Feminist Theory

Feminist theory is a diverse body of thought based for the most part on one or more traditional or contemporary political, social, and cultural theories such as liberalism, socialism, and postmodernism. The difference between feminist theory and nonfeminist theory is that the former self-consciously reflects on the experience of women and deliberately uses the lens of gender as its preferred critical perspective. Sometimes nonfeminist theorists fault feminist theorists for not viewing reality through the single lens of the quintessential impartial and objective human being but instead through the multiple lenses of partial and subjective existing women. But feminist theorists are not flummoxed by this harsh critique. They respond that no one can simply be human. Among other feminist theorists, Susan Bordo emphasizes that reality is gendered. We cannot entirely escape the categories male/female, man/woman, and masculine/feminine, not even if we are transgendered, transsexual, multiply gendered, multiply sexed, or trying to be nongendered/nonsexed.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, liberal, radical, and Marxist-socialist feminisms were predominant, but they were complemented by several other modalities of feminist thought including psychoanalytic and gender feminism. By the 1980s and 1990s, these types of feminist thinking had been joined by multicultural, global, and postmodern feminism, all of which have been further supplemented by new millennial thirdwave feminist thinking. Whatever their disagreements with each other may be, most feminist thinkers agree that to be classified as feminist, a theory must proceed on the assumption that traditional, largely patriarchal, modes of thinking, which support women's subordination to men, have to be replaced by modes of thinking that equally value both women's and men's intellectual, moral, and social contributions to the private, professional, and public domains.