowly realized that we were doing the same work and playing the same roles inside the movement as outside it: typing, making coffee, no politics.

During feminists’ struggle to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, opponents used their antiwar activism against them. In particular, accusations that feminists were un-American or unpatriotic, and that the ERA would send women into battle, drew more converts to the conservative STOP-ERA campaign.

After the Second World War, the Cold War between the capitalist and socialist worlds also extended into the major theoretical schools explaining uneven global development. Modernization theorists tended to be conservatives or moderate liberals sympathetic to capitalism. They attributed Third World countries’ development problems to internal factors such as overpopulation, illiteracy, the constraints of traditional values and cultures, and/or a lack of resources and technology.

Dependency theorists, by contrast, tended to be left liberals, anticolonialists, and/or pro-socialists. They argued that uneven and unequal development in Third World countries resulted from external factors: First World governments’ neocolonialism and multinational corporations’ exploitation of cheap labor, which transferred wealth from the Third World to the First. Dependency theorists described First World enrichment through Third World exploitation as “the development of underdevelopment.”

Reading 112, Irene Tinker’s “The Adverse Impact of Development on Women” (1976), summarizes findings from early global feminist research. Tinker discusses how a gender-blind approach to modernization meant that, at the time she wrote, women had lost ground relative to men “in nearly every country and every class.” A major cause of this “sorry state of affairs” was development planners’ frequent neglect of women’s double burden of work inside and outside the household. Tinker describes, for example, European colonizers’ assumption that men were superior to women even where women were the principal cultivators. Consequently, when new agricultural technologies were introduced, women did not receive timely instruction. Even after many former colonies became independent states following the Second World War, development experts continued to ignore advanced technologies’ adverse effects on women’s traditional roles, workloads, and/or wages.

Feminisms Inspired by Dependency Theory

In the 1960s, labor-intensive industries in the Third World expanded rapidly as multinational capital turned its attention to them. These global sweatshops found profitable homes in countries generally characterized by elites or regimes favorable to the First World, low levels of unionization and regulation, cheap labor, and high unemployment. Of particular importance to feminists was the overwhelming predominance of young Third World women in these factories’ workforces. The selection from Barbara Ehrenreich and Annette Fuentes’s “Life on the Global Assembly Line” (1981) exposes the intense exploitation within them. When women organized for better working conditions, they faced police brutality and/or the companies simply relocated to other Third World countries with more compliant workers.

Feminist dependency theorists also stressed that offshoring and outsourcing affected not only Third World workers but First World working-class people who lost their jobs in the process. Between 1965 and 1985, industrial manufacturing’s share of US employment fell from 60 to 26 percent, while service employment rose from 40 to 74 percent. New service jobs did not compensate for the loss of blue-collar manufacturing work: many service workers received low wages and lacked the healthcare and pension benefits associated with blue-collar unions.

Many people from the Third World migrated to First World countries to fill these growing numbers of low-paid service jobs, taking on roles once performed by First World stay-at-home mothers—as nannies and domestic workers. The feminization of global migration refers to the growing number of women migrant workers crossing the world in search of jobs.

Reading 121, from Grace Chang’s “The Global Trade in Filipina Workers” (1997), describes women’s global migration from poorer to wealthier regions. There they work as sex workers; as nannies and maids in private households; and as caregivers in hospitals, hospices, childcare centers, and nursing homes. Chang shows how the implementation of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) in the 1980s helped drive migration’s feminization. Third World governments often encouraged both women and men to emigrate for the foreign currency they sent home. These workers’ remittances provided much-needed reserve currency for servicing national debt.

A more personal account of confronting neocolonialism appears in Reading 118, intersectional theorist June Jordan’s “Report from the Bahamas.” Jordan’s continually self-questioning awareness of race, class, gender, and neocolonialism troubles her short vacation in the sunny Bahamas. Her relative privilege as a tourist and consumer, compared with the local women cleaning her room and selling handicrafts in the market, is undeniable and inescapable, forcing her to question critically the basis of political connection.

Overall, feminist dependency theorists called on the First World to assume greater responsibility for Third World problems and advocated policies protecting poor and working-class women across the globe. They also called for collective political action, such as workers employed by multinationals forming their own unions or protesting decisions harmful to working-class and poor people at international institutions such as the World Bank.

