feminist theory values

Feminist Theory

Jo Ann Arinder

Feminist theory falls under the umbrella of critical theory, which in general have the purpose of destabilizing systems of power and oppression. Feminist theory will be discussed here as a theory with a lower case ‘t’, however this is not meant to imply that it is not a Theory or cannot be used as one, only to acknowledge that for some it may be a sub-genre of Critical Theory, while for others it stands alone. According to Egbert and Sanden (2020), some scholars see critical paradigms as extensions of the interpretivist, but there is also an emphasis on oppression and lived experience grounded in subjectivist epistemology.

The purpose of using a feminist lens is to enable the discovery of how people interact within systems and possibly offer solutions to confront and eradicate oppressive systems and structures. Feminist theory considers the lived experience of any person/people, not just women, with an emphasis on oppression.  While there may not be a consensus on where feminist theory fits as a theory or paradigm, disruption of oppression is a core tenant of feminist work. As hooks (2000) states, “Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression. I liked this definition because it does not imply that men were the enemy” (p. viii).

Previous Studies

Marxism and socialism are key components in the heritage.of feminist theory. The origins of feminist theory can be found in the 18th century with growth in the 1970s’ and 1980s’ equality movements. According to Burton (2014), feminist theory has its roots in Marxism but specifically looks to Engles’ (1884) work as one possible starting point. Burton (2014) notes that, “Origin of the Family and commentaries on it were central texts to the feminist movement in its early years because of the felt need to understand the origins and subsequent development of the subordination of the female sex” (p. 2). Work in feminist theory, including research regarding gender equality, is ongoing.

Gender equality continues to be an issue today, and research into gender equality in education is still moving feminist theory forward. For example, Pincock’s (2017) study discusses the impact of repressive norms on the education of girls in Tanzania. The author states that, “…considerations of what empowerment looks like in relation to one’s sexuality are particularly important in relation to schooling for teenage girls as a route to expanding their agency” (p. 909). This consideration can be extended to any oppressed group within an educational setting and is not an area of inquiry relegated to the oppression of only female students. For example, non-binary students face oppression within educational systems and even male students can face barriers, and students are often still led towards what are considered “gender appropriate” studies. This creates a system of oppression that requires active work to disrupt.

Looking at representation in the literature used in education is another area of inquiry in feminist research. For example, Earles (2017) focused on physical educational settings to explore relationships “between gendered literary characters and stories and the normative and marginal responses produced by children” (p. 369). In this research, Earles found evidence to support that a contradiction between the literature and children’s lived experiences exists. The author suggests that educators can help to continue the reduction of oppressive gender norms through careful selection of literature and spaces to allow learners opportunities for appropriate discussions about these inconsistencies.

In another study, Mackie (1999) explored incorporating feminist theory into evaluation research. Mackie was evaluating curriculum created for English language learners that recognized the dual realities of some students, also known as the intersectionality of identity, and concluded that this recognition empowered students. Mackie noted that valuing experience and identity created a potential for change on an individual and community level and “Feminist and other types of critical teaching and research provide needed balance to TESL and applied linguistics” (p. 571).Further, Bierema and Cseh (2003) used a feminist research framework to examine previously ignored structural inequalities that affect the lives of women working in the field of human resources.

Model of Feminist Theory

Figure 1 presents a model of feminist theory that begins with the belief that systems exist that oppress and work against individuals. The model then shows that oppression is based on intersecting identities that can create discrimination and exclusion. The model indicates the idea that, through knowledge and action, oppressive systems can be disrupted to support change and understanding.

The core concepts in feminist theory are sex, gender, race, discrimination, equality, difference, and choice. There are systems and structures in place that work against individuals based on these qualities and against equality and equity. Research in critical paradigms requires the belief that, through the exploration of these existing conditions in the current social order, truths can be revealed. More important, however, this exploration can simultaneously build awareness of oppressive systems and create spaces for diverse voices to speak for themselves (Egbert & Sanden, 2019).

Constructs 

Feminism is concerned with the constructs of intersectionality, dimensions of social life, social inequality, and social transformation. Through feminist research, lasting contributions have been made to understanding the complexities and changes in the gendered division of labor. Men and women should be politically, economically, and socially equal and this theory does not subscribe to differences or similarities between men, nor does it refer to excluding men or only furthering women’s causes. Feminist theory works to support change and understanding through acknowledging and disrupting power and oppression.

Proposition 

Feminist theory proposes that when power and oppression are acknowledged and disrupted, understanding, advocacy, and change can occur.

Using the Model

There are many potential ways to utilize this model in research and practice. First, teachers and students can consider what systems of power exist in their classroom, school, or district. They can question how these systems are working to create discrimination and exclusion. By considering existing social structures, they can acknowledge barriers and issues inherit to the system. Once these issues are acknowledged, they can be disrupted so that change and understanding can begin. This may manifest, for example, as considering how past colonialism has oppressed learners of English as a second or foreign language.

The use of feminist theory in the classroom can ensure that the classroom is created, in advance, to consider barriers to learning faced by learners due to sex, gender, difference, race, or ability. This can help to reduce oppression created by systemic issues. In the case of the English language classroom, learners may be facing oppression based on their native language or country of origin. Facing these barriers in and out of the classroom can affect learners’ access to education. Considering these barriers in planning and including efforts to mitigate the issues and barriers faced by learners is a use of feminist theory.

Feminist research is interested in disrupting systems of oppression or barriers created from these systems with a goal of creating change. All research can include feminist theory when the research adds to efforts to work against and advocate to eliminate the power and oppression that exists within systems or structures that, in particular, oppress women. An examination of education in general could be useful since education is a field typically dominated by women; however, women are not often in leadership roles in the field. In the same way, using feminist theory for an examination into the lack of people of color and male teachers represented in education might also be useful. Action research is another area that can use feminist theory. Action research is often conducted in the pursuit of establishing changes that are discovered during a project. Feminism and action research are both concerned with creating change, which makes them a natural pairing.

Pre-existing beliefs about what feminism means can make including it in classroom practice or research challenging. Understanding that feminism is about reducing oppression for everyone and sharing that definition can reduce this challenge. hooks (2000) said that, “A male who has divested of male privilege, who has embraced feminist politics, is a worthy comrade in struggle, in no way a threat to feminism, whereas a female who remains wedded to sexist thinking and behavior infiltrating feminist movement is a dangerous threat”(p. 12). As Angela Davis noted during a speech at Western Washington University in 2017, “Everything is a feminist issue.” Feminist theory is about questioning existing structures and whether they are creating barriers for anyone. An interest in the reduction of barriers is feminist. Anyone can believe in the need to eliminate oppression and work as teachers or researchers to actively to disrupt systems of oppression.

Bierema, L. L., & Cseh, M. (2003). Evaluating AHRD research using a feminist research framework.  Human Resource Development Quarterly ,  14 (1), 5–26.

Burton, C. (2014).   Subordination: Feminism and social theory . Routledge.

Earles, J. (2017). Reading gender: A feminist, queer approach to children’s literature and children’s discursive agency.  Gender and Education, 29 (3), 369–388.

Egbert, J., & Sanden, S. (2019).  Foundations of education research: Understanding theoretical components . Taylor & Francis.

Hooks, B. (2000). Feminism is for everybody: Passionate politics . South End Press.

Mackie, A. (1999). Possibilities for feminism in ESL education and research.  TESOL  Quarterly, 33 (3), 566-573.

Pincock, K. (2018). School, sexuality and problematic girlhoods: Reframing ‘empowerment’ discourse.  Third World Quarterly, 39 (5), 906-919.

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Article contents

Feminist theory.

• Pelagia Goulimari Pelagia Goulimari Department of English, University of Oxford
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.976
• Published online: 19 November 2020

Feminist theory in the 21st century is an enormously diverse field. Mapping its genealogy of multiple intersecting traditions offers a toolkit for 21st-century feminist literary criticism, indeed for literary criticism tout court. Feminist phenomenologists (Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Marion Young, Toril Moi, Miranda Fricker, Pamela Sue Anderson, Sara Ahmed, Alia Al-Saji) have contributed concepts and analyses of situation, lived experience, embodiment, and orientation. African American feminists (Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Hortense J. Spillers, Saidiya V. Hartman) have theorized race, intersectionality, and heterogeneity, particularly differences among women and among black women. Postcolonial feminists (Assia Djebar, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Florence Stratton, Saba Mahmood, Jasbir K. Puar) have focused on the subaltern, specificity, and agency. Queer and transgender feminists (Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, Susan Stryker) have theorized performativity, resignification, continuous transition, and self-identification. Questions of representation have been central to all traditions of feminist theory.

• continuous transition
• heterogeneity
• intersectionality
• lived experience
• performativity
• resignification
• self-identification
• the subaltern

Mapping 21st-Century Feminist Theory

Feminist theory is a vast, enormously diverse, interdisciplinary field that cuts across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. As a result, this article cannot offer a historical overview or even an exhaustive account of 21st-century feminist theory. But it offers a genealogy and a toolkit for 21st-century feminist criticism. 1 The aim of this article is to outline the questions and issues 21st-century feminist theorists have been addressing; the concepts, figures, and narratives they have been honing; and the practices they have been experimenting with—some inherited, others new. This account of feminist theory will include African American, postcolonial, and Islamic feminists as well as queer and transgender theorists and writers who identify as feminists. While these fields are distinct and while they need to reckon with their respective Eurocentrism, racism, misogyny, queerphobia, or transphobia, this article will focus on their mutual allyship, in spite of continuing tensions. Particularly troubling are feminists who define themselves against queer and transgender theory and activism; by way of response, this article will be highlighting feminist queer theory and transfeminism.

On the one hand, literary criticism is not high on the agenda of many 21st-century feminist theorists. This means that literary critics need to imaginatively transpose feminist concepts to literature. On the other hand, a lot of feminist theorists practice literature; they write in an experimental way that combines academic work, creative writing, and life-writing; they combine narrative and figurative language with concepts and arguments. Contemporary feminist theory offers a powerful mix of experimental writing, big issues, quirky personal accounts, and utopian thinking of a new kind.

Feminists have been combining theory, criticism, and literature; Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Hélène Cixous, and Alice Walker have written across these genres. In African Sexualities: A Reader ( 2011 ), Sylvia Tamale’s decision to place academic scholarship side by side with poems, fiction, life-writing, political declarations, and reports is supported by feminist traditions. 2 Furthermore, the border between feminist theory, literature, and life-writing has been increasingly permeable in the 21st century , hence the centrality of texts in hybrid genres: theory with literary and life-writing elements, literature with meta-literary elements, and so on. Early 21st-century terms such as autofiction and autotheory register the prevalence of the tendency. This is at least partly a question of addressing different audiences—aiming for public engagement and connection with activism outside universities and bypassing the technical jargon of academic feminist theory. Another reason is that feminist theorists, especially those from marginalized groups, have found some of the conventions of academic scholarship objectionable or false—for example, the assumption of a universal, disembodied, or unsituated perspective.

Nevertheless, recent feminist experiments with genre—for example, by Anne Carson, Paul B. Preciado, Maggie Nelson, or Alison Bechdel—nod toward an integral part of women’s writing and feminist writing. 3 Historic experiments in mixed genre, going back to Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s poem-novel Aurora Leigh , include: Virginia Woolf’s critical-theoretical-fictional A Room of One’s Own ; Julia Kristeva’s poetico-theoretical “Stabat Mater”; Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time , oscillating between speculative science fiction and naturalist novel; Audre Lorde’s “biomythography,” Zami ; the mix of theory, fiction, and life-writing in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick ; or Qurratulain Hyder’s Fireflies in the Mist , hovering between historical fiction and romance. 4

Twenty-first-century feminist theory also tends to be thematically expansive and more than feminist theory narrowly understood, in that it is not only about “women” (those assigned female at birth or socially counted as women or self-identifying as women). It is a mature field that addresses structural injustice, social justice, and the future of the planet. As a result, cross-fertilization with other academic fields abounds. Relatively new academic fields such as feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory—emerging since the 1960s, established in the 1980s, and having initially to cement their distinctiveness and place within the academy—have been increasingly coming together and cross-fertilizing in the 21st century . Distinct feminist perspectives (phenomenological, poststructuralist, African American intersectional, postcolonial, Islamic, queer, transgender) have also been coming together and variously informing 21st-century feminist theory. While this article will introduce these perspectives, it will aim to show that feminist theorists are increasingly difficult to put in a box, and this is a good thing.

Feminist Phenomenology (Beauvoir, Young, Moi, Fricker, Anderson, Ahmed, Al-Saji): Situation, Lived Experience, Embodiment, Orientation

Simone de Beauvoir initiates feminist phenomenology, her existentialism emerging within the broader tradition of phenomenology. While the present account of feminist theory begins with Beauvoir, it is important to acknowledge the continuing influence of older feminists and proto-feminists, as “feminism” only acquired its current ( 20th- and 21st-century ) meaning in the late 19th century , according to the Oxford English Dictionary. See, for example, Christine de Pizan, “Jane Anger,” Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, Anne Finch, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Davies, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, and Virginia Woolf.

All contemporary feminist theory has been influenced by Beauvoir, in some respect or other. Her famous claim that “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman,” opening volume 2 of The Second Sex ( 1949 ), points to the asymmetrical socialization of men and women. 5 In her philosophical terms, man is the One, the universal, subject, freedom, transcendence, mind, spirit, culture; woman is the Other, the particular, object, situation, immanence, body, flesh, nature. Patriarchy for Beauvoir is a system of binary oppositions, whose terms are mutually exclusive: the One/the Other, the universal/the particular, subject/object, freedom/situation, transcendence/immanence, mind/body, spirit/flesh, culture/nature. Men have been socialized to aim for—indeed to become—the valued terms in each binary opposition (the One, the universal, subject, freedom, transcendence, mind, spirit, culture); while the undesirable terms (the Other, the particular, object, situation, immanence, body, flesh, nature) are projected onto women, who are socialized to become those terms—to become object, for example. Emerging from this system is the illusion of a transhistorical feminine essence or a norm of femininity that misconstrues, disciplines, and oppresses actual, historical women. Women for Beauvoir are an oppressed group, and her aim is their liberation. 6

Beauvoir critiques the social aims and myths of patriarchy, pointing to the pervasiveness of patriarchal myths in philosophy, literature, and culture. But she also critiques the very forms of patriarchy—binary opposition, dualistic thinking, essentialism, universalism, abstraction—while not completely able to free her own analysis from them. Instead of them, Beauvoir advocates attention to concrete situation and close phenomenological description; indeed The Second Sex abounds in vivid and richly detailed descriptions of early 20th-century French women’s lives. Such close attention and description allow her to demonstrate that all humans are, potentially, both subject and object, free and situated, transcendent and immanent, spirit and flesh, hence the ambiguity of the human condition. 7

The philosophy of existentialism and the broader philosophical movement of phenomenology, within which Beauvoir situates her work, claim to offer radical aims and methods. Phenomenology (Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon) is committed to the phenomenological description of the particular in order to avoid the abstractions of scientism. It aims to avoid traditional philosophical dualisms such as mind/body. It re-describes human beings not as disembodied minds but as intentional beings engaged with the world, being-in-the-world (Heidegger’s term), situated in a particular time and place; as lived bodies that are centers of perception, action, and lived experience rather than mere objects; and as being-with and being-for others in inter-subjective relationships rather than just subject/object relationships. Human beings immerse themselves in their projects, using the world and their own bodies—with all their acquired skills, competencies, and sedimented habits—as instruments. While these instruments are indispensable to their projects, they are usually unperceived and remain in the background. They are the background against which objects of perception and action objectives come into view. And yet what is backgrounded can always come to the foreground, suddenly and rudely—when the world resists one, when a blunt knife does not cut the bread, when one’s body is in pain or sick and intrudes, interrupting one’s vision and plans. 8

Without minimizing the novelty of Beauvoir’s theorization of patriarchy, the present quick sketch of phenomenology ought to have highlighted its suitability for feminist appropriations. Nevertheless, Sartre, Beauvoir’s closest collaborator, for example, continues to think that one is distinctively human only to the extent that they transcend their situation. This arguably universalizes Sartre’s particular situation as a member of a privileged group determined to be free, while effectively blaming the situation of oppressed groups on their members, blaming the victims for lacking humanity. 9 By contrast, Beauvoir sheds light on women’s social situation and lived experience: men have “far more concrete opportunities” to be effective; women experience the world not as tools for their projects but as resistance to them; their “energy” is “thrown into the world” but “fails to grasp any object”; a woman’s body is not the “pure instrument of her grasp on the world” but painfully objectified and foregrounded. 10 Beauvoir goes on to distinguish between a variety of unequal social situations with different degrees of freedom inherent in them. Yes, on the whole, French men are freer, less constrained than French women. But Beauvoir discusses the “concrete situation” of other groups “kept in a situation of inferiority”—workers, the colonized, African American slaves, her contemporary African Americans, Jews—while explicitly acknowledging that women themselves are socially divided by class and race. 11

Beauvoir outlines impediments to women’s collective and individual liberation and sketches out paths to collective action and to the “independent woman” of the future, placing literature center stage. She claims that women lack the “concrete means” to organize themselves “in opposition” to patriarchy, in that they lack a shared collective space, such as the factory and the racially segregated community for working-class and black struggles, instead living dispersed private lives. 12 While white middle-class women “are in solidarity” with men of their class and race, rather than with working-class and black women, Beauvoir calls for solidarity among women across class and race boundaries. 13 She addresses white middle-class women like herself, who benefit materially from their connection to white middle-class men, asking them to abandon these benefits for the precarious pursuit of women’s solidarity and freedom. To the extent that women lack freedom by virtue of their social situation qua women, they need to claim their freedom in collective “revolt.” 14 Beauvoir’s 1949 call to organized political action was “the movement before the movement,” according to Michèle Le Doeuff. 15

However, Beauvoir also advocates writing literature as a means of liberation for women and considers all her writing—philosophical, literary, life-writing—a form of activism. Beauvoir devotes considerable space to literary criticism throughout The Second Sex . She shows how writers have reproduced patriarchal myths, often unwittingly. 16 But her future-oriented, crucial chapter “The Independent Woman” centers on a discussion of women writers and even addresses women writers. Having sketched out a history of women’s writing, she turns to young writers to offer advice, based on her analysis of women’s “situation.” 17 To overcome women’s socially imposed apprenticeship in “reasonable modesty,” they need to undertake a counter-practice of “abandonment and transcendence,” “pride” and boldness; they need to become “women insurgents” who feel “responsible for the universe.” 18 Her call, “The free woman is just being born” energizes new women writers to live and write freely—and has been answered by many. 19 But this is not triumphalist empty rhetoric; women writers also need to understand the “ambiguity” of the human condition and of truth itself. 20

Iris Marion Young returns to Beauvoir’s description of women’s social situation and lived experience in “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality” ( 1980 ). Young takes Beauvoir’s description as the starting point for her own phenomenology of women’s project-oriented bodily movement in “contemporary advanced industrial, urban, and commercial society,” arguing that their movement is inhibited, ambiguous, discontinuous, and ineffective. 21 Women exhibit a form of socially induced dyspraxia. Young contends that women’s movement “exhibits an ambiguous transcendence, an inhibited intentionality, and a discontinuous unity with its surroundings.” 22 Young turns to women’s bodies in their “orientation toward and action upon and within” their surroundings, particularly the “confrontation of the body’s capacities and possibilities with the resistance and malleability of things” when the body “aims to accomplish a definite purpose or task.” 23 It will be remembered that the phenomenological tradition theorizes the human body as a lived body that is the locus of subjectivity, perception, and action, a capable body extending itself into the world rather than a thing; this is especially the case with Merleau-Ponty. Young’s description of the deviation of women’s bodily experience from this norm is a powerful indictment of women’s social situation.

Firstly, Young identifies that women experience their bodies as ambiguously transcendent: both as a “capacity” and as a “ thing ”; both striving to act upon the world and a “burden.” 24 Secondly, they experience an inhibited intentionality: while acting, they hesitate, their “hesitancy” resulting in “wasted motion . . . from the effort of testing and reorientation.” 25 Thirdly, they experience their bodies as discontinuous with the world: rather than extending themselves and acting upon their surroundings, which is the norm, they live their bodies as objects “ positioned in space.” 26 Or rather, the “space that belongs to her and is available to her grasp and manipulation” is experienced as “constricted,” while “the space beyond is not available to her.” 27 In other words, she experiences her surroundings not as at-hand and within-reach for her projects but as out-of-reach. This discontinuity between “aim and capacity to realize” it is the secret of women’s “tentativeness and uncertainty.” 28 Even more ominously, they live the “ever-present possibility” of becoming the “object of another subject’s . . . manipulations.” 29 In the very exercise of bodily freedom—for example, in opening up the “body in free, active, open extension and bold outward-directedness”—women risk “objectification,” Young argues. 30

Young describes the situation of women as one in which they have to learn “actively to hamper” their “movements.” 31 If this has been the norm of genderization in modern Western urban societies, is it still at work and is it lived differently depending on one’s class, race, sexuality, and so on? 32 Similarly with Beauvoir’s theorization of the situation of women: does it continue to be relevant and useful?

