Perspective on Gender

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Module 2
2.1. Feminism : Different Waves & Perspectives

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Feminism
• Feminism - both ideology and theory - a translated idea like Marxism;
Women empowerment or men hatred? Depends a lot on the author’s
perspective

• Largely based on activism-idea that there is not fundamental
difference between the sexes-A political movement for equality-later
only theorised-also a literary approach

• Committed to theorising bases of inequality (in opportunities, rights,
privileges) between genders, to a programme of social change for
addressing it

• Different views of why there is gender inequality - gives rise to
different forms of feminism with different recommendations for change

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• It starts with the difference between male and female
distinction

• Only with the 3rd wave, the multiple gender came into the
armpit of feminism

• Today gender no longer can be seen as binary rather it is
multiple

• Heteronormativity or heterofascism as the thing of the past

• LGBTIQ+

• The + sign says that you can actually reinvent your gender,
you can imagine any number of genders and you can
appropriate the gender and that is what you are! This is the
doctrine

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• Feminism - do not consider men as the enemy, rather,
anybody indoctrinated by patriarchal ideology, anyone
trying to dictate or impose patriarchy on an audience of
people that is the enemy

• Political movement; politics-the struggle for power-
feminism-women trying to establish their identity as equal
citizens in any power structure

• First step is sensitisation-making them realise that they are
in chains; otherwise they are in love with that chain, believe
that they are the ideal way to be

• Althusser-ISA-Ideology plays a huge role in naturalising
ideology-so women accepts that they are inferior to men
and feel that they are passive

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• All those traits associated with femininity and masculinity

• Feminism reconsiders
fi
elds like history, medicine, anthropology,
sociology, the media discourse (movies, novels, arts) etc

• Feminism-Eurocentric idea-the thirst towards women
empowerment was there throughout the world at different point
of time

• Eg. Channar revolt of Kerala (1813 to 1859) but Suffragette
started in 1903 only

• Do you know W.E.B Du Bois (1868-1963) ?? Or Harriet Martineau
(1802-1876) - knowledge and power

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Di
ff
erent Waves of Feminism

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• According to the English feminist
academic, Maggie Humm (1945-) and
the American writer feminist activist
Rebecca Walker (1969), the history of
feminism can be divided into 3 waves

• First wave -19th and early 20th century

• Second wave - 1960s and 1970s

• Third wave - extends from the 1990s
to the present (different schools of
thoughts are there, some say that at
around 2000-2005, there arose post
feminism)
Maggie Humm
Rebecca Walker

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First Wave (1890s-1960s)
• Historical events - in the 1830s, the main issues
were the abolition of slavery and women’s rights;
1848-Women’s Rights Convention held in Seneca
Falls, New York-1920- the 19th Amendment
guaranteed women the right to vote

• Aim - Acquisition of rights that was reserved for men

• Right to vote, right to work etc

• The enlightenment doctrine of human rights, as
expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man
and of the Citizen (1789)

• Political aspects- Voting, ownership of property,
inheritance, education and ability to run for public
of
fi
ce

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• John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) The Subjection of Women
(1869) - focused on establishing a right to vote and to
hold political of
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ce - undermines the popular
stereotypes of women that were used to justify
political exclusion

• Harriet Taylor - The Enfranchisement of Women (1851)

• Arguing for political enfranchisement for women

• Added essays in later additions argued for women’s
right to sue for divorce

• Both Mill and Taylor - same perspective - coedited
works, essays

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Soviet poster for international women’s day 1932

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Second Wave (1960s-1990s)
• The personal is political (Carol Hanisch)

• Radical feminist - body becomes the cite of contestation—
They were trying to change their domestic and their personal
life

• Earlier homosexuals were given electric shock-mental illness-
Foucault - sane and insane-dyslexia

• When to get married, when to have baby-decided by religion,
state etc

• 2nd wave desire to gain control over their body

• A simple reversal of the dualism of the men and women will
affect the liberation of female half-once this binary is
disrupted females will become an equal citizen just as males
Carol Hanisch

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• Historical Events - in the years 1966-1979, there was
heightened feminist consciousness. The movement was
linked to the Civil Rights movement begun in the 1950s.

