altariel | Typology of feminism

Gerald goes on about this typology a lot (mostly in terms of its lack of fit with her experience of the women's movement in the UK and Australia in the 70s) - I'll ask her about it tonight.

Thanks

gair (and Gerald in advance). It's one of those things you look at and go, "Well, yes, but..." I can see its usefulness in conveying some broad brush information, but I'd like to communicate a bit of nuance too!

This was the standard classification we used back in the late seventies/early eighties. For exampel I attende da lecture by Janet radcliffe-Richards which was based on this classification (she identified herself as liberal-f)

Liberal = 'human nature is a tabula rasa, let women be free to choose what they want', socialist = 'human nature is dependent on social context, let us offer support to women in various areas', radical = 'women and men are innately different, and the only route for women is separation from male-dominated society'.

Incidentally it amuses me that radical feminism is the one chosen by people who wish to bad-mouth feminism (Andrea Dworkin, 'all men are rapists' etc.) while simulataneously having been adopted as mainstream political belief - it is now widely held that men and women are innately different and anti-feminist say men are innately violent and misogynist. very complex area of course.

worst spelling ever, sorry

Thanks for this: it's a classification I've come across again and again over the years, and now I'm about to pass it on, I began to wonder where it had first come from. It sounds like it has at least roots in the 70s.

Interesting...we tend to often classify as first, second, third, which I first saw in Kristeva's Women's Time...I wonder how well the two align (though while the liberal lines up with first, I think socialist and radical might both be second with third being all about constructed gender, gender trouble, transgender theory etc)

[ok, weird icon, but it's the only kristeva i have :-)]

Thanks! I know the first wave etc. one too. This does work quite well in that I'll trying to map relationships between stances to particular bits of workplace legislation, etc.

AWESOME icon!

vilakins made it!

Not to mention: where does feministic theology come into the game?

Sorry, I live with two male theologians, both of whom find 'feminist theology' an insult to the discipline in terms of scholarship, for various reasons, not all of them sheer reactionary fervor. I don't touch the stuff with a ten foot pole, and never will, but so far as I'm concerned, feminist theology "comes in" only after you've gone through some grounding in philosophy, or it becomes a shallow, whiney, separatist endeavor.

But I know Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote a women's Bible, which is the earliest piece of explicitly feminist 'theology' that I know of. But then, I know very little.

Dwim

Well, I've read my fair share of feminist theology, including liturgical works, and while there was a lot of stuff that pushed my WTF-meter off scale, I found just as much stuff that helped me to turn my back on the institution Church only, not on God generally.

That was my last, best effort to occupy myself with theology in any form. Since then, I go my own path, and it works for me just fine.

I've studied philosopy from two diagonally opposite POVs, and in the end, found most of it makebelief, I'm sorry. Whatever philosophers try to sell us, IMO, is their personal vision of the universe, and it usually doesn't happen to match mine, so I don't see why I should follow theirs. It's like trying to walk a marathon in shoes that don't fit.

But I'm strange in my ways, so don't listen to me.

Whether or not philosophy is purely personal (hello, Nietzsche) is itself a question for philosophical inquiry. *shrug* And if philosophy is personal, and if God's relationship to me is as well, like the size of my shoes and the distance I have to cover, then it's in perfectly good company to my way of thinking. I just worry that the tendency, once this has been broached, is to then curtail any serious discussion in favor of an increasingly privatized spirituality, whether that manifests in a philosophical or a theological mode.

But in any case, the gender war seems to be especially virulent in our theology department. It's really polarized the graduate student body, on top of an already divided program, where it seems that within the three tracks, there are extremely few friends across the subdisciplinary lines. One gets suggestions from second hand reports that often, professors do a poor job presenting feminist theology and a wretched job of dealing with the philosophy informing theology, which, when added to all that, just makes for a collegial and educational disaster.

It's actually kind of horrifically fascinating to watch from a distance, but at the same time, highly depressing, to say nothing of the resulting alienation of all parties that certainly goes counter to the more communal modes of thinking and theorizing supposedly promoted by feminists of a non-separatist strand.