The emergence of “sexual difference” feminism or écriture féminine in France in the mid-1970s, with landmark publications by Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, brought with it a critique of Beauvoir. 33 In view of the present discussion of Beauvoir, one might argue that Beauvoir’s aim is the abolition of gender. Her horizon is the abolition of gender binarism and an end to the oppression of women. However, in “Equal or Different?” ( 1986 ) Irigaray reads this as a pursuit of equality through women’s adoption of male norms, at a great cost, that of “suppress[ing] sexual difference.” 34 In Irigaray’s eyes, Beauvoir’s work is assimilationist, while her own work is radical—it aims to redefine femininity in positive terms. Irigaray insists on the political autonomy of women’s struggles from other liberation movements and, controversially, the priority of feminism over other movements because of the priority of gender over class, race, and so on. Gender is “the primary and irreducible division.” 35

In 1994 feminist literary critic Toril Moi compares Beauvoir to Irigaray and Frantz Fanon, one of the founders of postcolonial theory. Like Fanon who redefined blackness positively and viewed anticolonial struggles as autonomous, Irigaray aims to redefine femininity and mobilize it autonomously, while Beauvoir failed to “grasp the progressive potential of ‘femininity’ as a political discourse” and also “vastly underestimated the potential political impact of an independent woman’s movement.” 36 However, Moi sides with Beauvoir against Irigaray and other “sexual difference” feminists, when comparing their aims. Beauvoir’s ultimate aim is the disappearance of gender, while difference feminists “focus on women’s difference, often without regard for other social movements,” claiming that “women’s interests are best served by the establishment of an enduring regime of sexual difference.” 37

Aiming toward the disappearance of gender does not mean blinding oneself to the situation and lived experience of women. In a 2009 piece on women writers, literature, and feminist theory, Moi turns to Beauvoir to analyze the social situation of women writers. Importantly, Beauvoir focuses on what happens “ once somebody has been taken to be a woman ”—the woman in question might or might not be assigned female at birth and might or might not identify as a woman. 38 While the body of someone taken to be a man is viewed as a “direct and normal connection with the world” that he “apprehends objectively,” the body of someone taken to be a woman is viewed as “weighed down by everything specific to it: an obstacle, a prison.” 39 Concomitantly, male writers and their perspectives and concerns are associated with universality—women writers associated with biased particularity. But if women writers adopt male perspectives and concerns to lay claim to universality, they are alienated from their own lived experience. This is how a “sexist (or racist) society” forces “women and blacks, and other raced minorities, to ‘eliminate’ their gendered (or raced) subjectivity” and “masquerade as some kind of generic universal human being, in ways that devalue their actual experiences as embodied human beings in the world.” 40 All too often women writers have declared “I am not a woman writer,” but this has to be understood as a “ defensive speech act”: a “ response ” to those who have tried to use her gender “against her.” 41

In 2001 feminist philosopher and Beauvoir scholar Michèle Le Doeuff announces a renaissance in Beauvoir studies, in her keynote for the Ninth International Simone de Beauvoir Conference: “It is no longer possible to claim, in the light of a certain New French Feminism, that Beauvoir is obsolete.” 42 She prioritizes the need for scholarship on the conflicts between Sartre and Beauvoir, with a view to making the case for Beauvoir’s originality as a philosopher, in spite of Beauvoir’s self-identification as a writer and reluctance to clash with Sartre philosophically.

Feminist philosopher Miranda Fricker returns more than once to the question of whether Beauvoir is a philosopher or a writer. In 2003 Fricker locates Beauvoir’s originality in her understanding of ambiguity and argues that life-writing has been the medium most suited to her thought, focusing on Beauvoir’s The Prime of Life ( La Force de l’age , 1960 ). 43 Beauvoir found in the institution of philosophy, as she experienced it, a pathological, obsessional attitude—a demand for abstract theorizing that divorces thinkers from their situation to lend their thought universal applicability. This imperious, sovereign role was seriously at odds with Beauvoir’s sense of reality, history, and the self. For Beauvoir, reality is “full of ambiguities, baffling, and impenetrable” and history a violent shock to the self: “History burst over me, and I dissolved into fragments . . . scattered over the four quarters of the globe, linked by every nerve in me to each and every other individual.” 44 Beauvoir uses narrative, particularly life-writing, to connect with her past selves but also to appeal to the reader: “self-knowledge is impossible, and the best one can hope for is self-revelation” to the reader. 45 Fricker claims that Beauvoir primarily addresses female readers; and Beauvoir’s alliance-building with her readers—her “feminist commitment to female solidarity”—promises to bring out, through the reader, “the ‘unity’ to that ‘scattered, broken’ object that is her life.” 46

An example of the role of the reader is Fricker’s 2007 reading of Beauvoir’s under-written account of an early epistemic clash with Sartre. 47 Beauvoir’s first-person narrative voice doesn’t quite say that Sartre undermined her as a knower, but Fricker interprets this incident as an epistemic attack by Sartre that Beauvoir had the resilience to survive, and which contributed to her self-identification as a writer rather than a philosopher. Here the violence of history and the institution of philosophy take very concrete, embodied, intimate form. But the incident also serves as a springboard for Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice and its two forms: testimonial injustice, and hermeneutical injustice and lacunas. For Fricker, Sartre in this instance does Beauvoir a “testimonial injustice” in that he erodes her confidence and her credibility as a knower. 48 This process might also be “ongoing” and involve “persistent petty intellectual underminings.” 49 Hermeneutical (or interpretive) injustice, on the other hand, has to do with a gap in collective interpretative resources, where a name should be to describe a social experience. 50 For example, the relatively recent term “sexual harassment” has described a social experience where previously there was a hermeneutic lacuna, according to Fricker. Such lacunas are often due to the systemic epistemic marginalization of some groups, and any progress (for example, in adopting a proposed new term) is contingent upon a “virtuous hearer” who will try to listen without prejudice but also requires systemic change. 51 In George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss Maggie Tulliver suffers both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. 52

This article will now turn to feminist phenomenology within queer theory and critical race theory. Sara Ahmed, in Queer Phenomenology ( 2006 ), offers not a phenomenology of queerness but rather a phenomenological account of heteronormativity as well as a feminist queer critique of phenomenology. In an important reversal of perspective, Ahmed denaturalizes being straight—denaturalizes heteronormativity—by asking: how does one become straight? This is not simply a matter of sexual orientation and choice of love-object. Rather heteronormativity is itself “something that we are oriented around, even if it disappears from view”; “bodies become straight by ‘lining up’” with normative “lines that are already given.” 53 Being straight is “an effect of being ‘in line.’” 54 Unlike earlier phenomenologists such as Heidegger, what is usually being backgrounded and thus invisible is a naturalized system that Ahmed hopes to foreground and bring “into view”: heteronormativity. 55 Ahmed thus extends Beauvoir’s and Young’s analyses of the systematic oppression and incapacitation of women, respectively. 56 Ahmed puts Young’s language to use in order to talk about lesbian lives: heteronormativity “puts some things in reach and others out of reach,” in a manner that incapacitates lesbian lives. Ahmed searches for a different form of sociality, “a space in which the lesbian body can extend itself , as a body that gets near other bodies.” 57 Her critique of even the most promising phenomenologists is that in their work “the straight world is already in place” as an invisible background. 58

Ahmed extends her analysis of the production of heteronormativity to the production of whiteness in “A Phenomenology of Whiteness” ( 2007 ), asking: how does one become white? Ahmed thus furthers her critique of phenomenology from within. Phenomenologists such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty define the body as “successful,” as “‘able’ to extend itself (through objects) in order to act on and in the world,” as a body that “‘can do’ by flowing into space.” 59 However, far from this being a universal experience, it is the experience of a “bodily form of privilege” from which many groups are excluded. 60 Ahmed does not here acknowledge Young’s analysis of women’s socially induced dyspraxia but turns instead to Fanon’s “phenomenology of ‘being stopped.’” 61 Ahmed calls “discomfort” the social experience of being impeded and goes on to outline its critical potential in “bringing what is in the background, what gets over-looked” back into view. 62 More than a negative feeling, discomfort has the exhilarating potential of opening up a whole world that was previously obscured. 63 Ahmed’s subsequent work has focused on institutional critique, especially of universities in their continuing failure to become inclusive, hospitable spaces for certain groups, in spite of their managerial language of diversity. 64

Where Ahmed calls for critical and transformative “discomfort,” Alia Al-Saji calls for a critical and transformative “hesitation” in “A Phenomenology of Hesitation” ( 2014 ). Al-Saji’s concept of hesitation revises the work of Beauvoir and Young and enlarges their focus on gender to include race. Beauvoir’s analysis of patriarchy as a system that projects and naturalizes fixed, oppositional, hierarchical identities is redeployed toward a “race-critical and feminist” project, though Al-Saji does not acknowledge Beauvoir explicitly but credits Fanon’s work. 65 The systematic and “socially pathological othering” of fluid, relational, contextual, contingent differences into rigid, frozen, naturalized hierarchies remains “hidden from view.” 66 Experience, affect, and vision, in their pathological form, are closed and rigid; in their healthy form, they have a “creative and critical potential . . . to hesitate”—they are ambiguous, open, fluid, responsive, receptive, dynamic, changing, improvisational, self-critical. 67 Al-Saji argues that the “paralyzing hesitation” analyzed by Young can be “mined” to extract a critical hesitation, as Young’s own work exemplifies. 68 By contrast, the “normative ‘I can’ – posited as human but in fact correlated to white, male bodies”—rigidly “excludes other ways of seeing and acting”; it is “objectifying – racializing and sexist[,] . . . reifying and othering .” 69 The alternative to both thoughtless action and paralyzing inaction is: “ acting hesitantly ” and responsively. 70

Feminist philosopher Pamela Sue Anderson’s last writings on “vulnerability” build on Michèle Le Doeuff’s critique of unexamined myths and narratives underlying the Western “imaginary.” One values and strives for invulnerability and equates vulnerability with exposure to violence and suffering. One projects vulnerability onto “the vulnerable” to disavow their own vulnerability: “a dark social imaginary continues to stigmatize those needing to be cared for as a drain on an economy, carefully separating ‘the cared for’ from those who are thought to be ‘in control’ of their lives and of the world.” 71 Furthermore, members of privileged groups often exhibit a “wilful ignorance” of systemic forms of social vulnerability and social injustice. 72 But Anderson also outlines “ethical” vulnerability as a capability for a transformative and life-enhancing openness to others and mutual affection—occasioned by ontological vulnerability. Ethical vulnerability is envisaged as a project where reason, critical self-reflexivity, emotion, intuition and imagination, concepts, arguments, myths and narrative all have a role to play, while also needing to be reimagined and rethought.

African American Feminisms (Morrison, Lorde, Walker, Spillers, Hartman): Race, Intersectionality, Differences among Women and among Black Women

African American and postcolonial feminists have struggled to create space for themselves, caught between a predominantly white women’s movement on the one hand, and male-led civil-rights and anticolonial struggles and postcolonial elites on the other hand. They have fought against assumptions that “All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men” and that white women are “saving brown women from brown men.” 73 African American and postcolonial writers and thinkers (from Toni Morrison to Chandra Talpade Mohanty) have hesitated to self-identify with a primarily white movement that, they argued powerfully, effectively excluded them in unthinkingly prioritizing the concerns of white, middle-class women. Some have avoided self-identifying as a feminist, self-identifying as a “black woman writer” instead. Alice Walker invented the term “womanism” to signal black feminism. “Intersectionality” was coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, and other African American feminists to highlight the intersections of gender and race, feminist and antiracist struggles, creating a space between the white women’s movement and the male-led civil-rights movement. 74 Postcolonial feminists (Assia Djebar, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty) similarly created a space between Western feminists and male-led anticolonial struggles and postcolonial elites.

African American feminists have been critical of Beauvoir and of the women’s movements of the 1960s. They have been reconstructing oral, written, and activist traditions of black women such as abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs, and modernists Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen—all previously neglected and marginalized. 75 These traditions prioritize: collectivism; the need to critique and resist internalized but unlivable white middle-class norms; waywardness or willfulness rather than individualism; differences among women; difference among black women; and friendship and solidarity among black women across their differences. (By contrast, contemporary white American feminist critics such as Elaine Showalter emphasized self-realization and self-actualization. 76 ) African American women writers—rather than literary critics—have led the way, inspired by orators, musicians, and collective oral forms, as critics have acknowledged. 77

Toni Morrison, as a self-identified black woman writer, announces these strategic priorities in her first novel, The Bluest Eye ( 1970 ). 78 In The Bluest Eye she revises Beauvoir’s analysis of patriarchy as a binary opposition—man/woman—that projects onto “woman” what men disown in themselves. She examines a related binary opposition: white, light-skinned, middle-class, beautiful, proper lady vs. dark-skinned, poor, ugly girl (the racialized opposition between angelic and demonic woman). The first novel to focus on black girls, The Bluest Eye shows the systemic propagation and internalization of white norms of beauty and femininity, leading to hierarchical oppositions between black and white girls as well as between black girls (light-skinned middle-class Maureen, solidly working-class Claudia and Frieda, and precariously poor Pecola). The projection, by everyone, of all ugliness onto poor, dark-skinned Pecola, combined with white norms that are impossible for her, lead to Pecola’s madness. Her attempts at existential affirmation are crushed by the judgment of the world. Pecola’s Bildungsroman turns out naturalist tragedy. However, Claudia, the narrator, develops anagnorisis and shares her increasingly complex critique with the readers.

In “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib” ( 1971 ) Morrison uses Beauvoir’s language to bring attention both to the situation of African American women and to their traditions of resistance. Reminding readers of two segregation-era signs—“White Ladies” and “Black Women”—she asserts that many black women rejected ladylike behavior and “frequently kicked back . . . [O]ut of the profound desolation of her reality” the black woman “may very well have invented herself.” 79 Black women have been working and heading single-parent households in a hostile world. If ladies are all “softness, helplessness and modesty,” black women have been “tough, capable, independent and immodest.” 80

Audre Lorde explores similar themes. Her poem, “Who Said It Was Simple” ( 1973 ) illustrates the hierarchy between white “ladies,” in their feminist struggle for self-realization, and black “girls” on whose work they rely. Sister Outsider , Lorde’s essays and speeches from 1976 to 1984 , theorizes intersections of race, sexuality, class, and age that are particularly binding and threatening for black lesbian women. 81 White feminists are ignorant of racism and wrongly assume their concerns to be universally shared by all women, thus replicating the patriarchal elevation of men to the universal analyzed by Beauvoir; they need to drop the “pretense to a homogeneity of experience,” educate themselves about black women, read their work, and listen. 82 In “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” delivered during a Beauvoir conference, Lorde argues that Beauvoir’s call to know “the genuine conditions of our lives” must include racism and homophobia. 83 Black men misdirect their anger for the racism they encounter toward black women, who, paid less and more socially devalued, are easy targets. Falsely equating anti-sexist with anti-Black, black men are hostile to black feminists and especially lesbians; so black men’s sexism is different from the sexism of privileged white men analyzed by Beauvoir. 84 Black women have also been hostile toward each other, due to internalized racism and sexism, projected toward the most marginalized among them; identifying with their oppressors, black women suffer a “misnaming” and “distortion” in their understanding of their situation. 85

But Lorde also exalts traditions of black women’s solidarity across their differences. Once differences among women and among black women are properly understood and named, they can be creative and generative. To achieve this, she extols recording, examining, and naming one’s experience, perceptions, and feelings, as a path to clarity, precision, and illumination, leading to concepts and theories but also to empowerment. Anger, unlike hatred, is potentially both full of information and generative. 86 Affect, more broadly, can be a path to understanding, as affect and rationality are not mutually exclusive: “I don’t see feel/think as a dichotomy.” 87 Particularly innovative is Lorde’s theorization of the “erotic.” In contrast to the pornographic, the erotic is a power intrinsically connected to (and cutting across) love, friendship, self-connection, joy, the spiritual, creativity, work, collaboration, and the political—especially among black women. 88 But relations of interdependence and mutuality among women are only possible in a context of non-hierarchical differences among equals and peers, Lorde stresses repeatedly. 89

Alice Walker attends to many of these themes in Color Purple ( 1982 ). 90 In her collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose ( 1983 ), she pays tribute to black women’s traditions of resistance, due to which “womanish” connotes “outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior.” 91 Her term “womanism” honors these collectivist traditions and their commitment to the “survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.” 92 But she also calls for the reconstruction of a written tradition of forgotten black women writers, resurrecting Zora Neale Hurston from oblivion in “Looking for Zora,” initially published in Ms . magazine in 1975 . 93

In 1979 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination established the enforced privatization and entrapped idleness of 19th-century white middle-class women. 94 In 1987 Hortense J. Spillers powerfully added that this was made possible by the enforced hard labor of black women, as house or field slaves and later as domestic servants who often headed single-parent households. 95 Furthermore, the gender polarization within the white middle-class family was accompanied by the ungendering of African American slaves, who were not allowed to marry and raise their children, and the structural rape of black women. In the late 1980s Crenshaw and Collins formally introduced the concept of intersectionality, though intersectionality-like ideas—that the black woman is the “mule uh de world”—have been a part of black women’s thought for a long time. 96

“Slavery and gender” has been a core topic since the 1980s, with publications such as Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death ( 1982 ), Toni Morrison’s Beloved ( 1987 ) and Playing in the Dark ( 1992 ), and Saidiya V. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection ( 1997 ). 97 Hartman’s abiding topic has been a lost history of black girls and women that can only partially be retrieved and that requires new methodologies. Archives and official records are full of gaps, systematically “dissimulate the extreme violence” of slavery, and “disavow the pain” and “deny the sorrow” of slaves. 98 Even while reading them “against the grain,” Hartman underlines the “ impossibility of fully recovering the experience of the enslaved.” 99 In Lose Your Mother ( 2006 ) Hartman’s concept of the “afterlife of slavery” describes the persistence of “devalued” and “imperiled” black lives, racialized violence, “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery.” 100 In “Venus in Two Acts” ( 2008 ), Hartman defines her method as “critical fabulation”: mixing critical use of archival research, theorization, and multiple speculative narratives, in an experimental writing that acknowledges its own failure and refuses “to fill in the gaps” to “provide closure.” 101 This writing is:

straining against the limits of the archive . . . and . . . enacting the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration . . . [in order] to displace the . . . authorized account, . . . to imagine what might have happened[,] . . . to listen for the mutters and oaths and cries of the commodity[,] . . . to illuminate the contested character of history, narrative, event, and fact, to topple the hierarchy of discourse, and to engulf authorized speech in the clash of voices. 102

In “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner” ( 2018 ) Hartman returns to “critical fabulation” and offers a “speculative history” of Esther Brown, her friends, and their life in Harlem around 1917 . 103 Their experiments in “free love and free motherhood” were criminalized as “Loitering. Riotous and Disorderly. Solicitation. Violation of the Tenement House Law. . . . Vagrancy.” 104 Questions such as “ Is this man your husband? Where is the father of your child ?”—meant to detect the “likelihood” of their “future criminality” and moral depravity—might render them “three years confined at Bedford and . . . entangled with the criminal justice system and under state surveillance for a decade.” 105 In official records, these measures were narrated as rescuing, reforming, and rehabilitating, therapeutic interventions for the benefit of young black women.

Reading such records against the grain, Hartman tells the story of a “ revolution in a minor key ”: of “ too fast girls and surplus women and whores ” as “social visionaries, radical thinkers, and innovators.” 106 Their “wild and wayward” collective experiments, at the beginning of the 20th century , were building on centuries of black women’s “mutual aid societies” conducted “in stealth.” 107 Their aspiration has been “singularity and freedom”—not the “individuality and sovereignty” coveted by white liberal feminists. 108

Hartman’s work emerges out of African American feminist traditions but also out of postcolonial feminists, whose work pays particular attention to impossibility, failure, aporia, and the limits of representing the subaltern, as well as the heterogeneity and specificity of women’s agency.

Postcolonial Feminisms (Djebar, Spivak, Mohanty, Stratton, Mahmood, Puar): The Subaltern, Specificity, Agency

Colonized women had to contend not only with the “imbalances of their relations with their own men but also the baroque and violent array of hierarchical rules and restrictions that structured their new relations with imperial men and women.” 109 Furthermore, they were central to powerful orientalist fantasies that rendered their actual lives invisible. The relation of colonized land to colonizer was figured as that of a nubile, sexually available woman waiting for her lover, as in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines where the map of the land centers around “Sheba’s Breasts” and “Mouth of treasure cave.” 110 Algerian writer Assia Djebar exposes this colonial fantasy in Fantasia ( 1985 ). 111 The city of Algiers is seen by the arriving colonizers as a virginal bride waiting for her groom to possess her. She is an “Impregnable City” that “sheds her veils,” as if this was “mutual love at first sight” and “the invaders were coming as lovers!” 112 The Victorian patriarchal, hierarchical nuclear family, ruled by a benign and loving husband and father, was key to the colonial “civilizing mission” because it was the perfect metaphor for the relation between colonizer and colonized in colonial ideology. 113 However, in Women of Algiers in Their Apartment ( 1980 ; mirroring the title of Eugène Delacroix’s orientalist paintings) Djebar reminds her readers that women took part in large numbers in the Algerian anticolonial struggle and suffered torture, rape, and loss of life, but that their contribution was marginalized in post-independence narratives, while they were expected to return to a patriarchal mold ostensibly for the good of the new nation. 114 By contrast, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment foregrounds Algerian women’s heterogeneity but also the intergenerational transmission of their socially repressed, traumatic history, which cannot be fully recovered—hence the self-conscious aporia of Djebar’s project.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” ( 1983 , 1988 , 1999 ) is a subtle theorization of what remains outside colonial, anticolonial, postcolonial, neocolonial, and even “liberal multiculturalist” elites and discourses. 115 Spivak’s starting point is the unpresentability of the “subaltern” (those most marginalized and excluded). The subaltern exceeds any representation treating it as a full identity with a fixed meaning. The subaltern is an inaccessible social unconscious that can only be ethically presented in its unpresentability—fleetingly visible in fragments.

