Feminist Theory 101 GRADED A+

What are the basic questions of feminism? What is explored within each one? -1. And what about the women?/Where are women are the women in any situated being investigated?/How do they experience the situation? Answer: Women are present in most social situations (Academic, legislative, public, social actors), when they are not it is due to deliberate action to exclude them. Women's role are present but are different, less privileged, and subordinate to roles of men. Invisibility=Inequality 2. Why is women's situation as it is? 3. What about the differences between women? (Currently most significant) Answer: Invisibility, inequality, and role differences in relation to men that characterize women's lives are impacted by their social locations (race, class, age, physical ability, affectional preference, marital status, religion, ethnicity, global location) 4. How can we change and improve the social world to make it a more just place for all people? Social transformation in the interest of justice 5. How and why does gender inequality persist in the modern world? 6. What is really to be understood by the category "gender"? Sources include neoliberalism and postmodernism. Neocolonialism, capitalism. Gender Difference Theory --Women's location in and experience of most situations is different from that of men in the situation -must confront "essentialism argument that fundamental differences between man and woman are immutable traceable to 1. Biology, 2. existential or phenomenological need of human beings to produce an 'other' as part of the act of self determination, 3. different cultures women and men create, 4. Social institutional needs for men and women to fill different roles (family), 5. production of gender differences out of the process of interaction itself -difference as a process that masculine culture both creates and uses to constitute itself, while pushing women's experience and ways of knowing themselves to the very margins of conceptual framing. In its most intense form, this process creates a construct of the woman as "the Other," an objectified being who is assigned traits that represent the opposite of the agentic, subject male. -Cultural Feminism more focused on exploring and celebrating the social value of women's distinctive ways of being society needed such women's virtues as cooperation, caring, pacifism, and nonviolence in the settlement of conflicts Carol Gilligan, care work-associates with women's moral reasoning and which focuses on achieving outcomes where all parties feel that their needs are noticed and responded to, and the "ethic of justice," which Gilligan associates with men's moral reasoning and which focuses on protecting the legitimate rights of all parties -two explanations of gender- institutional Structural functionalism formally mapped the major social institutions in terms of their relations with each other, their contributions to or "functions" for societal "equilibrium" or stability, and their internal organization or systems of social status-roles, the designated positions and associated beha Interactionist -"doing gender"/ accomplishment ethnomethodology posits that institutions, culture, and stratificational systems are maintained by the ongoing activities of individuals in interaction -principle of accountability: People do not just act in any way they choose; people in interactions hold other people "accountable" for behaving in ways that are expected or useful or understandable. -'doing difference' -major criticisms include not clear where standards for accountability come from, uncritically focuses on interaction al reproductions of gender inequality failing to pursue "undoing" patterns "Doing Gender" -Gender, which is broadly understood as a social construction for classifying people and behaviors in terms of "man" and "woman," "masculine" and "feminine," operates in society as an individual identity, a patterning of interactional processes, and a macrosocial structure encompassing both power and stratification. -concept has become an almost unavoidable variable in research studies—a variable whose presence implies a normative commitment to some standard of gender equality or the possibility that findings of inequality may be explained by practices of gender discrimination. Gender Inequality Theory --Women's location in most situations is not only different form but also less privileged than or unequal to that of men