• Key issues : anti-discrimination policies and equal
privileges

• Evolved from
fi
rst wave

• Criticised for essentialising the concept of female, quite
unproblematised; didn’t look at women from other parts
of the world; focused only on the anglo-Eurocentric sort
of feminism

• The third wave tried destabilising such identities

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Third Wave (1990s
onwards)
• FEMINISMS

• Inclusive, eclectic, beyond the binaries

• Poststructural and postmodernist ideas in
fl
uenced
• Feminism enters into postmodernism when it questions the ideological
process by which man and woman are placed as the oppositional
categories and destabilised the notion of ‘autonomous subject’

• Derrida-deconstruction, dismantling the binary-there are no hierarchy -
taking away all kinds of identities

• Through postmodernism, feminism reinvents itself and multiple genders are
articulated, gender studies comes into the picture;

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• Then there is no essentialisation of
gender, rather it becomes a
fl
oating
signi
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er - gender is very subjective,
complex and multiple ideas

• Women were supposed as long to be
mothers - American history - Salem
witch trials
• When women dared to speak-automatically labelled as
witches/yakshi (Malayalam counterpart)

• Through a discourse of patriarchal ideology, the notion
of fear was attached to such concepts; the ruthlessness
and clever manupulation of patriarchal ideology

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• The twin imperatives of continuity and change are neatly
entwined within the 3rd wave of feminism

• The notion of culture; the geographical terrain in which a
woman lives; the notion of freedom is different women

• Recreate your own personal experience, not waiting for
the validation from the West, move forward to gain
independence and empowerment

• 3rd wave - a social movt, dealing with race, globalisation
and politics of desire (homosexual desires)

• Shift from grant narratives to personal narratives

• Started accepting Pluralism

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• Burn your bras (since it
is a con
fi
ning garment);
On contrary we have
Channar revolt (because
caste hegemony insists
them not to cover their
breasts),

• H
ij
ab (when Shah of Iran
bans it and when Taliban
impose it.. two different
realities)

• Karnataka H
ij
ab issue

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• Postfeminism - Women in the West - they achieved what they
fought for and now their biological clock is ticking away; want to
get married and have children

• “POST” is always problematic (like post colonialism)

• According Oxford dictionary, post feminism is de
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ned as relating
to the ideas and attitudes which ignore or reject feminist ideas of
1960s and subsequent decades; may not identify with
antifeminist movements; they are not against women
empowerment

• There are schools of thoughts - 1. after time or order
(periodising) 2. Rejecting (backlash)

• Male/patriarchal indoctrinated idea (politically quite incorrect)-
women achieved everything, so they want to go back to their
homes ( what if we ask the same question to men?

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• But there are some areas that women
ought to choose based on her
biological sex

• Postfeminism and popular culture

• Postfeminism as a backlash -
feminism failed to recognise what it
has gained;

• in the 1980s in America fewer and
fewer women were willing to
acknowledge that they are feminist -
became all about rules like patriarchy
- don’t shape your eyebrows, don’t
wax etc. (Aiswarya Rai and the
celebrity Bollywood culture)

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Di
ff
erent Perspectives

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• Feminism - variety of forms as a political and
intellectual movement - concerned with inequalities &
production of knowledge

• How different ways of thinking within feminism are
labelled

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• Liberal Feminism

• Socialist Feminism

• Radical Feminism

• Eco-Feminism and

• Postmodern Feminism

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Liberal Feminism
• Emerged as part of liberalism

• First wave - ‘equal rights’ in the realm of education, jobs, law
etc. - women are capable of performing like men if they are
given equal opportunities - Gender equity

• Liberal individualism- classical liberal feminist / equity feminists

• Founded and propagated in the west- suffragette movement,
1903

• Law as a crucial instrument in hampering and improving
women’s role

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• Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), John Stuart Mill, Betty Friedan

• Wollstonecraft in her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(1792) (just after French Revolution) - core idea- woman should
strive to have a personhood of her own because she possesses
equal intellectual and rational capacity.

• Tending to accentuate the similarities between men and women

• Criticised for being moderate, uncritical and shallow for it fails
to offer any comprehensive analysis of women’s oppression

• Did not focus on how social rewards are distributed;
reorganizing the social system in order to achieve a fairer
distribution of social ‘goodies’ is what distinguishes socialism
from liberalism

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Martha Nussbaum
Naomi Wolf
Betty Friedan

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Socialist/Materialist Feminism
• Gender division of labour as the root cause-gender oppression is always
associated with class oppression

• Men have historically been having control over means of production, capital,
terms of market etc

• Women historically relegated to domestic labour like household work,
reproduction, raising children - which doesn’t have any exchange value like
productive labour

• women’s liberation as a necessary part of larger quest for social, economic and
political emancipation.

