thesis on feminist theory

The Theoretical Framework of Feminism

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• Aleksandra Gasztold 2  

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This chapter examines the general principles of feminist theory, which are presented as part of the post-positivist approach. It exposes the essence of feminism, its conceptual grid, gender variable, and the waves of development of feminist thinking and theoretical currents (factions). Moreover, author refers to the trends in feminist epistemology (feminist empiricism, feminist position, and feminist postmodernism). Focusing on theoretical feminist frameworks, this chapter also draws attention to the evolution of women’s studies and gender studies. The author demonstrates the value of the analytical feminist approach in political science, especially in consideration of the ease with which it integrates the gender perspective in the study of specific phenomena and its critical approach to the institution of the state. The chapter also includes brief comments on the specifics of feminist research within the author’ academic milieu in Poland.

Women are to be found on the periphery—on the garbage heap of the symbolic order, among the refuse of the patriarchal narrative. Iwasiów ( 2008 , p. 90)

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Gasztold, A. (2020). The Theoretical Framework of Feminism. In: Feminist Perspectives on Terrorism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37234-7_2

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Feminist Theory

Jo Ann Arinder

Feminist theory falls under the umbrella of critical theory, which in general have the purpose of destabilizing systems of power and oppression. Feminist theory will be discussed here as a theory with a lower case ‘t’, however this is not meant to imply that it is not a Theory or cannot be used as one, only to acknowledge that for some it may be a sub-genre of Critical Theory, while for others it stands alone. According to Egbert and Sanden (2020), some scholars see critical paradigms as extensions of the interpretivist, but there is also an emphasis on oppression and lived experience grounded in subjectivist epistemology.

The purpose of using a feminist lens is to enable the discovery of how people interact within systems and possibly offer solutions to confront and eradicate oppressive systems and structures. Feminist theory considers the lived experience of any person/people, not just women, with an emphasis on oppression.  While there may not be a consensus on where feminist theory fits as a theory or paradigm, disruption of oppression is a core tenant of feminist work. As hooks (2000) states, “Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression. I liked this definition because it does not imply that men were the enemy” (p. viii).

Previous Studies

Marxism and socialism are key components in the heritage.of feminist theory. The origins of feminist theory can be found in the 18th century with growth in the 1970s’ and 1980s’ equality movements. According to Burton (2014), feminist theory has its roots in Marxism but specifically looks to Engles’ (1884) work as one possible starting point. Burton (2014) notes that, “Origin of the Family and commentaries on it were central texts to the feminist movement in its early years because of the felt need to understand the origins and subsequent development of the subordination of the female sex” (p. 2). Work in feminist theory, including research regarding gender equality, is ongoing.

Gender equality continues to be an issue today, and research into gender equality in education is still moving feminist theory forward. For example, Pincock’s (2017) study discusses the impact of repressive norms on the education of girls in Tanzania. The author states that, “…considerations of what empowerment looks like in relation to one’s sexuality are particularly important in relation to schooling for teenage girls as a route to expanding their agency” (p. 909). This consideration can be extended to any oppressed group within an educational setting and is not an area of inquiry relegated to the oppression of only female students. For example, non-binary students face oppression within educational systems and even male students can face barriers, and students are often still led towards what are considered “gender appropriate” studies. This creates a system of oppression that requires active work to disrupt.

Looking at representation in the literature used in education is another area of inquiry in feminist research. For example, Earles (2017) focused on physical educational settings to explore relationships “between gendered literary characters and stories and the normative and marginal responses produced by children” (p. 369). In this research, Earles found evidence to support that a contradiction between the literature and children’s lived experiences exists. The author suggests that educators can help to continue the reduction of oppressive gender norms through careful selection of literature and spaces to allow learners opportunities for appropriate discussions about these inconsistencies.

In another study, Mackie (1999) explored incorporating feminist theory into evaluation research. Mackie was evaluating curriculum created for English language learners that recognized the dual realities of some students, also known as the intersectionality of identity, and concluded that this recognition empowered students. Mackie noted that valuing experience and identity created a potential for change on an individual and community level and “Feminist and other types of critical teaching and research provide needed balance to TESL and applied linguistics” (p. 571).Further, Bierema and Cseh (2003) used a feminist research framework to examine previously ignored structural inequalities that affect the lives of women working in the field of human resources.

Model of Feminist Theory

Figure 1 presents a model of feminist theory that begins with the belief that systems exist that oppress and work against individuals. The model then shows that oppression is based on intersecting identities that can create discrimination and exclusion. The model indicates the idea that, through knowledge and action, oppressive systems can be disrupted to support change and understanding.

The core concepts in feminist theory are sex, gender, race, discrimination, equality, difference, and choice. There are systems and structures in place that work against individuals based on these qualities and against equality and equity. Research in critical paradigms requires the belief that, through the exploration of these existing conditions in the current social order, truths can be revealed. More important, however, this exploration can simultaneously build awareness of oppressive systems and create spaces for diverse voices to speak for themselves (Egbert & Sanden, 2019).

Constructs 

Feminism is concerned with the constructs of intersectionality, dimensions of social life, social inequality, and social transformation. Through feminist research, lasting contributions have been made to understanding the complexities and changes in the gendered division of labor. Men and women should be politically, economically, and socially equal and this theory does not subscribe to differences or similarities between men, nor does it refer to excluding men or only furthering women’s causes. Feminist theory works to support change and understanding through acknowledging and disrupting power and oppression.

Proposition 

Feminist theory proposes that when power and oppression are acknowledged and disrupted, understanding, advocacy, and change can occur.

Using the Model

There are many potential ways to utilize this model in research and practice. First, teachers and students can consider what systems of power exist in their classroom, school, or district. They can question how these systems are working to create discrimination and exclusion. By considering existing social structures, they can acknowledge barriers and issues inherit to the system. Once these issues are acknowledged, they can be disrupted so that change and understanding can begin. This may manifest, for example, as considering how past colonialism has oppressed learners of English as a second or foreign language.

The use of feminist theory in the classroom can ensure that the classroom is created, in advance, to consider barriers to learning faced by learners due to sex, gender, difference, race, or ability. This can help to reduce oppression created by systemic issues. In the case of the English language classroom, learners may be facing oppression based on their native language or country of origin. Facing these barriers in and out of the classroom can affect learners’ access to education. Considering these barriers in planning and including efforts to mitigate the issues and barriers faced by learners is a use of feminist theory.

Feminist research is interested in disrupting systems of oppression or barriers created from these systems with a goal of creating change. All research can include feminist theory when the research adds to efforts to work against and advocate to eliminate the power and oppression that exists within systems or structures that, in particular, oppress women. An examination of education in general could be useful since education is a field typically dominated by women; however, women are not often in leadership roles in the field. In the same way, using feminist theory for an examination into the lack of people of color and male teachers represented in education might also be useful. Action research is another area that can use feminist theory. Action research is often conducted in the pursuit of establishing changes that are discovered during a project. Feminism and action research are both concerned with creating change, which makes them a natural pairing.

Pre-existing beliefs about what feminism means can make including it in classroom practice or research challenging. Understanding that feminism is about reducing oppression for everyone and sharing that definition can reduce this challenge. hooks (2000) said that, “A male who has divested of male privilege, who has embraced feminist politics, is a worthy comrade in struggle, in no way a threat to feminism, whereas a female who remains wedded to sexist thinking and behavior infiltrating feminist movement is a dangerous threat”(p. 12). As Angela Davis noted during a speech at Western Washington University in 2017, “Everything is a feminist issue.” Feminist theory is about questioning existing structures and whether they are creating barriers for anyone. An interest in the reduction of barriers is feminist. Anyone can believe in the need to eliminate oppression and work as teachers or researchers to actively to disrupt systems of oppression.

Bierema, L. L., & Cseh, M. (2003). Evaluating AHRD research using a feminist research framework.  Human Resource Development Quarterly ,  14 (1), 5–26.

Burton, C. (2014).   Subordination: Feminism and social theory . Routledge.

Earles, J. (2017). Reading gender: A feminist, queer approach to children’s literature and children’s discursive agency.  Gender and Education, 29 (3), 369–388.

Egbert, J., & Sanden, S. (2019).  Foundations of education research: Understanding theoretical components . Taylor & Francis.

Hooks, B. (2000). Feminism is for everybody: Passionate politics . South End Press.

Mackie, A. (1999). Possibilities for feminism in ESL education and research.  TESOL  Quarterly, 33 (3), 566-573.

Pincock, K. (2018). School, sexuality and problematic girlhoods: Reframing ‘empowerment’ discourse.  Third World Quarterly, 39 (5), 906-919.

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Article contents

Feminist theory and its use in qualitative research in education.

• Emily Freeman Emily Freeman University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1193
• Published online: 28 August 2019

Feminist theory rose in prominence in educational research during the 1980s and experienced a resurgence in popularity during the late 1990s−2010s. Standpoint epistemologies, intersectionality, and feminist poststructuralism are the most prevalent theories, but feminist researchers often work across feminist theoretical thought. Feminist qualitative research in education encompasses a myriad of methods and methodologies, but projects share a commitment to feminist ethics and theories. Among the commitments are the understanding that knowledge is situated in the subjectivities and lived experiences of both researcher and participants and research is deeply reflexive. Feminist theory informs both research questions and the methodology of a project in addition to serving as a foundation for analysis. The goals of feminist educational research include dismantling systems of oppression, highlighting gender-based disparities, and seeking new ways of constructing knowledge.

• feminist theories
• qualitative research
• educational research
• positionality
• methodology

Introduction

Feminist qualitative research begins with the understanding that all knowledge is situated in the bodies and subjectivities of people, particularly women and historically marginalized groups. Donna Haraway ( 1988 ) wrote,

I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, position, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives I’m arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. Only the god trick is forbidden. . . . Feminism is about a critical vision consequent upon a critical positioning in unhomogeneous gendered social space. (p. 589)

By arguing that “politics and epistemologies” are always interpretive and partial, Haraway offered feminist qualitative researchers in education a way to understand all research as potentially political and always interpretive and partial. Because all humans bring their own histories, biases, and subjectivities with them to a research space or project, it is naïve to think that the written product of research could ever be considered neutral, but what does research with a strong commitment to feminism look like in the context of education?

Writing specifically about the ways researchers of both genders can use feminist ethnographic methods while conducting research on schools and schooling, Levinson ( 1998 ) stated, “I define feminist ethnography as intensive qualitative research, aimed toward the description and analysis of the gendered construction and representation of experience, which is informed by a political and intellectual commitment to the empowerment of women and the creation of more equitable arrangements between and among specific, culturally defined genders” (p. 339). The core of Levinson’s definition is helpful for understanding the ways that feminist educational anthropologists engage with schools as gendered and political constructs and the larger questions of feminist qualitative research in education. His message also extends to other forms of feminist qualitative research. By focusing on description, analysis, and representation of gendered constructs, educational researchers can move beyond simple binary analyses to more nuanced understandings of the myriad ways gender operates within educational contexts.