Dwim

Oh, now you've found the perfect example for a philosopher who'd tried to explain himself a mystery that cannot be explained -and in the end, he had no other way out then declare God to be dead. Of course, the end result shows that it's Nietzsche who's been dead for what? Two hundred years by now? While God is still alive and kicking, thank you very much, but that's another matter entirely. *g*

Philosophy and theology are a bit like linguistics. They're all disciplines that try to understand their main topic by taking it apart with surgical precision. Unfortunately, when they're done, all they have is a mutilated carcass.

Either that, or I'm way too stupid to understand the awesomeness of the whole thing. But that's okay. The world needs us, simpler minds, too.

Ah yes, God is dead-Nietzsche, Nietzsche is dead-God. At least he did not fail his cardinal test: thou shalt not lack chutzpah! ;-)

To the degree that he shed light on the (needed) death of a middle-class idol, more power to him. If he did so by claiming too much, it's not the first time and at least nobody died from his overreaching. And while I understand your objection to subjecting mystery to dissection, honestly, I get tired of "It's a mystery!" stopping analysis. We can do analysis and still have mystery; they are not exclusive when the mystery is supposed to be God, imo, or it's not God we're talking about anyway. In which case, I think there's probably some wisdom to saying "Let's kill the idol!"

My two cents as an agnostic.

Dwim

I think it all depends on the question whether or not you have an analytical mind. Me, I don't and all that dissecting and analyzing always seemed fairly forced to me. I even used to laugh myself silly on literature lessons where we were supposed to analyze poems - I never managed to see the same things in them that the poet supposedly meant.

So, I don't have any problems with other people cut everything into tiny pieces to see how they work. It just never works for me. *shrug*

I think we shouldn't clutter

altariel1's journal with this any longer. But if you want to discuss it further, you know where you find me. :)

I don't know who made the distinctions, but I've seen a fourth category added: Marxist feminism, as distinct from socialist feminism. I'm thinking of Alison Jagger here, since she was my introduction to the 'strands' of feminist thinking. I'll see if one of my friends knows, since her specialty is feminist philosophy.

Dwim

Ah, now Alison Jagger is a name I'd had mentioned in this context - do you have a particular text in mind?

It's one of those introductory works that tries to present basic trends... God, I can't recall the name, and she's written so much!

I'll have to check when I go home and see if I can find it on my bookshelf. Will let you know...

Dwim

Found it: Feminist Politics and Human Nature. She goes through four types of feminism: liberal, traditional Marxist, radical, and socialist.

That's from 1983, and in the introduction, Jagger claims that her taxonomy derives from the basic presuppositions about human nature that various feminist theorists use in order to identify the nature of the oppression women suffer, and so also what would count as liberation. She notes that the language of "oppression/liberation" itself is relatively recent, coming out of the sixties when the language of "equality" and "rights" was eclipsed by other vocabulary deriving from prominent social movements.

It's not clear whether she takes herself to be making the first formal attempt to give a classificatory survey of various feminist stances or not. If the terms were available in the 70s, then she may be drawing on them, but trying also to link them up in a more careful fashion than perhaps the practitioners of self-styled Marxist, radical, socialist, and liberal feminists did, to the philosophical presuppositions of whatever philosophical position the theorist has claimed for herself or himself.

Anyhow, so for Alison Jagger. Word from my friend who specializes in this area is that the labels were always highly contested, especially (apparently) the label 'liberal' (which seems somehow logical to me--if liberal is associated with the classic liberal conception of human nature, then its vocabulary was for a time the only vocabulary in use, so it would have moved from being the 'catholic' feminist position to something sort of left behind according to other feminists and in need of some new, special label to identify it where previously it would have needed none other than just 'feminism'). She says she'll make a quick check of her sources to see if she can find anything more specific about the origin of the terms.

Dwim

This is all tremendously useful, thank you very much - and thank you also to your friend for her contributions. The 'liberal' label makes sense to me too, not least because of Mill (I have On Liberty and The Subjection of Women in the same volume!). I feel a lot better about using it as a teaching tool if I can point people to a source and say, "You may like to use this taxonomy, but it's not the only one, and you may decide you like something else better."

Typology of feminism

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