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Feminist theory is a generalized, wide-ranging system of ideas about social life and human experience developed from a woman-centered perspective. 1. Major object for investigation is the situation(s) and experiences of women (starting point of investigations) a. It treats women as the central "subjects" in the investigative process b. Feminist theory is critical and activist on behalf of women seeking to produce a better world for women and for humankind. 2. Describing the social world from the vantage points of women

4. And what about the differences among women? (CONTEXTUALIZATION and SITUATION) a. Diversification of women, different backgrounds, multifarious experiences i. Hence, invisibility, inequality and role differences are anchored in womens social location age, race, affectional preferences, marital status, religion, ethnicity, global location

1. It is the work of an interdisciplinary multicultural and international community 2. Feminist sociologists work with a double agenda: a. to broaden and deepen sociology by reworking disciplinary knowledge. b. to develop a critical understanding of society in order to change the world.

Sociologys substantive research fields Reorient existing sociological theories By standing on feminisms own distinct theories Mobilize to craft a coherent system of feminist theories 1. Modern Macro-Social Theories of Gender a. Functionalism b. Analytic Conflict Theory c. World-Systems Theory 2. Modern Micro-Social Theories of Gender a. Symbolic Interactionism b. Ethnomethodology 3. Feminist Engagements with a. Giddens; b. Habermas and; c. Bourdieu

1. And what about women? (FUNCTION) a. Where are the women in any situation being investigated? b. Their invisibility becomes the indicator of inequality, why? 2. Why is all this as it is? (DEFINITION) a. The development of the concept of gender b. Distinction between sex and gender 3. How can we change and improve the social world to make it a more just place for women and for all people? (COMMITMENT and ACTION) a. Seeking justice, confronting injustice

Typologies were created within and outside Sociology Expansion of Sociology of Gender Sociology of Gender vis--vis Feminist Theory Groundedness; in principle and in practice Dynamism - ongoing relation between research and discovery

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Social Anthropology 191 Contemporary Social and Anthropological Theories

Answering the basic question, and what about women? through four (4) typologies: 1. Gender Difference - oldest of the feminist theories - men and women are and are not the same in behavior and experience -confronting the problem of what is usually termed as an essentialist argument (immutable differences of men and women) i.e. 1) biological, 2) social and institutional needs for men and women to fill in different roles, most especially but not exclusively in the family, 3) the existential or phenomenological need of human beings to produce an Other as part f the act of the self-definition - an attempt to scrutinize sociobiology; however other factors are considered more than sociobiology (e.g. range of locations) a. more on exploring than explaining the origins of the difference celebrating the social value of womens distinctive way of being (ways in which women are different from men) a side-step rather than resolve the problem o the essentialist argument Mens superiority over women anchored in a patriarchal setting; The natural inferiority of women can be seen in social subordination Proponents: Margaret Fuller, Frances Willard, Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman argument was reversed by the First Wave of Feminism, who are also the creators of the theory Cultural Feminism positive insights about female character and feminine personality

fantasies of sexuality and intimacy lower levels of aggressive behavior and greater
capacity for creating peaceful coexistence b. the marginalization of women as Other in a male-created culture (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex) the world is viewed and defined assuming that the male is the subject woman as an objectified being who has the opposite traits of a man; frightening for Beauvoir (following Hegel, Heidegger and Sartre); Otherness is a fundamental category of human thought binary opposition = one of the chief ways in which thought organizes culture the existence of other hinders and invades the sovereignty of the subjective consciousness of the man, hence hampering the ongoing self-actualization the question now is that, if women can achieve such form of distinctive subjectivity by liberating themselves (like men) c. i. roles of men and women in particular institutional settings = gender differences - sexual division of labor - roles that entail to a lifelong series of events and experiences very different from me (i.e. wife, mother, household worker, etc.) - these are repeated experiences carried over to the other institutions (i.e. careers, political behavior, etc.)

womens standards for ethical judgement caring attention in womens consciousness style of communication capacity for openness to emotional experience