Rather than documenting “subaltern” resistance in its “taxonomic” difference from the elite and rather than assuming that political forces are self-conscious and already constituted identities, Spivak assumes that political identities are being constituted through political action. 116 Many subaltern groups are highly articulate about their aims and their relations to elites and other subaltern groups, but Spivak understands the “subaltern” as singular acts of resistance that are “irretrievably heterogeneous” in relation to constituted identities. 117 Rather than asking for the recognition of “subjugated” and previously “disqualified” forms of knowledge, Spivak is intent on acknowledging her privileged positionality and insists that what she calls the “subaltern” is irretrievably silenced; the “subaltern” is what escapes—or is excluded from—any discourse. 118

Spivak’s heterogeneous subaltern is a (Derridean) singularity that cannot be translated fully or repeated exactly but can only be repeated differently. 119 The singularity in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is Talu’s suicide, as retold by Spivak. Spivak interprets it as a complex political intervention, by a young middle-class woman activist, that remained illegible as such. Entrusted with a political assassination in the context of the struggle for Indian independence, Spivak claims that Talu’s suicide was a complex refusal to do her mission without betraying the cause. Talu questioned anticolonial nationalism, sati suicide, and female “imprisonment” in heteronormativity, but her “Speech Act was refused” by everyone because it resisted translation into established discourses. 120 Spivak iterates Talu’s singularity differently: as a postcolonial feminist heroine. She does not present her version of Talu’s story as restoring speech to the subaltern. Speech acts are addressed to others and completed by others; they involve “distanced decipherment by another, which is, at best, an interception.” 121 To claim that Talu has finally spoken through Spivak would be a neocolonial “missionary” claim of saving the subaltern. 122 To avoid this, Spivak self-dramatizes her privileged institutional “positionality” and calls for “unlearning” one’s privilege. 123

Postcolonial feminists have been telling the story of the marginalization of women of color within anticolonial movements, postcolonial states, and within Western feminist movements. In “Three Women’sTexts and a Critique of Imperialism” ( 1985 ), Spivak argues that Gilbert and Gubar, in their reading of Jane Eyre in Madwoman in the Attic , unwittingly reproduce the “axioms of imperialism.” 124 For Spivak, in Jane Eyre Bertha, a dark colonial woman, sets the house on fire and kills herself so that Jane Eyre “can become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction”; she is “sacrificed as an insane animal” for her British “sister’s consolidation” in a manner that is exemplary of the “epistemic violence” of imperialism. 125 Gilbert and Gubar fail to see this and only read Jane and Bertha in individual, “psychological terms.” 126 By contrast, Jean Rhys’s rewriting of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea ( 1966 ) makes this visible and enables Spivak’s critique. 127 Rhys allows Bertha to tell her story and keeps Bertha’s “humanity, indeed her sanity as critic of imperialism, intact.” 128 In “Does the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak articulates the value of postcolonial feminism but refuses to defend it as a redemptive breakthrough. Instead she issues a call for self-reflexivity.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, in “Under Western Eyes” ( 1984 ), calls for studies of local collective struggles and for localized theorizing by investigators. 129 The category of “Third World Woman” is an essentialist fabrication reducing the irreducible “heterogeneity” of women in the Third World. 130 Mohanty’s call for specificity is a rejection of white middle-class feminists’ generalizations on “women” and “Third World women” as neocolonial:

Women are constituted as women through the complex interaction between class, culture, religion and other ideological institutions and frameworks. . . . [R]eductive cross-cultural comparisons result in the colonization of the conflicts and contradictions which characterize women of different social classes and cultures. 131

Mohanty is here remarkably close to African American feminists. What is at stake for Mohanty is for groups of marginalized women to represent themselves and to retrieve forms of agency within their own traditions. As she stresses in Feminism without Borders ( 2003 ): the “application of the notion of women as a homogeneous category to women in the Third World colonizes and appropriates the pluralities” of their complex location and “robs them of their historical and political agency .” 132

Saba Mahmood, in “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival” ( 2001 ), argues that rather than reading a specific cultural phenomenon through an established conception of agency, agency should be theorized through the specific phenomenon studied. 133 Her target is the Western feminist equation of feminist agency with secularism, resistance, and transgression, which she finds unhelpful when studying the “urban women’s mosque movement that is part of the larger Islamic revival in Cairo.” 134 While in some contexts feminist agency might take the form of “dramatic transgression and defiance,” for these Egyptian women it took the form of active participation and engagement with a religious movement. 135 It would be a neocolonial gesture to understand their involvement as due to “false consciousness” or internalized patriarchy. 136 Mahmood’s “situated analysis” thus endorses plural, local theories and concepts. 137

Florence Stratton focuses on gender in African postcolonial literature and criticism. She analyses the multiplicity of “ways in which women writers have been written out of the African literary tradition.” 138 They have been ignored by critics, marginalized by definitions of the African canon that universalize the tropes and themes of male writers, and silenced by “gender definitions which . . . maintain the status quo of women’s exclusion from public life.” 139 Particularly pernicious has been the “iteration in African men’s writing of the conventional colonial trope of Africa as female.” 140 Stratton discerns a ubiquitous pattern in African postcolonial men’s writing. Women are cast as symbols of the nation, in sexualized or bodily roles: as nubile virgin to be impregnated or as mother (Stratton calls this the “pot of culture” trope); or, alternatively, as degraded prostitute (the “sweep of history” trope). 141 So women are figured either as embodiments of an ostensibly static traditional culture (trope 1) or as passive victims of historical change (trope 2). This is coupled with a male quest narrative, where the male hero and his vision actively transform prostitute into mother Africa. Underlying this is a patriarchal division of active/passive and subject/object, which denies women as artists and citizens and neglects women’s issues (so actual sex work is totally obscured by its metaphorical role). Stratton goes on to show how African women writers have been “initiators” of “dialogue” with African male writers in order to self-authorize their work and make space for it in the African literary canon. 142 Stratton is also critical of white feminists who read African women writers through their own formal and thematic priorities, oblivious to African feminist traditions. 143

Jasbir K. Puar analyses how the “war on terror” and rising Islamophobia in the West, particularly the United States, have coopted feminist and queer struggles. While colonial orientalist fantasies projected sexual license onto the Middle East, 21st-century orientalist fantasies are “Islamophobic constructions” othering Muslims as “homophobic and perverse,” while constructing the West as “‘tolerant’ but sexually, racially, and gendered normal.” 144 On the one hand, Muslims are presented as “fundamentalist, patriarchal, and, often even homophobic.” 145 On the other hand, a “rhetoric of sexual modernization” turns American queer bodies into “normative patriot bodies.” 146 This involves the loss of an intersectional perspective and the “fissuring of race from sexuality.” 147 Muslims are seen as only marked by race and “presumptively sexually repressed, perverse, or both,” while Western queers are seen as only marked by sexuality and “presumptively white,” male, and “gender normative.” 148

Queer and Transgender Feminisms (Butler, Halberstam, Stryker): Performativity, Resignification, Continuous Transition, Self-Identification

Queer theory emerged in the period from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, in the midst of the outbreak of HIV/AIDS. 149 Queer theory, as an academic field, can be located at the intersection of poststructuralism (especially the work of Michel Foucault, but also Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze), Francophone feminism from Beauvoir to Irigaray, and African American feminism. Queer theorists have negotiated this genealogy variously; some are predominantly influenced by Foucault, less by feminist thought. The present account will focus on feminist queer theory, especially the work of Judith Butler, and its relation to earlier and subsequent feminist, queer, and transgender thought. As queer theory evolved, postcolonial feminists also became increasingly influential.

In brief, feminist queer theory, while indebted to “sexual difference” feminists such as Irigaray, critiques them through African American feminism. A core theoretical insight of African American feminism is that gender must not be considered on its own or as primary in relation to other social categories and hierarchies. Queer theorists adopt this insight. For queer theorists, sexual orientation is at least as important as gender. Indeed, they contend that what underpins the gender binary (the polarization of two genders) is the institution of “compulsory heterosexuality” or heteronormativity.

Transgender theory emerged in the mid to late 1990s, within the orbit of queer theory but also through its critique. The crux of this critique is that, despite queer theorists’ best intentions, the queer subject is primarily or implicitly white, Western, gender-normative, and cisgender. In attending to sexual orientation, queer theory neglected the spectrum of gender identities and translated issues of gender identification into issues of sexual orientation. Strands of queer activism—for example, figures such as Sylvia Rivera or Stormé DeLarverie in the United States—were marginalized by a politics of respectability led by affluent, white, cisgender queers. 150 This is particularly ironic, given the aspirations invested in the term “queer.”

In queer theory, the term “queer” was intended as an appropriation and resignification of a term of abuse but also as a floating signifier without a fixed meaning or definition and thus open to multiple and changing uses, in keeping with poststructuralist theory. “Queer” has been defined as beyond definition, transgressive, excessive, beyond polar opposites, and exceeding false polarization. So “queer” is both a particular social identity but also exemplary of a potential for openness, fluidity, and transformation in all identities (what poststructuralist theory calls the infinite deferral of the signified). It is important to point out that Spivak defined the “subaltern” and Irigaray the “feminine” in similar terms, also within a poststructuralist frame. A problem with such terms is that, though they are intended to be inclusive, they are exclusive in some of their effects. The chosen term is privileged as the only term that stands for marginality, potential for change, or openness to the past or future. In the process, the privileged term also loses specificity and becomes a metaphor. This is perhaps replicated in some uses of the term “trans” or “trans*,” where once again the term becomes a metaphor for the element of fluidity and openness in all identities.

Retracing one’s steps back to the beginnings of queer theory, while Beauvoir called for equality and the disappearance of gender, “sexual difference” feminists, such as Irigaray and Cixous, called for autonomous women’s struggles and a radical, utopian revisioning of the “feminine” to be performed by their écriture féminine . Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity ( 1990 ), one of queer theory’s inaugural texts, questions Irigaray’s utopianism and takes as her starting point Beauvoir’s “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” 151 Forty years after The Second Sex , Butler contends that societies continue to systematically produce two “discreet and polar genders,” as a prerequisite of heteronormativity; two “[d]iscreet genders are part of what ‘humanizes’ individuals within contemporary society; indeed, we regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right.” 152 One is produced as a recognizably human individual in their very repetition of genderizing practices, performance of gender norms, and iteration of speech acts that bring about gender and its effect of timeless naturalness. But the performativity and iterability of gender show up the “ imitative structure of gender ” and its historical “ contingency .” 153 In spite of the pervasiveness of genderizing practices and the unavailability of a position outside gender, the very performativity and iterability of gender open up the possibility of repeating it slightly differently. Butler hopes for destabilized and constantly resignified genders: “a fluidity of identities,” “an openness to resignification,” and “proliferating gender configurations.” 154 While gender is a normalizing, disciplinary force, it is possible to engage consciously with gender norms and open them to resignification. However, the success or failure of an attempt at resignification also depends on its audience or addressees and the authority they are prepared to attribute to it.

In the context of feminist theory, Butler’s call for continuous resignification takes the form of resignifying “woman” and “feminism” itself. As part of her “radical democratic” feminist politics, she aims to “release” the term “woman” into a “future of multiple significations.” 155 In resignifying feminism, she writes against those feminists who assume that there is an “ontological specificity to women. . . . In the 1980s, the feminist ‘we’ rightly came under attack by women of color who claimed that the ‘we’ was invariably white.” 156 Not only heterogeneity but contentions among feminists ought to be valued: “the rifts among women over the content” of the term “woman” ought to be “safeguarded and prized.” 157 Furthermore, Butler distrusts the utopianism of those feminists who believe they are “beyond the play of power,” asking instead for self-reflexive recognition of feminists’ inevitable embeddedness in power relations. 158

One of the targets of Butler’s critique is Irigaray. Her nuanced reading of Irigaray in Bodies That Matter defends her from accusations of essentialism but rejects the primacy of sexual difference over other forms of difference—race, class, sexual orientation, and so on—in Irigaray’s work. For example, Butler finds that Irigaray’s alternative mythology of two labial lips touching and being touched by each other is a self-conscious textual “rhetorical strategy” intended to counter established understandings of women’s genitals as a lack, a wound, and so on. 159 Rather than describing an essential sexual difference, Irigaray’s reparative, positive figuration of the two lips is a deliberately improper and catachrestic form of mimicry akin to Butler’s resignification; it is “not itself a natural relation, but a symbolic articulation.” 160 Irigaray distinguishes between the false feminine within gender binaries and a true feminine “excluded in and by such a binary opposition” and appearing “only in catachresis .” 161 The true feminine is an “ excessive feminine” in that it “exceeds its figuration”; its essence is to have no essence, to undermine binary oppositions and their essences, and to exceed conceptuality. 162 Irigaray’s textual practice is intended as the “very operation of the feminine in language.” 163 Butler seems to endorse Irigaray’s purely strategic essentialism. However, it is troubling that Irigaray’s true feminine is a name for all that escapes binary oppositions and social hierarchies.

Butler’s critique of Irigaray is that her exclusive focus on the feminine is an implicitly white, middle-class, heterosexual position attending to the marginalization of women qua women but neglecting other forms of social marginalization. Since Irigaray’s true feminine is “exactly what is excluded” from binary oppositions, it “monopolizes the sphere of exclusion,” resulting in Irigaray’s “constitutive exclusions” of other forms of difference. 164 For Irigaray “the outside is ‘always’ the feminine,” breaking its link to race, class, sexual orientation, and so on. 165 By contrast, Butler embraces intersectionality. Whereas for Irigaray sexual difference is “autonomous” and “more fundamental” than other differences, which are viewed as “ derived from” it, for Butler gender is “articulated through or as other vectors of power.” 166

Butler acknowledges her debt to African American literature and feminist thought, in a rare foray into literary criticism, her close reading of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing . She also pays tribute to feminists of color, such as Chicana feminist Norma Alarcón, who similarly theorized women of color as multiply rather than singly positioned and marginalized. In Passing and in related African American literary criticism by Barbara Christian, Hazel Carby, Deborah McDowell, and others, Butler finds valuable theoretical insights that “ racializing norms ” and gender norms are “articulated through one another.” 167 But these texts also identify the value of solidarity among black women and the many obstacles to this solidarity. Versions of “racial uplift” adhering to the white middle-class nuclear family have been obstructive; they have been “masculine uplift” whose disproportionate “cost . . . for black women” has been the “impossibility of sexual freedom” for them. 168 Larsen’s critique of “racial uplift”—and its promotion of white middle-class gender norms, marriage, nuclear family, and heteronormativity—grasps the interimplication of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. By contrast, Larsen’s Passing and Toni Morrison’s Sula uphold the precarious “promise of connection” among black women. 169

If “racial uplift” has been obstructive, Irigaray’s exclusive focus on the feminine is equally obstructive, according to Butler. Irigaray seems to assume that sexual difference is “unmarked by race” and that “whiteness is not a form of racial difference.” 170 By contrast, Larsen highlights historical articulations “of racialized gender, of gendered race, of the sexualization of racial ideals, or the racialization of gender norms.” 171 In Passing Clare passes as white, and Butler’s reading particularly traces the convergence of race and sexuality. Clare’s “risk-taking” takes the dual form of “racial crossing and sexual infidelity” that undermines middle-class norms, questioning both the “sanctity of marriage” and the “clarity of racial demarcations.” 172 Sexual and racial closeting are also interlinked: “the muteness of homosexuality converges in the story with the illegibility of Clare’s blackness.” 173 The word “queering” in Passing is “a term for betraying what ought to remain concealed,” in relation to both race and sexuality. 174

If some early commentators interpreted Butler’s theory of the performativity of gender and her call for gender resignification as a voluntarist, individualist, consumerist lifestyle choice for privileged Westerners, this article has tried to show just how constrained gender resignification is, and how inextricable from other social struggles. In Butler’s more recent work, issues of gender and sexual orientation are situated in interlocking frames of social exclusion and social precarity. Neither gender nor sexual orientation on their own can determine what counts as a human, livable, and grievable life. 175

Susan Stryker, one of the founders of transgender theory, addresses her first publication, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix” ( 1994 ), to feminist and queer communities and exposes their exclusion and abjection of the “transgendered subject” as a monster. 176 Through a close reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , she expresses her affinity with Frankenstein’s monster. 177 She criticizes the medical discourse that “produced sex reassignment techniques” for its “deeply conservative attempt to stabilize gendered identity in service of the naturalized heterosexual order” and insists on the disjunction between the “naturalistic effect biomedical technology can achieve” and the “subjective experience” of this transformation. 178 She rejects the continuing pathologization of the transgendered subject by psychiatrists, with the effect that “the sounds that come out of my mouth can be summarily dismissed.” 179 Notable here is an emphasis on self-identification and lived experience, which inherits the insights of phenomenological feminists that the body is not an object but a center of perception. To honor this emphasis, Stryker enlists a mixed form that combines criticism, diary entry, poetry, and theory.

Jack Halberstam’s 1998 Female Masculinity is a complex negotiation between feminist theory, queer theory, and the emerging field of transgender theory. While in medical discourse the approved narrative for the authorization of hormones and gender confirmation surgery is that of being in the wrong body and transitioning toward the right body, Halberstam warns that the “metaphor of crossing over and indeed migrating to the right body from the wrong body merely leaves the politics of stable gender identities, and therefore stable gender hierarchies, completely intact.” 180 Indeed he endorses the very “refusal of the dialectic of home and border” in Chicana/o studies and postcolonial studies. 181 Taking a broadly intersectional position, he argues that “alternative masculinities, ultimately, will fail to change existing gender hierarchies to the extent to which they fail to be feminist, antiracist, and queer.” 182

In his 2018 “Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition” of Female Masculinity Halberstam defines “female masculinity” and “the butch” in a manner that bears a family resemblance to Irigaray’s “feminine,” Spivak’s “subaltern,” and queer theory’s “queer.” “Female masculinity” includes “multiple modes of identification and gender assignation” without “stabilizing” their “meanings.” 183 “The butch” is a “placeholder for the unassimilable, for that which remains indefinable or unspeakable within the many identifications that we make and that we claim”; “let the butch stand as all that cannot be absorbed into systems of signification, legitimation, legibility, recognition, and legality.” 184 The butch is “neither cis-gender nor simply transgender” but a “bodily catachresis . . . the rhetorical practice of misnaming something for which there would otherwise be no words.” 185 In Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability ( 2018 ) Halberstam defines trans* in similar terms. In keeping with his commitment to gender identity as “continuous transition,” the term trans* “embraces the nonspecificity of the term ‘trans’ and uses it to open the term up to a shifting set of conditions and possibilities rather than to attach it only to the life narratives of a specific group of people”; the asterisk “keeps at bay any sense of knowing in advance what the meaning of this or that gender variant form may be.” 186 His 2018 “Theory in the Wild,” co-written with Tavia Nyong’o, folds a “range of concerns” in addition to gender and sexuality—“race, coloniality, ecology, anarchy”—in a language that stretches from academic to creative writing. 187

In “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin” ( 2004 ), Susan Stryker launches transgender studies as an academic field “born of the union of sexuality studies and feminism” but distinct from them. The rationale for this autonomization is that “all too often queer remains a code word for ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian,’” while “transgender phenomena are misapprehended through a lens that privileges sexual orientation.” 188 Transgender studies is intended to disrupt the “privileged . . . narratives that favor sexual identity labels” at the expense of “gender categories.” 189 But Stryker is keen to acknowledge her own Western privilege: transgender studies is “marked by its First World point of origin” and the new field risks reproducing the “power structures of colonialism by subsuming non-Western configurations of personhood into Western constructs of sexuality and gender.” 190

In “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies” ( 2006 ), Stryker continues to argue that, within queer theory, “the entire discussion of ‘gender diversity’” was “subsumed within a discussion of sexual desire—as if the only reason to express gender was to signal the mode of one’s attractions.” 191 While the term transgender “began as a buzzword of the early 1990s,” in the 21st century it is established as the name for a “wide range of phenomena that call attention to the fact that ‘gender,’ as it is lived, embodied, experienced, performed, and encountered, is more complex and varied” than previously thought. 192 As this definition suggests, transgender studies draws on the insights of all the strands of feminist theory discussed in this article—phenomenological, poststructuralist, intersectional, and postcolonial. Stryker reminds readers that, since at least Sojourner Truth, “fighting for representation within the term ‘woman’ has been . . . a part of the feminist tradition,” and “the fight over transgender inclusion within feminism is not significantly different.” 193 As with African American and postcolonial feminisms, transgender theory calls for feminists’ examination of their “exclusionary assumptions.” 194 In turn, transgender theorists need to reckon with the “whiteness” of their academic field and the “First World origin” of the term transgender, as it is being exported globally across “racial, ethnic, linguistic, and socioeconomic communities.” 195 Arundati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness explores the clash, in India, between the terms of transgender theory—emanating from the United States and disseminated by NGOs, magazines, and other publications—and the terminology, self-understanding, and practices of hijras . 196

Stryker is particularly critical of the modern Western correlation of biological or bodily sex (particularly genital status) and gender identity, where gender is taken to be merely the “representation of an objectively knowable material sex.” 197 Stryker is adamant that “Sex . . . is not the foundation of gender.” 198 Nor is sex as self-evident as it appears to be, in that the different components of sex—chromosomal, anatomical, reproductive, and morphological—do not necessarily line up. (For example, one’s chromosomal status might not line up with their anatomical sex.) This supposedly “objective” correlation is based on the “assumed correlation of a particular” component of “biological sex with a particular,” normative “social gender,” with the result that transgender people (among others) are forever viewed as making “false representations of an underlying material truth.” 199 Many feminist strands have shed light on the correlation of biological sex and “gender normativity,” and Stryker promises that transgender theory will continue to analyze the “operations of systems and institutions that simultaneously produce various possibilities of viable personhood, and eliminate others.” 200 In recognizing diversity beyond “Eurocentric norms,” Stryker notes that “relationships between bodily sex, subjective gender identity, social gender roles, sexual behaviors, and kinship status” have varied greatly. 201 Of central importance to transgender theory is subjective gender identity, which Stryker understands within the tradition of feminist phenomenology.

It is important to distinguish between gender as a social category within social classifications and hierarchies and gender as one’s self-identification and sense of self. Stryker focuses on the latter and connects it to the body, as the “contingent ground of all our knowledge.” 202 The antidote to fake objectivity is the recognition of “embodiment,” “embodied experience,” and “experiential knowledge”; one’s “gendered sense of self” and “lived complexity” of gender are “inalienable.” 203 All voices are embodied and no voice should be allowed to “mask” its “particularities and specificities” under the cloak of “false universality.” 204 It is therefore imperative to either speak from “direct experience” or to represent others “in an ethical fashion.” 205 It is equally vital to include forms of knowledge previously “disqualified as nonconceptual[,] . . . naïve” and “hierarchically inferior.” 206 Once again, Stryker here joins several strands of feminist theory that have practiced formal innovation—for example, in mixing theory, literature, and life-writing—not for its own sake but in the pursuit of truth and justice.

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to Julie Rak and Jean Wyatt for their suggestions for revision, John Frow for his comments, and Ian Richards-Karamarkovich for his in-house editorial support.

Further Reading

• Ahmed, Sara . Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
• Al-Saji, Alia . “A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racialized Habits of Seeing.” In Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment . Edited by Emily S. Lee , 133–172. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014.
• Anderson, Pamela Sue . “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability: Undoing an Oppressive Form of (Wilful) Ignorance.” In “Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson.” Edited by Pelagia Goulimari . Special issue, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 25, no. 1–2 (February–April 2020): 36–45.
• Beauvoir, Simone de . The Second Sex . Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier . London: Vintage, 2011.
• Butler, Judith . Gender Trouble . London: Routledge, 1990.
• Cixous, Hélène . “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen . Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 875–893.
• Collins, Patricia Hill . Black Feminist Thought . Rev. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2000.
• Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams . “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241–1299.
• Djebar, Assia . Women of Algiers in Their Apartment . Translated by Marjolijn De Jager . Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992.
• Fricker, Miranda . Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Gilbert, Sandra , and Susan Gubar . The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination . 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
• Halberstam, Jack . Female Masculinity . 20th anniversary ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.
• Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Irigaray, Luce . This Sex Which Is Not One . Translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.
• Lorde, Audre . Your Silence Will Not Protect You . Preface by Reni Eddo-Lodge , introduction by Sara Ahmed . London: Silver Press, 2017.
• Mahmood, Saba . “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival.” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2 (May 2001): 202–236.
• Mohanty, Chandra Talpade . “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” boundary 2 12–13 (Spring–Autumn 1984): 333–358.
• Moi, Toril . “‘ I Am Not a Woman Writer’: About Women, Literature and Feminist Theory Today .” Eurozine , June 2009.
• Morrison, Toni . The Bluest Eye . London: Picador, 1990.
• Puar, Jasbir K. “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages.” Social Text 23, no. 3–4 (2005): 121–139.
• Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s May Be: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64–81.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty . “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present , by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak , 198–311. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
• Stratton, Florence . “Periodic Embodiments: A Ubiquitous Trope in African Men’s Writing.” Research in African Literatures 21, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 111–126.
• Stryker, Susan . “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix.” GLQ 1, no. 3 (1994): 237–254.
• Walker, Alice . In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose . Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.
• Young, Iris Marion . “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality.” In On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays , by Iris Marion Young , 27–45. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

1. See also the companion, complementary piece by Pelagia Goulimari, “Genders,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (March 2020).