Radical Feminist Global Analyses

From the 1970s onward, radical feminists played a leading role in emphasizing and explaining how patriarchal practices obstructed women’s liberation worldwide. Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978) was one of the most widely read radical feminist books on global patriarchal practices. It contains chapters on Indian sati, foot-binding in ancient China, and African genital cutting as structures of violence against Third World women. Daly says her book will “analyze certain barbarous rituals” to discover the “underlying common patterns” constituting patriarchy’s “sado-ritual syndrome.” In Reading 113, she describes this syndrome through the example of sati in India. The selection also demonstrates her emphasis on the “universal sameness of phallic morality.”

Global Feminist Analyses Inspired by Rosa Luxemburg

Given Rosa Luxemburg’s concern with colonialism and imperialism’s destruction of premodern societies, second-wave feminists inspired by her work went furthest in critically questioning Western development models and recognizing their negative ecological effects. Reading 119, from Maria Mies’s Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (1986), discusses this destruction and emphasizes how women suffer more than men. Similarly, in the coauthored Women: The Last Colony (1988), Mies describes capitalism’s impact on Indian women:

The available evidence supports the argument that capitalist penetration impoverishes and marginalizes large numbers of formerly self-sufficient producers; secondly, women are more affected by these processes than men, who may still be partially absorbed into the actual wage-labor force. Inequality and polarization between the sexes increase. Far from bringing greater equality between women and men, capitalist penetration [into noncapitalist forms abroad]… actually introduces new elements of patriarchy and sexism.

Mies explains how this process feminizes poverty and increases violence against women as their status deteriorates relative to men’s. She also discusses the breakup of households when poor men migrate to cities for wage labor, leaving wives and daughters in villages to undertake subsistence farming or turn to prostitution to survive.

Another feminist inspired by Luxemburg, Vandana Shiva, uses “maldevelopment” to describe this destruction. Earlier analyses of development, whether politically left, right, or center, primarily used economic growth as their measure of development. They assumed that industrialization had to replace less efficient premodern production to increase output and alleviate Third World poverty. Modernization and dependency theorists shared this assumption: the benefits of industrialization were common ground between otherwise opposed capitalist and socialist development paths.

Shiva rejects these paths. Her alternative vision is most clearly articulated in Ecofeminism (1993), coauthored with Maria Mies. They describe it in terms of self-sufficiency and a subsistence perspective. One of this perspective’s major features is a shift in the aim of economic activity, from producing ever-growing “mountains of commodities” to meeting basic human needs. Reliance on community exchange—barter—and social ties replaces markets and financial institutions, while natural resources such as water, soil, and oil are neither privatized nor commercialized but treated as community responsibilities.

Postcolonial and Transnational Feminisms

The emergence of postcolonial and transnational perspectives marked a major paradigm shift in global feminist analysis. Many feminists today prefer transnational analysis to the conceptual approaches and First World/Third World framework favored by earlier modern global feminism. As Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan explain, those earlier frameworks retained traces of a Euro–North American-centered Western worldview, portraying holders of global power as the movers and shakers of world history while ignoring complex, actual class divisions at the local level.

In Reading 131, from Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (1999), Ella Shohat praises intersectional analysis but criticizes US intersectional theorists for rarely discussing their own privileged position as citizens of a First World country and global superpower. Opposition to racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia within the United States, she points out, has never guaranteed opposition to US global hegemony abroad. She discusses, for example, how people of color often use the US military as a route to upward mobility, serving in many of its imperialist aggressions overseas. Shohat argues that “First World” status, even for those who have climbed up from below, entails privileges that must be recognized when discussing local/global connections.

“Postcolonial” is a key concept referring to engagement with and interrogation of the legacies of colonial discourse, power structures, and social hierarchies. Postcolonial theorists also pay closer attention to globalization’s cultural and discursive expressions. They do not ignore political economy; rather, they see political and economic questions as intertwined with cultural and discursive analysis. Reading 123 comes from Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), a foundational work of postcolonial theory. Said refocuses attention on enduring Western prejudices about Arab-Islamic and Asian peoples and cultures of the Near, Middle, and Far East, naming this prejudice “Orientalism.” He describes the “Orient” as a material-discursive construction of the “West,” projected onto colonized Eastern lands and peoples. This process requires the “Othering” of the “Orient,” which in turn helps define and consolidate the “West.” Orientalism thus depicts the West as much as it depicts the East through a Western filter. Postcolonial theory aims to analyze critically the social implications of this mutually constitutive process between colonizer and colonized.

Decolonizing Feminist Thought

Reading 124, Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” (1984), is a landmark article introducing postcolonial feminist theory to US feminists. Mohanty aims to deconstruct and dismantle the privilege and ethnocentrism found in much First World global feminist discourse. She particularly criticizes its pervasive essentialism: Western feminists construct a singular, composite “Third World woman,” a group presumed to share interests and desires regardless of actual class, national, or racial location.

