Beasley Chapter 1
Beasley Chapter 1
Beasley Chapter 1
CHAPTER 1
Discuss the term gender in order to place Feminism as a subfield within overall
gender/sexuality field.
What this debate signals is an ongoing discussion central to the entire field of
gender/sexuality theory regarding the question of whether focus on particular identity
groups is politically helpful or harmful. Discussion about the status of identity politics
arises in Feminist, Sexuality and Masculinity Studies. Identity politics highlight in
reference to gender/sexuality field along a Modernist-Postmodern continuum.
DEBATE 2.Gender has been used to indicate that nature (bodies) do not tell you much about human social
organisation of sexed identities and practices. A male body is not necessarily result in social
masculinity, in a personal identity deemed masculine. Gender in this setting was seen as a
reference to social construction. Gender was a term that enable a questioning of biologistic
presumptions.
Other thinkers asserted that setting up gender against (bodily) sex = distinction between
social/cultural and biological/natural.
Some writers employing psychoanalytic frameworks and/or attending to bodily materiality, prefer
to use sex, sexuality or sexual difference as the coverall term rather than gender.
Gender did not become widespread in critical thinking on the topic until the 1970s.
DEBATE 3.Writers who justify the usage or the term gender as against sex or sexuality do so
indicating that the differentiation of men and women is not nature. By contrast, those who
dispute its usage reject the biological-social division.
Most writers in Feminist and Masculinity Studies view gender as intertwined with sexuality.
Many go so far as to presume that gender is the foundation of sexual identities and practices.
Gayle Rubin claims that sexuality should be treated separately from gender and sexual theorist
to assert that sexuality is prior to gender.
Feminist and Masculinity Studies tend to line up together and focus on the significance of
gender while Sexuality Studies focus upon the organisation of desire. Debates:
- Whether we should focus on particular groups/identities (woman rather than
gender)
- The relationship between the social and biological/natural/bodily.
- The connection between gender and sexuality.
The three of the subfields of gender/sexuality theory are Feminist, Masculinity and Sexuality
Studies.
INTRODUCING FEMINISM:
Feminism is the first of the three subfields of gender/sexuality.
Beasley consider that gender/sexuality in terms of five main theoretical directions, which are
distinguished in relation to certain frames of reference and debates. She uses ModernismPostmodernism continuum of views on a range of debates as a means to highlight main
directions. Views on debates tend to be connected to weaker or stronger versions of Modernism
and Postmodernism and to positions on the Modernist-Postmodernist continuu.
similar concerns in relation to Feminism. The subfields show a concern with social change that
resists the existing hierarchy of sex and power.
POSTMODERNISM
Weak -------------------------- Strong
1.- HUMAN
2.- (SINGULAR) DIFFERENCE
3.- (MULTIPLE) DIFFERENCES
4.- RELATIONAL
POWER
5.- FLUIDITY/INSTABILITY
POSTMODFERNISM
1. EMANCIPATORY
(Liberal, Marxist/Socialist
And Radical Feminism)
2.- (SINGULAR) GENDER DIFFERENCES
(Radical, Socialist and Psychoanalytic feminisms)
3.- SOCIAL
CONSTRUCCIONIST
(Socialist feminisms)
4.- (MULTIPLE) DIFFERENCES
(race/ethnicity/imperialism feminisms
5.- POSTMODERN
What I have delineated as Postmodernism might be labelled Postructuralism.
Liberal feminism pointed out that Liberal, supposedly universal standards of humanity, equality
and reason were not in fact universal because women were denied full social participation,
public life and education.
Equality and liberty refer to human beings capable of reason, those who are deemed outside
reason are not quite human and not capable of receiving these rights and freedoms. They are
controlled and cannot be free within the private realm of the family and/or public legal terms.
Liberal feminism has pointed out that full social participation and public life has been denied to
women. Liberal feminism asserts that the universalist claims of the Enlightenment did not
extend to women.
Naomi Wolf locates her power feminism as an extension of the Liberal feminism of 19 th century
thinkers like Mary Wollstonecraft. In common with Wollstonecraft and most Liberal feminists,
she is little concerned with class or money or race, and appears primarily focused on the
problems of women like herself. She encourages women to form power groups to pool their
resources in the way men do. Like all Liberal feminists, she seeks to incorporate women and
Feminism into capitalism. Wolf even seeks to develop a brand logo for Feminism to sell it all the
better. The enthusiastic self-help and inspirational tone of Wolf work, combined with its
readability, highly effective in showing women in an increasingly conservative political climate
what Feminism might mean to them individually. Wolf is a kind of celebrity feminist, in an age of
celebrity worship.
CONCLUSION:
Liberal feminism is an assimilationist and reformist approach. It aims to fir women into existing
society and to remove obstacles to their public advancement. Its willingness to accommodate
and celebrate the virtues of mainstream capitalist democracies makes it a form of Feminism that
is possibly the only popularist platform for feminist thinking today.