2. Sylvia Tamale, ed., African Sexualities: A Reader (Oxford: Pambazuka, 2011).

3. Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006); Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012); Anne Carson, Antigonick , ill. Bianca Stone (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2012); Maggie Nelson, Jane: A Murder (London: Zed Books, 2019); Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (London: Melville House, 2016); and Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era , trans. Bruce Benderson (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2013).

4. Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, Aurora Leigh , new ed., ed. Kerry McSweeney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Penguin, 2004); Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Poetics Today 6.1–2 (January 1985): 133–152; Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (London: Women’s Press, 2000); Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name; A Biomythography (London: Penguin, 2018); Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues: A Novel (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1993); Chris Kraus, I Love Dick (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2016); and Qurratulain Hyder, Fireflies in the Mist (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2008).

5. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex , trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (London: Vintage, 2011), 293 .

6. For example, the situation of women is a form of “slavery of half of humanity” and Beauvoir calls for its abolition; Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 782.

7. For example, “every existent [human being] is at once immanence and transcendence,” Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 276; if woman is flesh for man, “man is also flesh for woman; and woman is other than a carnal object” (277); “The same drama of flesh and spirit, and of finitude and transcendence, plays itself out in both sexes,” and both sexes should assume the “ambiguity” of their situation (779–780). See also Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity , trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 2015).

8. See further Pelagia Goulimari, Literary Criticism and Theory: From Plato to Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 2015), ch. 10.

9. See Michèle Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc ., trans. Trista Selous (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 60.

10. Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 672, 654, 663, 672. This description by Beauvoir is the starting point for Iris Marion Young’s work. Beauvoir adds that, lacking the means to grasp the world, a woman might offer herself as a “gift” (679). Hélène Cixous will return to this offering and reappraise it more positively in “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 875–893.

11. Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 4, 12, 15, 654.

12. Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 8.

13. Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 9.

14. Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 680.

15. Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice , 57.

16. See, for example, the section on D. H. Lawrence in Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 236–244.

17. Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 767.

18. Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 762, 765, 762, 766.

19. Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 767. For example, Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément echo Beauvoir in their book, The Newly Born Woman , trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

20. “[T]ruth itself is ambiguity,” Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 763.

21. Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” in On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays , by Iris Marion Young (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 27–45, 30.

22. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 35.

23. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 29, 35, 30.

24. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 35–36 (emphasis added).

25. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 37. Alia Al-Saji will adopt Young’s discussion of hesitation to build her own phenomenology of hesitation.

26. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 39 (emphasis added).

27. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 40.

28. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 40–41.

29. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 44.

30. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 45.

31. Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 43.

32. For example, Dianne Chisholm claims that Young’s phenomenological description is out of date and no longer relevant. Dianne Chisholm, “Climbing Like a Girl: An Exemplary Adventure in Feminist Phenomenology,” Hypatia 23, no. 1 (January–March 2008): 9–40.

33. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman , trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One,” in This Sex Which Is Not One , trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke, by Luce Irigaray (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 23–33; Luce Irigaray, “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine,” in This Sex Which Is Not One , trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke, by Luce Irigaray (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 68–85; and Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa.”

34. Luce Irigaray, “Equal or Different?,” trans. David Macey, in The Irigaray Reader , ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 30–33, 32.

35. Irigaray, “Equal or Different?,” 32–33.

36. Toril Moi, “‘Independent Women’ and Narratives of Liberation,” in Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader , ed. Elizabeth Fallaize (London: Routledge, 1998), 72–92, 86.

37. Moi, “Independent Women,” 87–88.

38. Toril Moi, “‘ I Am Not a Woman Writer’: About Women, Literature and Feminist Theory Today ,” Eurozine (June 2009), 8 (emphasis added).

39. Moi, “I Am Not a Woman Writer,” 6, quoting Beauvoir, translation amended by Moi.

40. Moi, “I Am Not a Woman Writer,” 7.

41. Moi, “I Am Not a Woman Writer,” 7 (emphasis added).

42. Michèle Le Doeuff, “Engaging with Simone de Beauvoir,” in The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir , ed. Margaret A. Simons (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 11–19, 12.

43. Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life , trans. Peter Green (London: Penguin, 2001).

44. Beauvoir quoted in Miranda Fricker, “Life-Story in Beauvoir’s Memoirs,” in The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir , ed. Claudia Card (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 208–227, 219, 225.

45. Beauvoir quoted in Fricker, “Life-Story,” 223.

46. Fricker, “Life-Story,” 226.

47. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 50–51.

48. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice , 50.

49. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice , 51.

50. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice , 150–152; see also 158–159.

51. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice , 169–175.

52. George Eliot, Mill on the Floss , ed. Gordon Sherman Haight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). See Dorota Filipczak, “The Disavowal of the Female ‘Knower’: Reading Literature in the Light of Pamela Sue Anderson’s Project on Vulnerability,” in “Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson,” ed. Pelagia Goulimari, special issue, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 25, no. 1–2 (February–April 2020): 156–164.

53. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 90–91, 23.

54. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology , 66.

55. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology , 87.

56. Ahmed’s work is also informed by Michel Foucault on disciplinary practices producing capable but docile bodies and Pierre Bourdieu on the “habitus” (naturalized socio-cultural habits).

57. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology , 101–102, 105 (emphasis added).

58. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology , 106.

59. Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (August 2007): 149–168, 161.

60. Ahmed, “Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 161.

61. Ahmed, “Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 161.

62. Ahmed, “Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 163.

63. Ahmed, “Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 163.

64. See Sara Ahmed, What’s the Use? (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

65. Alia Al-Saji, “A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racialized Habits of Seeing,” in Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment , ed. Emily S. Lee (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 133–172, 138 .

66. Al-Saji, “Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 136.

67. Al-Saji, “Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 142.

68. Al-Saji, “Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 155.

69. Al-Saji, “Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 153 (emphasis added).

70. Al-Saji, “Phenomenology of Hesitation,” 154 (emphasis added).

71. Pamela Sue Anderson, “Creating a New Imaginary for Love in Religion,” in “Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson,” ed. Pelagia Goulimari, special issue, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 25, no. 1–2 (February–April 2020): 46–53, 49 .

72. Pamela Sue Anderson, “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability: Undoing an Oppressive Form of (Wilful) Ignorance,” in “Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson,” ed. Pelagia Goulimari, special issue, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 25, no. 1–2 (February–April 2020): 36–45 .

73. See Akasha Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies , 2nd ed. (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2015). See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present , by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 284 .

74. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241–1299 ; and Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought , rev. 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2000) .

75. See Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a Woman?,” in Women in Culture: An Intersectional Anthology for Gender and Women’s Studies , ed. Bonnie Kime Scott et al., 2nd ed. (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2017); Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism , ed. Frances Smith Foster and Richard Yarborough, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019); Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God , introd. Zadie Smith, afterword by Sherley Anne Williams (London: Virago, 2018); and Nella Larsen, Passing , ed. Thadious M. Davis (New York: Penguin, 2003).

76. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing , new ed. (London: Virago, 1999). See further Goulimari, Literary Criticism and Theory , ch. 9.

77. Indeed Barbara Christian argues that black women writers have had to include self-theorizing in their texts, becoming their own critics. Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (April 1988): 67–79.

78. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (London: Picador, 1990) .

79. Toni Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib,” in What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction , ed. Carolyn C. Denard (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 18–30, 24.

80. Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks,” 18, 19.

81. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Ten Speed Press, 2007). Also included in Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You , preface by Reni Eddo-Lodge, introd. Sara Ahmed (London: Silver Press, 2017) .

82. Lorde, Your Silence , 96.

83. Lorde, Your Silence , 113.

84. Lorde, Your Silence , 12.

85. Lorde, Your Silence , 29, and see the chapter “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred and Anger.”

86. See “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” in Lorde, Your Silence .

87. Lorde, Your Silence , 78.

88. See “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” in Lorde, Your Silence .

89. See “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” in Lorde, Your Silence .

90. Alice Walker, Color Purple (London: Women’s Press, 1983).

91. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004) , xi (emphasis added).

92. Walker, In Search , xi (emphasis added).

93. Alice Walker, “Looking for Zora,” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose , by Alice Walker (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004), 93–118 .

94. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination , 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000) .

95. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s May Be: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64–81 .

96. Hurston, Their Eyes , 29.

97. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Picador, 1988); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) .

98. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection , 23, 36.

99. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection , 10 (emphasis added).

100. Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 6.

101. Saidiya V. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1–14, 12.

102. Hartman, “Venus,” 11–12.

103. Saidiya V. Hartman, “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner,” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (July 2018): 465–490, 470, 486.

104. Hartman, “Anarchy,” 471, 473.

105. Hartman, “Anarchy,” 474, 486 (emphasis added).

106. Hartman, “Anarchy,” 471, 470 (emphasis added).

107. Hartman, “Anarchy,” 469, 466, 471.

108. Hartman, “Anarchy,” 471. See further Saidiya V. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019).

109. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather (London: Routledge, 1995), 6.

110. H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines , ed. Robert Hampson (London: Penguin, 2007), 24.

111. Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade , trans. Dorothy S. Blair (London: Quartet, 1989).

112. Djebar, Fantasia , 6, 8.

113. McClintock, Imperial Leather , 45.

114. Assia Djebar, Women of Algiers in Their Apartment , trans. Marjolijn De Jager (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992) .

115. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 309. Delivered as a lecture in 1983, it was published in different versions of varying length. This article discusses the version in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) .

116. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 271.

117. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 270.

118. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 267.

119. See Goulimari, Literary Criticism and Theory , ch. 11. See also Hartman on singularity, as discussed in the section “ African American Feminisms (Morrison, Lorde, Walker, Spillers, Hartman): Race, Intersectionality, Differences among Women and among Black Women ” in this article.

120. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 307, 273.

121. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 309.

122. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 310.

123. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 283, 284.

124. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (October 1985): 243–261, 243; and Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre , 3rd ed., ed. Jane Jack and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

125. Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts,” 251.

126. Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts,” 248.

127. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea , ed. Angela Smith (London: Penguin, 1997).

128. Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts,” 249.

129. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” boundary 2 12–13 (Spring–Autumn 1984): 333–358 .

130. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 333.

131. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 344.

132. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 39 (emphasis added).

133. Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2 (May 2001): 202–236 .

134. Mahmood, “Feminist Theory,” 202.

135. Mahmood, “Feminist Theory,” 217.

136. Mahmood, “Feminist Theory,” 205.

137. Mahmood, “Feminist Theory,” 224.

138. Florence Stratton, Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender (London: Routledge, 1994), 1.

139. Stratton, Contemporary African Literature , 10.

140. Stratton, Contemporary African Literature , 18.

141. Florence Stratton, “Periodic Embodiments: A Ubiquitous Trope in African Men’s Writing,” Research in African Literatures 21, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 111–126, 112 .

142. Stratton, Contemporary African Literature , 11.

143. Stratton, Contemporary African Literature , 11.

144. Jasbir K. Puar, “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages,” Social Text 23.3–4 (2005): 121–139, 122 (emphasis added).

145. Puar, “Queer Times,” 131.

146. Puar, “Queer Times,” 122, 121.

147. Puar, “Queer Times,” 126.

148. Puar, “Queer Times,” 126.

149. See, for example, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire , 30th anniversary ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

150. See Eileen Myles, “ The Lady Who Appears to Be a Gentleman ,” Harper’s Magazine , June 2019.

151. Beauvoir, The Second Sex , 293.

152. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), 140, 139–140.

153. Butler, Gender Trouble , 137 (emphasis added).

154. Butler, Gender Trouble , 138, 141.

155. Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange , by Seyla Benhabib, et al. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 35–58, 50–51.

156. Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” 49.

157. Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” 50.

158. Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” 39.

159. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993), 38; and Luce Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak Together,” in This Sex Which Is Not One , trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke, by Luce Irigaray (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 205–218 .

160. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 46 (emphasis added).

161. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 37 (emphasis added).

162. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 39, 41 (emphasis added).

163. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 46.

164. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 37, 42.

165. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 49.

166. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 167 (emphasis added).

167. Nella Larsen, Passing , ed. Thadious M. Davis (New York: Penguin, 2003); and Butler, Bodies That Matter , 182 (emphasis added).

168. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 178.

169. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 183; and Toni Morrison, Sula (London: Picador, 1991).

170. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 181–182.

171. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 182.

172. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 169.

173. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 175.

174. Butler, Bodies That Matter , 176.

175. See Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004); and Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2016).

176. Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix,” GLQ 1, no. 3 (1994): 237–254 , 241. See also 251n2: “transgender” as “an umbrella term that refers to all identities or practices that cross over, cut across, move between, or otherwise queer socially constructed sex/gender boundaries.”

177. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein , 2nd ed., ed. J. Paul Hunter (London: W. W. Norton, 2012).

178. Stryker, “My Words,” 242.

179. Stryker, “My Words,” 244.

180. Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity , 20th anniversary ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 171 .

181. Halberstam, Female Masculinity , 170.

182. Halberstam, Female Masculinity , 173.

183. Halberstam, Female Masculinity , xii.

184. Halberstam, Female Masculinity , xx, xxi.

185. Halberstam, Female Masculinity , xx.

186. Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 95, 52–53, 4.

187. Jack Halberstam and Tavia Nyong’o, “Introduction: Theory in the Wild,” in “Wildness,” ed. Jack Halberstam and Tavia Nyong’o, special issue, South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (July 2018): 453–464, 462.

188. Susan Stryker, “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin,” GLQ 10, no. 2 (2004): 212–215, 214.

189. Stryker, “Transgender Studies,” 212.

190. Stryker, “Transgender Studies,” 214–215.

191. Susan Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies,” in The Transgender Studies Reader , ed. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (London: Routledge, 2006), 1–18, 1.

192. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 3.

193. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 7.

194. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 7.

195. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 14–15.

196. Arundati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2017). On the expression of third-gender and non-normative gender identities in non-Western cultures, see, for example, the Rae-rae (Tahitian trans women), Faʻafafine (Samoan third gender), and Māhū (Polynesian “middle” or third gender).

197. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 8.

198. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 9.

199. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 9.

200. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 13, 3.

201. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 14.

202. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 12.

203. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 12, 13, 10, 7.

204. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 12.

205. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 13.

206. Stryker, “(De)Subjectivated Knowledges,” 13.

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Approaches to Feminism

Feminist philosophy emerged in the US in the 1970s following only a decade behind the rise of the US women's movement in the 1960s. Although Simone de Beauvoir published her now highly influential The Second Sex in 1953, it would take at least a decade for women in the US to begin to organize around the injustices Beauvoir identified, and even longer for feminist philosophers in the US to turn to her work for inspiration.

Although I will focus in this introductory essay on the emergence of contemporary US feminist philosophies, it is important to stress that this is only one chapter in a larger history of feminist philosophy. Feminist philosophies have histories that date back historically at least to the early modern period, and have different genealogies in different geographical regions. Both the history of and particular character of feminist philosophy in other countries and in other time periods varies in important and interesting ways. It is crucial, therefore, to understand this essay only as an introduction to contemporary feminist philosophies in the U.S.

Understanding the emergence of feminist philosophy in the U.S. requires an overview of at least two contexts — the political context of what came to be called the “second wave of the woman's movement” and the nature of philosophy in U.S. academies.

1. The Political Context: The Rise of the U.S. Feminist Movement

2. the rise of feminist philosophical scholarship in the u.s., 3. the inheritance from philosophy, 4. approaches to feminist philosophy: overview of the encyclopedia sub-entries, other internet resources, related entries.

The 1950s are a complex decade in the U.S. The country is at the height of the McCarthy era, yet it is the same decade that witnesses the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1953 Barrows Dunham, chair of the philosophy department at Temple University is subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Although he is tried and acquitted for refusing to provide more than his name, address, and age, Temple University fires him. A number of philosophers are called upon to testify before the HUAC and others are fired from positions because of their membership in the Communist Party. In 1955 Rosa Parks is arrested for keeping her seat in the front of a bus in Montgomery Alabama just one year after the Supreme Court in Brown vs. the Board of Education bans segregation in public schools. In 1957 Martin Luther King is named president of the newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference and begins his campaign to end race discrimination.

It is important to remember that 1950 is only five years into a campaign to encourage women to return to home and hearth, leaving the jobs they had taken on as part of the war effort. [ 1 ] As one telling example, consider Adlai Stevenson's 1955 address to the Smith College graduating class urging these educated women not to define themselves by a profession but to participate in politics through the role of wife and mother. While McCarthyism rooted out political subversion, science and the media worked to instill proper gender roles. A 1956 Life magazine published interviews with five male psychiatrists who argued that female ambition was the root of mental illness in wives, emotional upsets in husbands, and homosexuality in boys.

But the increasing involvement of women in freedom marches and, somewhat later, the protests of the Vietnam War give rise to a budding awareness of gender injustices. Looking back in the 1975 edition to her landmark study of the U.S. Women's Movement in 1959, Eleanor Flexner explains:

First in the South and eventually everywhere in this country, women were involved in these struggles. Some white women learned the degree to which black women were worse off than they were, or than black men. White and black women learned what the minority of women active in the organized labor movement had learned much earlier: that women were typically excluded from policy-making leadership roles of even the most radical movement, a lesson that would have to be relearned again and again in the political and peace campaigns of the late sixties (1975, xxix).

The National Organization for Women forms in 1966, petitioning to stop sex segregation of want ads and one year later to request federally funded childcare centers. By 1968 NOW begins to focus on legalizing abortion. In 1967 Eugene McCarthy introduces the Equal Rights Amendment in the Senate. In 1968 feminists in New York protest the Miss America pageant and crown a live sheep as Miss America and set up a ‘freedom trashcan’ in which to dispose of oppressive symbols, including bras, girdles, wigs, and false eyelashes. (Although there was no fire, it was this symbolic protest that the media transformed into the infamous ‘bra burning’ incident.) The Stonewall riot in 1969 marks the beginning of the gay and lesbian rights movement. In 1970 the San Francisco Women's Liberation Front invades a CBS stockholders meeting to demand changes in how the network portrays women, and a model affirmative action plan is published by NOW and submitted to the Labor Department. In this same year three key texts of the U.S. feminist movement are published: Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex ; Kate Millett's Sexual Politics ; and Robin Morgan's Sisterhood is Powerful . In 1970 a press conference headed by women's movement leaders Gloria Steinem, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Flo Kennedy, Sally Kempton, Susan Brownmiller, Ivy Bottini, and Dolores Alexander expressed solidarity with the struggles of gays and lesbians to attain liberation in a sexist society. However, in 1971, at a Women's National Abortion conference, while adopting demands for repeal of all abortion laws, for no restrictions on contraceptives, and taking a stance against forced sterilization, the group votes down a demand for freedom of sexual expression, causing many in the audience to walk out in protest and seeding the development of a separatist movement within the feminist movement (See What is Feminism? ).

It is out of this powerful social and political cauldron that feminist philosophy emerges in the U.S. While few would now dispute the claim that the development of ideas and theories in the sciences, as well as the social science and humanities, reflect and are influenced by their social, historical, and intellectual contexts, philosophers in the U.S. have, until recently, paid scant attention to the social contexts of twentieth century U.S. philosophy, particularly with how cultural and political factors have influenced the movements of philosophy within the academy (McCumber 2001). The emergence of feminist philosophy in the U.S. presents an excellent illustration of the close intersection between the development of philosophical positions and methods, and their social contexts.

Many of the early writings of U.S. feminist philosophers arose from attempts to grapple with issues that emerged from the women's movement: the identification of the nature of sexism and the underlying causes of the oppression of women, questions of how to best obtain emancipation for women — e.g., equal rights within the current political and social structure vs. revolutionary changes of that structure, the issue of ‘woman's nature,’ philosophical analyses of the morality of abortion, and so on. In this first decade of writing, feminist philosophers in the U.S. also turned their attention to the past to investigate how canonical philosophers dealt with the question of women, both to determine if their views might provide resources for addressing contemporary issues or whether the sexism of their theories continued to pervade contemporary philosophical and, perhaps, even social and political practices.

A snapshot, albeit a limited image, of the emergence of feminist philosophical scholarship in the U.S. and beyond can be obtained by looking at numbers of journal articles catalogued in The Philosophers Index . [ 2 ] The Philosopher's Index lists only three articles under the keyword ‘feminism’ until 1973 when the number leaps to eleven thanks in large part to a special issue of The Philosophical Forum edited by Carol Gould and Marx Wartofsky that became the basis for an important first anthology on feminist philosophy, Women and Philosophy: Toward a Theory of Liberation . From 1974 to 1980 these numbers increased to 109 entries for this seven year period, with the decade between 1981 to 1990 witnessing an explosion of work in the area of feminist philosophy with 718 entries listed in the Philosopher's Index .In the following 12 years 2,058 more articles are added to the Index under this heading.

Clearly there are a number of reasons for the startling expansion of feminist philosophical work in the U.S. Although I cannot trace all of them, I would like to identify a few that are particularly significant. First is the fact that many philosophers in the U.S. were involved in the social justice movements of the 60s. Most of the philosophers who contributed to the emergence of feminist philosophy in the 70s in the U.S. were active in or influenced by the women's movement. As a result of this participation, these philosophers were attentive to and concerned about the injustices caused by unfair practices emerging from the complex phenomena of sexism. Since their professional skills included the realm of philosophical scholarship and teaching, it comes as no surprise that they would turn the tools they knew best to feminist ends. Second, by the 1970s many women in traditionally male professions often experienced what Dorothy Smith called a ‘fault-line’ in which the expectations of the conventionally ‘proper role of women’ and their own professional experiences were in tension. As women moved through the profession of philosophy in the U.S. in increasing numbers, they often found themselves personally confronted by the sexism of the profession. Sexual harassment and other sexist practices contributed to creating a chilly climate for women in philosophy. But thanks to the consciousness-raising of their involvement in the women's movement, these women were less likely to internalize the message that women were, by nature, less capable of philosophical work or to give in to the sometimes unconscious efforts to exclude them from the profession.