This homogenized construction, she argues, frequently implies that Third World women are poor, ignorant, tradition-bound victims of oppression. The unspoken assumption is that First World women, by comparison, are educated and modern, control their bodies and sexualities, and freely make their own decisions. This binary discourse not only “takes a paternalistic attitude toward Third World women” but reduces them to victimized objects, “depriving them of historical and political agency.” An example appears on a cover of the US second-wave feminist magazine off our backs, headed “Latin American Feminists Meet.” The woman on the cover represents the supposedly poor, victimized Third World woman whom Mohanty identifies in Western feminist thought.

Like Mohanty’s, Uma Narayan’s work exposes the implicitly colonial character of Western feminist positions and assumptions. In Reading 129, from Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism (1997), Narayan uses the work of US radical feminist Mary Daly (see Reading 113) to explore representations of “Third World traditions” that reproduce a “colonialist stance” toward Third World women. Narayan makes clear that not every Western feminist critique of Third World cultural practices is inherently colonialist or ethnocentric. Rather, a colonialist stance entails a missionary framework of representation in which Third World women appear as victims who must be rescued from their own cultural traditions. They are thus treated as lacking agency, unable to represent or speak for themselves. The colonialist stance also erases the historical contexts in which cultural traditions emerge and develop. Those traditions appear unchanging and “timeless,” making Third World countries seem like “places without history” and without local forms of resistance.

Narayan also deconstructs terms such as “Westernization.” She discusses how the word is often used as a “strategy of exile”: the villains brand Third World feminists advocating women’s rights as Westernized “traitors to the community” in order to undermine their legitimate feminist claims and actions. Her opponents, she notes, are always selective about what counts as Westernized: they drive cars and use computers without considering themselves traitors. In short, she calls for a more critical debate about the meaning of Westernization to deconstruct the term’s uses and abuses.

Can the Subaltern Speak?

Combining elements of Marxism and poststructuralism, postcolonial theorists attend not only to colonialism and imperialism’s economic and political effects but also to their discursive implications. The latter are emphasized in Reading 125, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1985). A member of India’s Subaltern Studies collective, Spivak uses “subaltern” to mean the general attribute of subordinated groups, whether expressed through class, caste, age, gender, or any other distinction.

For Spivak, imperial codes and practices imposed on colonized peoples destroy their Indigenous symbolic systems—a process she calls epistemic violence. The cultural effects of this violent rupture are complex, but they include the silencing of authentic Indigenous cultures. For Spivak, the genuinely subaltern—the most marginalized groups—cannot speak. If the subaltern could speak, she or he would no longer occupy a subaltern position. Some writers interpret this as excluding or silencing Indigenous peoples as historical subjects and participants in struggle. Spivak means something very different, however. Anti-imperialist writers and activists are clearly not outside imperialism as a discursive field, since they engage with it directly. Those regarded as producing theoretical critiques of colonial discourse can hardly occupy a subaltern position. Their own privilege and hybridity must be recognized and acknowledged.

Spivak’s position differs from that of feminist standpoint theorists, who regard marginalized people as possessing the most critical vantage point and thus privilege the knowledge of the oppressed, or subaltern. Spivak considers such projects “deeply insulting in the long run.” She argues that these writers can make such claims only under the guise of “representing” the subaltern. That is, when feminists privilege oppressed people’s knowledge, it is actually feminist intellectuals who interpret and speak for marginalized positions. In foregrounding those positions, the intellectuals themselves disappear behind the scenes, failing to acknowledge their interpretive role or the displacement and substitution involved when they speak for oppressed groups and interpret their standpoints. For Spivak, claiming actually to represent another person without acknowledging this displacement makes one complicit in a new form of domination, even when it rests on radical or emancipatory practice.

Spivak’s work is valuable because it makes these careful analytical distinctions while insisting on connections among women—often difficult global connections. She urges feminists to recognize that all feminist thought, whether written by white Western women, Western women of color, or postcolonial theorists, must be questioned and deconstructed for its possible imperialist logic. She teaches us to “read the world” critically and “shed personal privilege” as an ethical and political responsibility.