Feminist qualitative research spans the range of qualitative methodologies, but much early research emerged out of the feminist postmodern turn in anthropology (Behar & Gordon, 1995 ), which was a response to male anthropologists who ignored the gendered implications of ethnographic research (e.g., Clifford & Marcus, 1986 ). Historically, most of the work on feminist education was conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, with a resurgence in the late 2010s (Culley & Portuges, 1985 ; DuBois, Kelly, Kennedy, Korsmeyer, & Robinson, 1985 ; Gottesman, 2016 ; Maher & Tetreault, 1994 ; Thayer-Bacon, Stone, & Sprecher, 2013 ). Within this body of research, the majority focuses on higher education (Coffey & Delamont, 2000 ; Digiovanni & Liston, 2005 ; Diller, Houston, Morgan, & Ayim, 1996 ; Gabriel & Smithson, 1990 ; Mayberry & Rose, 1999 ). Even leading journals, such as Feminist Teacher ( 1984 −present), focus mostly on the challenges of teaching about and to women in higher education, although more scholarship on P–12 education has emerged in recent issues.

There is also a large collection of work on the links between gender, achievement, and self-esteem (American Association of University Women, 1992 , 1999 ; Digiovanni & Liston, 2005 ; Gilligan, 1982 ; Hancock, 1989 ; Jackson, Paechter, & Renold, 2010 ; National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, 2002 ; Orenstein, 1994 ; Pipher, 1994 ; Sadker & Sadker, 1994 ). However, just because research examines gender does not mean that it is feminist. Simply using gender as a category of analysis does not mean the research project is informed by feminist theory, ethics, or methods, but it is often a starting point for researchers who are interested in the complex ways gender is constructed and the ways it operates in education.

This article examines the histories and theories of U.S.–based feminism, the tenets of feminist qualitative research and methodologies, examples of feminist qualitative studies, and the possibilities for feminist qualitative research in education to provide feminist educational researchers context and methods for engaging in transformative and subversive research. Each section provides a brief overview of the major concepts and conversations, along with examples from educational research to highlight the ways feminist theory has informed educational scholarship. Some examples are given limited attention and serve as entry points into a more detailed analysis of a few key examples. While there is a large body of non-Western feminist theory (e.g., the works of Lila Abu-Lughod, Sara Ahmed, Raewyn Connell, Saba Mahmood, Chandra Mohanty, and Gayatri Spivak), much of the educational research using feminist theory draws on Western feminist theory. This article focuses on U.S.–based research to show the ways that the utilization of feminist theory has changed since the 1980s.

Histories, Origins, and Theories of U.S.–Based Feminism

The normative historiography of feminist theory and activism in the United States is broken into three waves. First-wave feminism (1830s−1920s) primarily focused on women’s suffrage and women’s rights to legally exist in public spaces. During this time period, there were major schisms between feminist groups concerning abolition, rights for African American women, and the erasure of marginalized voices from larger feminist debates. The second wave (1960s and 1980s) worked to extend some of the rights won during the first wave. Activists of this time period focused on women’s rights to enter the workforce, sexual harassment, educational equality, and abortion rights. During this wave, colleges and universities started creating women’s studies departments and those scholars provided much of the theoretical work that informs feminist research and activism today. While there were major feminist victories during second-wave feminism, notably Title IX and Roe v. Wade , issues concerning the marginalization of race, sexual orientation, and gender identity led many feminists of color to separate from mainstream white feminist groups. The third wave (1990s to the present) is often characterized as the intersectional wave, as some feminist groups began utilizing Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality ( 1991 ) to understand that oppression operates via multiple categories (e.g., gender, race, class, age, ability) and that intersecting oppressions lead to different lived experiences.

Historians and scholars of feminism argue that dividing feminist activism into three waves flattens and erases the major contributions of women of color and gender-nonconforming people. Thompson ( 2002 ) called this history a history of hegemonic feminism and proposed that we look at the contributions of multiracial feminism when discussing history. Her work, along with that of Allen ( 1984 ) about the indigenous roots of U.S. feminism, raised many questions about the ways that feminism operates within the public and academic spheres. For those who wish to engage in feminist research, it is vital to spend time understanding the historical, theoretical, and political ways that feminism(s) can both liberate and oppress, depending on the scholar’s understandings of, and orientations to, feminist projects.

Standpoint Epistemology

Much of the theoretical work that informs feminist qualitative research today emerged out of second-wave feminist scholarship. Standpoint epistemology, according to Harding ( 1991 , 2004 ), posits that knowledge comes from one’s particular social location, that it is subjective, and the further one is from the hegemonic norm, the clearer one can see oppression. This was a major challenge to androcentric and Enlightenment theories of knowledge because standpoint theory acknowledges that there is no universal understanding of the world. This theory aligns with the second-wave feminist slogan, “The personal is political,” and advocates for a view of knowledge that is produced from the body.

Greene ( 1994 ) wrote from a feminist postmodernist epistemology and attacked Enlightenment thinking by using standpoint theory as her starting point. Her work serves as an example of one way that educational scholars can use standpoint theory in their work. She theorized encounters with “imaginative literature” to help educators conceptualize new ways of using reading and writing in the classroom and called for teachers to think of literature as “a harbinger of the possible.” (Greene, 1994 , p. 218). Greene wrote from an explicitly feminist perspective and moved beyond simple analyses of gender to a larger critique of the ways that knowledge is constructed in classrooms.

Intersectionality

Crenshaw ( 1991 ) and Collins ( 2000 ) challenged and expanded standpoint theory to move it beyond an individual understanding of knowledge to a group-based theory of oppression. Their work, and that of other black and womanist feminists, opened up multiple spaces of possibility for feminist scholars and researchers because it challenged hegemonic feminist thought. For those interested in conducting feminist research in educational settings, their work is especially pertinent because they advocate for feminists to attend to all aspects of oppression rather than flattening them to one of simple gender-based oppression.

Haddix, McArthur, Muhammad, Price-Dennis, and Sealey-Ruiz ( 2016 ), all women-of-color feminist educators, wrote a provocateur piece in a special issue of English Education on black girls’ literacy. The four authors drew on black feminist thought and conducted a virtual kitchen-table conversation. By symbolically representing their conversations as one from the kitchen, this article pays homage to women-of-color feminism and pushes educators who read English Education to reconsider elements of their own subjectivities. Third-wave feminism and black feminism emphasize intersectionality, in that different demographic details like race, class, and gender are inextricably linked in power structures. Intersectionality is an important frame for educational research because identifying the unique experiences, realities, and narratives of those involved in educational systems can highlight the ways that power and oppression operate in society.

Feminist Poststructural Theory

Feminist poststructural theory has greatly informed many feminist projects in educational research. Deconstruction is

a critical practice that aims to ‘dismantle [ déconstruire ] the metaphysical and rhetorical structures that are at work, not in order to reject or discard them, but to reinscribe them in another way,’ (Derrida, quoted in Spivak, 1974 , p. lxxv). Thus, deconstruction is not about tearing down, but about looking at how a structure has been constructed, what holds it together, and what it produces. (St. Pierre, 2000 , p. 482)

Reality, subjectivity, knowledge, and truth are constructed through language and discourse (cultural practices, power relations, etc.), so truth is local and diverse, rather than a universal experience (St. Pierre, 2000 ). Feminist poststructuralist theory may be used to question structural inequality that is maintained in education through dominant discourses.

In Go Be a Writer! Expanding the Curricular Boundaries of Literacy Learning with Children , Kuby and Rucker ( 2016 ) explored early elementary literacy practices using poststructural and posthumanist theories. Their book drew on hours of classroom observations, student interviews and work, and their own musings on ways to de-standardize literacy instruction and curriculum. Through the process of pedagogical documentation, Kuby and Rucker drew on the works of Barad, Deleuze and Guattari, and Derrida to explore the ways they saw children engaging in what they call “literacy desiring(s).” One aim of the book is to find practical and applicable ways to “Disrupt literacy in ways that rewrite the curriculum, the interactions, and the power dynamics of the classroom even begetting a new kind of energy that spirals and bounces and explodes” (Kuby & Rucker, 2016 , p. 5). The second goal of their book is not only to understand what happened in Rucker’s classroom using the theories, but also to unbound the links between “teaching↔learning” (p. 202) and to write with the theories, rather than separating theory from the methodology and classroom enactments (p. 45) because “knowing/being/doing were not separate” (p. 28). This work engages with key tenets of feminist poststructuralist theory and adds to both the theoretical and pedagogical conversations about what counts as a literacy practice.

While the discussion in this section provides an overview of the histories and major feminist theories, it is by no means exhaustive. Scholars who wish to engage in feminist educational research need to spend time doing the work of understanding the various theories and trajectories that constitute feminist work so they are able to ground their projects and theories in a particular tradition that will inform the ethics and methods of research.

Tenets of Feminist Qualitative Research

Why engage in feminist qualitative research.

Evans and Spivak ( 2016 ) stated, “The only real and effective way you can sabotage something this way is when you are working intimately within it.” Feminist researchers are in the classroom and the academy, working intimately within curricular, pedagogical, and methodological constraints that serve neoliberal ideologies, so it is vital to better understand the ways that we can engage in affirmative sabotage to build a more just and equitable world. Spivak’s ( 2014 ) notion of affirmative sabotage has become a cornerstone for understanding feminist qualitative research and teaching. She borrowed and built on Gramsci’s role of the organic intellectual and stated that they/we need to engage in affirmative sabotage to transform the humanities.

I used the term “affirmative sabotage” to gloss on the usual meaning of sabotage: the deliberate ruining of the master’s machine from the inside. Affirmative sabotage doesn’t just ruin; the idea is of entering the discourse that you are criticizing fully, so that you can turn it around from inside. The only real and effective way you can sabotage something this way is when you are working intimately within it. (Evans & Spivak, 2016 )

While Spivak has been mostly concerned with literary education, her writings provide teachers and researchers numerous lines of inquiry into projects that can explode androcentric universal notions of knowledge and resist reproductive heteronormativity.

Spivak’s pedagogical musings center on deconstruction, primarily Derridean notions of deconstruction (Derrida, 2016 ; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 ; Spivak, 2006 , 2009 , 2012 ) that seek to destabilize existing categories and to call into question previously unquestioned beliefs about the goals of education. Her works provide an excellent starting point for examining the links between feminism and educational research. The desire to create new worlds within classrooms, worlds that are fluid, interpretive, and inclusive in order to interrogate power structures, lies at the core of what it means to be a feminist education researcher. As researchers, we must seriously engage with feminist theory and include it in our research so that feminism is not seen as a dirty word, but as a movement/pedagogy/methodology that seeks the liberation of all (Davis, 2016 ).