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Social Anthropology 191 Contemporary Social and Anthropological Theories

ii. analysis of gender as an accomplishment = ethnomethodology, doing gender - institutional order, culture, and stratificational systems are maintained by the ongoing activities of individuals in interaction - gender is constantly being produced by people in interaction with each other as a way of making sense of and letting the world work - Butlers performativity; There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to b the results 2. Gender Inequality - men and women are not just only differently but also unequally situated in the society - inequality results from the organization in the society - women are situationally less empowered a. - argues that women may claim equality with men on the basis of essential human capacity for reasoned moral agency - gender inequality is said to be a result of sexist patterning of the division of labor; and therefore, gender equality may be achieved by transforming and repatterning the division of labor (through different social institutions) - liberal feminists have worked through legislative change to ensure equality; law, regulation, litigation, education, marriage, etc. - targetive on the very foundations of inequality to achieve equality - individual acting as free and responsible moral agent, choosing the lifestyle that is most suitable to her or him, that choice has to be accepted and respected 3. Gender Oppression - trying to describe womens situation as the consequence of a direct power relationship between men and women, in which:

- men have fundamental and concrete interests in controlling, using and oppressing women - through the practice of domination - the dominant is successful in making the subordinate follow his will (subordinate becomes an instrument or tool) - instrumentality may entail to the denial of the subordinates independent subjectivity - power arrangement in the society is hinge on the values of patriarchy hence produces the following; gender differences, gender oppression and gender inequality a. - reformulating the theories of Freud and his intellectual heirs and trying to explain patriarchy - emotional dynamics of personality, emotions which are buried in the subconscious or unconscious are of the psyche - also sees patriarchy as the system that subjugates women - why men everywhere bring such unremitting energy to the task of sustaining patriarchy and why is there an absence of countervailing energy on the part of women? - mens deep emotional need to control women? b. women are of absolute positive value women are everywhere oppressed elaborating a theory of social organization, gender oppression and strategies for change also targetive about patriarchy, the image of violence violence may not just be physical cruelty but may also be hidden in the practices of exploitation and control patriarchy creates guilt and repression, sadism and masochism, manipulation and deception, etc. physical force to establish control violence: rape, sexual abuse, enforced prostitution, spouse abuse, incest, sexual molestation of children, witch burning, hysterectomies, the stoning to death of the adulteresses,

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Social Anthropology 191 Contemporary Social and Anthropological Theories

persecution of lesbians, corrective rape, practice of clitorectomy, female infanticide, Chinese foot-binding, etc. - how can patriarchy be defeated? Through the reworking of womens consciousness, recognition of her own value and strength - rejection of patriarchal values - separatism - lesbian feminism as a major strand in radical feminism 4. Structural Oppression - recognize that oppression results from the fact that some groups of people derive direct benefits from controlling, using, subjugating; and oppressing other groups of people - analyze how interests in domination are enacted through social structure, recurring and routinized large-scale arrangements of social relations which are always arrangements of power that have arisen out of history, that is, over time. a. Three goals: 1. To achieve a critique of the distinctive yet interrelated oppressions of patriarchy and capitalism from a standpoint in women's experience 2. To develop explicit and adequate methods for social analysis out of an expanded understanding of historical materialism 3. To incorporate an understanding of the significance of ideas into a materialist analysis of the determination of human affairs. - accepted the Marxian analysis of capitalisms class relations as an explication of one major structure of oppression but rejected the Marxian analysts of patriarchy as a by-product of the same economic production Dual Knowledge (Capitalist Patriarchy): 1. Knowledge of oppression under capitalism 2. Knowledge of oppression under patriarchy `Marxian Feminism

Is a relatively dormant theory in contemporary American feminism An influence on socialist feminism Major Concern: - Social class oppression - Gender oppression Women are central to socialist feminism in two ways. 1. The oppression of women remains a primary topic for analysis. 2. Women's location and experience of the world serve as the essential vantage point on domination in all its forms. Difference between Socialists Feminists and Marxian 1. Socialist feminists broaden the meaning of the material conditions of human life 2. Socialist feminists perspective's emphasis on what some Marxians might call, dismissively, mental or ideational. 3. The object of analysis for socialist feminists is not primarily class inequality but the complex intertwining of a wide range of social inequalities. Socialist feminist analyses may be divided into three distinct emphases: 1. Materialist feminism 2. Relations on Ruling (Dorothy Smith) 3. Cultural Materialism DOROTHY SMITH - Born in the North of England in 1926 - Canadian sociologist - Smith did her undergraduate work at the London School of Economics, earning her B.Sc in Sociology with a Major in Social Anthropology in 1955. - Married to William Reid Smith, whom she had met while attending London School of Economics. Both attended graduate school at the University of California at Berkley, where she received her PhD in Sociology in 1963. - Lecturer at UC Berkeley from 1964 to 1966 and the only woman teaching in a faculty of 42..