Migration and the Gender Politics of Postcolonial Space

Rather than simply portraying global migrants as victims of dominant cultures, postcolonial theorists such as Avtar Brah and Trinh T. Minh-ha show how migrants continually challenge those cultures’ marginalizing impulses. Dominant cultures themselves change in the process. Brah’s Cartographies of Diaspora (1996), for example, discusses how “Britishness” has been dismantled and reconstructed through mass migration to Britain from its former colonies since the Second World War. Through this process, the old London or “English” character—Englishness—becomes just one ethnicity among many. This idea is vividly expressed in Reading 126, from Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989):

The West painfully recognizes the Third World’s presence within the First World, and vice versa. The “master” must recognize that his culture is not as homogeneous or unified as he imagined. Very reluctantly, “he” discovers that “he” is only one among “others.”

Trinh’s work undermines the notion of “true insiders” in any culture, revealing how every culture is formed through mixture. By contrast, “the dominant Western attitude to cultural hybridity assumes that hybridity is always somewhere else, or is infiltrating an identity or position presumed always to have been pure and unchanging.” Such a pure position has never existed, as Trinh wants to show. Correcting this idealized assumption is an aim of “decolonizing” Western thought.

Feminism and Fundamentalism

In Reading 127, from Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices ([1994] 2006), Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan discuss the importance of theorizing the enormous changes of postmodernity. They are particularly concerned with challenges posed by the growth of transnational militarism and religious fundamentalism in the post-9/11 era. Grewal and Kaplan call for a materialist-deconstructive approach to the political and economic roots of contemporary religious fundamentalism’s expansion, rather than simply treating these transnational global conflicts as “culture wars.”

US mass media frequently put on a show of deadly seriousness in depicting today’s global conflicts as culture wars. The West is associated either with its Judeo-Christian traditions or with its modern secular culture—both portrayed as enemies of fundamentalist Islam. Even some contemporary theorists interpret global conflicts as a backlash by traditionally organized communities against the discursive frameworks fostered by modernity: the Western advocacy of separating religion and state, freedom of speech, and individualist ideals, for example. Once again, the emphasis falls on cultural difference.

Grewal and Kaplan argue that recognizing anti-Western sentiment abroad as a response not only to culture wars but also to the effects of earlier colonial and neocolonial policies makes it easier to see how Western hegemony produces global flashpoints involving itself. For example, the CIA helped bring about the antidemocratic coup that restored Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power in Iran in 1953. The Pahlavi puppet dictatorship of the US imperial power was ultimately overthrown in 1979 by the Islamic fundamentalists who govern Iran today. In the 1980s, the US government gave military and financial support to Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviet Union. Yet two decades later, the United States went to war in Afghanistan against the Taliban as part of its war on terror.

[English edition note: The Chinese compilation calls the US-backed forces of the 1980s the “Taliban.” They were mujahideen; the Taliban emerged in the 1990s.]

Grewal and Kaplan warn feminists not to let historical amnesia blind us to how earlier Western support for authoritarian regimes produced contemporary global conflicts. They also urge US feminists not to focus exclusively on Islamic fundamentalism’s patriarchal character, but to examine Christian fundamentalism and how its influence on the Republican Party has affected millions of women worldwide through funding restrictions on reproductive choice and development practices.

Portraying Muslim women as victims of oppressive religious and cultural customs has often helped win support for the US government’s war on terror. President George W. Bush, for example, used the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan as evidence of his commitment to women’s rights, seeking to attract women voters to the Republican Party. In Reading 132, Lila Abu-Lughod asks, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” She warns feminists to beware of tidy cultural icons—memes—being pasted over messier historical and political narratives that claim to be “liberating Muslim women,” especially when backed by military force.

[Chinese compiler-translator’s note, attached to the title “Do Muslim Women Really Need Bank Savings?”: This is probably a riff on the aversion to loan interest in Muslim culture.]

[English edition note: In Abu-Lughod’s 2002 article, “saving” means rescue, not bank savings.]

Discussing the politics of veiling and the burqa, Abu-Lughod also asks how feminists should challenge the reductive interpretation of veiling as the quintessential sign of women’s oppression. Feminists, she argues, must accept differences, recognizing that other women may envision freedom and justice differently. At the same time, she warns against the trap of cultural relativism: feminists must not stop criticizing or resisting oppressive practices. For Abu-Lughod, casting Muslim women as people in need of rescue recalls paternalistic colonial images of white Westerners saving brown women from brown men. [English edition note: The Chinese gloss identifies “brown men” as Native American men; the colonial context here is India.] Such imagery reinforces Western superiority—a form of arrogance that deserves and requires challenge.