Feminist research and feminist teaching are intrinsically linked. As Kerkhoff ( 2015 ) wrote, “Feminist pedagogy requires students to challenge the norms and to question whether existing practices privilege certain groups and marginalize others” (p. 444), and this is exactly what feminist educational research should do. Bailey ( 2001 ) called on teachers, particularly those who identify as feminists, to be activists, “The values of one’s teaching should not be separated sharply from the values one expresses outside the classroom, because teaching is not inherently pure or laboratory practice” (p. 126); however, we have to be careful not to glorify teachers as activists because that leads to the risk of misinterpreting actions. Bailey argued that teaching critical thinking is not enough if it is not coupled with curriculums and pedagogies that are antiheteronormative, antisexist, and antiracist. As Bailey warned, just using feminist theory or identifying as a feminist is not enough. It is very easy to use the language and theories of feminism without being actively feminist in one’s research. There are ethical and methodological issues that feminist scholars must consider when conducting research.

Feminist research requires one to discuss ethics, not as a bureaucratic move, but as a reflexive move that shows the researchers understand that, no matter how much they wish it didn’t, power always plays a role in the process. According to Davies ( 2014 ), “Ethics, as Barad defines it, is a matter of questioning what is being made to matter and how that mattering affects what it is possible to do and to think” (p. 11). In other words, ethics is what is made to matter in a particular time and place.

Davies ( 2016 ) extended her definition of ethics to the interactions one has with others.

This is not ethics as a matter of separate individuals following a set of rules. Ethical practice, as both Barad and Deleuze define it, requires thinking beyond the already known, being open in the moment of the encounter, pausing at the threshold and crossing over. Ethical practice is emergent in encounters with others, in emergent listening with others. It is a matter of questioning what is being made to matter and how that mattering affects what it is possible to do and to think. Ethics is emergent in the intra-active encounters in which knowing, being, and doing (epistemology, ontology, and ethics) are inextricably linked. (Barad, 2007 , p. 83)

The ethics of any project must be negotiated and contested before, during, and after the process of conducting research in conjunction with the participants. Feminist research is highly reflexive and should be conducted in ways that challenge power dynamics between individuals and social institutions. Educational researchers must heed the warning to avoid the “god-trick” (Haraway, 1988 ) and to continually question and re-question the ways we seek to define and present subjugated knowledge (Hesse-Biber, 2012 ).

Positionalities and Reflexivity

According to feminist ethnographer Noelle Stout, “Positionality isn’t meant to be a few sentences at the beginning of a work” (personal communication, April 5, 2016 ). In order to move to new ways of experiencing and studying the world, it is vital that scholars examine the ways that reflexivity and positionality are constructed. In a glorious footnote, Margery Wolf ( 1992 ) related reflexivity in anthropological writing to a bureaucratic procedure (p. 136), and that resonates with how positionality often operates in the field of education.

The current trend in educational research is to include a positionality statement that fixes the identity of the author in a particular place and time and is derived from feminist standpoint theory. Researchers should make their biases and the identities of the authors clear in a text, but there are serious issues with the way that positionality functions as a boundary around the authors. Examining how the researchers exert authority within a text allows the reader the opportunity to determine the intent and philosophy behind the text. If positionality were used in an embedded and reflexive manner, then educational research would be much richer and allow more nuanced views of schools, in addition to being more feminist in nature. The rest of this section briefly discussrs articles that engage with feminist ethics regarding researcher subjectivities and positionality, and two articles are examined in greater depth.

When looking for examples of research that includes deeply reflexive and embedded positionality, one finds that they mostly deal with issues of race, equity, and diversity. The highlighted articles provide examples of positionality statements that are deeply reflexive and represent the ways that feminist researchers can attend to the ethics of being part of a research project. These examples all come from feminist ethnographic projects, but they are applicable to a wide variety of feminist qualitative projects.

Martinez ( 2016 ) examined how research methods are or are not appropriate for specific contexts. Calderon ( 2016 ) examined autoethnography and the reproduction of “settler colonial understandings of marginalized communities” (p. 5). Similarly, Wissman, Staples, Vasudevan, and Nichols ( 2015 ) discussed how to research with adolescents through engaged participation and collaborative inquiry, and Ceglowski and Makovsky ( 2012 ) discussed the ways researchers can engage in duoethnography with young children.

Abajian ( 2016 ) uncovered the ways military recruiters operate in high schools and paid particular attention to the politics of remaining neutral while also working to subvert school militarization. She wrote,

Because of the sensitive and also controversial nature of my research, it was not possible to have a collaborative process with students, teachers, and parents. Purposefully intervening would have made documentation impossible because that would have (rightfully) aligned me with anti-war and counter-recruitment activists who were usually not welcomed on school campuses (Abajian & Guzman, 2013 ). It was difficult enough to find an administrator who gave me consent to conduct my research within her school, as I had explicitly stated in my participant recruitment letters and consent forms that I was going to research the promotion of post-secondary paths including the military. Hence, any purposeful intervention on my part would have resulted in the termination of my research project. At the same time, my documentation was, in essence, an intervention. I hoped that my presence as an observer positively shaped the context of my observation and also contributed to the larger struggle against the militarization of schools. (p. 26)

Her positionality played a vital role in the creation, implementation, and analysis of military recruitment, but it also forced her into unexpected silences in order to carry out her research. Abajian’s positionality statement brings up many questions about the ways researchers have to use or silence their positionality to further their research, especially if they are working in ostensibly “neutral” and “politically free” zones, such as schools. Her work drew on engaged anthropology (Low & Merry, 2010 ) and critical reflexivity (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008 ) to highlight how researchers’ subjectivities shape ethnographic projects. Questions of subjectivity and positionality in her work reflect the larger discourses around these topics in feminist theory and qualitative research.

Brown ( 2011 ) provided another example of embedded and reflexive positionality of the articles surveyed. Her entire study engaged with questions about how her positionality influenced the study during the field-work portion of her ethnography on how race and racism operate in ethnographic field-work. This excerpt from her study highlights how she conceived of positionality and how it informed her work and her process.

Next, I provide a brief overview of the research study from which this paper emerged and I follow this with a presentation of four, first-person narratives from key encounters I experienced while doing ethnographic field research. Each of these stories centres the role race played as I negotiated my multiple, complex positionality vis-á-vis different informants and participants in my study. These stories highlight the emotional pressures that race work has on the researcher and the research process, thus reaffirming why one needs to recognise the role race plays, and may play, in research prior to, during, and after conducting one’s study (Milner, 2007 ). I conclude by discussing the implications these insights have on preparing researchers of color to conduct cross-racial qualitative research. (Brown, 2011 , p. 98)

Brown centered the roles of race and subjectivity, both hers and her participants, by focusing her analysis on the four narratives. The researchers highlighted in this section thought deeply about the ethics of their projects and the ways that their positionality informed their choice of methods.

Methods and Challenges

Feminist qualitative research can take many forms, but the most common data collection methods include interviews, observations, and narrative or discourse analysis. For the purposes of this article, methods refer to the tools and techniques researchers use, while methodology refers to the larger philosophical and epistemological approaches to conducting research. It is also important to note that these are not fixed terms, and that there continues to be much debate about what constitutes feminist theory and feminist research methods among feminist qualitative researchers. This section discusses some of the tensions and constraints of using feminist theory in educational research.

Jackson and Mazzei ( 2012 ) called on researchers to think through their data with theory at all stages of the collection and analysis process. They also reminded us that all data collection is partial and informed by the researcher’s own beliefs (Koro-Ljungberg, Löytönen, & Tesar, 2017 ). Interviews are sites of power and critiques because they show the power of stories and serve as a method of worlding, the process of “making a world, turning insight into instrument, through and into a possible act of freedom” (Spivak, 2014 , p. xiii). Interviews allow researchers and participants ways to engage in new ways of understanding past experiences and connecting them to feminist theories. The narratives serve as data, but it is worth noting that the data collected from interviews are “partial, incomplete, and always being re-told and re-membered” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 , p. 3), much like the lived experiences of both researcher and participant.

Research, data collection, and interpretation are not neutral endeavors, particularly with interviews (Jackson & Mazzei, 2009 ; Mazzei, 2007 , 2013 ). Since education research emerged out of educational psychology (Lather, 1991 ; St. Pierre, 2016 ), historically there has been an emphasis on generalizability and positivist data collection methods. Most feminist research makes no claims of generalizability or truth; indeed, to do so would negate the hyperpersonal and particular nature of this type of research (Love, 2017 ). St. Pierre ( 2016 ) viewed the lack of generalizability as an asset of feminist and poststructural research, rather than a limitation, because it creates a space of resistance against positivist research methodologies.

Denzin and Giardina ( 2016 ) urged researchers to “consider an alternative mode of thinking about the critical turn in qualitative inquiry and posit the following suggestion: perhaps it is time we turned away from ‘methodology’ altogether ” (p. 5, italics original). Despite the contention over the term critical among some feminist scholars (e.g. Ellsworth, 1989 ), their suggestion is valid and has been picked up by feminist and poststructural scholars who examine the tensions between following a strict research method/ology and the theoretical systems out of which they operate because precision in method obscures the messy and human nature of research (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016 ; Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2017 ; Love, 2017 ; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000 ). Feminist qualitative researchers should seek to complicate the question of what method and methodology mean when conducting feminist research (Lather, 1991 ), due to the feminist emphasis on reflexive and situated research methods (Hesse-Biber, 2012 ).

Examples of Feminist Qualitative Research in Education

A complete overview of the literature is not possible here, due to considerations of length, but the articles and books selected represent the various debates within feminist educational research. They also show how research preoccupations have changed over the course of feminist work in education. The literature review is divided into three broad categories: Power, canons, and gender; feminist pedagogies, curriculums, and classrooms; and teacher education, identities, and knowledge. Each section provides a broad overview of the literature to demonstrate the breadth of work using feminist theory, with some examples more deeply explicated to describe how feminist theories inform the scholarship.

Power, Canons, and Gender

The literature in this category contests disciplinary practices that are androcentric in both content and form, while asserting the value of using feminist knowledge to construct knowledge. The majority of the work was written in the 1980s and supported the creation of feminist ways of knowing, particularly via the creation of women’s studies programs or courses in existing departments that centered female voices and experiences.

Questioning the canon has long been a focus of feminist scholarship, as has the attempt to subvert its power in the disciplines. Bezucha ( 1985 ) focused on the ways that departments of history resist the inclusion of both women and feminism in the historical canon. Similarly, Miller ( 1985 ) discussed feminism as subversion when seeking to expand the canon of French literature in higher education.

Lauter and Dieterich ( 1972 ) examined a report by ERIC, “Women’s Place in Academe,” a collection of articles about the discrepancies by gender in jobs and tenure-track positions and the lack of inclusion of women authors in literature classes. They also found that women were relegated to “softer” disciplines and that feminist knowledge was not acknowledged as valid work. Culley and Portuges ( 1985 ) expanded the focus beyond disciplines to the larger structures of higher education and noted the varies ways that professors subvert from within their disciplines. DuBois et al. ( 1985 ) chronicled the development of feminist scholarship in the disciplines of anthropology, education, history, literature, and philosophy. They explained that the institutions of higher education often prevent feminist scholars from working across disciplines in an attempt to keep them separate. Raymond ( 1985 ) also critiqued the academy for not encouraging relationships across disciplines and offered the development of women’s, gender, and feminist studies as one solution to greater interdisciplinary work.