In response to the sexism of the profession, U.S. feminist philosophers organized the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) in 1972. [ 3 ] The emergence of SWIP is a third component in the swift rise in contemporary feminist philosophical scholarship in the U.S. SWIP was founded to promote and support women in philosophy. This goal took two forms: 1) working to overcome sexist practices in the profession and 2) supporting feminist philosophical scholarship. While the efforts of SWIP to overcome sexism in the profession certainly contributed to the inclusion and retention of more women in philosophy, it was in the latter goal that SWIP made a significant impact on scholarship. SWIP divisions were formed in a fashion parallel to the American Philosophical Association, with three divisions — Pacific SWIP, Midwest SWIP, and Eastern SWIP (plus a Canadian SWIP) — each of which held yearly or bi-yearly meetings that focused on feminist philosophical scholarship. In addition, the International Association of Feminist Philosophers (IAPh) was founded in 1974 in order to support international exchange of feminist philosophies.

After a decade of meetings, U.S. SWIP members decided to launch an academic journal, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy . Hypatia was set up “to provide a forum for dialogue on the philosophical issues raised by the women's liberation movement” and published feminist philosophical work committed “to understanding and ending the sexist oppression of women, and a sense of the relevance of philosophy to the task.” [ 4 ] While Hypatia was certainly not the only forum in which feminist philosophy was published, it contributed to the creation of a sustained dialogue amongst feminist philosophers in the U.S. and beyond, and a forum for developing feminist philosophical methods and approaches.

Those who drafted the first wave of contemporary feminist philosophical scholarship in the U.S. were influenced by another very important context, their philosophical training. Until very recently one could not go to graduate school to study ‘feminist philosophy.’ While students and scholars could turn to the writings of Simone de Beauvoir or look back historically to the writings of ‘first wave’ feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft, most of the philosophers writing in the first decades of the emergence of feminist philosophical scholarship both in the U.S. and in other countries brought their particular training and expertise to bear on the development of this area of scholarship.

Although many of the writings of the first decade of feminist philosophical scholarship in the U.S. were devoted to analyzing issues raised by the women's liberation movement, such as abortion, affirmative action, equal opportunity, the institutions of marriage, sexuality, and love, feminist philosophical scholarship increasingly focused on the very same types of issues philosophers had been and were dealing with. And since these feminist philosophers employed the philosophical tools they both knew best and found the most promising, U.S. feminist philosophy began to emerge from all the traditions of philosophy prevalent within the U.S. at the end of the twentieth century including analytic, Continental, and classical American philosophy. It should come as no surprise then that the thematic focus of their work was often influenced by the topics and questions highlighted by these traditions.

Feminist philosophical scholarship in the U.S. begins with attention to women, to their roles and locations. What are women doing? What social/political locations are they part of or excluded from? How do their activities compare to those of men? Are the activities or exclusions of some groups of women different from those of other groups and why? What do the various roles and locations of women allow or preclude? How have their roles been valued or devalued? How do the complexities of a woman's situatedness, including her class, race, ability, and sexuality impact her locations? To this we add attention to the experiences and concerns of women. Have any of women's experiences or problems been ignored or undervalued? How might attention to these transform our current methods or values? And from here we move to the realm of the symbolic. How is the feminine instantiated and constructed within the texts of philosophy? What role does the feminine play in forming, either through its absence or its presence, the central concepts of philosophy? And so on.

The ‘difference’ of feminist philosophical scholarship as it has developed in the U.S. proceeds not from a unique method but from the premise that gender is an important lens for analysis. Feminist philosophers in the U.S. and beyond have shown that taking gender seriously provides new insights in all the areas of philosophical scholarship: history of philosophy, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of science, aesthetics, social and political philosophy, metaphysics, etc.

Feminist philosophical scholarship is not homogeneous either in methods or in conclusions. Indeed, there has been significant debate within feminist philosophical circles concerning the effectiveness of particular methods within philosophy for feminist goals. Some, for example, have found the methods of analytic philosophy to provide clarity of both form and argumentation not found in some schools of Continental philosophy, while others have argued that such alleged clarity comes at the expense of rhetorical styles and methodological approaches that provide insights into affective, psychic, or embodied components of human experience. Other feminists find approaches within American pragmatism to provide the clarity of form and argumentation sometimes missing in Continental approaches and the connection to real world concerns sometimes missing in analytic approaches.

While Hypatia has embraced the diversity of approaches in feminist philosophy, publishing work from all three traditions, feminist scholarship in each of these traditions is advanced and supported though scholarly exchange at various professional societies. The Society for Analytical Feminism, for example, was founded in 1991 to promote the study of issues in feminism by methods broadly construed as analytic, to examine the use of analytic methods as applied to feminist issues, and to provide a means by which those interested in analytical feminist can meet and exchange ideas. philoSOPHIA was established in 2005 to promote continental feminist scholarly and pedagogical development. The Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology is a network of scholars who do work in phenomenology from a feminist perspective or who use phenomenological approaches in their scholarly work. In the field of feminist pragmatism, an affiliated group of scholars have formed the Jane Collective to advance pragmatism in the spirit of the social philosophy of Jane Addams (1860-1935). The Society for the Study of Women Philosophers was established in 1987 to promote the study of the contributions of women to the profession of philosophy.

While feminists have clearly embraced approaches from various traditions within philosophy, they have also argued for the reconfiguration of accepted structures and problematics of philosophy. For example, feminists have not only rejected the privileging of epistemological concerns over ethical concerns common to much of U.S. philosophy, they have argued that these two areas of concern are inextricably intertwined. Such questioning of the problematic of mainstream approaches to philosophy has often led to feminists using methods and approaches from more than one philosophical tradition.

One key area of intersection noted by Georgia Warnke is the appropriation of psychoanalytic theory. (Feminist Approaches to the Intersection of Analytic and Continental Philosophy.) The importance of psychoanalytic approaches is also underscored in Shannon Sullivan's essay Feminist Approaches to the Intersection of Pragmatism and Continental Philosophy. Given the importance of psychoanalytic feminism for all three traditions, a separate essay on this approach to feminist theory is included in this section.

The following are links to essays in this section:

• Analytic Feminism (Ann Garry)
• Continental Feminism (Ann J. Cahill)
• Pragmatist Feminism (Judy Whipps)
• Intersections Between Pragmatist and Continental Feminism (Shannon Sullivan)
• Intersections Between Analytic and Continental Feminism (Georgia Warnke)
• -->Psychoanalytic Feminism --> (Emily Zakin)

The essays in this section provide overviews of the dominant approaches to feminist philosophy in the U.S. It is important to note that U.S. feminist philosophy has been influenced by feminist philosophical work in other countries. For example, analytic feminism in the U.S. has benefited from the work of feminist philosophers in the United Kingdom and Canada; U.S. Continental feminist scholarship has been richly influenced by the work of feminist philosophers in Europe and Australia. But it is also important to note that, with only a few exceptions, the work of feminist philosophers in Asia, South America, Africa, and Russia have not been the focus of attention of most U.S. feminist philosophers.

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• Code, Lorraine, 2006, Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location , New York: Oxford University Press.
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• –––, 1991, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
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• Freeland, Cynthia (ed.), 1998, Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle , University Park: Penn State Press.
• Fricker, Miranda and Jennifer Hornsby, 2000, Feminism in Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Frye, Marilyn, 1983, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory , Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press.
• Frye, Marilyn & Sarah Lucia Hoagland (eds.), 2000, Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly , University Park: Penn State Press.
• Fraser, Nancy, 1989, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Gardner, Catherine Villanueva, 2000, Rediscovering Women Philosophers: Philosophical Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy , Boulder: Westview Press.
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• Grasswick, Heidi, 2011, Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge , New York: Springer.
• Grosz, Elizabeth, 1994, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporal Feminism , Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Hamington, Maurice, 2004, Embodied Care: Jane Addams, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Feminist Ethics , Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
• Harding, Sandra, 2008, Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities , Durham: Duke University Press.
• Heyes, Cressida J., 2007, Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Holland, Nancy (ed.), 1997, Feminist Interpretations of Jacques Derrida , University Park: Penn State Press.
• Holland, Nancy & Pat Huntington (eds.), 2001 Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger , University Park: Penn State Press.
• Honig, Bonnie (ed.), 1995, Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt , University Park: Penn State Press.
• Irigaray, Luce, 1985, Speculum of the Other Woman , Trans. Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Jacobson, Anne Jaap (ed.), 2000, Feminist Interpretations of David Hume , University Park: Penn State Press.
• Jaggar, Alison, 1983, Feminist Politics and Human Nature , Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Allanheld.
• Jantzen, Gail, 1998, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion , Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Kittay, Eva, 1999, Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency , New York: Routledge.
• Kofman, Sarah, 1985, The Enigma of Woman: Women in Freud's Writings , Trans. Catherine Porter, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• –––, 1998, Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher , Trans. Catherine Porter, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Kourany, Janet, 1998, Philosophy in a Feminist Voice , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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• Le Dœuff, Michèle, 1989, The Philosophical Imaginary , Trans. C. Gordon, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Léon Céline & Sylvia Walsh (eds.), 1997, Feminist Interpretations of Soren Kierkegaard , University Park: Penn State Press.
• Lloyd, Genevieve, 2001, Feminism and the History of Philosophy , New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1984, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Longino, Helen, 1990, Science as Social Knowledge , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Lugones, María, 2003, Pilgrimages = Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against MultipleOoppressions , Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• McWhorter, Ladelle, 2009, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy , Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Mann, Bonnie, 2006, Women's Liberation and the Sublime: Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment , New York: Oxford University Press.
• May, Vivian M., 2007, Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction , New York: Routledge.
• Millett, Kate, 1970, Sexual Politics , Garden City: Doubleday.
• Mills, Patricia Jagentowicz (ed.), 1996, Feminist Interpretations of G.W.F. Hegel , University Park: Penn State Press.
• Morgan, Robin, 1970, Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Woman's Liberation Movement , New York: Vintage Books.
• Murphy, Julien (ed.), 1999, Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Paul Sartre , University Park: Penn State Press.
• Narayan, Uma and Sandra Harding, 2000, De-centering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World , Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Nelson, Lynn Hankinson & Jack Nelson (eds.), 2003, Feminist Interpretations of W. Quine , University Park: Penn State Press.
• Nussbaum, Martha C., 1999, Sex and Social Justice , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Oliver, Kelly, 1993, Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind , Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Oliver, Kelly & Marilyn Pearsall (eds.), 1998, Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche , University Park: Penn State Press.
• Pearsall, Marilyn (ed.), 1999, Woman and Values: Readings in Recent Feminist Philosophy , Belmont: Wadsworth.
• Ruddick, Sara, 1989, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace , Boston: Beacon Press.
• Scheman, Naomi, 1993, Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority, and Privilege , New York: Routledge.
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• Schwartzman, Lisa H., 2006, Challenging liberalism: Feminism as Political Critique , University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
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• Sullivan, Shannon, 2006, Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege , Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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• Tougas, Cecile T., and Sara Ebenrick (eds.), 2000, Presenting Women Philosophers Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• Tuana, Nancy (ed.), 1994, Feminist Interpretations of Plato , University Park: Penn State Press.
• –––, 1992, Woman and the History of Philosophy , New York: Paragon Press.
• Waithe, Mary Ellen (ed.), 1987-91, A History of Women Philosophers , Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
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Feminist Ethics

Embodied Relationality as a Normative Guide for Management and Organizations

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• Marianna Fotaki 4  

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The chapter considers developments in feminist ethics through the prism of post-structuralism and psychoanalysis. It proposes a notion of ethics based on interconnectedness and relationality as an intersubjective phenomenon that is embedded in the social norms, discourses, and political arrangements. The aim is to advance the new organizational ethics by drawing inspiration from diverse strands of feminism as a way of counteracting exclusionary organizational practices. Specifically, the chapter develops an ethical proposition of the feminist embodied relationality by drawing on Bracha Ettinger’s productive engagement with psychoanalysis, philosophy, and art as an affirmative ethics of life. Ettinger’s work is foregrounded through engaging with Judith Butler’s thinking on precarity of human life and Jessica Benjamin’s work on “thirdness” as a space for relating emerging between the self and the other. Overall, the proposed ethical framing offers a new understanding of the work of organizations while striving to promote equality in management practice.

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Fotaki, M. (2022). Feminist Ethics. In: Neesham, C., Reihlen, M., Schoeneborn, D. (eds) Handbook of Philosophy of Management. Handbooks in Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76606-1_15

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Key Concepts/Overview

Feminist Theory

• Key areas of focus within feminist theory include discrimination and exclusion  on the basis of sex and gender , objectification, structural and economic inequality, power and oppression, and  gender roles and stereotypes , among others.
• Some feminist theory provides an analytic framework for understanding how women's location in, and experience of, social situations differ from men's.
• For example, cultural feminists look to the different values associated with womanhood and femininity as a reason why men and women experience the social world differently. 
• Feminist theories that focus on gender inequality recognize that women's location in, and experience of, social situations are not only different but also unequal to men's.
• Liberal feminists argue that women have the same capacity as men for moral reasoning and agency, but that patriarchy, particularly the sexist division of labor, has historically denied women the opportunity to express and practice this reasoning. 
• Theories of gender oppression go further than theories of gender difference and gender inequality by arguing that not only are women different from or unequal to men, but that they are actively oppressed, subordinated,  and even abused by men .
• Power is the key variable in the two main theories of gender oppression: psychoanalytic feminism and  radical feminism .

Intersectional feminism: what it means and why it matters right now

Date: Wednesday, 1 July 2020

Originally published on Medium.com/@UN_Women

From the disparate impacts of the COVID-19 crisis in communities around the globe to international protests against racism and discrimination, current events have shown that we are far from achieving equality. Trying to interpret and battle a multitude of injustices right now may feel overwhelming. How do we take on all these issues, and why should we? Intersectional feminism offers a lens through which we can better understand one another and strive towards a more just future for all.

Kimberlé Crenshaw , an American law professor who coined the term in 1989 explained Intersectional feminism as, “a prism for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other,” in a recent interview with Time .

“All inequality is not created equal,” she says. An intersectional approach shows the way that people’s social identities can overlap, creating compounding experiences of discrimination.

“We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts,” Crenshaw said.

Intersectional feminism centres the voices of those experiencing overlapping, concurrent forms of oppression in order to understand the depths of the inequalities and the relationships among them in any given context.

In Brazil, Valdecir Nascimento , a prominent women’s rights activist, says that, “The dialogue to advance black women’s rights should put them in the centre.” For 40 years, Nascimento has been fighting for equal rights, “Black women from Brazil have never stopped fighting,” she says, noting that black women were part of the feminist movement, the black movement, and other progressive movements. “We don’t want others to speak for black feminists—neither white feminists nor black men. It’s necessary for young black women to take on this fight. We are the solution in Brazil, not the problem,” she says.

Using an intersectional lens also means recognizing the historical contexts surrounding an issue. Long histories of violence and systematic discrimination have created deep inequities that disadvantage some from the outset. These inequalities intersect with each other, for example, poverty, caste systems, racism and sexism, denying people their rights and equal opportunities. The impacts extend across generations.

Sonia Maribel Sontay Herrera is an indigenous woman and human rights defender from Guatemala where systematic discrimination against indigenous women has gone on for decades. Herrera has felt the consequences of these historical injustices since she was a girl.

At ten years old, she moved to a city to attend school, an opportunity most indigenous girls don’t get, she says. However, Herrera was forced to abandon her native language, K'iche', and learn in Spanish, which she experienced as an unjust burden for an indigenous woman, since it was the language of the colonizer. After finishing her studies, as Herrera searched for professional work, she immediately encountered racism and sexist stereotypes. Since she was an indigenous woman, some said that they only had work for her in the home.

“They see us as domestic workers; when they see an indigenous woman, they assume that’s all we can do,” she explains, outlining the ways in which she experiences compounding forms of discrimination based on her identity.

“Those who are most impacted by gender-based violence, and by gender inequalities, are also the most impoverished and marginalized—black and brown women, indigenous women, women in rural areas, young girls, girls living with disabilities, trans youth and gender non-conforming youth,” explains Majandra Rodriguez Acha , a youth leader and climate justice advocate from Lima, Peru. That marginalized communities are the most impacted by natural disasters and the devastating effects of climate change is not a mere coincidence, she stresses.

While issues ranging from discrimination based on gender identity to disparate environmental burdens may seem separate at first, intersectional feminism illuminates the connections between all fights for justice and liberation. It shows us that fighting for equality means not only turning the tables on gender injustices, but rooting out all forms of oppression. It serves as a framework through which to build inclusive, robust movements that work to solve overlapping forms of discrimination, simultaneously.

As concurrent, ongoing crises unfold across the globe today, we can use an intersectional feminist lens to understand their linkages and build back better.

Intersectional feminism matters today because:

The impacts of crises are not uniform.

Countries and communities around the world are facing multiple, compounding threats. While the sets of issues vary from place to place, they share the effect of magnifying pre-existing needs such as housing, food, education, care , employment, and protection .

Yet crises responses often fail to protect the most vulnerable. “If you are invisible in everyday life, your needs will not be thought of, let alone addressed, in a crisis situation,” says Matcha Phorn-In , a lesbian feminist human-rights defender from Thailand who works to address the unique needs of LGBTIQ+ people, many of whom are indigenous, in crisis settings.

In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, the challenges of the virus have exacerbated long standing inequities and decades of discriminatory practices, leading to unequal trajectories.

Rather than fragmenting our fights, taking on board the experiences and challenges faced by different groups has a unifying effect; we are better able to understand the issues at hand and, therefore, find solutions that work for all.

Injustices must not go unnamed or unchallenged.

Looking through an intersectional feminist lens, we see how different communities are battling various, interconnected issues, all at once. Standing in solidarity with one another, questioning power structures, and speaking out against the root causes of inequalities are critical actions for building a future that leaves no one behind.

“If you see inequality as a “them” problem or “unfortunate other” problem, that is a problem,” says Crenshaw . “We’ve got to be open to looking at all of the ways our systems reproduce these inequalities, and that includes the privileges as well as the harms.”

A new ‘normal’ must be fair for all.

Because crises lay bare the structural inequalities that shape our lives, they are also moments of big resets – catalysts for rebuilding societies that offer justice and safety to everyone. They provide a chance to redefine ‘normal’ rather than return to business as usual.

Taking an intersectional feminist approach to the crises of today helps us seize the opportunity to build back better, stronger, resilient, and equal societies.

“COVID-19 has presented us... with a rare opportunity,” says Silliniu Lina Chang, President of the Samoa Victim Support Group, who has been advocating for improved services for victims of domestic violence during the pandemic. “[It is] a time for all of us to reset. Think outside of our comfort zone and look beyond to the neighbour that is in need.”

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16 Feminist Approaches to Counseling

Carolyn Zerbe Enns, Department of Psychology, Cornell College, Mount Vernon, IA

• Published: 18 September 2012
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This chapter summarizes central values and features of feminist counseling. It discusses feminist theories that support feminist counseling, characteristics of an egalitarian feminist therapy relationship, and the ways in which feminist counselors enact the maxim “the personal is political.” A biopsychosocial, ecological approach to assessment and conceptualization is proposed. The chapter articulates ways in which feminist counseling operates from a social justice perspective informed by locational, intersectional, and multicultural frameworks, as well as approaches that are attentive to the diverse gender and social identities of clients. Examples of feminist counseling as an integrative approach are provided. Future directions include building linkages across social justice approaches and practicing feminist values in a changing society, in counseling men, and in global contexts.

Feminist therapy emerged in the midst of second-wave feminist activism during the 1960s and 1970s (Contratto & Rossier, 2005 ; Kaschak, 1981 ). The first forms of feminist counseling and therapy were modeled after consciousness-raising groups, which were created as a vehicle for exploring women’s experiences of sexism and discrimination, and building commitment to social and political activism. Participants soon discovered that these ad hoc groups also offered therapeutic and personal growth benefits, assisted women in making connections between the personal and political realities of their lives, and fostered visions of mental health based on egalitarian roles (Brodsky, 1977 ; Kravetz, 1978 ).

In parallel developments, feminist psychologists identified biases within personality theories and research (Barrett, Berg, Eaton, & Pomeroy, 1974 ; Weisstein, 1970 ), double standards of mental heath that overvalued “masculine” attributes and devalued “feminine” attributes (Broverman, Broverman, Clarkson, Rosenkrantz, & Vogel, 1970 ), psychotherapy relationships in which the therapist defined reality for the client (Chesler, 1972 ), and diagnostic practices that contributed to the labeling of persons without regard to the contexts in which they experienced distress (Kaplan, 1983 ). Extended definitions and principles of feminist counseling and psychotherapy were constructed during the mid-1970s and 1980s (e.g., Brodsky, 1980 ; Greenspan, 1983 ; Rawlings & Carter, 1977 ; Sturdivant, 1980 ).

During its 40-year evolution, feminist counseling has grown from a critique of psychotherapy practice to a well-developed approach that is embedded within the rich research and theoretical foundation of the feminist psychology of women and gender (e.g., Crawford, 2006 ; Matlin, 2008; Yoder, 2007 ) and featured in a variety of introductory counseling texts (e.g., Corey, 2009 ; Murdock, 2008 ; Sharf, 2008 ). Feminist therapists have also contributed to a wider consensus about values, ethics, and consumer rights in counseling. For example, feminist psychologists were among the first to call for informed consent practices and increased attention to the rights of clients (Hare-Mustin, Marecek, Kaplan, & Liss-Levinson, 1979 ). Feminist counselors brought attention to the ethical problems of violence and abuse in relationships, boundary violations in psychotherapy, careless and harmful diagnostic practices, gender role strains that limited development, and a monocultural model of mental health. They also proposed aspirational approaches to ethics (Brabeck, 2000 ; Brown & Brodsky, 1992 ; Feminist Therapy Institute [FTI] 2000 ; Vasquez, 2003 ). Most recently, many of the values and contributions of feminist psychologists have informed the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Girls and Women ( 2007 ).

Since its earliest days, feminist counseling has been described as a large umbrella or awning that supports a flexible scaffold for organizing philosophical assumptions about human experience, personal and social change, and approaches to seeking knowledge (Brown, 2010 ; Rawlings & Carter, 1977 ). This overarching structure provides a foundation for social justice–oriented practice; is embedded in interdisciplinary scholarship and activism; and encompasses personal, interpersonal, collective, and sociocultural transformation. It is informed by scholarship about multiculturalism, the study of oppression in its many forms (e.g., racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ageism, ableism), and methods for challenging and transcending biases and discrimination. Feminist counseling represents an integrative and technically eclectic approach that can be compatible with many approaches to psychotherapy, prevention, and social activism. Feminist counseling is informed by values that are most consistently reflected in how one thinks about distress and change, rather than in specific counselor behaviors. It is “a sensibility, a political and aesthetic center that informs a work pervasively” (Luepnitz, 1988 , p. 231), and “not a prescription or technique” (Brown & Brodsky, 1992 , p. 51). As a result, feminist counseling holds affinity with theories that are attentive to the diversity and complexity of women’s and men’s lives, recognize the intricate connections between the internal and external worlds of all people, and give voice to the worldviews and perspectives of those who experience discrimination and oppression.