Transnational Feminist Organizing

In Reading 134, “Towards Transnational Feminisms” (2006), Jyotsna Agnihotri Gupta discusses what “transnational feminism” means and how it differs from earlier notions of “global sisterhood.” Whereas the latter began with commonalities among women, transnational feminism begins by recognizing differences among women worldwide. A transnational approach also acknowledges how one person’s privilege in the world system is connected to another’s oppression. It requires comparative analysis of multiple, overlapping, and dispersed oppressions rather than a universal theory of gender that presupposes a unified feminist agenda, as earlier global-sisterhood approaches did.

Although committed to intersectional analysis, transversal politics, and practices rooted in postcolonial critique, transnational feminist approaches also seek to overcome the undertheorization of political economy in feminist postcolonial approaches that remain caught in cultural and discursive debates. To explain this, Gupta draws on changes in Mohanty’s postcolonial approach over time. Mohanty’s early work, such as “Under Western Eyes” (1984), in Reading 124, focused on decolonizing Western feminist thought. In later work, such as Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, she argues that “capitalism’s political and economic domains are a more urgent terrain of struggle.” Mohanty makes clear that she is not severing political economy’s connection with culture and discourse, only shifting her focus. For Gupta, this materialist-deconstructive approach, attending both to the micropolitics of local contexts, subjectivities, and struggles and to the macropolitics of global economic and political systems and processes, is central to transnational feminism.

Feminism and Film Theory: The Male Gaze

Penis Envy?

Perhaps because all they know of psychoanalysis is that its founder, Freud, accused women of suffering from penis envy, readers tend to imagine it as an inherently misogynistic field. It can therefore be difficult to explain to female students why feminist film critics of the 1970s and 1980s were so enamored of psychoanalysis, or why many contemporary feminist critics still rely heavily on its insights.

…Because Freud’s interpretive technique depended on tracing particular symptoms back to sexual repression, he came to believe that his society’s excessive restrictions on female sexuality caused women’s ailments, such as the bodily symptoms of hysteria. Although Freud was hardly a feminist, he offered a starting point from which heteropatriarchal definitions of female sexuality could be challenged.

…

Penis Envy, Anyone?

Damn right! In a cultural order like this, it would be astonishing for a woman not to envy those who possess a penis. Not that women necessarily want the penis itself—whether the organ is all that attractive is debatable—but who could turn down the social, political, and economic power associated with it? We will soon see that this power is illusory in many respects, but that is another story. This is why Freud thought boys had good reason to leave the Oedipus complex behind and accept the role society had prepared for them: giving up killing one’s father and marrying one’s mother was a small price for the enormous future reward of becoming a socially respected father. And it was reasonable to think that women’s willingness to enter the devalued position of the “Other”—someone always already castrated—needed explaining.

Freud therefore could not understand why women did not reject the problematic designation of themselves as beings of “lack.” Overt oppression obviously played a major role, but could not fully explain women’s widespread, compliant acceptance of secondary status. To explain this, Freud returned to his concept of the Oedipus complex: the process of socialization that produces standard, normative masculinity and femininity.

Like Freud, Lacan recognized that society elevates the penis to a special status, giving its possessors privileges denied to those without it. But Lacan went further, arguing that this privileged status was entirely illusory: no one, not even the man with the biggest penis, can attain the ideal of phallic power underpinning heteropatriarchy as a system of male domination. On some level, we know this. It is why we make fun of the enormous belt buckles, cowboy hats, and red convertibles some men use to shore up their manly, phallic standing. Lacan succinctly exposes the desperation beneath this performance: the phallus, as a symbol of social power, has no referent in the real world. The penis is not the phallus, however much some men wish it were.

That is, because men have penises, and because society tends automatically to equate the penis with phallic power, men arguably find it easier than women to deceive themselves into believing they do not lack. Masculine peacocking—the enormous belt buckles, cowboy hats, and so on—is one way to accomplish this, denying the lack, the fundamental castration, present in every human life. I do not mean that women’s social oppression is unreal or has no concrete consequences—obviously it does. I mean only that, in Lacanian terms, men’s displays of authority amount to a futile attempt to erase the fact that, at the end of the day, men are just as fragmented, just as torn apart, as women.

Cinematic Suture and Psychoanalysis

Early feminist analyses of cinematic suture, including Kaja Silverman’s, tended to focus on its problematic side: it draws us so effectively into fantasy worlds because it relies on readily recognizable archetypes, including gender stereotypes. Silverman argues that suture not only brings us into being as subjects by providing a clear model of who we should be, but also sustains—repeatedly “reactivates”—our subjectivity over time. Teresa de Lauretis puts this more concretely in Alice Doesn’t: “If women spectators are to buy their tickets and their popcorn, the work of cinema… may be said to require women’s consent; and we may well suspect that narrative cinema in particular must be aimed, like desire, toward seducing women into femininity.” In short, de Lauretis argues that if the heteropatriarchal social order is to endure, women must be seduced into femininity—continually “reactivated” as female subjects in Silverman’s sense. Suture, particularly the alluring embodiments of femininity on screen, is the cinematic mechanism accomplishing this reactivation. As de Lauretis puts it, women are “made over and over again” into women.