Parson ( 2016 ) examined the ways that STEM syllabi reinforce gendered norms in higher education. She specifically looked at eight syllabi from math, chemistry, biology, physics, and geology classes to determine how modal verbs showing stance, pronouns, intertextuality, interdiscursivity, and gender showed power relations in higher education. She framed the study through poststructuralist feminist critical discourse analysis to uncover “the ways that gendered practices that favor men are represented and replicated in the syllabus” (p. 103). She found that all the syllabi positioned knowledge as something that is, rather than something that can be co-constructed. Additionally, the syllabi also favored individual and masculine notions of what it means to learn by stressing the competitive and difficult nature of the classroom and content.

When reading newer work on feminism in higher education and the construction of knowledge, it is easy to feel that, while the conversations might have shifted somewhat, the challenge of conducting interdisciplinary feminist work in institutions of higher education remains as present as it was during the creation of women’s and gender studies departments. The articles all point to the fact that simply including women’s and marginalized voices in the academy does not erase or mitigate the larger issues of gender discrimination and androcentricity within the silos of the academy.

Feminist Pedagogies, Curricula, and Classrooms

This category of literature has many similarities to the previous one, but all the works focus more specifically on questions of curriculum and pedagogy. A review of the literature shows that the earliest conversations were about the role of women in academia and knowledge construction, and this selection builds on that work to emphasize the ways that feminism can influence the events within classes and expands the focus to more levels of education.

Rich ( 1985 ) explained that curriculum in higher education courses needs to validate gender identities while resisting patriarchal canons. Maher ( 1985 ) narrowed the focus to a critique of the lecture as a pedagogical technique that reinforces androcentric ways of learning and knowing. She called for classes in higher education to be “collaborative, cooperative, and interactive” (p. 30), a cry that still echoes across many college campuses today, especially from students in large lecture-based courses. Maher and Tetreault ( 1994 ) provided a collection of essays that are rooted in feminist classroom practice and moved from the classroom into theoretical possibilities for feminist education. Warren ( 1998 ) recommended using Peggy McIntosh’s five phases of curriculum development ( 1990 ) and extending it to include feminist pedagogies that challenge patriarchal ways of teaching. Exploring the relational encounters that exist in feminist classrooms, Sánchez-Pardo ( 2017 ) discussed the ethics of pedagogy as a politics of visibility and investigated the ways that democratic classrooms relate to feminist classrooms.

While all of the previously cited literature is U.S.–based, the next two works focus on the ways that feminist pedagogies and curriculum operate in a European context. Weiner ( 1994 ) used autobiography and narrative methodologies to provide an introduction to how feminism has influenced educational research and pedagogy in Britain. Revelles-Benavente and Ramos ( 2017 ) collected a series of studies about how situated feminist knowledge challenges the problems of neoliberal education across Europe. These two, among many European feminist works, demonstrate the range of scholarship and show the trans-Atlantic links between how feminism has been received in educational settings. However, much more work needs to be done in looking at the broader global context, and particularly by feminist scholars who come from non-Western contexts.

The following literature moves us into P–12 classrooms. DiGiovanni and Liston ( 2005 ) called for a new research agenda in K–5 education that explores the hidden curriculums surrounding gender and gender identity. One source of the hidden curriculum is classroom literature, which both Davies ( 2003 ) and Vandergrift ( 1995 ) discussed in their works. Davies ( 2003 ) used feminist ethnography to understand how children who were exposed to feminist picture books talked about gender and gender roles. Vandergrift ( 1995 ) presented a theoretical piece that explored the ways picture books reinforce or resist canons. She laid out a future research agenda using reader response theory to better comprehend how young children question gender in literature. Willinsky ( 1987 ) explored the ways that dictionary definitions reinforced constructions of gender. He looked at the definitions of the words clitoris, penis , and vagina in six school dictionaries and then compared them with A Feminist Dictionary to see how the definitions varied across texts. He found a stark difference in the treatment of the words vagina and penis ; definitions of the word vagina were treated as medical or anatomical and devoid of sexuality, while definitions of the term penis were linked to sex (p. 151).

Weisner ( 2004 ) addressed middle school classrooms and highlighted the various ways her school discouraged unconventional and feminist ways of teaching. She also brought up issues of silence, on the part of both teachers and students, regarding sexuality. By including students in the curriculum planning process, Weisner provided more possibilities for challenging power in classrooms. Wallace ( 1999 ) returned to the realm of higher education and pushed literature professors to expand pedagogy to be about more than just the texts that are read. She challenged the metaphoric dichotomy of classrooms as places of love or battlefields; in doing so, she “advocate[d] active ignorance and attention to resistances” (p. 194) as a method of subverting transference from students to teachers.

The works discussed in this section cover topics ranging from the place of women in curriculum to the gendered encounters teachers and students have with curriculums and pedagogies. They offer current feminist scholars many directions for future research, particularly in the arena of P–12 education.

Teacher Education, Identities, and Knowledge

The third subset of literature examines the ways that teachers exist in classrooms and some possibilities for feminist teacher education. The majority of the literature in this section starts from the premise that the teachers are engaged in feminist projects. The selections concerning teacher education offer critiques of existing heteropatriarchal normative teacher education and include possibilities for weaving feminism and feminist pedagogies into the education of preservice teachers.

Holzman ( 1986 ) explored the role of multicultural teaching and how it can challenge systematic oppression; however, she complicated the process with her personal narrative of being a lesbian and working to find a place within the school for her sexual identity. She questioned how teachers can protect their identities while also engaging in the fight for justice and equity. Hoffman ( 1985 ) discussed the ways teacher power operates in the classroom and how to balance the personal and political while still engaging in disciplinary curriculums. She contended that teachers can work from personal knowledge and connect it to the larger curricular concerns of their discipline. Golden ( 1998 ) used teacher narratives to unpack how teachers can become radicalized in the higher education classroom when faced with unrelenting patriarchal and heteronormative messages.

Extending this work, Bailey ( 2001 ) discussed teachers as activists within the classroom. She focused on three aspects of teaching: integrity with regard to relationships, course content, and teaching strategies. She concluded that teachers cannot separate their values from their profession. Simon ( 2007 ) conducted a case study of a secondary teacher and communities of inquiry to see how they impacted her work in the classroom. The teacher, Laura, explicitly tied her inquiry activities to activist teacher education and critical pedagogy, “For this study, inquiry is fundamental to critical pedagogy, shaped by power and ideology, relationships within and outside of the classroom, as well as teachers’ and students’ autochthonous histories and epistemologies” (Simon, 2007 , p. 47). Laura’s experiences during her teacher education program continued during her years in the classroom, leading her to create a larger activism-oriented teacher organization.

Collecting educational autobiographies from 17 college-level feminist professors, Maher and Tetreault ( 1994 ) worried that educators often conflated “the experience and values of white middle-class women like ourselves for gendered universals” (p. 15). They complicated the idea of a democratic feminist teacher, raised issues regarding the problematic ways hegemonic feminism flattens experience to that of just white women, and pushed feminist professors to pay particular attention to the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality when teaching.

Cheira ( 2017 ) called for gender-conscious teaching and literature-based teaching to confront the gender stereotypes she encountered in Portuguese secondary schools. Papoulis and Smith ( 1992 ) conducted summer sessions where teachers experienced writing activities they could teach their students. Conceptualized as an experiential professional development course, the article revolved around an incident where the seminar was reading Emily Dickinson and the men in the course asked the two female instructors why they had to read feminist literature and the conversations that arose. The stories the women told tie into Papoulis and Smith’s call for teacher educators to interrogate their underlying beliefs and ideologies about gender, race, and class, so they are able to foster communities of study that can purposefully and consciously address feminist inquiry.

McWilliam ( 1994 ) collected stories of preservice teachers in Australia to understand how feminism can influence teacher education. She explored how textual practices affect how preservice teachers understand teaching and their role. Robertson ( 1994 ) tackled the issue of teacher education and challenged teachers to move beyond the two metaphors of banking and midwifery when discussing feminist ways of teaching. She called for teacher educators to use feminist pedagogies within schools of education so that preservice teachers experience a feminist education. Maher and Rathbone ( 1986 ) explored the scholarship on women’s and girls’ educational experiences and used their findings to call for changes in teacher education. They argued that schools reinforce the notion that female qualities are inferior due to androcentric curriculums and ways of showing knowledge. Justice-oriented teacher education is a more recent iteration of this debate, and Jones and Hughes ( 2016 ) called for community-based practices to expand the traditional definitions of schooling and education. They called for preservice teachers to be conversant with, and open to, feminist storylines that defy existing gendered, raced, and classed stereotypes.

Bieler ( 2010 ) drew on feminist and critical definitions of dialogue (e.g., those by Bakhtin, Freire, Ellsworth, hooks, and Burbules) to reframe mentoring discourse in university supervision and dialogic praxis. She concluded by calling on university supervisors to change their methods of working with preservice teachers to “Explicitly and transparently cultivat[e] dialogic praxis-oriented mentoring relationships so that the newest members of our field can ‘feel their own strength at last,’ as Homer’s Telemachus aspired to do” (Bieler, 2010 , p. 422).

Johnson ( 2004 ) also examined the role of teacher educators, but she focused on the bodies and sexualities of preservice teachers. She explored the dynamics of sexual tension in secondary classrooms, the role of the body in teaching, and concerns about clothing when teaching. She explicitly worked to resist and undermine Cartesian dualities and, instead, explored the erotic power of teaching and seducing students into a love of subject matter. “But empowered women threaten the patriarchal structure of this society. Therefore, women have been acculturated to distrust erotic power” (Johnson, 2004 , p. 7). Like Bieler ( 2010 ), Johnson ( 2004 ) concluded that, “Teacher educators could play a role in creating a space within the larger framework of teacher education discourse such that bodily knowledge is considered along with pedagogical and content knowledge as a necessary component of teacher training and professional development” (p. 24). The articles about teacher education all sought to provoke questions about how we engage in the preparation and continuing development of educators.

Teacher identity and teacher education constitute how teachers construct knowledge, as both students and teachers. The works in this section raise issues of what identities are “acceptable” in the classroom, ways teachers and teacher educators can disrupt oppressive storylines and practices, and the challenges of utilizing feminist pedagogies without falling into hegemonic feminist practices.

Possibilities for Feminist Qualitative Research

Spivak ( 2012 ) believed that “gender is our first instrument of abstraction” (p. 30) and is often overlooked in a desire to understand political, curricular, or cultural moments. More work needs to be done to center gender and intersecting identities in educational research. One way is by using feminist qualitative methods. Classrooms and educational systems need to be examined through their gendered components, and the ways students operate within and negotiate systems of power and oppression need to be explored. We need to see if and how teachers are actively challenging patriarchal and heteronormative curriculums and to learn new methods for engaging in affirmative sabotage (Spivak, 2014 ). Given the historical emphasis on higher education, more work is needed regarding P–12 education, because it is in P–12 classrooms that affirmative sabotage may be the most necessary to subvert systems of oppression.