This chapter provides a glimpse of central values and features of feminist counseling and includes a historical perspective on feminist theories that inform feminist counseling. Following a discussion of the counseling relationship, it uses “the personal is political” as an organizer for summarizing major characteristics. Later sections of the chapter illustrate several ways in which feminist counseling operates as an integrative approach. It concludes with a brief discussion of new directions and issues in feminist counseling. The themes discussed in this chapter are informed by the APA ( 2007 ) Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Girls and Women (referred to hereafter as the 2007 Guidelines); the APA ( 2003 ) Guidelines on Multicultural Education and Training, Research, Practice, and Organization Change for Psychologists; and the APA ( 2000 ) Guidelines for Psychotherapy with Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Clients.

Values and Foundations of Feminist Counseling

In her landmark description, Gilbert ( 1980 ) identified two core features of feminist therapy: the personal is political, and the psychotherapy relationship is egalitarian. During the past 30 years, feminist practitioners have elaborated substantially on these tenets, and most of the central values of feminist therapy can still be organized around these two major themes (Ballou, Hill, & West, 2008 ; Worell & Remer, 2003 ). The phrases “the personal is political” and the “the political is personal” emphasize the systemic, sociocultural, and ecological perspectives that are central to feminist concepts of distress and change. These phrases also highlight the importance of consciousness-raising and empowerment at individual, interpersonal, and societal levels. The egalitarian relationship represents the context in which feminist values are modeled and enacted, and new forms of behavior are practiced and affirmed. Egalitarian relationships are also valued as goals and outcomes of feminist counseling (Ballou & West, 2000 ; Brown, 1994 , 2010 ; Enns, 2004 ; Worell & Remer, 2003 ; Wyche & Rice, 1997).

As feminist counseling has matured, a third theme of diversity has become central to practice. Feminist counseling is informed by multicultural, intersectional, and locational perspectives that conceptualize identities and experience as complex, changing, and socially constructed (American Psychological Association [APA], 2007 ; Porter, 2005 ; Shields, 2008 ; Stewart & McDermott, 2004 ; Worell & Remer, 2003 ). Porter ( 2005 ) uses the repetition of one word—“location, location, location” (p. 144)—to highlight three central positionalities or perspectives that are brought to the counseling context by the theorist, the therapist, and the client. Contemporary feminist therapists seek to be attentive to the multiple and diverse realities, roles, and needs of women and men in a 21st-century world.

The premises of multiracial feminism (Zinn & Dill, 1996 ) and critical race feminism (Wing, 2000 ) are helpful for framing the wide range of interlocking identities, inequalities, privileges, and realities that contribute to the construction of gender. Gender, class, race, sexuality, ability, and a variety of additional social identities are experienced differently, depending on one’s position in a “matrix of domination” (Collins, 2000 ) and one’s access to social privilege and power. These interlocking features are not separable but operate simultaneously and uniquely to shape an individual’s experience. Each element of identity, such as religion, sexual orientation, or nationality, shapes how other aspects of self are experienced, and the salience of any one dimension may vary across contexts (Wing, 2000 ). Furthermore, privilege and oppression are not “always or never” experiences. As the foreground and background of various identities shift across contexts, a person may experience privilege in one situation (e.g., due to light skin color, heterosexual orientation, or middle-class status) and discrimination in another setting (e.g., gender-based bias in a setting in which a person is the only woman). This locational perspective is not only relevant to women, but also to men and boys of all classes, genders, and races. In addition, all groups are characterized by within-group diversity (Shields, 2008 ; Stewart & McDermott, 2004 ).

Visual cues, such as skin color or body size, may also modify experiences of gendered privilege and oppression. For example, discrimination on the basis of skin color, including skin tone, often permeates class, gender, and sexual identities and life experiences (Higginbotham, 1992 ; Root, 1995 ). Thus, for many women of color, racism is a more everyday and virulent experience than is sexism, and may be magnified by a variety of microaggressions that can have powerful negative effects on well-being, but may be discounted or minimized by perpetrators (Sue et al., 2007 ). Alternatively, the invisibility associated with statuses, such as a lesbian identity, can also contribute to complex decisions about “coming out,” which are likely to affect experiences of oppression and privilege (Stein, 1997 ). Although gender is a powerful social cue associated with privilege and power, gender cannot be assumed to be the primary, most significant, or unifying form of oppression that links all women and girls (e.g., Espín & Gawelek, 1992 ; Comas-Díaz & Greene, 1994 ).

Feminist Theory and Feminist Counseling

Feminist theories have developed along a parallel course that intersects with and complements feminist counseling practice. Although feminist counselors share an endorsement of the three principles identified in the previous section, these commitments are interpreted in multiple ways, depending on the feminist theoretical orientation that a counselor chooses either implicitly or explicitly. Because these theoretical positions mark major areas of “nonconsensus” within feminist counseling (Ballou & Gabalac, 1985 ), it is important to briefly discuss their development and the ways in which they have informed feminist counseling. More detailed discussions of feminist theory and psychology can be found in Enns ( 2004 ) and Enns and Sinacore ( 2005 ).

Second-wave Feminisms and Feminist Practice

During the early years of feminist counseling, various civil rights movements, including anti-psychiatry and radical psychiatry traditions, challenged the very structure of society and its mental health professions (Ballou et al., 2008 ). Most feminist theories addressed four themes: the description of gendered oppression, why and how power differences and oppression exist and are perpetuated, the goals of feminism or what “should be,” and strategies for eliminating injustice and changing reality (Bunch, 1987 ). Many second-wave feminist theorists developed comprehensive explanations or “grand theories” (Jaggar, 2008 ) about why oppression occurs and how inequality can be eliminated. The theories that gained the widest recognition and prominence included liberal feminism, socialist feminism, radical feminism, and cultural feminism.

In general, liberal feminist theorists and activists have worked to reform existing institutions rather than question their underlying foundations. They emphasize equal opportunity, personal initiative, and fair treatment of individuals. The impact of liberal feminist thought can be found in a variety of research and therapeutic approaches that emphasize “nonsexist” therapy and a “questioning” perspective within psychology (Ballou & Gabalac, 1985 ; Rawlings & Carter, 1977 ). Consistent with liberal feminism, these approaches focus on efforts to eliminate biases in treatment and research, disentangle myths about individual gender differences, treat clients and research participants equitably, and enhance the objectivity with which researchers and therapists approach their work (McHugh, Koeske, & Frieze, 1986 ).

Second-wave radical feminist theorists proposed that gender-based oppression is the original and most pervasive form of oppression. According to radical theorists, gender oppression appears in all cultures. It is often manifested through the exploitation of women’s sexuality, such as through violence against women, the imposition of heterosexual norms, and the control of women’s reproductive physiology (Jaggar & Rothenberg, 1993 ). Theorists have called for the dismantling of patriarchal power at its roots and a reconstruction of society, to be accomplished by abolishing gender and sex roles and replacing them with new possibilities that are free of gender stereotypes and mandates (Kaschak, 1981 ; Lorber, 2005 ; Tong, 2008 ).

Radical approaches that challenge institutional structures have been closely connected to consciousness-raising activities, but the deep application of radical principles has not been compatible with well-established disciplines, including professional and academic psychology (Ballou & Gabalac, 1985 ; Crowley-Long, 1998 ). Many second-wave grassroots antiviolence programs, such as domestic violence shelters and antirape programs, were built on radical feminist principles and offered therapeutic services consistent with a radical egalitarian approach that rejected the use of diagnosis, relied on forms of psychotherapy informed by consciousness-raising practices, incorporated peer support among survivors/victims, and emphasized organizational decision-making based on consensus and social activism as a cornerstone of counseling (Enns, 1992 ; Kaschak, 1981 ). Burstow’s ( 1992 ) enduring radical antipsychiatry approach highlights ways in which woman is reduced to a body that is beautified, objectified, sexualized, exploited, and violated. She rejects the use of psychotropic medications, and places priority on practical assistance, advocacy, and social change. Others operating from a radical perspective have argued that all psychotherapy, including feminist counseling, places the burden of change on individuals, and is inconsistent with an emphasis on social change (e.g., Kitzinger & Perkins, 1993 ).

Socialist feminist theorists have shared radical feminist beliefs that social structures need to be dismantled and transformed. In contrast to those who view gender as a fundamental focus of oppression, socialist feminists generated an integrated analysis of race/ethnicity, class/economics, and gender to explain social problems, and emphasized the importance of understanding intersecting forms of inequality (Tong, 2008 ). Socialist feminist theories also became a foundation for some second-wave women of color feminisms (e.g., Combahee River Collective, 1982 ).

Feminist practice rooted in radical and socialist principles has occurred most frequently in grassroots, community-based feminist organizations. Early practices were based on group process, informal connections, advocacy for women as a group, volunteerism, and decision-making by consensus. Over time, these organizations increasingly emphasized meeting the individual needs of clients and implemented more formal, hierarchical organizational and decision-making structures that supported efforts to acquire government funding (Kravetz, 2004 ; Metzendorf, 2005 ). With external funding came requirements for grassroots agencies to provide “professional” services and to be accountable to funding agencies. As a result of these changes and the growing power of formal diagnosis to dictate the terms of psychotherapy, organizations that rely on radical and socialist practices have decreased in number and become less visible.

A fourth second-wave feminism, cultural feminism, has focused on transforming individuals and the larger culture by challenging the hegemony or dominance of individualistic “masculine” values such as autonomy, independence, and self-sufficiency. A major goal of cultural feminism is to revalue and infuse “feminine” and relationally oriented values throughout the culture (Donovan, 2000 ). Women’s historic roles as nurturers and mothers are seen as important foundations for new social structures based on nonviolence and cooperation. Some cultural feminists began their feminist journey as radical feminists and adopted a radical-cultural position as they moved toward supporting women’s institutions and alternative autonomous communities (e.g., bookstores, music festivals, lesbian communities) that were designed to model options for living based on women’s strengths (Rudy, 2001 ; Taylor, Whittier, & Pelak, 2001 ). Others gravitated toward a cultural feminist perspective after being exposed to the writings of feminist philosophers, psychologists, and scholars who challenged traditional and patriarchal values embedded in academic disciplines (Robb, 2006 ).

Psychological approaches with the greatest similarity to cultural feminist values have sought to revalue “women’s way’s of knowing” (e.g., Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986 ) or women’s relational self (e.g., Gilligan, 1982 ; Miller, 1976 ), and have often emphasized a unique mother–daughter bond that fosters connection and growth (e.g., Eichenbaum & Orbach, 1983 ). Within feminist circles, Gilligan’s ( 1982 ) book on women’s “different voice” received wide acclaim as well as criticism (Becker, 2005 ). Efforts to increase awareness of options for gaining empowerment through participation in the development of others offered a corrective to psychological theories that emphasized autonomy to the exclusion of relational themes, and became a source of inspiration for many who identified themselves as feminist therapists. Others viewed these relational models as encouraging romantic oversimplification of women’s experience (Kerber, 1986 ) or a reintroduction of the “cult of true womanhood” (Luria, 1986 , p. 320).

Some of the most influential theoretical and practice-oriented contributions in feminist therapy are referred to as relational-cultural theory (e.g., West, 2005 ), and were inspired in large part by woman-centered psychological theories that bear resemblance to cultural feminist thought. Over time, these approaches have expanded and increasingly centralized the lives of diverse groups of women (Goldberger, 1996 ; Jenkins, 2000 ; Turner, 1997 ; West, 2005 ). In general, relational-cultural feminist therapists frame connection and mutual empathy as the source of mental health and identify disconnection as a major cause of problems (Miller & Stiver, 1997 ).

Jaggar ( 2008 ) described second-wave rival theories and their “bold conjectures” as “so ambitious that they were massively underdetermined by the available data” (p. 193). Despite their limitations, these theories spawned concepts and language that raised consciousness about a wide range of gendered social problems, such as date and acquaintance rape, sexual harassment, domestic violence, the second shift, comparable worth, the feminization of poverty, heterosexism, and sexual objectification. Second-wave theories remain influential, but feminist psychologists are less likely to be influenced by a single position. In an effort to address gaps within specific theories, they are more likely to endorse hybrid options that integrate multiple perspectives.

Although some elements of all second-wave feminisms can be seen within feminist psychology, the impact of liberal feminism has been more enduring, perhaps because of its compatibility with institutionalized social science (Crowley-Long, 1998 ). Various studies also reveal that many women who do not self-identify as feminist often endorse liberal feminist beliefs (e.g., Aronson, 2003 ; Quinn & Radtke, 2006 ; Zucker, 2004 ). These individuals are sometimes referred to as egalitarians, lifestyle feminists, or “I’m not a feminist, but…” women, and may be responsive to feminist counseling practices based on liberal feminist thought.

Diversification and Locational Third-wave Feminisms

By the mid 1980s and early 1990s, theories inspired by cultural feminism and other related second-wave approaches were often identified as “essentialist.” They were often criticized for drawing generalizations about the “universal woman,” and were characterized as being inattentive to the standpoints, life challenges, and survival needs of women of color (Jaggar, 2008 ; Thompson, 1998 ). An essentialist position was defined as treating gendered behaviors as “fundamental attributes” (Bohan, 1993 , p. 7) that are persistent and “resident within the individual” (p. 6). In contrast, constructionist alternatives were often posited as preferred alternatives, and these conceptualize gender as “doing,” as a byproduct of activity and interactions within a social context, and as attentive to differences among people. Antiessentialist critiques examined the ways in which the lives of white, middle-class women had become normative within feminist theory and often led to the erasure of differences among women. Within psychology, theories about women’s relational self and “ways of knowing” (e.g., Belenky et al., 1986 ; Gilligan, 1982 ) were sometimes seen as oversimplifying gender or even seeking to replace “woman as inferior” models with “woman as superior” options (Tavris, 1992 ).

Also criticized were empirical methods that tended to reduce the complexity of gender to binary categories, as well as approaches that obscured the complex dynamics of oppression and detracted from strength and coping perspectives by relying on a “woman as victim” discourse (Lamb, 1999 ). Finally, approaches that drew arbitrary or artificial distinctions between the “personal and the political,” or social and individual manifestations of distress, were perceived as ignoring myriad ways in which the political and personal interact in people’s lives (Cosgrove, 2002 ; Hurtado, 1989 ). Corrective efforts tended to emerge in two forms: postmodern feminist perspectives, and a variety of “diversity” approaches that focused on the standpoints of women of color and lesbian women.

Although theories and activism by and for women of color had been crucial to second-wave feminism (Smith, 1983 ; Thompson, 2002 ), the voices of women of color feminists and lesbians were sometimes marginalized or overlooked. Along with growing awareness of the inadequacy of previous theories, the perspectives of women of color and lesbians have been increasingly centralized within feminist psychology. As noted by Butler ( 2000 ), when the lives of women with diverse life experiences, sexual orientations, and ethnicities are placed at the center of inquiry, the lives of privileged persons are more likely to be decentered and “we raise our awareness and understand of the experiences of all women either implicitly or directly” (p. 177).

A variety of standpoint feminisms, which were authored by and highlighted the “herstories” and lives of specific groups of women, featured Black feminist thought (e.g., Collins, 2000 ), Chicana feminism (e.g., Bernal, 1998 ; Hurtado, 2003 ), Asian feminisms (e.g., Asian Women United of California, 1997 ; Nam, 2001 ), and lesbian feminism (e.g., Garber, 2001 ; Ross, 1995 ; Rudy, 2001 ). Other theorists emphasized the complex interactions of statuses and identities in their discussions of multiracial feminism (Zinn & Dill, 1996 ), critical race feminism (Wing, 2000 ), antiracist feminism (Calliste, Dei, & Aguilar, 2000 ), queer theory (Garber, 2001 ; Weed & Schor, 1997 ), Third World feminism (Mohanty, Russo, & Torres, 1991 ), and global/transnational feminisms (Basu, 1995 ). Within feminist psychology, the voices of women of color theorists and psychologists such as Jean Chin, Lillian Comas-Díaz, Oliva Espín, Beverly Greene, Maria Root, and Carolyn West have been influential in centralizing perspectives that emphasize the integration of sexuality, race, colonialism, indigenous healing practices, and immigration status (Barrett et al., 2005 ; Chin, 2000 ; Comas-Díaz, 2000 ; Comas-Díaz & Greene, 1994 ; Espín, 1999 ; Root, 1992 , 1995 ; Jackson & Greene, 2000 ; West, 2002 ). Locational themes, an intersectional perspective, and a multicultural framework have become cornerstones of contemporary feminist counseling practice (Enns, 2010 ; Enns & Byars-Winston, 2010 ).

In other developments, many critiques of the 1980s and 1990s relied heavily on “deconstruction,” which involves examining the implied meanings of texts and concepts, such as the underlying assumptions about truth, reality, language, and the self, and how these suppositions imbue concepts with power and authority (Flax, 1987 ). Postmodern feminists argued that it is impossible to create knowledge that is ahistorical, universal, or context free. Postmodern feminisms provided feminist psychologists with tools for asking meta-theoretical questions about the role and function of theory and practice, and became a mechanism for supporting less all-encompassing or “grand” theories and more modest approaches to feminism (Enns, 2004 ). Postmodern reality (including feminist reality) is viewed as invented and negotiated in social relationships and historical contexts, and reproduced through power relationships.

Of particular interest to postmodern feminists is the manner in which language reveals power relationships, which are often communicated as bipolar and polarized concepts (e.g., strong vs. weak). The deconstruction of language reveals, for example, that when masculine is compared to feminine, or objective is placed beside subjective, the first word in a pair typically assumes primacy or is more highly valued than the second term. Multiple, nonoppositional, or integrative ways of constructing social reality become obscured (Scott, 1988 ). Deconstruction challenges existing power relationships and reveals that binary constructs such as heterosexual–homosexual, white–black, and masculine–feminine are creations that only have meaning when they are viewed as dichotomous entities.

Some authors have expressed concern that postmodern thought can result in a slide into relativism, in which all realities are placed into question (Alcoff, 1988 ). Despite concerns about its inability to offer universal, enduring truths and a united rationale for pursuing social change, postmodernism has become increasingly accepted as a reminder of the complexity of gender and related intersecting identities, as well as the ways in which power structures evolve over time. Gergen ( 2001 ) proposed that postmodern theory provides us with tools for critiquing narrow ways of conducting science and constructing theory; encouraging psychologists to practice reflexivity, which involves ongoing self-reflection and self-questioning about the limitations of our perspectives; and recognizing the role of values and language in knowledge construction.

Recent locational and postmodern feminisms speak to the importance of relying on flexible feminisms that recognize wide-ranging social identities without exaggerating differences or seeing difference as divisive (Friedman, 1998 ). These feminisms are also marked by engagement with multiculturalism, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, queer theory, and transnational and poststructual views (Brown, 1994 ; Enns, 2004 ). Many contemporary feminist therapists draw on these perspectives to create integrative, flexible frameworks that can be modified.

A postmodern outlook has also been incorporated within third-wave feminism, an approach that is often endorsed by the daughters and sons of second-wave feminists who have benefited from the higher levels of equality earned by previous generations (Peltola, Milkie, & Presser, 2004 ). Self-identified third-wave feminists tend to resist “politically correct” elements of second-wave feminism. Instead, they tend to adopt strategic, hybrid, and flexible approaches, and seek to apply the most appropriate feminist lens for the specific need or occasion. Their goals include expanding what it means to be feminist, transcending seeming contradictions among feminist theories, and becoming more global in orientation (Heywood & Drake, 1997 ). Their activist efforts focus on a wide range of causes (e.g., AIDS, racism, poverty, violence against women) and often rely on personal stories, cyberspace, Internet “zines,” and unique forms of grassroots projects to communicate about feminist issues (Baumgardner & Richards, 2000 , 2005 ; Dicker & Piepmeier, 2003 ; Hernández & Rehman, 2002 ). Body image and body self-acceptance are also identified as revealing political implications of the personal (Rubin & Nemeroff, 2001 ). Feminist approaches to eating disorders and trauma are especially relevant to third-wave feminist counseling applications.

The Feminist Therapist and the Counseling Relationship

From its earliest days, feminist counselors have emphasized the importance of egalitarian relationships. In her influential critique, Chesler ( 1972 ) characterized the traditional therapeutic relationship as that of patriarch and patient and “just one more instance of an unequal relationship, just one more opportunity to be rewarded for expressing distress and to be ‘helped’ by being (expertly) dominated” (p. 140). To redefine this relationship, the feminist therapist became a “supporter and believer” (Brodsky, 1976, p. 376) of women’s competence and worked toward sharing power and responsibility with clients (Marecek & Kravetz, 1977 ). Rawlings and Carter ( 1977 ) also recommended forming counseling contracts that specified goals, supported client autonomy, and limited the likelihood that the therapist could manipulate the client. Feminist therapists’ attentiveness to client and therapist responsibilities led to increased awareness throughout psychology of ethical issues regarding informed consent, collaboration, and power dynamics (Ballou & Hill, 2008 ).

Transparency on the part of the feminist therapist is another foundational concept. Feminist therapists are encouraged to provide appropriate levels of information about their values in order to convey respect for the client’s right to full disclosure about the therapist’s approach, ensure that therapists do not inadvertently bring limited self-awareness or hidden agendas to the working alliance, and provide a basis for clients to become full partners (Hare-Mustin et al., 1979 ). Despite these stated values, Marecek and Kravetz’s ( 1998 ) qualitative study revealed that feminist therapists sometimes reported concealing their feminist values from clients, fearing that disclosure might limit their effectiveness or credibility, or might lead to loss of business. Marecek and Kravetz argued that withholding such information can be a form of dishonesty, may convey a patronizing attitude, or reveal limited respect for clients’ abilities to think for themselves.

Although egalitarian values are central to feminist concepts of growth, power differences are inevitable in relationships in which one person has studied psychological and social issues, gained professional credentials, and built knowledge based on substantial experience. The adoption of “undifferentiated egalitarianism,” which involves the belief that the erasure of all power differences is possible, can lead to the blurring of boundaries, inappropriate role reversals, and carelessness about the therapist’s responsibilities to the client (Brown, 1991 ; FTI, 2000 ). The feminist counselor is attentive to the levels and forms of self-disclosure that are in the best interests of the client. For example, she or he may avoid communicating information that may overwhelm the client, or may be of limited use to the client who is in crisis (Wyche & Rice, 1997).