Silverman and de Lauretis offer an explanation for the enigma of femininity that puzzled Freud. They suggest, as Freud did, that normative femininity is so objectionable that women must be given powerful reasons to collude with the system: precisely, they must be seduced into femininity. Suture becomes one of the instruments of seduction, persuading women that being a non-subject—a passive object of desire—is pleasurable. As we will see later, subsequent theories of spectatorship insist on a greater distance between visual narrative and spectator, arguing that spectators are not merely dupes of dominant cultural codes but active participants in their creation and revision. Nevertheless, psychoanalytic feminist film theorists’ analyses of suture in the 1980s explain something of the reproduction of normative femininity—and masculinity—in our culture.

The Male Gaze

The passage from Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” discussed here remains one of feminist film theory’s most legendary statements: as long as men are active subjects of desire and women merely its passive objects, the only desire available to women is the desire to be desired—to become the perfect object of the male gaze. In other words, women’s desire is indirect. The closest they can come to desiring is to want male desire; essentially, they want to be wanted. Women’s eroticism is thus constructed through their objectification of themselves.

In teaching feminist film theory, I have found that this account brings many young women up short: they immediately recognize that Mulvey’s description of women’s desire to be desired still concerns them. Certainly, much has changed since 1975. Billboards, magazines, television shows, and Hollywood films now teem with men displayed, often half-naked, for women’s gaze. Women can now look at men, objectify them, desire them, and so on. Indeed, affirming active female desire has become one of the twenty-first century’s most successful advertising ploys, second only to the rhetoric of “female empowerment,” which sells everything from clothes, cosmetics, and perfume to cars and apartments.

At the same time, many expectations still tell women to exhibit their desirability rather than approach the objects of their desire directly. They are expected to signal their availability, usually cautiously, so that the men they are interested in will take the hint, act, and approach them. Thus, however much we might like to believe that the old days are gone and women are no longer reduced to objects of the male gaze, traces of this dynamic persist: women are more or less expected to wait passively for a man to decide whether she is desirable enough for him to pursue.

Psychoanalytic feminist film critics, most famously Mulvey, argue that the male gaze in classical Hollywood cinema is activated through three “looks”: (1) the camera’s look, which puts women on screen to be looked at; (2) the look of male characters within the film’s narrative—how men on screen look at women on screen; and (3) the spectator’s look, which automatically aligns spectators with the male protagonist, the agent of action on screen. Regardless of gender, spectators thus identify with his perspective and what he sees, including the women he looks at and evaluates.

Mulvey argues that classical Hollywood films, such as Hitchcock’s Vertigo, are often organized around the male gaze, leaving female spectators only two choices. They can join that gaze and look at women on screen from a male position, or identify with those women and accept their situation as passive objects of the gaze. Neither option is pleasant. The first is tantamount to sadism, understood here as the drive to subject one’s object of desire to a scrutinizing, even invasive gaze. The second, unhappily for female spectators, is tantamount to masochism: submission to another’s controlling gaze…. Whenever they choose the latter identification, they learn to objectify themselves and enjoy it. Like their on-screen counterparts, they also aspire to conform to heteropatriarchal fantasy, embodying the mythical capital-W Woman, hoping to arouse male desire one day and taking pride in the prospect.

In Mulvey’s analysis, then, Hollywood cinema, like other aspects of our culture, teaches straight women to covet the opportunity to become objects of the male gaze. If they are to gain any agency at all, this is their only route: exercising limited control over men through their sexuality. Although objectification may be intrinsic to erotic representation—every object of desire is objectified to some extent—the patriarchal unconscious creates a gendered division of labor in which straight women’s pleasure comes from their objectification of themselves rather than from men’s objectification of them.

Rethinking the Male Gaze

…A shopping scene in Vertigo is particularly biting. Scottie takes Judy to an expensive department store and painstakingly chooses clothes for her himself, despite her vocal resistance. The clothes are identical to those she wore while impersonating Madeleine, so Judy knows very well that Scottie is trying to recreate his fantasy. Hitchcock makes the workings of heteropatriarchal power unmistakable: Judy tries to resist the transformation, while an exasperated Scottie responds that it will not make much difference to her.