In order to engage in affirmative sabotage, it is vital that qualitative researchers who wish to use feminist theory spend time grappling with the complexity and multiplicity of feminist theory. It is only by doing this thought work that researchers will be able to understand the ongoing debates within feminist theory and to use it in a way that leads to a more equitable and just world. Simply using feminist theory because it may be trendy ignores the very real political nature of feminist activism. Researchers need to consider which theories they draw on and why they use those theories in their projects. One way of doing this is to explicitly think with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012 ) at all stages of the research project and to consider which voices are being heard and which are being silenced (Gilligan, 2011 ; Spivak, 1988 ) in educational research. More consideration also needs to be given to non-U.S. and non-Western feminist theories and research to expand our understanding of education and schooling.

Paying close attention to feminist debates about method and methodology provides another possibility for qualitative research. The very process of challenging positivist research methods opens up new spaces and places for feminist qualitative research in education. It also allows researchers room to explore subjectivities that are often marginalized. When researchers engage in the deeply reflexive work that feminist research requires, it leads to acts of affirmative sabotage within the academy. These discussions create the spaces that lead to new visions and new worlds. Spivak ( 2006 ) once declared, “I am helpless before the fact that all my essays these days seem to end with projects for future work” (p. 35), but this is precisely the beauty of feminist qualitative research. We are setting ourselves and other feminist researchers up for future work, future questions, and actively changing the nature of qualitative research.

Acknowledgements

Dr. George Noblit provided the author with the opportunity to think deeply about qualitative methods and to write this article, for which the author is extremely grateful. Dr. Lynda Stone and Dr. Tanya Shields are thanked for encouraging the author’s passion for feminist theory and for providing many hours of fruitful conversation and book lists. A final thank you is owed to the author’s partner, Ben Skelton, for hours of listening to her talk about feminist methods, for always being a first reader, and for taking care of their infant while the author finished writing this article.

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5 Feminist Critical Theory

Allison Weir is a Canadian social and political philosopher who researches and writes about critical theories of freedom, identity and power, feminisms and theories of gender, race, class, and religion, Indigenous philosophies, decolonizing theories, and global care chains. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto. Allison Weir co-founded the Institute for Social Justice in Sydney, Australia, where she was Research Professor and Director of the Doctoral Program in Social Political Thought, until the Institute closed in late 2018. Before moving to Australia she held a tenured professorship in Philosophy and in Women and Gender Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. She has held visiting positions at Concordia University in Montreal, the New School in New York, the University of Dundee, Scotland, and the University of Frankfurt, Germany. Her book, Decolonizing Freedom, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2021. She is the author of Identities and Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Sacrificial Logics (Routledge, 1996), as well as many articles in books and journals including Hypatia: An International Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Philosophical Topics, and Critical Horizons.

• Published: 12 May 2021
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This chapter offers an account of central issues and themes in feminist philosophical engagements with critical theory, focusing specifically on critical theory of the Frankfurt School. The chapter’s discussion reflects on examples of important feminist interventions in and contributions to critical theory, debates within feminist critical theory, and the extent to which critical theory can be considered feminist given its critique of power relations and interests in emancipation. The chapter suggests that future directions in the field must go beyond the question of gender inclusion and focus on the transformation of critical theory itself.

There are many kinds of feminist critical theories. Feminist theorists have made extensive contributions to critical legal theory, critical race theory, and critical literary theory. I would argue that feminist theory is by definition critical theory. The scope of this entry, however, is considerably narrower. It will focus on feminist critical theories emerging out of and engaging with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, which originated with the work of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and others in the 1930s, and continues today with the work of Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, Rainer Forst, Thomas McCarthy, Amy Allen, and others.

Max Horkheimer defined the aim of critical theory as the emancipation of human beings from slavery (Horkheimer 1972 , 246). The Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory draws on the philosophical tradition of critique from Kant through Hegel and Marx; the social theories of Weber, Durkheim, and Mead; and the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Klein, and Winnicott, sometimes to consider how human emancipation might be possible, but more often to understand the forces producing our continued enslavement. This has involved critiques of capitalist political economy along with wide-ranging social and cultural analysis and analyses of the self and subjectivity, to understand the complexity of forms of social power and to ask how and why human beings so often seem to desire their own subjection.

The approach of critical theory is, as Horkheimer argued, distinct from both normative and positivist empirical theories. As Amy Allen writes, “Critical theory understands itself to be rooted in and constituted by an existing social reality that is structured by power relations that it therefore also aims to critique by appealing to immanent standards of normativity and rationality. … [W]hat is distinctive about critical theory is its conception of the critical subject as self-consciously rooted in and shaped by the power relations in the society that she nevertheless aims self-reflexively and rationally to critique” (2016, xiii). Iris Young writes, “The method of critical theory, as I understand it, reflects on existing social relations and processes to identify what we experience as valuable in them, but as present only intermittently, partially, or potentially” (2000, 10). Nancy Fraser returns to Marx, to define critical theory as “the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age” (1987, 31). The theorists of the original Frankfurt School were Jews in Nazi Germany, some of whom escaped to America, some of whom did not. Their studies of anti-Semitism and the authoritarian personality, and of a strange America apparently dominated by Walt Disney, were acutely attuned to the struggles and wishes of their age. Critical theory, as Wendy Brown writes, “upturned the myth of Enlightenment reason, integrated psychoanalysis into political philosophy, pressed Nietzsche and Weber into Marx, attacked positivism as an ideology of capitalism, theorized the revolutionary potential of high art, plumbed the authoritarian ethos and structure of the nuclear family, mapped cultural and social effects of capital, thought and rethought dialectical materialism, and took philosophies of aesthetics, reason, and history to places they had never gone before” (2006, 2). According to Brown, this involved not only grasping social orders of power but also revisioning thought itself, to develop “new forms of thinking.”

Critical theory, then, would seem to be an approach particularly suited to feminist theory. If critical theory is focused on the “the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age,” it should, as Fraser has pointed out, respond to contemporary feminism—and, I would add, to Black Lives Matter, queer politics, Indigenous resistance to colonization, struggles against Islamophobia and Western imperialism, struggles to address climate change and the Anthropocene, and the displacement of peoples in the context of global capitalism and imperialism.

So what’s feminist about critical theory? For many critical theorists, there is nothing feminist whatsoever. The entry for “Critical Theory” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy barely mentions feminism; the entry for “The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory” in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy does not mention it at all; and both field overviews include virtually no women (or nonwhite men) in their lists of references. Furthermore, The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory (Thompson 2017 ) rarely mentions feminism, and includes only two essays by women, out of a total of thirty-two. One might be forgiven for concluding that only (straight) white men do critical theory, and that feminist critical theory does not exist. But one would be wrong.

Feminist critical theory in the Frankfurt School tradition includes substantial bodies of work by Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, Iris Young, and Amy Allen, and many other feminist theorists have engaged with critical theory, including Jessica Benjamin, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Mary Caputi, Jean Cohen, Patricia Hill Collins, Drucilla Cornell, Angela Davis, Jodi Dean, Barbara Fultner, Maria Pia Lara, Claudia Leeb, Robin Marasco, Maria Markus, Lois McNay, Johanna Meehan, Patricia Mills, Linda Nicholson, Kelly Oliver, Georgia Warnke, Allison Weir, Cynthia Willett, Linda Zerilli, and others. Feminist critical theorists have contributed incisive critiques of the effects of the androcentrism and inattention to gender in critical theory, and have developed important analyses of the gendered production of the public and private spheres in the capitalist welfare state, as well as theories of individual and collective subjectivity and agency, power and emancipation.

Yet many feminist theorists have not engaged deeply with the tradition of Frankfurt School critical theory—in part because in the past few decades this school has been dominated by the work of Habermas, oriented toward the establishment of universal norms at a time when these have been thoroughly deconstructed. Contemporary Frankfurt School theory is, ironically, resistant to many of the prevalent forms of critique and critical theory outside the Frankfurt School, including deconstruction and poststructuralism—and to much of the work of the early Frankfurt School. Few critical theorists have engaged much with critical race theory or with postcolonial or decolonial thought.

In this brief chapter, I discuss the historical development of feminist critical theory, beginning with the early interventions in the 1970s and 1980s, noting some of the directions taken since this early work, and then taking up the pivotal debate on agency and the feminist subject in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (Benhabib et al. 1995 ). Finally, I discuss the engagements of feminist critical theory with issues of race and colonization.

Early Interventions

Feminist critical theory in the era of second-wave feminism can be traced to Angela Davis’s “Women and Capitalism,” an essay written in the Palo Alto Jail in 1971 (1977). Another important early contribution was a lecture by Herbert Marcuse titled “Marxism and Feminism,” published in the journal Women’s Studies in 1974 (1974). Both argued that the feminist movement could be a force of resistance against capitalism and its “performance principle,” which rationalizes domination in the reduction of human life to the performance of productive labor, and glorifies masculine aggression and competition. Women’s liberation would involve the emancipation of eros from “repressive desublimation” and the emancipation of positive qualities that have been designated as feminine. Davis went on to develop analyses of the intersections of racism and patriarchy with capitalism in Women, Race, and Class (1981). Referencing Marcuse, Wendy Brown notes that the commitment to utopian revolution in this early work, and in much of early feminist theory, has since been replaced by more cautious projects. As she writes, feminist theory has abandoned its radicalism: ambitions to overthrow relations of domination have been replaced by “projects of resistance, reform, or resignification, on the one hand, and normative political theory abstracted from conditions for its realization, on the other” (2006, 2). Brown suggests that this abandoned radicalism is commensurate with feminist disengagement with critical theory. However, I would argue that much of feminist critical theory tends to fall into the two camps she describes here.

The 1987 collection Feminism as Critique sets out the key interventions and debates in contemporary feminist critical theory in the 1980s and early 1990s (see, e.g., Nicholson 1986 ; Fraser 1989 ; Butler 1990 ; Young 1990 ; Cornell 1991 ; and Benhabib 1992 ). In what follows, I will take up some of the central themes in this work.

