Book: A Glossary of Feminist Theory, Sonya Andermahr

Abuse

• One of the key areas of feminist activism to highlight and campaign against the abuse of women.
• This has frequently involved a redefinition of what constitutes abuse as the types of abuse suffered by women have tended not to be seen as such or to be taken for granted
• The identification of abuse as universal has been an important one for feminists, yet it is not without its problems for feminist theory and practice. It implies a certain equivalence between types of abuse across time and space, tending to diminish historical differences and elide cultural specificity. 

Aesthetics 

• Aesthetics is that branch of Western philosophy whose concerns are the nature of art, of artistic 'taste' and beauty, of aesthetic experience, and the grounds of aesthetic judgement. Throughout history, aesthetic theory has been shot through with assumptions about women and gender. (Battersby 1989) 
• Feminist aesthetic theory shares some common ground with approaches, often Marxist in inspiration, which rewrite the history of aesthetics in terms of its historically variable social and ideological functions (Bourdieu 1984a; Eagleton 1990). Such as socio-historical contextualisation often debunks the pretensions of 'the aesthetic'. But many feminist theories of art and literature are less concerned to undermine aesthetics than to reformulate its questions. (Battersby 1989; Felski 1989a; Lovell 1980; Wolff 1983; Wolff 1991).

Appropriation

• In Marxist theory, a key term denoting the relationship of the capitalist to the product of the labour-power of the worker. 
• Feminists exploring the ways in which Marxist theory might be used to analyse the oppression of women pointed to the appropriation of women's bodies and their labour, including their capacity to reproduce, by men as well as by capital (Sargent (e.d) 1981).

Authority

• Roughly the legitimate exercise of Power. Different types of authority are recognised within social theory. 
• The concept of power has had a wider circulation within feminist theory than that of 'authority', partly because women's exercise of power is denied legitimacy (Rosaldo and Lamphere (eds) 1974).  
• While the initial focus has usually been on the power men exercise over women in a wide variety of contexts, women's power, especially their ability to empower other women through communities of women and women's culture, was given early recognition in radical feminist writings and another, alternative source of authority was identified in women's experience.

Body

• Feminism has a history of deep ambivalence towards the female body, which has figured alternately as the source of women's oppression and as the locus of a specifically female power. 
• Both approaches focus on the reproductive body; on female sexuality, menstruation, pregnancy, lactation, menopause. These corporealities of women may be seen as making us vulnerable to male domination and control, both directly through the exercise of superior physical power, and indirectly through social compulsions and the representation of sexual difference across a variety of discourses (Bordo 1993; de Beauvoir 1953; Laqueur 1990; Sayers 1982)
• Those  who celebrate the female body as a source of power, affirming women's corporeality positively in its differences from that of men, and radically and essentially different from men  (Schor and Weed (eds) 1994).
• In male-dominated socio-cultural worlds, every affirmation of female difference is likely to be used to further disadvantage women. (Narayan 1989). 

Capitalism

• Capitalism usually refers to a type of economy or society characterised by the pervasive commodification of property, labour and knowledge.
• In Marxist thought the relationship between capitalism and what we now call gender relations was seen in several ways.  
• Capitalism was seen as progressive, sweeping away all pre-existing hierarchies and divisions, including women's oppression; the apparent economic independence of women employed in factories seemed evidence this was occurring. 
• Although some feminists have recognised the positive role capitalist development has played in the emergence of feminism - the replacement of notions of kinship-based rights and obligations by the liberal conception of human rights as based in the individual is central to the early history of feminist thought - second-wave feminists have tended to highlight the inequalities fostered by capitalism.
• Marxist feminists in the 1970s were much preoccupied with conceptualising the relations between capitalist social relations and gender hierarchy at an abstract level, in terms of relation between production and reproduction, whereas more recent feminist thought has tended to prefer a more concrete analysis or middle range theory focusing on gender segregation in the labour market, for instance, or specific state social policies.
• Today materialist feminism recognises that women and men live in societies in which the organisation of the economy is of central importance to life chances and social relationships but it sees economic life itself deeply gendered rather than as a starting point which 'precedes' gender analysis, and women's relation to consumption as well as production is given more attention. 

Dependency

• In societies in which all or some women are positioned as the economic dependents of their husbands, the ideology of dependency has shaped the relationship between family and economy and underwritten state employment and welfare policies.
• For instance, the post-war Beveridge settlement in British state welfare benefits for families assumed the husband's responsibility for supporting his wife and children, and women's lower wages (and the negligible employment rights attached to part-time work) were justified because married women were seen as only intermittent second earners. 

Desire 

• Debates about desire - women's and men's - have been central to the history of feminism. Wollstonecraft saw desire as problematic if not dangerous for women, arguing for the necessity of tempering what she saw as (feminine) desiring excess with (masculine) reason. 
• Women have usually featured as desired rather than desiring: Victorian feminists and moral purity campaigners frequently adopted the dominant belief in women's sexlessness in order to resist men's sexual exploitation of women. 
• During the second wave of feminism, revolutionary feminists and political lesbians have suggested that women should channel their desires away from men and towards each other. 
• Like feminists before them they have played down female sexuality as a part of political strategy. 
• What mainstream - and feminist - history clearly demonstrates is that women's desire is nearly always constructed as an adjunct, consequence or reflection of men's.