This is why our reading of Vertigo cannot be as simple as Mulvey’s. Hitchcock is shrewd in his characterization, portraying Scottie as a man fixated on the woman of his fantasy. This also gives us grounds to argue that, rather than teaching women to take pleasure in objectifying themselves as Mulvey supposes, Vertigo delivers a scathing critique of heteropatriarchal violence.

Karen Hollinger reexamined Mulvey’s reading of Vertigo in a 1987 essay. Hollinger argues that by isolating the male gaze from its narrative context, such as the shopping scene, Mulvey overlooks the possibility that Vertigo exposes rather than reaffirms heteropatriarchy, revealing “the incompatibility of male desire with female individuality, independence, and liberation.” Judy suffers as she struggles to suppress her personality to satisfy Scottie’s fantasy. By making spectators witness this process, the film gradually makes them feel the perversity and unease of Scottie’s gaze, undermining their ability to identify with him. By the end, spectators may be as critical of the male gaze’s compulsiveness as Mulvey herself.

bell hooks adds a Black feminist perspective: the assumption that female spectators automatically submit to the male gaze presumes that those spectators are white. While white women may worry about objectification by the male gaze, hooks argues, Black women confront a different concern, since the gaze often passes them over without registering their existence. By dominant standards of attractiveness, Black women simply “do not count.” This does not mean Black women are never objectified. Quite the opposite: hooks wants to show that our society is racist as well as heteropatriarchal. Dominant cultural ideals of femininity exclude Black women, rendering them invisible.

hooks argues that this predicament has generated a politicized way of engaging with images. Here pleasure comes not from complacent suture but from questioning and criticizing the images. She calls this critical attitude “the oppositional gaze.” It is a resistant gaze that counters the male gaze by actively challenging normative definitions of femininity. As hooks concludes in “The Oppositional Gaze,” “Identifying with neither the phallocentric gaze nor the construction of white womanhood as lack, critical black female spectators construct a theory of looking relations where cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation.”

These critiques of Mulvey challenge the idea that spectators form readily distinguishable identifications with images. Moreover, as Joan Copjec argues in Read My Desire (1994), “identification” is not, in the first place, a particularly accurate way to describe the dynamics between spectators and images. For Copjec, images do not simply—or even primarily—encourage identification with pleasing alter egos; they invite us to invest them with our desire. Desire, in turn, does not always master its object as the male gaze does in Mulvey’s account. On the contrary, desire often entails a loss of mastery, even anxiety. The pleasure we derive from cinema, therefore, is by no means equivalent to treating the screen as a mirror of narcissistic gratification.

When the Object Returns the Gaze

Copjec’s argument that desire can decenter, even traumatize, the subject—including the subject’s activity of looking—is connected to a more rigorous Lacanian theory of the gaze. Developed by Lacanians such as Copjec herself, Todd McGowan, and Slavoj Žižek, this account has challenged the overly simple application of Lacan’s ideas by film theorists associated with the British journal Screen, which published Mulvey’s essay in 1975.

Where Mulvey and feminist film theorists following her equate the “gaze” directly with the male subject’s act of looking, the critics I have just mentioned rightly point out that Lacan actually associates the gaze with a disturbing hole or absence in the subject’s visual field. That hole or absence itself generates desire, which, as McGowan puts it, “drives spectators to the cinema in the first place.” An all-seeing subject, he explains, would have no desire to look. We want to see precisely because we cannot see everything, because blind spots distort our visual field. The cinema screen is one such blind spot.

As McGowan explains, “the gaze is a distortion in the visual field at which seemingly omnipotent vision collapses”; it “appears as a stain that renders part of the visual field obscure or unintelligible.” In this sense, the Lacanian gaze is the exact opposite of the conquering, masterful male gaze analyzed by Mulvey: the Lacanian gaze destroys mastery, producing instead a disorienting sense of impotence.

In this account, the gaze belongs on the side of the object, not the subject. Žižek illustrates this through the example of a subject approaching a threatening house in a Hitchcock film: “the subject’s eye sees the house, but the house—the object—seems somehow to return the gaze…”

…

The object that looks back refuses to remain a static object and almost turns the tables. The viewer’s coherence as a subject, and their ability to master the image being viewed, are called into question. This is another way to understand why the Lacanian gaze is the exact opposite of Mulvey’s male gaze. It is why McGowan insists that, from a Lacanian perspective, we should use “look,” not “gaze,” for the subject’s act of looking—the act Mulvey analyzes. Despite her explicit references to Lacan, Mulvey’s account of the male gaze is thus more Foucauldian than Lacanian. She is more concerned with heteropatriarchal power, with how men dominate women, than with the decentering and traumatic effects on the desiring subject when an object gazes back.

