Feminist theory

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Feminist theory
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Outline

• What is feminism?
• Liberal feminism
• Radical feminism
• Poststructuralist and postcolonial critic

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Question
           Google Se översatta engelska resultat för behövs män i politiken? (need for women in politics?)

• Do we need men in politics?

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Kvinnorna styr Sverige i sommar

• Sverige är troligen världens enda matriarkat.
  Det blev ett lättsamt möte, sa justitieminister
  Beatrice Ask.
• AB 2010-07-16

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What is feminism?

• Politics in theory and practice have formed and
  reproduced the subordination of women.
• Gender is a historical, social and political
  category.
• Seeks to politicize the practices and technology
  of power in relations to the body, reproductive
  labour and sexuality.

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Dividing Questions

• Social construction?
• Subordination of women? Exercise of power?
• What sorts of political methods and ideas of
  freedom?

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Liberal feminism

• Wollstonecraft, JS Mill, Wendt/Åse, Moller Okin
• Liberal feminism liberals who are critical of
  the exclusion of women from the liberal project
  and the modern democracy.

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Unfinished democracy

• Autonomy and individual freedom for women!
• The rights for everyone to be regarded as an
  entity of ones own.
• No female essence, apart from social norms -
  biological sex differences are irrelevant
• The personal is political
• Social and political reforms
• Gender neutrality
• Sovereign women - Sapere Aude

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Binary oppositions

• Individual
• Culture
• Independent
• Reason
• Order
• Mind

• Woman
• Nature
• Dependent
• Emotions
• Chaos
• Body

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• "We have been asked by many people to accept
  that women are making progress, because one sees
  our presence in these places where we weren't
  before. And those of us who are berated for being
  radicals have been saying 'That is not the way
  we measure progress. We count the number of
  rapes. We count the women who are being battered.
  We keep track of the children who are being raped
  by their fathers. We count the dead. And when
  those numbers start to change in a way that is
  meaningful, we will then talk to you about
  whether or not we can measure progress.'
• Andrea Dworkin 1997

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Radical feminism

• MacKinnon, Rich, Pateman, Wendt Höjer Åse.

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Sexuality and Power

• Sexual violence as the core of Patriarchy
• Universal male dominance
• Women oppressed as women
• Consciousness raising
• The state - a male apparatus
• Sovereign women

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Gender

• Gender socialization is the process through which
  women come to identify themselves as sexual
  beings, as beings that exist for men. It is that
  process through which women internalize (make
  their own) a male image of their sexuality as
  their identity as women. It is not just an
  illusion. MacKinnon 1996
• Ideology on gender differences and compulsory
  heterosexuality.

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Poststructuralist och Postcolonial feminism

• Butler, Spivak, Mohanty

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Gender etc.

• Gender/Sex as fiction regulated by compulsory
  heterosexuality
• Also constituted by class, etnicity, race och
  sexuality.
• A/ B, but also A/ -A

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Feminism without essence

• The idea of women in modern feminism excludes
  lesbians, racialised and workingclass women from
  womens movement
• The idea of universal patriarchy exploits the
  Other Woman and reinforce capitalism and
  imperialism.

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Strategic essentialism

• One cannot decide in advance what is
  revolutionary or liberating. Each situation must
  be carefully considered in terms of the present
  operating power relations and techniques. We can
  not stop using categories, therefore we must
  constantly criticise them and use them
  strategically.