Feminism

Feminism is both a theoretical perspective and a social movement. As a theoretical perspective, feminism provides an explanation of social behavior and social phenomena, particularly those having to do with gender. As a social movement, feminism seeks to bring about social change, specifically gender equity.

Feminism as a social theory is not a single, unified perspective. Rather, there are multiple feminisms (e.g., liberal feminism, socialist feminism, standpoint feminism). However, there are several principles common to all feminist perspectives. One principle is that gender is socially created rather than innately determined. This is not to deny the fact that humans are biological beings and that our biological makeup influences who we are as women and men. However, from a feminist perspective, there is a complex interaction between biology and culture, and biological traits may be modified by environmental or social conditions. Feminism defines gender as a set of social expectations that is reproduced and transmitted through a process of social learning.

A second feminist principle is that gender is a central organizing factor in the social world. Gender is embedded in all social interactions and processes of everyday life as well as all social institutions. At the institutional level, gender is shaped by a society's economic and political structure. In every society, a specific set of gender norms is dominant, even though these norms may vary from society to society—further evidence that gender is socially constructed. According to the feminist perspective, no gender is inherently better or superior to any other. However, the culture of a society may imbue one gender with a higher value than another gender. In the United States and most Western societies, for example, masculinity (i.e., behaviors and traits associated with being male) is valued more highly than femininity (i.e., behaviors and traits associated with being female). Men, therefore, are accorded greater access to resources and rewards in these societies, simply because they are (masculine) men. Thus differential valuing produces gender inequality.

A common misconception about feminism is that it focuses only on women or “women's issues.” It is the case that feminism's primary goal, as a theoretical perspective, has been to study and explain the position of women in society, largely because women and the behaviors and traits associated with them have historically been devalued or ignored. Nevertheless, feminism recognizes that men have gender, too, and that although virtually all men benefit in some way from gender privilege, some groups of men are disadvan-taged by other social factors. A third principle of feminism, therefore, is that gender inequality does not have the same consequences for all women and men. The feminist perspective examines how gender inequality intersects with other types of inequality—racism, social class inequality, heterosexism, ageism, and inequalities based on physical and intellectual abilities—to affect different groups of women and men differently. For instance, a man who behaves effeminately is viewed as deviant and is punished for this deviation in various ways, which include social ostracism; discrimination in employment, housing, and other areas; and sometimes even violence. Similarly, poor men of color have less access to societal resources and rewards than white middle-class women do, because the negative effects of racism and social class inequality in their lives outweigh the advantages of gender privilege.

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