Theorizing the Public and Private Spheres

Linda Nicholson and Nancy Fraser analyze the effects of the failure of Marx and Habermas to consider gender as a category of analysis, focusing on their failure to problematize the gendered nature of paid work and work in the capitalist private sphere of the family and their tendency to naturalize the capitalist division of public and private realms. Nicholson notes the importance of the work of feminists who have criticized Marx’s focus on production to the exclusion of reproduction, but also notes Iris Marion Young’s critique of the “dual systems theory” of Marxist feminism: while it is important to include reproductive work in social analysis, the danger is that this can be simply additive, failing to challenge the framework of Marxist theory. Nicholson argues that Marx’s historical analysis is undermined by his designation of the categories of production and of the economy as ahistorical universals. Thus, she writes, “The Marxist tendency to employ categories rooted in capitalist social relations and its failure in comprehending gender are deeply related. In so far as Marxists interpret ‘production’ as necessarily distinct from ‘reproduction,’ then aspects of capitalist society are falsely universalized and gender relations in both precapitalist and capitalist societies are obscured” (1987, 29). Nancy Fraser argues that while Habermas’s analysis of modern capitalist society in terms of four domains—economy, state, public participation, and family—usefully problematizes the public/private binary, his failure to comprehend gender systems severely limits his analysis. Habermas assumes, for example, that the nuclear family is primarily a domain of the “lifeworld,” organized through communicative relations, as opposed to spheres governed by functional imperatives of a “system” (the state, the economy). Fraser points out that in capitalist societies “the household, like the paid workplace, is a site of labor” and “families are thoroughly permeated with, in Habermas’s terms, the media of money and power. They are sites of egocentric, strategic and instrumental calculation as well as sites of usually exploitative exchanges of services, labor, cash, and sex, not to mention sites, frequently, of coercion and violence” (1987, 37). As Fraser continues, “By omitting any mention of the childrearer role, and by failing to thematize the gender subtext underlying the roles of worker and consumer, Habermas fails to understand precisely how the capitalist workplace is linked to the modern, restricted, male-headed, nuclear family” (45). Fraser complicates Habermas’s analysis, developing a differentiated account of multiple spheres that takes gendered relations into account.

Elsewhere Fraser develops this analysis in her work on the politics of need interpretations, analyzing the socialist feminist politicization of issues considered “private” (located in capitalist property relations and in the private realm of the family and sexuality) and the ways in which these contesting discourses are met with discourses of reprivatization and depoliticization in the “juridical-administrative-therapeutic state apparatus” (drawing on Foucault and Habermas) of the American welfare state. In this work, Fraser calls the sphere of contesting discourses “the social,” and differentiates it from the public sphere (Fraser 1989 ). Fraser continues to problematize the public/private split in Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (1997). For example, the chapter “A Genealogy of ‘Dependency’: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State” (coauthored with Linda Gordon) presents an analysis of the raced and gendered histories of the concepts of “independence” and “dependency” in the American welfare state (121–50). Also, in the chapter “After the Family Wage: A Postindustrial Thought Experiment,” Fraser argues that the “ideal typical citizen” should be not just a paid worker but a caregiver (41–68).

Central to this work is the question Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell articulated a decade earlier in their introduction to Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender in Late Capitalist Societies : “What kind of a restructuring of the public/private realms is possible and desirable” (1987). In her essay in this volume, “Impartiality and the Civic Public,” Iris Marion Young ( 1987 ) argues for a reconception of the public realm, critiquing the ideal of impartiality grounded in ideals of universal reason and the identity of the subject (56–76). Within a few years, Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, Joan Landes, Young, and others criticize the assumption of a single public sphere focused on determining a shared general interest, noting the gendered nature of the division between the public and the social, and the exclusion of modes of reasoning and modes of expression deemed “feminine.” While they commend Habermas’s theory of communicative action and discourse ethics as a better basis for determining shared norms than either liberal or communitarian theories, all argue that Habermas remains wedded to divisions between public and private, reason and affect, justice and the good life, generalizable interests and private need interpretations, public norms and private values—all of which are called into question by feminist analyses (see, e.g., Meehan 1995 ). Fraser ( 2013 ) and Young (1992) argue for a broadening of our understanding of the public sphere to include multiple contesting discourses in multiple spheres. Benhabib ( 2002 ) draws on Hannah Arendt to extend her analysis of public participation, arguing that domains Arendt designated as social spheres, such as eighteenth- to nineteenth-century “salons,” are in fact sites of public political discussion.

The Constitution of the Feminine Subject and the Deconstruction of Gender Identity

In their essays in Feminism and Critique (1987), Seyla Benhabib, Maria Markus, and Isaac Balbus argue, as Marcuse did, that we can find resources in socialized femininity to challenge the patriarchal capitalist performance principle, the masculine model of the atomistic unencumbered self, and androcentric unitary reason. Benhabib ( 1987 ) argues for a conception of the self as situated in relation to concrete, as well as generalized, others. In their contribution to the volume, Drucilla Cornell and Adam Thurschwell ( 1987 ) draw on psychoanalytic theory and argue that “the gender categories themselves retain indelible traces of their Other, belying the rigid identification of one’s self as a fully gender-differentiated subject.” Citing Jacques Derrida and Christie McDonald, they suggest “the immanent potential for a way of relating ‘where the code of sexual marks would no longer be discriminating’ ” (145).

Judith Butler argues instead for a deconstruction of sexed and gendered identity, drawing on Wittig’s argument that human social identities are “structured by a gender system predicated upon the alleged naturalness of binary oppositions and, consequently, heterosexuality” (1987, 135). Hence “the category of ‘sex’ is always subsumed under the discourse of heterosexuality” (136). Unlike Wittig, Butler does not call for the emancipation of the lesbian as the harbinger of a sexless society, which will emerge through the dissolution of the binary framework. Drawing on Foucault, and against Marcuse, Butler argues that the eros that is liberated will be already structured by power dynamics. Instead, she follows Foucault in calling not for transcendence but for subversion of binary opposites through a proliferation of multiple differences. While she cautions that this call can repeat the existentialist ideal of radical self-invention and notes the Lacanian psychoanalytic objection that this proliferation is a preoedipal fantasy, she opens and imagines the possibility of a future proliferation of genders, released from their binary restrictions.

Benhabib and Cornell end their editors’ introduction to Feminism as Critique by identifying a tension between the “deconstructive” critiques of identitarian binary logic in the work of Butler, Cornell and Thurschwell, Young, and Fraser, and the “reconstructive” arguments made by Benhabib, Markus, and Balbus, who “see in present forms of gender constitution utopian traces of a future mode of otherness” (1987, 13). But, in fact, Butler’s essay in the volume, despite her own caveats, imagines a utopian future, as does Cornell and Thurschwell’s essay. The difference lies in the imagined utopias, and in their theoretical and political foundations.

The Subject of Feminism: Theorizing Feminist Agency

The differences thematized here harden into oppositions with the publication of Feminist Contentions (1995) (including responses to an earlier version published in Praxis International in 1990), which focuses on some of the most important political and philosophical questions in contemporary feminist theory: questions of individual and collective agency, the meaning of gender, and the normative and theoretical foundations of feminism. Central to this debate is Benhabib’s position that feminist critical theory must be grounded in normative critical theory, against Butler’s poststructuralist critique of norms.

The debate opens with Benhabib’s critique of the dangers of postmodernist influences in feminist critical theory. Benhabib argues that the postmodernist theses of the death of man, the end of history, and the end of metaphysics (as described by Jane Flax 1990 ) are useful in moderation, but “the postmodernist position(s) thought through to their conclusions may eliminate not only the specificity of feminist theory but place in question the very emancipatory ideals of the women’s movements altogether” (Benhabib et al. 1995 , 20). Benhabib names the feminist versions of these theses as “Demystification of the Male Subject of Reason,” “Engendering of Historical Narrative,” and “Feminist Scepticism Toward the Claims of Transcendent Reason” (18–19, capitalized in the original). Feminism, she argues, would be unthinkable without adherence to normative ideals of autonomy and emancipation. For Benhabib, while the situated and gendered subject is heteronomously determined, she still strives toward autonomy. We necessarily relate to ourselves as the author and character of a narrative that makes sense to us. Hence, any call for the “death of the subject” is incompatible with feminist ideals of emancipation. Similarly, while she agrees with the critique of grand narratives, she argues that we need to hold onto the ideal of historical emancipation. Finally, she argues that feminism as situated criticism requires “philosophy,” which involves an ordering of normative priorities and a clarification of principle, oriented toward a utopian vision of the future. Critical feminist theory requires critique from the perspective of utopian ideals.

Many of these criticisms are directed toward Butler, who responds by questioning the assumption that politics requires philosophical foundations and criticizing the authority of a normative political philosophy that positions itself beyond the play of power. For Benhabib, politics, critical theory, and philosophy require normative grounds; for Butler, the role of philosophy, and particularly critical theory, is to question assumptions, and the practice of politics cannot be constrained by unquestionable certainties. We need to ask what our positions authorize and what they exclude or foreclose. Butler agrees with Benhabib that political action includes working collectively toward the achievement of normative ideals, opposing oppressive regimes. But political action also involves many other forms of action: questioning, subversions, parodies, microresistances, resignifying performances. For Butler the “sphere of the political” is where our agency is produced: political action is where we risk transforming who we are, and the answers to our questions of which way to go and who we will be cannot be known in advance.

Both are making important points that can open up crucial questions. What is the role of philosophy? To propose ideal norms, or to open our certainties to question? And how do we do politics? Butler is, of course, not just arguing that all positions must be opened to question. She’s also arguing for some strong positions. Her argument shifts between two descriptions of the constitution of subjects and identities. On one hand, “subjects are formed through exclusionary operations” (Benhabib et al. 1995 , 48); “identity categories are never merely descriptive, but always normative, and as such, exclusionary” (50). On the other hand, she writes, “If feminism presupposes that ‘women’ designates an undesignatable field of differences, one that cannot be totalized or summarized by a descriptive identity category, then the very term becomes a site of permanent openness and resignifiability” (50). On one hand, language constitutes subjects and identities always and only through an exclusionary identitarian logic; on the other hand, identity categories are fields of differences open to resignification and change. Similarly, she shifts from the claim that all metaphysical claims and normative positions must be questioned to the metaphysical claim that all identities are normative and all norms are predicated on exclusions and are claims to authority.

Fraser contends that Benhabib and Butler are embracing “false antitheses” (Benhabib et al. 1995 ). Both positions are important, and the breadth and complexity of feminist issues require an eclectic, pragmatic feminist critical theory, in which different theories are appropriate to address different questions in different contexts. Both Fraser and Nicholson worry that Benhabib, Butler, and Cornell rely on problematic universals—Benhabib’s universal norms, Butler’s universalized theory of language, and Cornell’s psychoanalytic theory of the symbolic order (also in Benhabib et al. 1995 ). They question Benhabib’s adherence to a philosophy that defends universal validity claims, to a conception of history characterized by a singular historical narrative, and to a theory of a universal process of individuation. And they argue that Butler’s theory of the subject produced through universal norms of language is ahistorical and deterministic. Both argue for a critical theory that is defined by historically situated social critique. Against the charge of linguistic determinism, leveled by Benhabib, Fraser, and Nicholson, Butler argues, “to be constituted by language is to be produced within a given network of power/discourse which is open to resignification, redeployment, subversive citation from within, and interruption and inadvertent convergences with other such networks. ‘Agency’ is to be found precisely at such junctures where discourse is renewed” (135). Cornell’s argument for what she calls “ethical feminism,” characterized by a reworking of the feminine subject position from a psychoanalytic perspective, receives little attention in this debate, apart from the charge of universalism.