• Removal of class inequalities, correcting economic relations would
automatically lead to the emancipation of women

• Foundation laid by Engels “The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the
State” - according to him, Women’s subordination to men is because the
source and mode of production are under the control of men historically

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• Women’s liberation possible only through
change in economic mode of production
and production relations

• Eleanor Marx - The Women Question :
From a Socialist Point of View (in this, she
argues that men and women should work
together to overcome the oppression of
women and that ‘feminist liberation’ is a
necessary condition to achieve socialism.

• Clara Zetkin - Women and Class : Towards
Socialist Feminism, Lenin on the Women’s
question (socialism was the only way to
truly end the oppression of women; get
women out of the house and into work so
that they could participate in trade unions
and other workers rights organizations in
order to improve conditions for themselves)

Eleanor Marx
Clara Zetkin

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CRITICISMS :

• Gayle Rubin - “The Traf
fi
c in Women: Notes on the ‘Political
Economy’ of Sex”, she coins the phrase “sex/gender system”
and criticises Marxism for what she claims is its incomplete
analysis of sexism under capitalism, without dismissing or
dismantling Marxist fundamentals in the process.

• Radical feminist theorists stated that modern society and its
constructs (law, religion, politics, art, etc.) are the product of
males and therefore have a patriarchal character. the best
solution for women’s oppression would be to treat patriarchy
not as a subset of capitalism but as a problem in its own
right. Thus, elimination of women’s oppression implies
elimination of male domination in all its forms

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• Heidi Hartmann (1981) and Sylvia Walby (1986)
developed a dual-systems theory that attempted to see
capitalism and patriarchy as systems that connected
through the labour market.

• Feminists tended to move towards a position in the
1980s where patriarchy was seen as existing not just
within capitalism but within a range of historical
conditions

• Yet the focus on materialism was felt by other feminists
to be inadequate in explaining women’s social position,
leading to the emergence of radical feminism

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Radical Feminism
• The personal is political; male control of women’s sexuality; patriarchy as
the central to their position

• Woman’s oppression is located in the locus of biology (sex and gender) -
which is the major violence in the society

• Discourage marriage, reproduction and heterosexuality

• Shulamith Firestone (Dialectic of sex, 1972; Marxist analysis of class
replaced by sex), Kate Millet (Sexual politics, 1970), Susan Brownmiller,
belong to this school

• New radical reproductive technology ought to be developed so that even
men will be able to conceive and reproduce children

• Until and unless this becomes feasible, they claim that women should shun
having sexual relations with men and stick to lesbian and other non-
reproductive, non-heterosexual sexual activities.

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• Patriarchy as a trans-historic phenomenon and oldest
form of oppression

• Root cause of women’s oppression - patriarchal
gender relations

• Abolish patriarchy

• Criticised for its biological reductionism (essentialist
approach) and parochialism

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The Discovery of Honey

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• 1498-Piero di Cosimo

• Italian painter of the Renaissance

• The Discovery of Honey— celebrates the festive and
open mouthed character of what theorist Mikhail
Bakthin calls the “carnivalesque body”

• In this painting such a body relishes exchanges and
interactions with society and the natural world, rather
than presenting itself as a sealed off monad

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• The sex of the environment is implied as female

• Eg. the pioneers in North America broke the virgin land…

• virgin forest, fertility of soil, mother nature etc

• Breaking, clearing, rape and conquest of female nature

• These metaphors suggest-there’s an ideological link
between the domination of nature and the domination of
women

• These gendered associations imply a clear hierarchy with
men on top

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Ecofeminism
• Originating in the 1970s

• Ecofeminism emerged from the intersection of feminist,
environmental, and activist thought

• The term coined by the French writer Françoise d’Eaubonne
(1974) in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort.

• At its inception, some deemed an “essentialist” or
romanticised interpretation of the linkages connecting
women to nature

• Later a more social- constructivist perspective

• There is no “one version” of ecofeminism to which all
ecofeminists adhere; rather, there are a number of variants,
including socialist ecofeminism, cultural ecofeminism, and
radical ecofeminism (Warren,1990)

• Core idea - the oppression of women is deeply and critically
connected to the domination of nature and that solutions to
environmental problems must incorporate feminist
perspectives

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• Vandana Shiva - indigenous expertise
vs techno-scienti
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c approaches??