Equal Opportunities

• Refers to efforts to widen the participation of previously under-represented groups, especially women and racialized minorities of both sexes, but with several different meanings in practice.
• It can connote efforts to create a 'level playing field' which are limited to the removal of directly and indirectly discriminatory employment practices. 
• The relevance of measures to achieve formal equality has been criticised by many feminists, not least because they tend to be applied to professional and managerical jobs rather than clerical, sales or factory work. 
• Moreover, equal opportunities programmes seek to enable women to compete with men on equal terms seem to assume the organisation of paid work around men's lives or to deny the relevance of sexual difference.

Exploitation

• Many feminists also use the term exploitation in sexual contexts, to refer to men's use of women's bodies for their own pleasure. For instance MacKinnon's famous dictum that 'Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism: that which is most one's own, yet most taken away' (1982: 516) transposed the concept of exploitation from the economic domain to the personal, seeing the 'exploitation' or 'appropriation' of women's sexuality as the basis of women's oppression.

Gaze 

• In Freudian theory the gaze is theorised in terms of voyeurism and exhibitionism, the active and passive forms of scopophilia, or the drive to look.
• Laura Mulvey's classic essay 'Visual pleasure and narrative cinema' (1989a) utilises the concept to explore the power relations of looking and represents the cinematic gaze as inherently masculine. 
• Mulvey argued that cinematic pleasure was constructed in such a way as to reassure male subjects of their integrity in the face of sexual difference. Specifically, the sight of the women on the screen precipitates an oedipal crisis which is resolved through fetishisation of the women's body thus concealing her 'lack'.
• However, it has been criticised for presenting an overly monolithic conception of the gaze which denies that women have pleasure of their own, and for prioritising the visual over the tactile (Grosz 1989; Irigaray 1985a).

Heroinism

• The identification and celebration of heroines has long been a feature of feminism. Western particularly but not exclusively liberal, feminism has constructed a narrative comprising individual heroines, usually beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft and including among others Josephine Butler, Emily Dickinson, The Pankhursts and, of course, Virginia Woolf (Dodd1990).
• Much important, if ultimately partial, work has been done on the reclamation of key figures in feminist history. Dale Spender's polemical and remedial Women of Ideas (and What Men Have Done To Them) (1983) is a good example. 
• Contemporary heroinisation within academic feminism takes the form of identifying cult or star figures who have accrued cultural capital. The feminist penchant for heroines would appear at least as insistent as the commitment to egalitarian and democratic organisation. 

Identification

• Self-identification plays some part in the construction of social identity, and identities attributed by others may be contested. Indeed, if a person adamantly refuses to enact an ascribed identity the social process may break down. But social identity depends strategically upon the recognition by others, formally or informally, that one has indeed a certain identity, and not just on self-recognition. 
• Identification can only be made through recognition, and all recognition is itself an implicit confirmation of existing form...Identification enforces a collapse of the subject onto the normative demands for sameness, which under patriarchy is always male (Friedberg 1993: 53).
• Social identity is principally the identity which is recognised and confirmed by others, however strenuously individuals may disavow or evade it. Feminist discussions of identity might be criticised for paying too much attention to self and group identity, and not enough to the social process. 

Ideology

• This concept as it circulate in Marxist theory is perhaps the most problematic and least well developed, but has been the one which feminists have learnt on most heavily in theorising patriarchy.  
• Patriarchal institutions, underpinned by patriarchal ideology, it was argued quite widely inside and outside of Marxist feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, had the effect of reproducing the domination of women by men, and the task of winning the consent of women to that domination (Kuhn and Wolpe (eds) 1978; Barrett 1988).
• 'Ideology' has been used fairly loosely within feminism, usually in its critical rather than positive sense. Patriarchal or gender ideology is understood as a cultural ordering in which gender differences present themselves utterly natural, founded upon biologically given differences of sex. 
• Girls and boys are socialised (socialisation is the sociological concept which occupies much of the ground covered by 'ideology' in Marxism) to enact and thereby to reproduce this hierarchical gender order. 
• The activity of consciousness-raising in women's groups was used in the women's movement to delve below the carapace of ideology to uncover women's experience to expose the social construction of gender difference, and to construct a 'feminist consciousness' which might serve the interests of women in overthrowing gender oppression. 
• Marxist feminists linked patriarchal or gender ideology to the dominant ideology which served not only the interests of men but also those of capitalism. 
• The contemporary 'withering away of ideology' has opened up feminism onto contemporary theories of subjectivity, but at a cost and many feminists prefer to retain the critical concept of ideology, for all its difficulties. 

