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Week Two: Contemporary Feminist Debate - Lecture

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http://www.citationmachine.net/mla/cite-a-website/manual

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Origin of feminism has its roots in the French feminist suffragette movement.
Second wave was focused on sexual difference theory, labour rights and scholarship around reproductive rights.

Women's studies in the 70's focused on the social identity of woman - on anglo-american perspective.

Why are we still clinging to the category of woman - 80's and 90's feminist scholarship.
-challenging the stability of the category of gender, understood through the social identity "woman"
- called out the inseparbility of the category of gender from markers such as race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation constituted a challenge to the coherence of a discipline premised on the social identity "woman"

Wittig - the myth of a woman produced by societal gender norms, institutions (health, legal, educational)

Irigary - women acts out the role that is imposed on her.

Butler - identifying gender as a more performative identity - distinct from sex. Gender is constantly changing, being adapted according to social norms. "Gender is a free-floating artifice". Asks, maybe we need to think of a new sort of feminist politics distinct from gender and sex. We need to acknowledge the performativity of our attachment of gender to sex.

Do we dispose of the category woman in Women's studies?

The category woman should be distinct from women. Women is "the class within which we fight" for our liberation - Wittig.

Susan Bordo - argues against the rejection of general categories, in order to retain a feminist politics and a feminist consciousness.

"Women" is a binaristic term that refers to a western way of ascribing gender norms.

The term, however, is important for women's studies to retain a place in the academy.

Understanding gender has to be understood alongside race as well.

The oppressions of white women are different from WOC.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty - Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses - criticises Western feminism for simply adding third world difference to the women's studies.
Woman vs. third world woman.

Intersectionality in feminist scholarship has become whitened: focussing on class and sexuality rather than race.

Sara Ahmed: sweaty concepts are created off the back of oppressed, abused experiences, from an exhausted body.
Citations are a choice to say that you respect this writer, who you hold in high esteem, who do we support, what kind of ideas do we identify with. It is a process of acknowledging texts in order to benefit from them.

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