The elephant in the room in this discussion is queer theory and politics, which is, weirdly, never mentioned by anyone. The shift from a politics of women’s liberation and gay and lesbian liberation to the queer politics of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) and Queer Nation was co-constitutive with the shift in theory from grand theories and normative commitments, theories of autonomous agency and identity politics, to Foucauldian, poststructuralist, and deconstructivist critiques. But while the terms “postmodern,” “poststructuralist,” and “deconstruction” are hotly contested, and Foucault and Derrida and others are named, the term “queer theory” is never used. 1 Acknowledging queer politics might have had a transformative effect on this debate. For example, if Butler were to point out that her theory is addressing the heterosexist constitution of complementary gender identities that produces “deviant” subjects and oppresses all gendered subjects who are forced to police their identities, and to repress or abject qualities that are not gender normative, that might satisfy the demand for a normative position while maintaining the critique of the constitution of norms and normative identities. If Benhabib were to acknowledge the queer politics of subversion, she could shift her focus from the need to defend a collective feminist subject and the emergence of women’s autonomy to acknowledge the historical diversity of forms of political struggle, and even possibly to acknowledge that philosophy and politics can involve not just defending norms but questioning certainties. As Butler points out, this entire debate excludes the questions and arguments posed by postcolonial theorists and feminists of color, who similarly question claims to a collective feminist subject. For Linda Zerilli ( 2005 ), the whole debate founders on “the subject question” rather than asking how feminists can do politics (see also McNay 2000 ; Brown 2005 ; Allen 2008 ; Weir 1996 and 2013 ; Leeb 2017 ).

The debates between Benhabib, Butler, Cornell, and Fraser in Feminist Contentions continue to inform their later work. Benhabib continues to explore subjectivity and agency, drawing on Arendt to develop a narrative conception of the self. Butler refines her conception of language and resignification, and addresses relational psychoanalytic theories of dependency and theories of otherness. And Fraser turns from pragmatic eclecticism to “comprehensive, normative, programmatic thinking” (1997, 4). In their more recent work, these feminist critical theorists engage with transnational and global issues, with feminism as just one dimension of broader arguments. For example, Benhabib has published extensively on cosmopolitanism and international human rights; Fraser has theorized transnational publics and counterpublics and global capitalism; and Butler has addressed nationalisms, war and Zionism, and the politics of assembly.

Race, Colonization, and Western Imperialism

Frankfurt School critical theorists tend to forget that the aim of critical theory, according to Horkheimer’s founding text, is emancipation from slavery . There has been little analysis by prominent critical theorists of the African slave trade and the continuing legacies of colonization, racialization, and white supremacy in America and worldwide. Nor have many critical theorists addressed the destruction of Indigenous peoples and cultures and the appropriation of land as property in settler colonization. Hence, there has been little analysis of the ways in which global capitalism and modern regimes of power have historically been enabled through the appropriation and commodification of labor and land, and of how these practices have been linked with and facilitated through heteropatriarchal institutions and disciplinary regimes.

To return to a theorist with whom this chapter began, Angela Davis could be said to have invented feminist critical theory with her 1977 essay “Women and Capitalism.” In subsequent work Davis engages directly with the aim of emancipating human beings from slavery, analyzing relationships between capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy in the United States. In Women, Race, and Class , Davis addresses the legacies of slavery in the continued exploitation of Black women’s labor in domestic work, but also in the “legacy of tenacity, resistance and insistence on sexual equality” of Black women who worked as equals with Black men and who resisted and fought against slavery (1981, 29). Part of this legacy, Davis argues, was a new standard of women’s equality, which, along with the political experience of white women abolitionists who affirmed solidarity with Black activists, led to the movement for women’s rights. In later work, Davis’s ( 2003 ) analyses of the prison industrial complex focus directly on the incarceration of Black people as a continuation of slavery. White feminist critical theorists have not substantially engaged these analyses, and Davis is not included within the pantheon of contemporary Frankfurt School critical theory.

There are some Frankfurt School feminist critical theorists who have engaged with race issues. For example, Iris Marion Young includes some discussions of racialized oppression and of race and gender identity politics throughout her work. Nancy Fraser ( 1997 ) thematizes the intersecting axes of gender and class in modern capitalism in “A Genealogy of Dependency” and in her work on recognition and redistribution. Both Fraser and Young argue for transformative politics that address the oppression of social groups in relation to normative ideals of justice. Young ( 1990 ) argues for a politics of difference that stresses the importance of recognition, identifying five “faces” of oppression (exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence) and distinguishing among four dimensions of justice (distribution, division of labor, decision-making power, and cultural meanings). Fraser ( 1997 ) argues for a distinction between socioeconomic injustice, requiring a politics of redistribution, and cultural injustice, requiring a politics of recognition. 2 And she distinguishes between “affirmative” forms of redistribution and recognition (the liberal welfare state, multiculturalism policies, and identity politics) and “transformative” forms (socialism, deconstruction of race and gender identities, and queer politics). Ultimately, she argues that justice requires the transformative forms of both redistribution and recognition: the ideal is to transform the political economic system, and to transform our identities, to “change everyone’s sense of self” (24). While both Fraser and Young argue for transformative politics, the framing in terms of the politics of recognition and redistribution situates the debates within the politics and theories of the liberal Western state. Similarly, Benhabib affirms a deliberative democratic politics within the liberal state to adjudicate issues of difference and diversity.

In their more recent work, both Young and Fraser address transnational colonization and imperialism. Before her death in 2006, Young worked on Indigenous anticolonial politics and responsibility for global injustice and had begun to explore postcolonial and anticolonial theories (Young 2007 ; Levy and Young 2011 ). Fraser is currently working on analyses of racialized capitalism, theorizing racialized colonization, accumulation, and expropriation as “background conditions” of an expanded conception of capitalism. Drucilla Cornell has done extensive work drawing on imaginaries and symbolic and legal systems beyond the Eurocentric frame, focusing particularly on the South African idea of uBuntu, to defend normative ideals of freedom and justice and to “decolonize” critical theory. (Cornell 2008 )

While race and colonization are thematized within feminist critical theory, there has been little attention to critical race and postcolonial theories in this work. Charles Mills puts it quite bluntly: “Critical theorists” are white, and “critical race theorists” and postcolonial theorists are black and brown (Mills 2017 ). There has been little engagement in feminist critical theory with postcolonial critiques of Western feminisms and with how ideals of autonomy, rights, and secularism are used to support Western imperialism. In her extensive discussions of the global politics of gender and cultural diversity, Benhabib affirms a deliberative democratic multicultural politics within the liberal democratic state that “does not confine women and children to their communities of origin against their will, but encourages them to develop their autonomous agency vis-à-vis their ascribed identities” (2002, 86). As Amy Allen (2013) points out, Benhabib assumes that the modern Western ideal of autonomy, entailing a distanced reflection on one’s attachments and identities, represents a developmental advance over values and identities affirmed in other forms of life. Feminist critical theorists still tend to regard religion as the opiate of the masses, and cultural identities and attachments as primarily oppressive. This stance fails to address postcolonial and Islamic feminist critiques of Western secularism, and of the use of the discourse of the liberation of women from their oppressive cultures and religions to legitimate American imperialism and perpetuate Islamophobia.

Genuine engagement with all of these issues would require an expansion and transformation of the narrow definition of “critical theory” to include critical race theory and postcolonial theories, and reflection on the Eurocentrism and whiteness of the tradition of critical theory. This will require a transformation of what critical theory is and who it includes. Feminist critical theorists have struggled to expand Frankfurt School critical theory to include gender issues. They are now faced with the challenge of transforming critical theory. 3

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While the term “queer” was just emerging when the first version of this debate was published in 1990, it was well known by the time Feminist Contentions was published in 1995.

Fraser later adds a third dimension: representation.

This work has begun, with the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, founded in 2016 by Judith Butler and Penelope Deutscher. The Consortium aims to globalize critical theory, to connect disparate projects and programs, and to incite new forms of collaborative research. The Consortium has founded a journal, Critical Times, and a book series, Critical South.

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feminist Theory

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The extension of feminism (understood as a practical social movement concerned to address the inequality of the sexes) into theoretical discourse. Undoubtedly one of the most important and influential intellectual currents of the 20th century (every bit the equal of Marxism and psychoanalysis), Feminist theory encompasses most disciplines from art and architecture through to science and technology, but it is predominantly concentrated in the social sciences and the humanities. As diverse as it is, and the varieties of feminist theory are almost without limit, at its core it has four principal concerns, which are to: (i) elucidate the origins and causes of gender inequality; (ii) explain the operation and persistence of this state of affairs; (iii) delineate effective strategies to either bring about full equality between the sexes or at least ameliorate the effects of ongoing inequality; and (iv) imagine a world in which sexual inequality no longer exists. Of the four, feminist theory has tended to prioritize the first two, leaving the strategic questions to women working in the field, so to speak, in the various advocacy groups like the National Organization for Women founded in the US in 1966; while the task of imagining the future has been parcelled out to creative writers, particularly those working in SF like Ursula LeGuin and Marge Piercy. The decision to prioritize one or other of these four problematics is what gives shape to the specific feminisms.

The causes of sexual inequality are almost impossible to trace since for all of recorded history it was already an established fact. Therefore it is ultimately a matter for pure speculation. The most widely accepted hypothesis is that in prehistoric times biology placed women in a subordinate position to men because pregnancy and childrearing render them vulnerable and in need of assistance both to obtain food and fend off predators. While there is probably some truth to this strand of the biological determinism hypothesis from an anthropological point of view, the practical need to protect women does not explain the widespread denigration of women and their socialization as lesser beings. By the same token, as societies became more prosperous and their technology more sophisticated women's vulnerability diminished, but if anything the positioning of them assubordinate seemed to harden. For obvious reasons, then, the issue that has exercised feminist theorists the most is the one of persistence: why does sexism continue after the principal justification for it has long since ceased to obtain?

There are three basic answers to this question: first, biology continues to be a determining factor; second, that it is in men's interest to maintain the subordination of women; and third, women have been complicit with their own oppression. Surprisingly, perhaps, radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone support the first answer, although she then uses it as a stage to call for the use of biotechnology to put an end to women's reproductive role. Not surprisingly, the second answer has very widespread support, and shows the influence of Marxism. In effect, it equates feminist struggle with class struggle. The third answer, which is perhaps the most painful inasmuch as it is a form of self-criticism, has given rise to the most debate, and perhaps for that reason has contributed the most in the way of ideas for achieving the strategic goal of equality between the sexes. Both First Wave and Second Wave feminists agree that femininity—understood as a male-imposed ideal of how women should look and act—is a major limiting factor for feminist politics. So from Mary Wollstonecraft to Germaine Greer and Kate Millett feminist writers have advocated to a greater or lesser degree the abandoning of the practice of self-denial most versions of femininity demand. Interestingly, some Third Wave feminists have argued against this, calling instead for a celebration of femininity.

