Feminist Theories

Feminist theories are multiple, hybrid, complex, and changing. There is no one homogeneous, unified feminism or feminist theory. And although it is impossible to illuminate all aspects and variations of feminist theories in this entry, even when narrowed to the field of curriculum studies, it is possible to say that feminist theories are conflicting as well as intertwined, in response to one another as well as to particular social and cultural contexts and historical moments. They are part of, and yet critique from diverse theoretical orientations, the broader feminist political movement that seeks to rectify sexist discrimination and inequalities. Further, in their many variants, they do center and simultaneously problematize conceptions of the categories woman and gender identity, for example, and the various situations, embodiments, contexts, and institutions that frame diverse lived realities.

Together, feminist theories represent wildly divergent theoretical orientations, methodological, and analytic approaches and often incompatible approaches to the category gender and the social, psychological, and historical systems within which sexual identity becomes meaningful. Feminist theories often self-identify as representative of certain ideological positions, theoretical orientations, and disciplinary boundaries. And yet, given contemporary and rapidly changing contexts of globalization, theories simultaneously are destabilized through intertextuality, interdisciplinarity, and efforts to understand implications of race, ethnicity, nationality, class, sexuality, colonialism, and imperialism, for example, as intertwined with gender and as fluid and changing categories and forces that organize social and symbolic systems.

One typical way of attempting to grasp as well as to consider the now vast research and literature as well as widely varying theoretical orientations of feminist curriculum scholars, teachers, and activists is to align various work within the chronological groupings neatly identified as first, second, and third wave feminisms. Many other ways of identifying and grouping feminist theories are possible, of course, and even nomenclature attached to historically organized distinctions varies. Further, no matter how one attempts to organize and group prominent feminist theories, within each attempt are countless examples of widely differing epistemological and ontological assumptions and framings.

Within curriculum studies, however, it is prudent to adopt this chronological schema, given that feminist theories and studies that first appeared in the U.S. field during the 1970s are most congruent with characteristics assigned to second wave feminist theories and practices. Into the 21st century, a wide variety of feminist theories have proliferated in curriculum studies worldwide and yet may still be identified as loosely aligned with overall assumptions and characteristics of major feminist theories generated within the second and third waves, especially.