• She coined the term
“maldevelopment”

• To emphasise the deleterious
consequences of globally hegemonic,
Western ideologies of progress and
development.

• Promoted by global elites, these views
exemplify unwavering faith in techno-
scientific approaches to ecological
management and cavalier dismissal of
Indigenous and traditional expertise
Vandana Shiva
Françoise d’Eaubonne

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• Industrialisation of agriculture

• For example, the tendency for environmental crises to
be cast as a “population problem” unfairly places
blame on female-sexed bodies residing in poor
nations, while failing to address the disproportionately
greater contributions to environmental destruction
stemming from capitalist production, Western patterns
of consumption, and global corporate practice

• Thus, an ecofeminist reading of population concerns
uncovers the ways in which efforts to control women’s
bodies de
fl
ect attention away from the most signi
fi
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culprits of environmental harm

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• Recent developments - Feminist political ecology -
how geopolitics and political-economic contexts
shape local peoples’ gendered access to natural
resources, land tenure, property rights, and collective
action

• Both ecofeminism and feminist political ecology are
important frameworks for understanding the
connections between gender, environment, and
development

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Postmodern Feminism

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judith butler
Derrida
Simon de Beauvoir
Michel Foucault
Julia Kristeva
Luce Irigaray

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• Post modernism- highly liberative

• Free from compartmentalisation- taking away all kinds of
identities

• Through postmodernism, feminism reinvents itself

• Gender studies comes into picture

• Multiple genders are articulated

• Feminism enters into postmodernism when it questions the
ideological process by which man and women are placed
as oppositional categories and destabilised the notion of
‘autonomous subject’ ( a subject with complete agency)

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• Includes both postmodern and poststructuralist theory

• Derrida dismantles the binary

• There are no hierarchy

• You apply this to feminism and apply this idea to
female and male bodies, you get the idea of
multiplicity

• Gender is very subjective, complex and multiple ideas

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• Postmodernism built by Michel Foucault, Simon de
Beauvoir, Derrida, Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, and
Julia Kristeva can be termed as the prominent
postmodern feminists

• Sex and gender are mere construction of language

• Luce Irigaray is a psychoanalyst whose primary focus
is to liberate women from men’s philosophies,
including the ones of Derrida and Lacan, on which
she’s building.

• takes on Freudian and Lacanian conceptions of child
development to criticise the notion of Oedipus
complex

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Proposes three strategies for woman to retain her
individual identity:

1. create a gender neutral language,

2. engage in lesbian and autoerotic practice and

3. mimic the caricatures men have imposed on women

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Criticisms

• Modern public discourse/history/epistemology always
revolves around the settled notion of truth and the very
meaning of modernity and its associated structures do
emanate from this faith and foundation in this settled
idea of truth.

• Since this postmodern feminism fails to offer any
single explanation or solution for women’s problems, it
is criticised for not offering any path of action and
practical politics

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describe a slightly different political and theoretical approach to the one
Intellectual
tradition
Central ideas
and views of
women
Some
theorists
Political
goals
Liberal
feminism
Liberal modernism,
Mary Wollstonecraft
Women are rational
individuals entitled
to the same social
privileges as men
Nussbaum,
Woolf
Reform within the
system
Socialist/materialist
feminism
Marxism, historical
materialism
Women are oppressed
because of capitalism
or can be seen as a
class, exploited
through the capitalist
sexual division of
labour
Delphy,
Rowbotham
Gender inequalities
will disappear after
revolution or socialist
redistribution
Radical feminism
Marxism, liberation
theory
Women are repressed
within patriarchy, their
sexuality controlled &
experiences limited
Firestone,
Millett, Jackson
Revalue ‘feminine’
values such as an
ethic of care, feminist
revolution
Table 4.4 Feminist ‘labels’

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References
• Mary Holmes. (2007). What is Gender Sociological
Approaches. New Delhi: Sage

• V. Geetha. 2002. Gender. Calcutta: Stree

• Barbara J. Risman, Carissa M. Froyum, William J.
Scarborough. (2018). Handbook of the Sociology of
Gender. In Handbooks of Sociology and Social
Research. Springer International Publishing : USA
(CH.40)

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