Nevertheless, there may be points of contact between these different understandings of the gaze. To begin with, the male gaze can traumatize and decenter a woman who becomes aware that she is its object. She may not be disoriented by her own desire, but she may be unsettled by the man’s desire to look at her, usually against her wishes. On the one hand, the male gaze differs entirely from the uncanny gaze Žižek describes because, unlike the latter, it usually originates in a concrete subject. On the other, from the position of the woman it targets, it can acquire the same uncanny, unsettling, threatening implications Žižek and other Lacanians associate with the Lacanian gaze.

Sometimes this happens because the male gaze is openly aggressive. At other times—and this is what makes the comparison with the Lacanian gaze possible—it happens because, just as I do not actually see the Hitchcock house’s gaze although I know it is there, I often cannot see the actual male gaze although I am acutely aware of its presence. I know a man is looking at me, but because his attention frightens me too much to turn around, I do not actually see him watching. Yet I still feel his look. In a sense, I perceive his gaze without actually seeing it. Is this not more or less what Lacan means by the gaze as a blind spot in the visual field? Is it not an excellent illustration of his claim that one can feel oneself under someone’s gaze without seeing or even discerning that person’s eyes?

This is why I am also tempted to say that, from the position of the woman who is its object, the male gaze presents the same unsettling, traumatic predicament as the sardine can, the house, and the window. From her perspective, a man—especially a stranger watching her—is an uncanny object that, against all logic, keeps staring at her, the subject. Consider a woman as the subject of her own story, the subject of her own stumbling or tranquil life, when she has no wish to present herself as an object of desire. A man, especially a strange man watching her, often appears as a vaguely threatening, creepy object.

We have seen that the male gaze’s decentering and traumatic effects arise from its attempt to objectify the female subject. A stranger staring at me is not, for me, a subject. I know nothing about him. As far as I am concerned, he might be a sardine can: like a static screen, he is an object without meaning. But he thinks that if he strips me of my subjectivity, if he turns me into a passive object, he can become an active subject, a powerful entity. There is violence in this transaction. Just as the gaze in Lacan’s sense may disrupt the subject’s coherence, the male gaze in Mulvey’s sense may disrupt women’s subjectivity.

This is why I do not want to dismiss Mulvey’s theory as outdated. Furthermore, following the logic of her argument, male subjectivity begins to falter when the woman a man is gazing at looks back. The situation reverses: the woman who, in his eyes, should remain an object insists on being a subject. She becomes an uncannily animated object, a half-subject—the house, the window—that looks back, refusing the identity of a passive object and thereby sometimes unsettling the male subject. As de Lauretis observes, quoting Stephen Heath, whenever a woman actively looks, “castration is in the air.” If we shift our attention from the subject of Mulvey’s male gaze to its object, an object that sometimes decides to look back, we may find ourselves in a space compatible, to some extent, with the more rigorous Lacanian gaze.

One might argue that the gaze of any object—a man, a woman, a person of another gender, an inanimate entity, or Derrida’s cat—can potentially decenter and traumatize the subject who believes the gaze belongs to them. From this perspective, the gender of the object returning the subject’s gaze does not matter: whoever or whatever it is, the object steals the gaze the subject assumes to be their prerogative. What feminist theory attends to in this apparently neutral scenario, however, is heteropatriarchal power. Men in our society have historically held more power than women; historically, they have been defined as active subjects rather than passive objects. This means their gaze can do greater psychic damage—at the moment when a strange man, an ordinary object to me, turns his eyes on me and insists on making me an object. The same applies to racism, as Frantz Fanon describes in his account of becoming a Black object beneath the “white gaze.”

This explains why characters in mainstream films such as Pretty Woman generally do not look back at the audience. The sometimes daring The Good Wife, by contrast, opens its sixth season with Alan Cumming looking almost directly at the viewer. The effect is not merely startling; it also disrupts suture in the way I have described, making the spectator immediately aware of the cinematic apparatus manipulating images behind their back. This is why Vivian in Pretty Woman cannot look directly at the audience: doing so would instantly shatter the film’s fantasy world and disrupt the spectator’s immersion in its narrative. Romantic comedies and other mainstream films and television programs are generally unlikely to include any form of the Lacanian gaze, whereas art cinema often deliberately seeks to unsettle and traumatize viewers in this way.