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Social Anthropology 191 Contemporary Social and Anthropological Theories

In 1967 she moved with her two sons to Vancouver British Columbia to teach at the University of British Columbia, where she helped to establish a Women's Studies Program In 1977 she moved to Toronto, Ontario to work at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, where she stayed until she retired In 1994 she became an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, where she continues her work in institutional ethnography.

Director of the Africana Center at Tufts University between 1976 and 1980 before completing her doctorate in sociology at Brandeis in 1984 married to Roger L. Collins, a professor of education at the University of Cincinnati

`Produced the sociology that integrates neo-Marxian concerns with the structures of domination and phenomenological insights into the variety of subjective and microinteractional worlds. `Interested in developing her explorations of text-based organization and text-mediated social relations in people's everyday local practices. Intersectionality Theory - recognizes the fundamental link between ideology and power - one of the oldest traditions in feminism - The argument in intersectionality theory is that the pattern of intersection itself produces a particular experience of oppression-not merely the salience of any one variable, the working out of one vector Vectors of Oppression and Privilege: - race, class, global location, sexual preference, age - The pattern of the intersection produces the particular experience of oppression (black women and employment discrimination) PATRICIA HILL COLLINS - Born in Philadelphia Pennsylvania in 1948 - In 1969 she earned her bachelor's degree at Brandeis University - In 1970 she earned a master of arts degree at Harvard University - Between 1970 and 1976, she was a teacher and curriculum specialist at St Joseph Community School, as well at two other community schools in Boston, Mass.

Features: 1. Its sociology of knowledge 2. Its model of society 3. Its patterning of social interaction 4. Its focus on a subjective level of social experience, and 5. Its integration of these levels of social life A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge knowledge of the world - Feminist Standpoint Epistemology 1. It is always created from the standpoint of embodied actors situated in groups that are differentially located in social structure 2. It is, thus, always partial and interested, never total and objective 3. It is produced in and varies among groups and, to some degree, among actors within groups; and 4. It is always affected by power relations--whether it is formulated from the standpoint of dominant or subordinate groups.

The subfield of Feminist Anthropology emerged in the early 1970s as a reaction to a perceived androcentric bias within the discipline (Lamphere 1996: 488). The first feminist anthropologists perceived substantial gaps in the corpus of anthropological literature as a result of male bias (Lamphere 1996: 488). Contemporary feminist anthropologists are no longer focusing their research solely on the issue of gender asymmetry. But more on the importance of female activities, such as "foraging, parenting,

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Social Anthropology 191 Contemporary Social and Anthropological Theories

and sexual selection in our reconstructions of human history"(McGee and Warms 1996:391). Contemporary feminist anthropologists have shown that gender is an important analytical concept (McGee and Warms 1996:392). o Gender is a term that came into popular use in the early 1980's. o Gender was used to refer to both the male and the female, the cultural construction of these categories, and the relationship between them (Pine 1996:253) In the anthropological literature the discussion of women has been restricted to the areas of marriage, kinship, and family.

Sources: Leibowitz L (1975) Perspectives on the Evolution of Sex Differences. In Toward an Anthropology of Women, Rayna R. Reiter, ed., pp. 21-35. New York: Monthly Review Press. McGee, RJ and RL Warms (1996) Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History. London: Mayfield Publishing Company. Ritzer, G. (2008). Modern Sociological Theory. NY: McGraw-Hill.

PRINCIPAL CONCEPTS Feminist anthropology focused on analysis and development of theory to explain the subordination of women, which seemed to be universal and cross-cultural. In the late 1970's many feminist anthropologists were beginning to question the concept of universal female subordination and the usefulness of models based on dichotomies. CONTRIBUTIONS The most obvious contribution of feminist anthropology has been the increased awareness of women within anthropology, both in terms of ethnographic accounts and theory. CRITICISMS white, middle class female anthropologists were focusing too intensely on issues of gender the subfield was ignoring social inequalities arising from issues such as racism and the unequal distribution of wealth The field has attempted to address this issue by focusing more broadly on the issue of gender and moving away from the "Anthropology of Women

Prepared by: Alessandrea Calpito Rafael Ray Refomado

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