Feminist counselors have also raised consciousness about abuses of power within psychotherapy, such as sexual harassment and sexual victimization (FTI, 2000 ). Cognizant of the importance of relationship integrity, some feminist therapists have found traditional rule-oriented approaches to multiple relationships to be overly rigid or even inhumane (Marecek & Kravetz, 1998 ). The FTI ( 2000 ) Code of Ethics uses the phrase “overlapping relationships” to convey the reality that multiple relationships are sometimes unavoidable. The feminist counselor takes care to monitor any overlapping relationships, and works to support best interests of the client. The counselor also ensures that therapeutic interactions are not sexualized.

The importance of relational facets of the counseling relationship was documented by Rader and Gilbert’s ( 2005 ) study of 42 female therapists and their clients. This study revealed that feminist therapists (19 persons) were more likely than counselors who did not identify themselves as feminists (15 individuals) to report using power-sharing behaviors and to show higher levels of agreement with feminist attitudes. Clients who worked with these feminist therapists described their therapists as using power-sharing behaviors to a greater degree than did clients who were paired with counselors who did not identify themselves as feminist. These two groups of therapists (feminist and those who did not identify themselves as feminist) showed similar levels of endorsement of feminist therapy behaviors and techniques. Furthermore, clients who worked with both groups of therapists did not differ with regard to their perceptions of their therapists’ use of collaborative behaviors with clients. The absence of difference in the area of reported collaborative behaviors may reflect the growing value placed on collaboration across contemporary psychotherapy approaches. The lack of difference with regard to reported therapy behaviors is consistent with the definition of feminist therapy as a set of attitudes and beliefs rather than techniques.

A second study examined therapists’ endorsement of feminist therapy behaviors associated with three factors: the personal is political, empowerment, and assertiveness/autonomy (Moradi, Fischer, Hill, Jome, & Blum, 2000 ). Whereas self-identification as a feminist therapist predicted endorsement of the first two groups of behaviors (the personal is political and empowerment), it did not predict a greater emphasis on assertiveness and autonomy. Although assertive behaviors are often identified as a component of feminist empowerment (e.g., Worell, 2001 ), assertive behaviors are also valued goals of many nonsexist therapies, and thus, may not reflect unique features of the feminist counseling relationship.

More specific findings (Moradi et al., 2000 ) revealed that, compared to therapists who did not identify themselves as feminist (60 persons), self-identified feminist therapists (15 individuals) were more likely to report paying attention to clients’ experiences of oppression and discrimination, assuming a collaborative role with clients, and supporting self-esteem by focusing on positive and unique qualities of clients. When asked about their feminist behaviors with women clients, feminist therapists were more likely to report reframing clients’ definitions of problems to include socialization explanations. When asked about their work with men, feminist therapists were more likely to report supporting men’s efforts to expand behaviors beyond traditional gender roles. No differences were found in self-reports about unconditional positive regard or empathy.

Another study, based on a survey of 108 family therapists, revealed that, although general endorsement of feminist therapy behaviors was high, a minority (35%) identified feminist therapy as a guiding orientation (25% of 40 men and 40% of 68 women). In addition, self-identification as a feminist therapist and exposure to gender-sensitive training experiences were associated with higher levels of reported use of feminist therapy behaviors (Dankoski, Penn, Carlson, & Hecker, 1998 ). Similarly, a survey of male therapists found that 24% of 81 respondents identified themselves as feminist therapists. These therapists scored higher than did nonfeminist male therapists on scales that assessed attitudes toward gender roles and feminism as well as endorsement of feminist therapeutic behaviors (Szymanski, Baird, & Kornman, 2002 ).

Several studies have used qualitative approaches to explore counselors’ perceptions of core feminist relationship behaviors. Hill and Ballou ( 1998 ) completed a content analysis of 35 feminist therapists’ responses to open-ended questions that asked counselors to describe how they had made the “substance or ongoing dialogue of therapy feminist” (p. 7). A majority of responses focused on how therapists showed sensitivity to issues of power in the counseling relationship. The second most frequent theme emphasized sociocultural and structural causes of distress. Other themes included a valuing of the reality and priorities of clients, providing an integrated analysis of the interlocking matrix of oppression (e.g., sexism, sizism, racism), and valuing both overt and subtle social change goals. Another qualitative study of 13 self-identified feminist family therapists (Whipple, 1996 ) identified the following priorities of therapists: the formation of collaborative, nonhierarchical relationships; exploration of gender and egalitarianism in relationships; and empowerment and the affirmation of women.

Finally, Chester and Bretherton’s ( 2001 ) study of 140 feminist counselors made use of a checklist of feminist counseling characteristics. Over 90% of respondents identified the following as essential: knowledge of sex-role stereotyping and lifespan issues of women, belief in the ability of women to reach their potential, acknowledgment of the sociocultural aspects of women’s problems, and encouraging women to value themselves on their own terms.

A common finding of these studies is that feminist counselors share perceptions that sociocultural contributors to distress are central to assessment and counseling (the personal is political), and that valuing the personhood, perspectives, strengths, and growth alternatives of clients is crucial (empowerment). All studies reveal that the egalitarian, collaborative counseling relationship and respect for clients are perceived as central to the counseling relationship. The next section turns to a more specific discussion of central features of feminist counseling.

The Personal is Political

The notion that the personal is political informs the feminist therapist’s overall worldview, as well as his or her goals and interventions. Feminist therapy shares the values of critical psychology (Prilleltensky & Nelson, 2002 ), including an interest in deconstructing and challenging power structures both within and beyond psychology; an analysis of oppression, which can be defined as “a state of symmetric power relations characterized by domination, subordination, and resistance” (p. 13); an emphasis on liberation, which involves resisting oppressive influences; and the goal of well-being that balances personal, relational, and collective needs. Each of these themes is reflected in feminist therapy’s conceptualization of “the personal is political” and its corollary, the “political is personal.”

External Forces and Psychological Distress

Rawlings and Carter’s ( 1977 ) classic definition of feminist psychotherapy declared that “the primary source of women’s pathology is social, not personal: external, not internal” (p. 55). Since that time, there has been growing awareness that both intrapsychic issues and external forces contribute to distress; however, an emphasis on sociocultural forces remains central to feminist analysis. The following paragraphs illustrate some of the ways in which biases and “isms” may contribute to distress and/or lowered achievement.

Studies have found that psychological distress is related to perceived sexist, racist, and heterosexist experiences and the degree to which personal stress is experienced in response to these events and psychological distress (e.g., Klonoff, Landrine, & Campbell, 2000 ; Moradi & Subich, 2003 ; Moradi & Funderburk, 2006 ; Szymanski, 2005). Self-esteem may play a role in these links. Moradi and Subich ( 2004 ) found a significant association between psychological distress and perceived sexist events for women with low self-esteem, but not for women with high self-esteem. More recently, Fischer and Holz’s ( 2007 ) study found initial support for a sequence in which public and private collective self-esteem, as well as personal self-esteem mediated relationships between perceived sexist discrimination and both depression and anxiety symptoms.

Although the literature on sexism, racism, and other “isms” reveals that blatant forms of prejudice have decreased during recent decades (Campbell, Schellengerg, & Senn, 1997 ), contemporary forms of sexism, racism, and related biases have taken on more clandestine forms that are often referred to as modern racism and sexism , or unintentional or symbolic racism and sexism (Dovidio, Gaertner, Kawakami, & Hodson, 2002 ; Gaertner & Dovidio, 2005 ; Swim, Aikin, Hall, & Hunter, 1995 ). Stereotype threat , which involves the internalization of stereotypes about a marginalized social identity (e.g., gender or race), has also been shown to generate anxiety, affect working memory, and result in significant negative decrements on performance (Osborne, 2001; Schmader & Johns, 2003; Spencer, Steele, & Quinn, 1999 ).

Theory and research on ambivalent sexism (Glick & Fiske, 2001 ) reveals that sexism consists of two forms: hostile sexism and benevolent sexism. Although hostile sexism is blatant and is recognized easily, benevolent sexism is more subtle, can be associated with warmth and praise for women who fulfill traditional communal roles, and may be linked to patronizing behaviors. This set of attitudes and behaviors is not easily recognized as sexist; and instead, it is frequently unchallenged and may contribute to increased justification of restrictive gender relations (Barreto & Ellemers, 2005 ; Jost & Kay, 2005 ). Benevolent sexism, but not hostile sexism, has also been shown to have a negative impact on performance (Dardenne, Dumont, & Bollier, 2007 ). The person experiencing benevolent sexism typically feels that she is viewed as having limited competence, but the behavioral cues are ambiguous, and it is difficult to conclude whether the behavior in question is sexist or merely polite. Self-doubt, mental intrusions, and preoccupation with one’s performance appear to be mechanisms through which benevolent sexism may operate in performance situations. Fischer ( 2006 ) also found that benevolent sexism can also become a type of self-protective or defensive strategy that may be used by women who encounter another person’s negative attitudes about women. In other words, endorsing benevolent sexist beliefs (e.g., that women should be cherished by men or are morally superior to men) allows women to maintain at least some level of self-esteem in the face of restrictive attitudes.

Taken together, contemporary theory and research indicate that perceived and subtle discrimination are associated with psychological distress, lowered self-esteem, decreased performance or achievement, or the adoption of subtle biases toward other women. The exploration of these issues in the feminist counseling context may help the client reframe her or his experience, identify how her or his internalized problems have wider “political” implications, restore the client’s self-esteem, and help the client plan active, self-affirming responses to these challenges. A more extended discussion of these issues can be found in Moradi and Yoder ( 2011 ; Chapter 13 , this volume).

In addition to the “ordinary” external challenges identified above, a variety of gendered traumatic stressors related to interpersonal traumas, such as rape, battering, and sexual abuse, are summarized in the APA ( 2007 ) Guidelines. These traumatic stressors are associated with posttraumatic stress reactions, depression, and anxiety. The Guidelines also document a variety of biases and discrimination related to health systems, education, the workplace, religious institutions, the workplace, legal systems, and the family. Each of these external factors is related to women’s and girls’ distress.

A Strength and Coping Perspective

Long before positive psychologists Seligman and Csikszentihihalyi ( 2000 ) called for an end to the “exclusive focus on pathology” (p. 5) as well as human weakness, suffering, and disorder, feminist psychologists advocated a strength and coping perspective for women as “enactors, not victims” (Reid & Kelly, 1994 ). Klein ( 1976 ) declared: “Not all symptoms are neurotic. Pain in response to a bad situation is adaptive, not pathological” (p. 90). Building on this positive reframing of “pathology,” feminist counselors argue that many symptoms have functional, coping, or survival value as individuals negotiate difficult challenges (Greenspan, 1983 ). A major goal of the feminist therapist is to find the kernel of health embedded in behaviors that may be defined as pathological, and to help clients undo a “patient identity” by redirecting perceived weaknesses into strengths that that can enhance well-being and alter oppressive circumstances. This version of positive psychology emphasizes the development of strength, resilience, and optimism that is also grounded in a realistic assessment of challenges.

As noted by the APA Guidelines ( 2007 ), “Being attentive to the strengths and personal resources of girls and women may also help decrease the likelihood of committing inadvertent biases, overemphasizing problematic aspects of behavior, or pathologizing adaptive behaviors” (p. 964). Some of the pathways for developing resources in younger women and girls include education and positive attitudes toward academic activities, positive peer and adult relationships, supportive and flexible family systems, opportunities for problem-solving skill development, supportive and flexible family systems, experiences with growth-promoting community groups, and other satisfying skill-building activities (Worell, 2006 ).

Effective coping in the midst of obstacles is an important theme in the works of many feminists of color. For example, Anzaldúa ( 1987 ) described the ways in which women of color develop la facultad , a survival skill that is informed by experiences of marginalization, discrimination, and outsider status. La facultad facilitates efficient perception of power dynamics in everyday experiences and allows one to “adjust quickly and gracefully to changing (and often threatening) circumstances” (Moya, 2001 , p. 469). Although the creative survival skills of women of color have facilitated their ability to withstand economic, social, and sexual exploitation, these skills can also be associated with substantial emotional costs. West ( 1995 ) notes, for example, that the Mammy stereotype reinforces the notion that black women are capable of contributing endlessly to the needs of others without encountering negative outcomes. Feelings of being overburdened experienced by this “strong black woman” may be rendered invisible. As noted by bell hooks ( 1981 ), endurance and strength should not be confused with opportunities for growth and transformation. A strengths-based perspective must lead to opportunities for thriving.

The concept of posttraumatic growth, which is defined as “the experience of positive change that occurs as a result of the struggle with highly challenging life crises” (p. 1) is also relevant to feminist counseling. Posttraumatic growth includes a deeper appreciation of life and a redirection of priorities. It may include increased warmth and intimacy in relationships, an expanded view of personal strength, the identification of new directions for the future, and the development of a more spiritual perspective (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004 ). Within feminist psychology, an emphasis on posttraumatic growth can be seen most consistently in discussions of recovery and empowerment following interpersonal violence and trauma. It includes meaning-making following trauma and generating possibilities for participating in social change. A study of female survivors of childhood sexual abuse (Lev-Wiesel, Amir, & Besser, 2005 ) found that posttraumatic stress disorder and posttraumatic growth coexisted. Studies of battered women (e.g., Humphreys, 2003 ; Werner-Wilson, Zimmerman, & Whalen, 2000 ) have also revealed that high levels of physical and psychological distress can be accompanied by resourcefulness and resilience. By emphasizing strengths, feminist counselors help clients expand existing skills, as well as acknowledge the reality and relevance of their pain.

Assessment and Conceptualization in Feminist Counseling

Since its earliest days, feminist therapists have been skeptical about the value of traditional diagnosis, which is exemplified by Rawlings and Carter’s ( 1977 ) declaration that “the therapist does not use diagnostic labels” (p. 62). Instead, feminist counselors were encouraged to use behavior analysis, sex/gender role analysis, and other context-based assessments, thus ensuring that assessment emphasized client strengths and resources as well as deficit behaviors. At the time when these early statements were made, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was a 134-page document (DSM-II, American Psychiatric Association [APA], 1968 ) and represented “a mildly annoying formality required for insurance reimbursement” (Wylie, 1995 , p. 23). In contrast, the current edition of the DSM (DSM-IV-TR, APA, 2000 ) is a massive tome that exceeds 900 pages. Avoiding the use of formal diagnosis in the current era of managed care has become extraordinarily difficult (Ballou et al., 2008 ).

Over time, feminist counselors have criticized DSM - based diagnoses for many reasons, including its overemphasis on intrapsychic symptoms and inattentiveness to contextual factors; tendency to reinforce gender, cultural, and race-based stereotypes (especially the personality disorders); arbitrary criteria for conceptualizing disorders; adjustment versus change focus; scientific inadequacies; tendency to “pigeonhole” misery rather than offering creative ways of addressing pain; and tendency to reinforce or extend the values of powerful psychiatric, medical, and pharmaceutical establishments (e.g., Caplan & Cosgrove, 2004 ; Eriksen & Kress, 2005 ; Lerman, 1996 ). Feminist counselors’ distrust of formal diagnosis is also consistent with the views of counselors who practice narrative, humanistic, and existential psychotherapies. These approaches share the critique that DSM diagnosis can reduce the client to a label, pathologize difference, limit the counselor’s or client’s vision to the lens provided by DSM criteria, decrease attentiveness to strengths, and even elicit client behaviors consistent with diagnostic checklists (Rigazio-DiGilio, 2000 ; Winslade, Crockett, & Monk, 1997 ; Yalom, 2002 ).

Although diagnosis has been used cautiously by feminist counselors, the 1980 addition of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to the DSM was welcomed by many feminist counselors as a nonstigmatizing diagnosis consistent with feminist models (e.g., Walker, 1979 , battered woman syndrome) that would normalize clients’ reactions to interpersonal abuse, violence, and other external causes of distress (Brown, 2004 ). Compared to diagnoses that lend themselves to victim blaming (e.g., borderline personality disorder), PTSD seemed to offer feminist therapists “a rhetorical resource for voicing their objection, as feminists, to conventional diagnoses and the medical model” (Marecek, 1999 , p. 162). When diagnostic criteria for PTSD were broadened (APA, 1994 ), some feminist therapists found the category even more attractive, assuming that it would reflect more accurately the regularity with which intimate violence occurs, and might allow more individuals to gain access to needed services (Brown, 2004 ).

Becker ( 2004 ) argued, however, that using disease-based labels to normalize reactions to trauma is illogical when greater energy could be directed toward the prevention of circumstances that contribute to trauma. Furthermore, the expanded version of PTSD has the potential to become a “catch all” category that contributes to greater medicalization. For example, biological factors, such as hormonal differences, have been hypothesized as accounting for a portion of the 2:1 ratio of women to men who meet the criteria for this diagnosis (Wolfe & Kimerling, 1997 ). In addition, the DSM category does not allow for full consideration of the ways in which insidious and prolonged interpersonal trauma may affect the person (Courtois, 2004 ), nor does it lend adequate insight about how racism, sexism, heterosexism, ageism, classism, and cultural factors may affect posttraumatic reactions (Sanchez-Hucles & Hudgins, 2001 ). The PTSD example points to the complexity of conceptualizing problems adequately when diagnostic options are embedded within powerful institutional frameworks. Some feminists have proposed alternatives for understanding reactions to trauma and include Brown’s ( 1992 ) oppression artifact disorder, Root’s ( 1992 ) insidious trauma model, and Herman’s ( 1992 ) complex posttraumatic stress syndrome.

Despite concern about the potentially negative impact of many diagnostic categories, contemporary feminist counselors are less likely than early feminist therapists to reject DSM-based diagnosis, but see such diagnosis as only a starting point for conducting assessment. Brown ( 2006 , 2010 ) recommended “subversion” as a strategy for undermining traditional diagnosis. Although the feminist therapist is likely to provide a diagnosis required by an insurance company, often in consultation with the client, the feminist counselor also highlights multiple layers of experience and meaning that inform distress, such as developmental factors, coping strategies the client uses to deal with power and powerlessness, the competencies and strengths of the client, her or his social identities and locations, and dysfunctional and supportive aspects of the client’s context. A holistic biopsychosocial perspective is valued.

Of particular value to biopsychosocial assessment is a feminist ecological perspective, which facilitates the assessment of the complex systems that surround the individual (Ballou, Matsumoto, & Wagner, 2002 ; Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006 ). These systems encompass the individual’s microsystem , which includes the various familial, spiritual, educational, and other support systems; the mesosystem , or interactions among the structures of the microsystem; the exosystem , which consists of social, governmental, legal, and political institutions and policies with which a person may not have direct contact but have an impact on a person’s privileges, opportunities, oppression, and general flexibility of movement; and the macrosystem , which reflects cultural values, worldviews, ideologies, and global influences. The manner in which the client’s social identities (e.g., race, class, gender, disability) intersect with these systems is also relevant to an ecologically valid understanding of a client’s problems and strengths.

Feminist assessment is also embedded within a developmental approach (APA, 2007 ). Research conducted by feminist psychologists and summarized in a variety of psychology of women and gender texts (e.g., Crawford, 2006 ; Matlin, 2012 ; Yoder, 2007 ) has enriched our understanding of diverse gender-related biological, social, and psychological development. A developmental approach helps normalize life transitions and decreases the likelihood of pathologizing adjustments that may seem problematic on the surface, but may represent temporary life course corrections. For example, important biopsychosocial developmental realities relevant to reproduction include menarche, sexual development, sexual health practices, pregnancy, birth control, abortion, fertility/infertility, childbirth, postpartum reactions, and menopause. Each of these experiences mark changes in a woman’s or girl’s life and may be associated with enhanced possibilities as well as challenge and difficulty (APA, 2007 ). The negotiation of these reproductive experiences is also related to the timing of developmental changes, individual differences in priorities, and the degree to which these reproductive events are associated with supportive or complicated relationship, environmental, and cultural realities. Using a developmental approach supports and complements the strengths-based perspective discussed earlier.

A hallmark of feminist counseling is social identity analysis, which was originally referred to as sex role analysis (Kaschak, 1981 ; Rawlings & Carter, 1977 ). This personalized assessment is designed to clarify how a person’s socialization, privileges, oppressions, life phase issues, multiple social identities, and current environmental realties may influence the client and his or her interactions within an ecological network. This context includes, but is not limited to, the client’s family, educational environment, religious experience, peer relationships and groups, work settings, immigration/acculturation experiences, and cultural contexts (Brown, 1990 ). Open-ended questions about social identities can be integrated with tools such as power analysis (Worell & Remer, 2003 ) or a cultural genogram (Vasquez, & Magraw, 2005 ). Major goals include identifying ways in which external forces are internalized as strengths or limitations, considering how public and private aspects of the self interact, and exploring ways in which the personal is political and the personal is political within a person’s larger ecological context. This knowledge contributes to a deeper understanding of the self, decreased self-blame and discouragement, and greater knowledge for becoming an active change agent on one’s own behalf.

Assessment of feminist development can be included within social identity analysis. Persons who adopt a feminist identity tend to navigate a series of developmental stages that begin with passive acceptance of dominant cultural values and lack of awareness of gender identity issues. However, a crisis phase of “revelation,” can be triggered by direct experiences of bias, developmental transitions, or general awareness of oppression that may be facilitated by educational experience. The recognition of unfair treatment and bias (e.g., sexism and racism) is typically followed by the desire to test and reinforce one’s emerging awareness through interactions with like-minded individuals. Feminist identity evolves over time and culminates in a phase of active commitment to a nonsexist world (Downing & Rousch, 1985 ).

Feminist identification and activism are also predicted by exposure to feminism through life experiences, participating in women’s and gender studies courses, and social changes and milieu of childhood and adulthood (e.g., Liss, Crawford, & Popp, 2004 ; Reid & Purcell, 2004 ; Stake, 2007 ; Zucker & Stewart, 2007 ). Research reveals that early phases of development (e.g., denial of sexism) are associated with higher levels of psychological distress (Moradi & Subich, 2002 ), and feminist identification is related to psychological well-being (Saunders & Kashubeck-West, 2006 ; Yakushko, 2007 ). See Moradi and Yoder ( 2011 ; Chapter 13 , this volume) for more information.

Feminist identity development often intersects with other social identities, such as lesbian, racial/ethnic, womanist, and white identity (Hoffman, 2006 ; Jones & McEwen, 2000 ; Ossana, Helms, & Leonard, 1992 ; Parks, Carter, & Gushue, 1996 ; Reynolds & Pope, 1991 ). A person’s ability to work through the implications and challenges associated with multiple identities is likely to be influenced by the degree to which various identities are related or can be integrated, the person’s life events and transitions, the salience and visibility of identity domains, the relevance of these identities to current developmental experiences, the extent to which identities are associated with oppression or privilege, and family or cultural background (Stewart & McDermott, 2004 ; Suyemoto, 2002 ).

