Feminist Theory 101 GRADED A+
What are the basic questions of feminism? What is explored within each one? -✔✔✔1. And what
about the women?/Where are women are the women in any situated being investigated?/How do they
experience the situation?
Answer: Women are present in most social situations (Academic, legislative, public, social actors), when
they are not it is due to deliberate action to exclude them. Women's role are present but are different,
less privileged, and subordinate to roles of men. Invisibility=Inequality
2. Why is women's situation as it is?
3. What about the differences between women?
(Currently most significant)
Answer: Invisibility, inequality, and role differences in relation to men that characterize women's lives
are impacted by their social locations (race, class, age, physical ability, affectional preference, marital
status, religion, ethnicity, global location)
4. How can we change and improve the social world to make it a more just place for all people?
Social transformation in the interest of justice
5. How and why does gender inequality persist in the modern world?
6. What is really to be understood by the category "gender"?
Sources include neoliberalism and postmodernism. Neocolonialism, capitalism.
Gender Difference Theory -✔✔✔-Women's location in and experience of most situations is different
from that of men in the situation
-must confront "essentialism argument that fundamental differences between man and woman are
immutable traceable to 1. Biology, 2. existential or phenomenological need of human beings to produce
an 'other' as part of the act of self determination, 3. different cultures women and men create, 4. Social
institutional needs for men and women to fill different roles (family), 5. production of gender
differences out of the process of interaction itself
-difference as a process that masculine culture both creates and uses to constitute itself, while pushing
women's experience and ways of knowing themselves to the very margins of conceptual framing. In its
most intense form, this process creates a construct of the woman as "the Other," an objectified being
who is assigned traits that represent the opposite of the agentic, subject male.
, -Cultural Feminism
more focused on exploring and celebrating the social value of women's distinctive ways of being
society needed such women's virtues as cooperation, caring, pacifism, and nonviolence in the
settlement of conflicts
Carol Gilligan, care work-associates with women's moral reasoning and which focuses on achieving
outcomes where all parties feel that their needs are noticed and responded to, and the "ethic of
justice," which Gilligan associates with men's moral reasoning and which focuses on protecting the
legitimate rights of all parties
-two explanations of gender- institutional Structural functionalism formally mapped the major social
institutions in terms of their relations with each other, their contributions to or "functions" for societal
"equilibrium" or stability, and their internal organization or systems of social status-roles, the designated
positions and associated beha
Interactionist -✔✔✔"doing gender"/ accomplishment
ethnomethodology posits that institutions, culture, and stratificational systems are maintained by the
ongoing activities of individuals in interaction
-principle of accountability: People do not just act in any way they choose; people in interactions hold
other people "accountable" for behaving in ways that are expected or useful or understandable.
-'doing difference'
-major criticisms include not clear where standards for accountability come from, uncritically focuses on
interaction al reproductions of gender inequality failing to pursue "undoing" patterns
"Doing Gender" -✔✔✔Gender, which is broadly understood as a social construction for classifying
people and behaviors in terms of "man" and "woman," "masculine" and "feminine," operates in society
as an individual identity, a patterning of interactional processes, and a macrosocial structure
encompassing both power and stratification.
-concept has become an almost unavoidable variable in research studies—a variable whose presence
implies a normative commitment to some standard of gender equality or the possibility that findings of
inequality may be explained by practices of gender discrimination.
Gender Inequality Theory -✔✔✔-Women's location in most situations is not only different form but
also less privileged than or unequal to that of men
What are the basic questions of feminism? What is explored within each one? -✔✔✔1. And what
about the women?/Where are women are the women in any situated being investigated?/How do they
experience the situation?
Answer: Women are present in most social situations (Academic, legislative, public, social actors), when
they are not it is due to deliberate action to exclude them. Women's role are present but are different,
less privileged, and subordinate to roles of men. Invisibility=Inequality
2. Why is women's situation as it is?
3. What about the differences between women?
(Currently most significant)
Answer: Invisibility, inequality, and role differences in relation to men that characterize women's lives
are impacted by their social locations (race, class, age, physical ability, affectional preference, marital
status, religion, ethnicity, global location)
4. How can we change and improve the social world to make it a more just place for all people?
Social transformation in the interest of justice
5. How and why does gender inequality persist in the modern world?
6. What is really to be understood by the category "gender"?
Sources include neoliberalism and postmodernism. Neocolonialism, capitalism.
Gender Difference Theory -✔✔✔-Women's location in and experience of most situations is different
from that of men in the situation
-must confront "essentialism argument that fundamental differences between man and woman are
immutable traceable to 1. Biology, 2. existential or phenomenological need of human beings to produce
an 'other' as part of the act of self determination, 3. different cultures women and men create, 4. Social
institutional needs for men and women to fill different roles (family), 5. production of gender
differences out of the process of interaction itself
-difference as a process that masculine culture both creates and uses to constitute itself, while pushing
women's experience and ways of knowing themselves to the very margins of conceptual framing. In its
most intense form, this process creates a construct of the woman as "the Other," an objectified being
who is assigned traits that represent the opposite of the agentic, subject male.
, -Cultural Feminism
more focused on exploring and celebrating the social value of women's distinctive ways of being
society needed such women's virtues as cooperation, caring, pacifism, and nonviolence in the
settlement of conflicts
Carol Gilligan, care work-associates with women's moral reasoning and which focuses on achieving
outcomes where all parties feel that their needs are noticed and responded to, and the "ethic of
justice," which Gilligan associates with men's moral reasoning and which focuses on protecting the
legitimate rights of all parties
-two explanations of gender- institutional Structural functionalism formally mapped the major social
institutions in terms of their relations with each other, their contributions to or "functions" for societal
"equilibrium" or stability, and their internal organization or systems of social status-roles, the designated
positions and associated beha
Interactionist -✔✔✔"doing gender"/ accomplishment
ethnomethodology posits that institutions, culture, and stratificational systems are maintained by the
ongoing activities of individuals in interaction
-principle of accountability: People do not just act in any way they choose; people in interactions hold
other people "accountable" for behaving in ways that are expected or useful or understandable.
-'doing difference'
-major criticisms include not clear where standards for accountability come from, uncritically focuses on
interaction al reproductions of gender inequality failing to pursue "undoing" patterns
"Doing Gender" -✔✔✔Gender, which is broadly understood as a social construction for classifying
people and behaviors in terms of "man" and "woman," "masculine" and "feminine," operates in society
as an individual identity, a patterning of interactional processes, and a macrosocial structure
encompassing both power and stratification.
-concept has become an almost unavoidable variable in research studies—a variable whose presence
implies a normative commitment to some standard of gender equality or the possibility that findings of
inequality may be explained by practices of gender discrimination.
Gender Inequality Theory -✔✔✔-Women's location in most situations is not only different form but
also less privileged than or unequal to that of men
