Feminist Sex Wars: What Should Women Want?
What have we learned about women so far?
Characterising Feminist Thought
Difference; dominance & identity
Feminism & criminology
Feminist sex wars: Taking sides
Sexology, pornography, prostitution, sadomasochism
What have we learned about girls and women so far
¡ Early Sexology
They are more primitive & less moral than men
They are virtuous by nature yet easily corrupted
They are at the mercy of their sexuality (menstruation, reproduction)
¡ Freud & Psychoanalysis
They are prone to hysteria (ungovernable emotional excess, often
accompanied by sexual frustration & erotic fantasies)
They suffer from penis envy, fear castration, & experience difficulty in
achieving definitive femininity
They fantasise about being seduced by their fathers (& sometimes their
mothers)
Characterising Feminist Thought
- Daly and Chesney-Lind (1988) The following five features of feminist though
distinguish it from other theories
o Gender is not a natural fact but a social and cultural product
o Gender and gender relations order social life and institutions in fundamental
ways
o Gender relations are ordered on the basis of men’s superiority and socio-
economic dominance over women
o Systems of knowledge reflect men’s views of the world; the production of
knowledge is gendered
o Women should be the centre of social inquiry, not peripheral appendages to
men
The Sex/gender Distinction
- Sex (male/female)
o BIOLOGY: Chromosomes, hormonal profiles, internal and external organs
- Gender (Masculine/Feminine)
o CULTURE: The characteristics that a society or culture delineate as masculine
or feminine
Characterising Feminist Thought
Early Feminism: Women as Other
“One is not born a woman, but becomes one…..no biological, psychological or economic
fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a
, whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male & eunuch, which is
described as feminine.”
- Simone De Beauvoir The Second Sex (1949): Society is organised on the basis that
woman is man’s Other
- Man occupies the role of the subject (or ‘I’) while woman is characterised as the
object (or lack)
Characterising Feminist Thought
Marxist Feminism
Productive Labour – Labour results in goods and services, compensated by a wage
Reproductive Labour – Domestic Labour or childrearing, uncompensated
Male control of public and private spheres
Characterising Feminist thought
Radical Feminism: Female Sexuality as Subordination
- Mackinnion’s work is an example of radical feminist thought (sometimes called
‘dominance’ feminism)
- Sexuality at the root of women’s subordination to men
- This becomes conditioned not only by the law but by the language: ‘man fucks
woman; ‘subject verb object’
”Perhaps the wrong of rape has proven so difficult to articulate because the unquestionable
starting point has been that rape is definable as distinct from intercourse, when for women
it is difficult to distinguish them under conditions of male dominance.” (1983: 647)
Characterising Feminist Thought
Identity: Carol Smart
- Carol Smart adapts Foucault to argue women are discursively produced (by law and
medicine)
- Feminists should avoid focussing attention on a law reform
- This reinforces an image of law as a free-floating purveyor of ‘truth’ detached from
the social order
Characterising Feminist Thought
Feminism and Intersectionality
“Contemporary feminist criminologists bear the responsibility of advancing an inclusive
feminism, one that simultaneously attends to issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, age,
nationality, religion, physical ability, & other locations of inequality as they relate to crime &
deviance.” (Burgess-Proctor, 2006: 28)
- Kimbele Crenshaw: Critical of ‘universal’ class of womanhood constructed by most
(white!) radical feminists @ patriarchal dynamics of anti-racist movements
- Explores raced and gendered dimensions of violence against women of colour; their
experiences of violence are ignored, overlooked, misrepresented and silenced.
