The word ‘heterosexism’ derives directly from the feminist creation of the term ‘sexism’ during the late 1960s. The first usage of the term heterosexism is given as 1979 by the Oxford English Dictionary and it is defined as ‘prejudice and… Read More ›
The gender order is a patterned system of ideological and material practices, performed by individuals in a society, through which power relations between women and men are made, and remade, as meaningful. It is through the gender order of a… Read More ›
Third wave feminism has numerous definitions, but perhaps is best described in the most general terms as the feminism of a younger generation of women who acknowledge the legacy of second wave feminism, but also identify what they see as… Read More ›
Second wave feminism is a term used to describe a new period of feminist collective political activism and militancy which emerged in the late 1960s. The concept of ‘waves’ of feminism was itself only applied in the late 1960s and… Read More ›
The historical development of feminism (especially in Britain and the USA) is commonly divided into several key periods, some characterised by a relative absence of feminist thought and mobilisation, and others by the sustained growth both of feminist criticism and… Read More ›
The utopian vision of ‘sisterhood’ – the collecting together of all women under the same political banner – was in part responsible for the burgeoning interest in feminism and the emergent Women’s Liberation Movement. It was inevitably going to come… Read More ›
It must first be stated that there is no agreement about how postfeminism can be defined and consequently definitions essentially contradict each other in what they say about the term. At its most straightforward, the prefix ‘post’ in this context… Read More ›
Ecofeminism has become an increasingly important field in both contemporary feminist and environmental studies. Although, as Diamond and Orenstein note, ecofeminism is really ‘a new term for an ancient wisdom’ (Mies and Shiva 1993: 13), it first came to prominence… Read More ›
In the introduction to their book Genders, David Glover and Cora Kaplan make the observation that: ‘gender is a much contested concept, as slippery as it is indispensable, but a site of unease rather than agreement’ (Glover and Kaplan, 2000, ix)…. Read More ›
Chaos theory and complexity theory challenge some of our most deeply held beliefs about the nature of reality. The former claims that natural systems (for example, the weather) are controlled by mysterious forces, called ‘strange attractors‘, such that they are… Read More ›
Although Sigmund Freud himself inaugurated this field of study, he subsequently abandoned it. Early in his career, he assumed that a history of sexual seduction in childhood was responsible for the neurotic symptoms he observed in his patients. Gradually, however,… Read More ›
Theoretical approaches to the cinematic representation of lesbianism represent a particularly complex and fruitful area of feminist film study, as well as one filled with substantial debate. Issues arise, for instance, concerning the exact definition of a lesbian film as… Read More ›
In her works like Speculum of the Other Woman (translated 1985) and This Sex Which is Not One (1987), Luce Irigaray has argued that the woman has been constructed as the specular Other of man in all Western discourses. Combining Psychoanalysis,… Read More ›
A philosopher by profession and training Michele Le Doeuff‘s The Philosophical Imaginary (1989) argued that philosophy has a specific imaginary level intrinsic to itself. This imaginary level sets the conditions of what can be constructed as rationality within it. For Le… Read More ›
Eli Zaretsky‘s Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life (1976), along with the work of Juliet Mitchell in Woman’s Estate (1974) and the writings of Zillah Eisenstein, is an important text in the socialist-feminist tradition. A brief sketch of the central concerns… Read More ›
Ellen Moers‘ Literary Women (1976) was, along with Gilbert and Gubar’s , one of the early attempts to uncover the female literary tradition. Reading a range of authors like George Eliot, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Moers… Read More ›
Writing in the sixties and seventies, Juliet Mitchell’s work in Woman’s Estate (1971), Mitchell argued that woman’s oppression was linked to FOUR essential social structures: production, reroduction, sexuality and socialization. Mitchell sought to combine a critique of socialist thought and… Read More ›
Nancy Chodorow is studied under both Psychoanalysis and Feminism. In two important works The Reproduction of Mothering (1978) and Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (1989), Chodorow combines the object relations theories of Melanie Klein with contemporary gender concerns. (1) Chodorow argues… Read More ›
Contemporary lesbian feminism and action owes greatly to the thoughts of Adrienne Rich who argued that “compulsory heterosexuality” ensured a woman’s continuous subjugation by continually privileging man’s needs. She points out that such an ideology forces the girl/daughter to turn… Read More ›
Claiming that “Identity is performatively constituted”, Judith Butler in her path breaking Gender Trouble (1990) formulated a postmodernist notion of gender, in line with the deconstructive ethos and contradictory to the traditional notion’, that genders are fixed categories. Butler defined… Read More ›
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