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22 An Introduction to Feminist Theory

Brittany John; Caitlin Andreasen; Ryan French; and Katherine Whitcomb

Feminist criticism dates back to well before our time.  Although women’s movements in the 1960s and 1970s sparked a contemporary feminist criticism, texts that were written much earlier call for a certain feminist critique.  The feminist movements of the 1960s and 70s were calling attention to the unfortunate female experiences under male power.  There was a shift in feminist critique and theory by the 1980s that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar helped move into action.  Before the 1980s, feminist theory was more about the stereotypes that men had against females, and after the 1980s, feminist theory was more about the rearranging of forms that were seen as “feminine”, like a diary.  There were two kinds of feminists: liberal and radical.  The liberal feminists believed that, ultimately, gender was something that was constructed, and feminism should go outside of that construct that was built around them.  The radical feminists believed that there was a certain female essence, and that essence should be embraced by women.  These two types of feminists would lead into the two of the key ideas of feminist theory today: essentialist and constructivist.

Essentialist feminism is concerned with the inherent differences between men and women.  Taking root in psychoanalytic theory, the essentialist feminists believed that gender reflects a natural difference between men and women.  They believed this difference is as much psychological and linguistic as it is biological.

Essentialist feminists thought that women’s physical differences made them more attached to the physical world.  They believed this attachment made them more concerned with protecting nature than men.  Men, on the other hand, once separated from the mother, begin thinking in abstractions which allow them to assign identities and social roles to themselves and others.  While men think of rights while confronted with ethical issues, women think of responsibilities to others.

Constructivist feminism, on the other hand, has roots in Marxism. The constructivist feminists believe that gender is formed by culture in history.  They believe that patriarchal culture constructed gender identities with the intention to make men seem superior to women.  While essentialist feminists see female identity and psychology as inherently different from men, constructivist feminists see these differences as products of conditioning.

Another major duality in the feminist theory is the dynamic between the “angel” and the “monster” in female characters. The “angel” is described as a female character who is the perfect Victorian wife.  She is devoted to her husband/lover and she is selfless.  The “angel” is seen as virginal and pure, passive and ordinary, submissive and powerless, with no real story of her own and no story to set herself apart.

The “monster” in feminist theory is described as being able to express her desires and have an opinion of her own.  She has a sexual energy, and she shows a certain autonomy, authority, and aggressiveness.  The “monster” threatens to take the angels place, as she is the angel’s “mirror image” or “sister”.  Rivkin and Ryan argue that the monster can sometimes lie within the angel, and that no woman is inherently angelic.  This dynamic has been used in literature for years, and now, more contemporarily, used in film and television.

The four main points of the feminism theory are the differences between constructivist feminism and essentialist feminism, and the dynamic between the female “angel” and “monster” characters in a literary context.  One of the takeaways is that a constructivist feminist would say that gender is a construct formed by culture in history, and an essentialist feminist would say that gender reflects a natural difference between men and women.  The other takeaway is the importance of remembering that the “monster” sometimes lies within the “angel”, and that no woman is purely an “angel”.

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. “The Madwoman in the Attic.”  Literary Theory, an Anthology , by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, Blackwell, 1998.

The Student Theorist: An Open Handbook of Collective College Theory Copyright © 2018 by Brittany John; Caitlin Andreasen; Ryan French; and Katherine Whitcomb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Feminist Theory in Sociology

An Overview of Key Ideas and Issues

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• Key Concepts
• Major Sociologists
• News & Issues
• Research, Samples, and Statistics
• Recommended Reading
• Archaeology

Feminist theory is a major branch within sociology that shifts its assumptions, analytic lens, and topical focus away from the male viewpoint and experience toward that of women.

In doing so, feminist theory shines a light on social problems, trends, and issues that are otherwise overlooked or misidentified by the historically dominant male perspective within social theory .

Key Takeaways

Key areas of focus within feminist theory include:

• discrimination and exclusion on the basis of sex and gender
• objectification
• structural and economic inequality
• power and oppression
• gender roles and stereotypes

Many people incorrectly believe that feminist theory focuses exclusively on girls and women and that it has an inherent goal of promoting the superiority of women over men.

In reality, feminist theory has always been about viewing the social world in a way that illuminates the forces that create and support inequality, oppression, and injustice, and in doing so, promotes the pursuit of equality and justice.

That said, since the experiences and perspectives of women and girls were historically excluded for years from social theory and social science, much feminist theory has focused on their interactions and experiences within society to ensure that half the world's population is not left out of how we see and understand social forces, relations, and problems.

While most feminist theorists throughout history have been women, people of all genders can be found working in the discipline today. By shifting the focus of social theory away from the perspectives and experiences of men, feminist theorists have created social theories that are more inclusive and creative than those that assume the social actor to always be a man.

Part of what makes feminist theory creative and inclusive is that it often considers how systems of power and oppression interact , which is to say it does not just focus on gendered power and oppression, but on how this might intersect with systemic racism, a hierarchical class system, sexuality, nationality, and (dis)ability, among other things.

Gender Differences

Some feminist theory provides an analytic framework for understanding how women's location in and experience of social situations differ from men's.

For example, cultural feminists look at the different values associated with womanhood and femininity as a reason for why men and women experience the social world differently.   Other feminist theorists believe that the different roles assigned to women and men within institutions better explain gender differences, including the sexual division of labor in the household .  

Existential and phenomenological feminists focus on how women have been marginalized and defined as  “other”  in patriarchal societies . Some feminist theorists focus specifically on how masculinity is developed through socialization, and how its development interacts with the process of developing femininity in girls.

Gender Inequality

Feminist theories that focus on gender inequality recognize that women's location in and experience of social situations are not only different but also unequal to men's.

Liberal feminists argue that women have the same capacity as men for moral reasoning and agency, but that patriarchy , particularly the sexist division of labor, has historically denied women the opportunity to express and practice this reasoning.  

These dynamics serve to shove women into the  private sphere  of the household and to exclude them from full participation in public life. Liberal feminists point out that gender inequality exists for women in a heterosexual marriage and that women do not benefit from being married.  

Indeed, these feminist theorists claim, married women have higher levels of stress than unmarried women and married men.   Therefore, the sexual division of labor in both the public and private spheres needs to be altered for women to achieve equality in marriage.

Gender Oppression

Theories of gender oppression go further than theories of gender difference and gender inequality by arguing that not only are women different from or unequal to men, but that they are actively oppressed, subordinated, and even abused by men .  

Power is the key variable in the two main theories of gender oppression: psychoanalytic feminism and  radical feminism .

Psychoanalytic feminists attempt to explain power relations between men and women by reformulating Sigmund Freud's theories of human emotions, childhood development, and the workings of the subconscious and unconscious. They believe that conscious calculation cannot fully explain the production and reproduction of patriarchy.  

Radical feminists argue that being a woman is a positive thing in and of itself, but that this is not acknowledged in  patriarchal societies  where women are oppressed. They identify physical violence as being at the base of patriarchy, but they think that patriarchy can be defeated if women recognize their own value and strength, establish a sisterhood of trust with other women, confront oppression critically, and form female-based separatist networks in the private and public spheres.  

Structural Oppression

Structural oppression theories posit that women's oppression and inequality are a result of capitalism , patriarchy, and racism .

Socialist feminists agree with  Karl Marx  and Freidrich Engels that the working class is exploited as a consequence of capitalism, but they seek to extend this exploitation not just to class but also to gender.  

Intersectionality theorists seek to explain oppression and inequality across a variety of variables, including class, gender, race, ethnicity, and age. They offer the important insight that not all women experience oppression in the same way, and that the same forces that work to oppress women and girls also oppress people of color and other marginalized groups.  

One way structural oppression of women, specifically the economic kind, manifests in society is in the gender wage gap , which shows that men routinely earn more for the same work than women.

An intersectional view of this situation shows that women of color, and men of color, too, are even further penalized relative to the earnings of white men.  

In the late 20th century, this strain of feminist theory was extended to account for the globalization of capitalism and how its methods of production and of accumulating wealth center on the exploitation of women workers around the world.

Kachel, Sven, et al. "Traditional Masculinity and Femininity: Validation of a New Scale Assessing Gender Roles." Frontiers in Psychology , vol. 7, 5 July 2016, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00956

Zosuls, Kristina M., et al. "Gender Development Research in  Sex Roles : Historical Trends and Future Directions." Sex Roles , vol. 64, no. 11-12, June 2011, pp. 826-842., doi:10.1007/s11199-010-9902-3

Norlock, Kathryn. "Feminist Ethics." Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . 27 May 2019.

Liu, Huijun, et al. "Gender in Marriage and Life Satisfaction Under Gender Imbalance in China: The Role of Intergenerational Support and SES." Social Indicators Research , vol. 114, no. 3, Dec. 2013, pp. 915-933., doi:10.1007/s11205-012-0180-z

"Gender and Stress." American Psychological Association .

Stamarski, Cailin S., and Leanne S. Son Hing. "Gender Inequalities in the Workplace: The Effects of Organizational Structures, Processes, Practices, and Decision Makers’ Sexism." Frontiers in Psychology , 16 Sep. 2015, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01400

Barone-Chapman, Maryann . " Gender Legacies of Jung and Freud as Epistemology in Emergent Feminist Research on Late Motherhood." Behavioral Sciences , vol. 4, no. 1, 8 Jan. 2014, pp. 14-30., doi:10.3390/bs4010014

Srivastava, Kalpana, et al. "Misogyny, Feminism, and Sexual Harassment." Industrial Psychiatry Journal , vol. 26, no. 2, July-Dec. 2017, pp. 111-113., doi:10.4103/ipj.ipj_32_18

Armstrong, Elisabeth. "Marxist and Socialist Feminism." Study of Women and Gender: Faculty Publications . Smith College, 2020.

Pittman, Chavella T. "Race and Gender Oppression in the Classroom: The Experiences of Women Faculty of Color with White Male Students." Teaching Sociology , vol. 38, no. 3, 20 July 2010, pp. 183-196., doi:10.1177/0092055X10370120

Blau, Francine D., and Lawrence M. Kahn. "The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations." Journal of Economic Literature , vol. 55, no. 3, 2017, pp. 789-865., doi:10.1257/jel.20160995

• Socialist Feminism vs. Other Types of Feminism
• Patriarchal Society According to Feminism
• The Sociology of Gender
• Definition of Intersectionality
• What Is Sexism? Defining a Key Feminist Term
• Cultural Feminism
• 6 Quotes from ‘Female Liberation as the Basis for Social Revolution’
• Socialist Feminism Definition and Comparisons
• The Core Ideas and Beliefs of Feminism
• What Is Radical Feminism?
• Top 20 Influential Modern Feminist Theorists
• What Is Feminism Really All About?
• 10 Important Feminist Beliefs
• Liberal Feminism
• Biography of Patricia Hill Collins, Esteemed Sociologist
• Feminist Literary Criticism