Mass media

• The term refers to large-scale commodity production of culture, using modern technologies, from the printing press in fifteenth-century Europe to twentieth century film and television. 
• The term 'the masses' has not been prominent within feminist theory of any kind. There has however been considerable interest in research upon women in the mass media. 
• In Britain, mass media/culture theory was challenged in the 1960s by approaches which substituted the concept of ideology, rooted in the Marxist analysis of class, for the homogenising concept of 'the masses' (Swingewood 1977).
• Feminism has generated a rich body of close and sustained textual analysis of gender in representation, and significant, though rather less numerous, studies, some ethnographic, of audiences, readers and spectatorship. 

Modernism

• With the emergence of second-wave feminism critics began to point out the exclusion of women from accounts of modernism, to rediscover 'lost' women modernists and to revise interpretation of the work of others.
• In so far as Western feminism centres on examining women's own practices, politics, sexuality and lifestyles, recreating them anew, it is undoubtedly itself part of the heightened reflexivity spotlighted by some neo-modernity theorists. 
• Although in its earlier guise modernisation theory was influential among feminists seeking to integrate women into development, its main postulates were rejected in favour of theories of underdevelopment. 
• The relatively adverse impact of global integration for women constitutes an important critique if neo-modernity theories, as does the development of what are in effect the 'male democracies' (Molyneux 1995) of Eastern Europe and the ambiguous relationship between gender and civil society more generally.  

Object of Desire 

•  According to psychoanalytic theory, the breast is the original and archetypal object of desire. 
• Feminists have long drawn attention to the ways in which women are culturally constructed as objects of desire for men with the result that their own desire has been denied. 
• Rosalind Coward's Female Desire (1985) sees women's desire as invested not so much in men as in a variety of feminine cultural forms including romance fiction, food 'pornography', fashion and beauty in women's magazines. 

Oppression 

• The language of oppressor/oppressed, exploiter/exploited, entered feminism as part of the Marxist legacy. 
• While Marxist and socialist feminisms retained the original reference to class, radical feminists transposed these concepts to the relationship between the sexes, developing analyses of patriarchy, sexism, and male violence against women. 
• The discourse of oppression and exploitation attracted some criticism on political grounds, for it is one which is in danger of positioning women as victims, and feminism has an equally important need to stress women's agency and power of resistance.
• This reluctance to be positioned exclusively in the role of the victim was reinforced by the shift in feminist theory from Marxism to the poststructuralism of Michel Foucault (Barrett 1991; Bartky1990; McNay 1992; Ramazanoglu 1989; 1993; Sawicki 1991). 
• Foucault argued, famously, that power is not a zero-sum win-or-lose game but is structured through knowledge in discursive social practices within various fields. 
• No players are totally bereft of power, and power is productive rather than distributive. This view is in an alignment with feminists' use of the concept of empowerment, which is as central to feminist analysis as the concept of oppression.  

Power

• The power relations between men and women, especially struggles over the control of women's bodies. have been a key focus of feminist analysis, as indicated by titles like Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1971) or slogans like 'sisterhood is powerful'.
• Concepts such as patriarchy imply 'some relatively stable sex/gender system in which 'men possess power which they hold power over women (and subordinate men and children)' (Ramazanoglu and Holland 1993: 239).
• However, Foucault's theorisation of power has forced feminists to consider whether this way of conceptualising power best captures the kinds of relations they want to highlight. 
• Foucault rejects what he terms the juridico-discursive model of power, which sees power as (1) a possession held by individuals or classes; (2) emanating from a single site or central source, or imposed from top to bottom and (3) primarily repressive in its exercise (Sawicki 1991: 20). 
• While such a concept of power was relevant to the rise of Machiavelli's Prince (the most influential model of centralised state power), in contemporary societies power operates so differently that analysis based on the controversial definitions of liberal political theory will miss out many important instances of the exercise of power. 
• For Foucault power is (1) exercised rather than processed; it is never a zero-sum game in which one agent always loses when the other gains; (2) better analysed as operating in a capillary fashionfrom below; there is a multiplicity of power relations at work in any particular area; power is produced at every moment and at every point, (3) polymorphous, often and even primarily productive and positive rather than repressive or negative. 
• Feminists sympathetic to Foucault argue that his formulation parallels and develops many of the strengths implicit in the way feminists have conceptualised power, which is concerned with power in everyday life as with the power of state, especially the interactions between various sets of experts and laity; the power relations in which women are involved in a range of sites cannot be pinned down to any one institutional base nor reduced to any single factor. 
• Feminists have always refused to limit their notion of power to one which operates within structures, and the relationship between power, knowledge and discourse as elaborated by Foucault , parallels feminist concern with how power defines situations and subjects. 
• Others argue that Foucault's notion of power is a useful corrective to feminist strategies which in trying to overcome women's position as victims replicate and perpetuate discourses which position the female as victim. 
• Less sympathetic critics argue that Foucault's formulation makes it impossible to analyse - and even rejects the existence of - the systematic power of men as a group over women as a group, 'the massive continuity of male domination' (Balbus 1988, cited in Sawick; 1991: 58) and underestimates the continuing importance of state power and legal regulation in relation to women.