The feminist counselor is prepared to use interventions that address these developmental concerns (McNamara & Rickard, 1989 ; Rederstorff & Levendosky, 2007 ). At the earliest phases of feminist identity development, clients may prefer a relatively traditional relationship. Counselors may support development by asking open-ended questions that facilitate clients’ awareness of how their multiple social identities are related to presenting concerns. During middle phases of development, more active interventions, such as social and gender identity analysis, anger work, and self-disclosure, may be especially beneficial for addressing issues marked by greater awareness of biases, privileges, and “isms.” As clients gain more complex and meaningful understandings of their feminist and other intersecting social identities, they are likely to benefit from interventions that support concrete decision making and action-oriented responses (McNamara & Rickard, 1989 ; Rederstorff & Levendosky, 2007 ). Being mindful of the complexity and multidimensionality of social identity throughout assessment and intervention is crucial. Finally, it is important to note that womanist and/or feminist identity development may be experienced in unique ways that may not conform to this pattern (Park et al., 1996 ; Zucker & Stewart, 2007 ).

Empowerment and Social Activism

The concept of “empowerment” defies easy definition, in part because the term has become a “sanitized buzz-word” (Cheater, 1999 , p. 1) or an almost mandatory term for the mission statements of many human service organizations (Pease, 2002 ). The term empowerment is appropriated by persons with dramatically different ideologies to support diverse philosophies about “helping people gain control over their own lives” (Pease, 2002 , p. 136). Some suggest that the rhetoric of “empowerment” is in danger of losing its radical potential. Use of the term may project an “illusion of equality” (p. 138) without posing any real challenge to oppressive power structures. Thus, clarification of feminist empowerment practice is important.

Feminist theorists, as well as critical and liberation theorists, speak of the importance of consciousness-raising or conscientização as a foundation for personal empowerment and activism. Consciousness-raising involves using knowledge about personal distress, inequality, and stigmatization to inform self-awareness, healing, and activism. Similarly, conscientização or conscientization, is defined as “learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (Freire, 1970 , p. 19). Through involvement in consciousness-raising or conscientization, participants learn to recognize systems of oppression, articulate their roles and positions in these systems, and devise concrete responses (Burbules & Berk, 1999 ). Feminist empowerment entails helping individuals see themselves as active agents in personal, interpersonal, and sociopolitical contexts and includes analyzing how social power structures contribute to feelings of powerlessness and distorted, negative self-perceptions in an unequal world; exploring how individuals can learn to experience power in personal, interpersonal, and institutional domains; and applying advocacy skills in the service of social justice (Morrow & Hawxhurst, 1998 ). The new interpretive framework associated with empowerment can be liberating in and of itself, but also becomes the foundation for developing personal and social action plans.

Consciousness raising and conscientization lead to greater understanding about how the “personal is political.” In addition, “the public is personally political” (Hurtado, 1989 , p. 849). Hurdado’s reframing of the familiar maxim is consistent with the realities of many people of color and poor people whose personal lives have been so restricted by social policies and institutionalized racism/sexism that it is difficult to create private lives on their own terms. Whereas many middle-class white women experience at least some choice (e.g., choosing whether to work for monetary remuneration), less privileged women may not have such options. These variations in experience need to be understood when considering the personal meaning of consciousness-raising.

A feminist definition of empowerment is typically seen as inconsistent with “power over,” which relies on dominance, coercion, and oppression. “Power within” is associated with a sense of inner strength that allows one to make sound decisions, “power to” suggests a capacity to act in a manner that is respectful of oneself and others, and “power with” implies an ability to cooperate and make connections with others in enacting personal and social change (Smith & Douglas, 1990 ). Miller and Cummins’ ( 1992 ) study of women’s definitions revealed that these participants distinguished between “control over,” which included power over people and resources, and “personal authority” (p. 419). Respondents tended to define personal authority as experiencing self-control or engaging in self-enhancing activity, such as gaining knowledge or feeling physically healthy.

Worell ( 2001 ) proposed ten goals of empowerment: self-esteem and self-valuing, positive daily functioning, gender and culture awareness, perceived self-efficacy and control, self-nurturing capacities, problems-solving skills, behavioral flexibility, assertiveness, the ability to access and use community resources, and participation in social activism. The Personal Progress Scale (Worell & Remer, 2003 ) can be used to assess progress toward many of these goals. Another approach, the relational-cultural model, identifies relational connections and mutual empathy as leading to mutual empowerment and resilience (Miller & Stiver, 1997 ). Mutual empowerment consists of five aspects: zest, or vitality and energy that comes from emotional connection; action and the motivation to use “relational interplay” to behave in new ways, greater knowledge about oneself and others; an increased sense of worth based on relational connection; and a desire for additional growth-facilitating connections with others. Consistent with a postmodern perspective, Becker ( 2005 ) cautioned that feminist therapists emphasizing a relational approach can fall prey to dichotomous or binary thinking about complex concepts such as relatedness and autonomy, which should be seen as informing each other rather than standing in opposition to each other.

Although original descriptions identified the goal of feminist therapy as “social and political change” (Rawlings & Carter, 1977 , p. 56), there is lack of consensus about the importance of social activism (Ballou & Gabalac, 1985 ). Marecek and Kravetz’s ( 1998 ) in-depth interviews with 25 practitioners revealed that these therapists typically emphasized “inner power” (p. 22), “private and static” (p. 22) aspects of empowerment, and “personal fulfillment through a process of private discovery, without regard to social or political change” (p. 21). The empowerment strategies identified by these therapists included: creating a climate of respect and acceptance, encouraging clients to co-direct the psychotherapy process, using self-disclosure to increase awareness and model possibilities, and encouraging clients to participate in assessment by assisting in the selection of a diagnostic label. Although research participants spoke of the political and social changes needed for achieving equality, they “did not overtly challenge systems of power operating in society” (p. 26). Becker ( 2005 ) suggested that when empowerment is personalized and not connected to macro-level change, “therapeutic feminism” (p. 139) can contribute to the myth that women’s problems are more personal and medical than political.

Recent social justice developments within counseling psychology reinforce social change perspectives in feminist counseling. The APA ( 2007 ) Guidelines recommend knowledge and use of community, mental health, and education resources for girls and women (Guideline 10). In addition, psychologists “are encouraged to understand and work to change institutional and systemic bias that may impact girls and women” (Guideline 11, p. 969). An ongoing challenge for the 21st century involves identifying and implementing meaningful social action activities. Activism is an important priority of many third-wave feminists (e.g., Baumgardner & Richards 2000 , 2005 ; Labaton & Martin, 2004 ), and this commitment may facilitate higher levels of involvement in political action among third-wave feminist therapists. Consistent with third-wave perspectives, new forms of activism are likely to be more diverse and less obvious expressions of activism than those associated with second-wave feminism.

Feminist Counseling As an Integrative Approach

Feminist psychotherapy is a theoretically integrative and technically eclectic approach. Feminist counselors link their foundation in feminist values to various psychotherapy systems. No limits are placed on what frameworks are appropriate, provided these systems do not support biases or limit human potential. Worell and Remer ( 2003 ) identified areas feminist counselors should consider when examining the compatibility of theories, including potential sources of bias in historical development, theoretical concepts, assumptions about clients’ problems, forms of assessment, psychotherapy techniques, and the respective roles of counselor and client. When potential conflicts are identified, counselors explore how biased aspects of theories can be restructured and transformed within a feminist framework. Considering the fit between psychotherapy approaches and the counselor’s specific feminist and multicultural theoretical worldview is also important (Enns, 2004 ). Although it is not possible to provide extensive illustrations of feminist counseling as an integrative approach, the next section provides several examples: feminist narrative therapy and feminist trauma treatment.

Feminist Narrative Therapy As Theoretical Integration

Narrative therapy is often identified as a postmodern therapy that lends itself to integration with feminist counseling because of their theoretical similarities (e.g., Brown, 2007 ; Gremillion, 2004 ; Lee, 1997 ). Consistent with the priorities of feminist counselors, narrative therapists attempt to understand clients’ “insider” positions by paying close attention to the ways in which clients internalize dominant cultural messages that limit their agency and confine them to less than optimal functioning. Therapists do not look for externally validated definitions of problems or for “correct” interpretations or solutions. Instead, they emphasize the capacities of clients to generate their own solutions and to make sense of their challenges in light of personal realities or “truths.” A major goal of narrative therapists is to work collaboratively with clients in a series of co-authoring activities designed to disrupt and defy the power of culture, and to help clients reclaim or reauthor their lives according to empowering metaphors (Maisel, Epston, & Borden, 2004 ). Clients are viewed as major characters of their lives who actively create meaning by weaving together the past, present, and future in a coherent life story or narrative.

Narrative therapists avoid “totalizing” language, which refers to any effort to assign a single, all-encompassing description to a client’s problems or identity. Therapists also reject totalizing terms such as diagnosis, resistance, and denial, “which grant precedence to ‘regimes of truth over clients’ knowledge of their lives” (Winslade et al., 1997 , p. 56), or tend to place blame on individuals and discount their personal expertise about themselves. Clients are encouraged to develop more complex views of themselves and their options. From a narrative therapy perspective, “therapeutic practices are never ‘objective,’ or culturally neutral, because they help reconfigure persons’ lives and relationships in particular social contexts” (Gremillion, 2004 , p. 183). This feature is consistent with “the personal is political” and a feminist emphasis on an ecological framework for understanding distress and change.

The narrative therapy technique of externalization involves deconstructing a problem by helping separate the client from “being” the problem. Externalizing a problem includes distancing oneself from a problem-saturated story and self-definition, which may include self-labeling, self-blame, the adoption of a “victim” identity, or internalized oppression. Energy is redirected toward devising a counterplot associated with hope, possibility, and creative alternatives for change (Gremillion, 2004 ; Miller, Cardona, & Hardin, 2006 ). Narrative therapy and externalization are closely related to the strength and coping-based focus of feminist counseling, an emphasis on reframing problems, and the concept of empowerment. Similar to feminist practice, the counselor and client conceptualize an issue as a “problem story” that is reinforced by dominant cultural understandings of gender roles, ideal bodies, or a “proper self.”

Authors have proposed specific feminist narrative approaches for working with eating disorders (Brown, 2007 ; Gremillion, 2004 ; Maisel et al., 2004 ) and sexual assault (Miller et al., 2006 ). For example, an eating disorder can be described as a vindictive entity that is supported by cultural myths and attacks unsuspecting individuals. The goal of counseling is to “empower the ‘insider’ and weaken (and ultimately destroy) the dangerous external foes of anorexia and bulimia” (Strife, 2006 , p. 121). However, some feminist theories of eating disorders (see Gilbert & Thompson, 1996 ) note that eating preoccupations can represent efforts to gain control rather than merely reveal powerlessness in the face of a vindictive opponent. Thus, feminist therapists point out the value of integrating narrative approaches with feminist models that reflect a wider range of meanings associated with women’s bodies and eating (Brown, 2007 ). In the case of sexual assault, a narrative therapy approach begins with the telling of the client’s story, which is followed by deconstructing societal messages about victims. Using externalization, clients identify oppressive social messages, which contribute to the silencing of victims and the shame and self-denigration that often accompany assault. This process paves the way for resisting negative messages and creating a new story (Miller et al., 2006 ).

To summarize, narrative therapies and feminist therapy share an emphasis on collaboration and co-authoring strategies for change. Similar to feminist therapy, narrative therapists avoid formal diagnostic language because it tends to give greater priority to an external, “professional” truth than to the client’s reality. Both approaches encourage clients to act as their own best experts and to generate creative solutions. Furthermore, both approaches seek to decrease clients’ self-blame by understanding how external factors or definitions influence the person’s distress. In contrast to most feminist counseling approaches, narrative approaches place less emphasis on implications for social change and social activism. Thus, social identity analysis, power analysis, and social change perspectives can be used to enhance narrative therapy within a feminist framework.

Feminist Approaches to Trauma

Feminist approaches to trauma include theoretical models, such as those focusing on insidious traumatization (Root, 1992 ) and betrayal trauma (Freyd, 1996 ), as well as diagnostic models such as battered women’s syndrome (Walker, 1979 ), complex posttraumatic stress disorder (Herman, 1992 ), and oppression artifact disorder (Brown, 1992 ). Feminist therapists have also developed multiple intervention approaches such as Harvey’s ( 1996 ) ecological model, Walker’s ( 1994 ) survivor therapy, Courtois’ ( 2000 ) approach to working with sexual abuse memories, Herman’s ( 1992 ) phase-based model of working with long-term prolonged abuse, and Worell and Remer’s ( 2003 ) empowerment model.

The various feminist trauma approaches share some common themes, including an understanding that trauma must be understood from an individual’s subjective frame of reference, which is likely to be shaped by the person’s multiple identities and experiences with discrimination (Brown, 2004 ). In the case of rape trauma, for example, the feminist therapist facilitates a client’s examination of the cultural, gender role, and racial myths that contribute to victim blaming, as well as unequal power dynamics and socialization experiences that contribute to self-blame (West, 2002 ; Worell & Remer, 2003 ). Feminist therapists give visibility to the ways in which violence is gendered, bring a sociocultural and contextual analysis to trauma, and emphasize the importance of empowerment (Brown, 2004 ). Empowerment includes recovering a sense of personal power and efficacy as a survivor rather than as a victim, and, when appropriate, engaging in social change on behalf of other victims of violence (Worell & Remer, 2003 ).

Most feminist models address the challenges of working through traumatic memories and dealing with posttraumatic reactions, and recommend the use of empirically supported interventions for helping clients cope with symptoms of distress related to rape, child sexual abuse, and other traumas. In this way, feminist counselors draw on technically eclectic strategies for linking a feminist perspective with approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapies (CBT; Ford, Courtois, Steele, van der Hart, & Nijenhuis, 2005 ). For example, cognitive processing therapy (CPT) for sexual assault victims (Resick & Schnicke, 1993) combines successive writing assignments that expose clients to trauma memories. In addition, cognitive restructuring components focus on themes of safety, trust, power, esteem, and intimacy. Foa and Rothbaum’s (1998) CBT intervention for rape, interpersonal trauma, and PTSD holds many similarities to CPT and integrates both prolonged exposure (PE) and stress inoculation training within a structured intervention program. This CBT approach is designed to facilitate the emotional processing and reorganization of trauma; challenge unhelpful cognitions; and help clients establish schemas that enhance a sense of personal efficacy and competence, control, and meaning.

The efficacy of both approaches has been well-supported, and researchers exploring both CBT and CPT approaches have often worked collaboratively (e.g., Resick, Nishith, Weaver, Astin, & Feuer, 2002 ; Schnurr et al., 2007 ). Findings related to both CBT and CPT have shown that combined PE and cognitive restructuring treatments do not show superior outcomes over options that rely on PE alone or cognitive restructuring alone (Foa & Rauch, 2004 ; Foa et al., 2005 ; Resick et al., 2002 ; Resick, Galovski, Uhlmansiek, Scher, Clum, & Youn-Xu, 2008 ). Other CBT options for working with posttraumatic symptoms and interpersonal affect regulation therapy options are reviewed by Ford et al. ( 2005 ). Brown ( 2002 ) also recommends the integration of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing within a feminist therapy approach.

In addition to using technically integrative options with nonsexist approaches, such as those described above, it is also important for the feminist counselor to explore the theoretical connections between feminist counseling and CBT. During the first decades of feminist therapy, CBT approaches were often integrated with assertiveness and other group skills training programs, and framed as resocialization tools that would allow women to become aware of their interpersonal rights; challenge self-beliefs that limited their options; and adopt direct forms of self-expression to increase self-confidence, empowerment, and influence over their environments (e.g., Fodor, 1988 ; Jakubowski, 1977 ). These CBT interventions are based on a gender-neutral perspective. They also acknowledge the role that environments and external factors place on human development, and emphasize the importance of a collaborative client–therapist relationship (Enns, 2003 ; Worell & Remer, 2003 ).

After initial enthusiasm, observers noted that CBT approaches needed to be modified to be integrated effectively with feminist values. First, traditional CBT interventions emphasize individual change, and methods for addressing wider ecological issues that limit personal choices (e.g., sexual harassment, patterns of interruption in conversation) may be ignored (Fodor, 1988 ; Kantrowitz & Ballou, 1992 ). Second, CBT approaches provide no critical examination of androcentric assumptions that tend to prioritize rationality over emotion. Labeling a client’s cognitions as “irrational” or “distorted” may deny the client’s reality, which may include traumatic events or more insidious social conditions that may contribute to cognitions that limit one’s perspective or wear down one’s ability to challenge others directly. Even “feminist” assertiveness programs may fall short of the goals of feminist therapy because of the underlying assumption that the use of assertive skills will naturally lead to successful interpersonal outcomes, and that human rights can be defined independently from the complex gender and cultural injunctions that shape perceptions of rights. With modification, however, CBT tools can be integrated with more contextually valid approaches that consider the interpersonal and social realities of participants and the costs and benefits of any specific course of action (Enns, 2003 ). It should be noted that CBT interventions have also been effectively integrated with feminist eating disorder interventions, depression, and anxiety.

Because feminist counseling represents a worldview or system for organizing one’s thinking about interventions rather than a specific technique-oriented approach, feminist counseling does not lend itself to traditional outcome research. However, feminist therapists seek to employ techniques that have been supported by research, especially outcome research relevant to gender-related concerns. It can be argued, therefore, that feminist therapists are practicing empirically supported or empirically validated counseling when they operate from a well-articulated theoretical and technically integrative approach that is informed by research. The APA Guidelines ( 2007 ) also call on psychologists to implement approaches that have been demonstrated to facilitate women’s and girls’ efforts to negotiate developmental transitions, resolve life challenges, and achieve positive outcomes. The Guidelines identify a wide range of approaches (e.g., family therapies, humanistic therapies) that can be integrated within a feminist framework.

Future Directions

Feminist counseling and psychotherapy approaches emerged approximately 40 years ago to facilitate work with women who had been disenfranchised by traditional psychotherapy. Over time, feminist therapy has become a broadly based social justice approach that combines knowledge from multiple disciplines in an intersectional and locational perspective that is attentive to the multidimensional social identities of clients. Feminist counseling approaches have been enriched by a range of feminist theories (e.g., body objectification, violence) and integrative approaches for working with highly challenging problems and social change issues (Brown, 2010 ). This chapter concludes with a brief identification of four challenges and recent directions: implementing feminist counseling approaches within changing (and sometimes conservative) cultural contexts, building solid working alliances that decenter positions of privilege and centralize knowledge based in diversity, applying feminist frameworks to interventions with boys and men, and exploring possibilities for global partnerships.

In general, research reveals that, although feminist values and change efforts are often viewed positively, individuals are often disinclined to identify themselves as feminist (Aronson, 2003 ; Quinn & Radtke, 2006 ; Zucker, 2004 ). Furthermore, some therapists who endorse many feminist counseling behaviors are hesitant to claim the label “feminist” (e.g., Dankoski et al., 1998 ), and some self-identified feminist therapists avoid using this label with clients because of potential business consequences (Marecek & Kravetz, 1998 ). Still others appear uncomfortable with a feminist counseling commitment to social activism and prefer the “neutrality” of providing individual counseling services informed by feminism without making a more radical, social change commitment (Morrow et al., 2006 ). Claims that we have entered a “postfeminist” era further complicate the challenges of working as a feminist counselor in the 21st century.

Despite the concerns identified above and popular media sources that claim the erosion of feminist values, a variety of researchers note that feminism remains a vibrant force, but that each generation may need to define feminism in ways that are most meaningful to contemporary contexts (Hall & Rodriguez, 2003 ; Peltola et al., 2004 ). Similarly, feminist therapy needs to be seen as a living, evolving, flexible approach. The theoretical and practice contributions of second-and third-generation feminist therapists will become especially important to this evolution.

A recent working group (Mansour, Gosset, Elder, Averill, & Morrow, 2008 ) discussed challenges for practicing feminist multicultural therapy in conservative contexts. The group identified a list of strategies, which included seeking mentoring and networking opportunities, resisting discouragement and isolation by seeking out support and consultation groups, being well-grounded in research about the costs of discrimination and oppression, emphasizing patience and persistence, building collaborative alliances with others who share social justice goals, and placing priority on advocacy and social activism and advocacy. These suggestions reaffirm goals that date back to the earliest days of feminist therapy, and also point to the types of environments that are likely to nurture the contributions of future feminist therapy theorists.

Second, it is also important to acknowledge painful conflicts within feminism that have contributed to the disavowal of a feminist label. For example, many women of color prefer to self-identify as “womanist” and remain wary because of white feminists’ historical inattentiveness to their own privileged status, tendency to generalize research and theory based on white women’s lives to all women, and limited awareness that leads to difficulty in acting on the egalitarian values they claim (Bowman et al., 2001 ). Important directions for the future include developing truly inclusive forms of feminist practice that centralize diversities among individuals, building alliances that involve implementing stated values, and expanding on feminist multicultural counseling models.

An emphasis on intersectionality and the inseparability of multiple social identities will be especially useful for transcending past limitations of feminist theory and practice. Shields ( 2008 ) noted that, although intersectionality has become an accepted concept for approaching the study of gender, methods that are useful for implementing intersectional research and practice have lagged behind. Cole ( 2008 ) recommends the use of coalitions that foster connections across differences as a central feature for future work related to intersectionality. The National Multicultural Conference and Summit (NCMS) has become one setting in which “difficult dialogues” about interrelationships across race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation gender, and other social identities have been fostered, and is an important base for coalition building (Sue, Bingham, Porché-Burke, & Vasquez, 1999 ). Building approaches that integrate feminist approaches with other social justice undertakings can be facilitated in other environments that resemble the NCMS and that feature face-to-face dialogue.

A third development is the growth of approaches for working with men and masculinity. The accumulation of 25 years of research and theory on male gender role conflict (GRC) and its implications for counseling has resulted in a robust body of literature (O’Neil, 2008 ). To date, however, much of the research literature on male GRC has emphasized individual and interpersonal aspects and costs of GRC for men. This literature has only addressed the implications of gender as a system of power relations to a limited degree. Theory and research relevant to male GRC and its consequences can be further enhanced through the use of intersectional, social structural analyses that are becoming increasingly central within feminist psychology (Stewart & McDermott, 2004 ). Similarly, depression and other psychological issues of men and women have been linked to gender-related challenges. Integrating research on relationships between depression and conformity to masculinity norms (e.g., Mahalik & Rochlen, 2006 ) and feminine communal norms (e.g., Mazure, Keita, & Blehar, 2002 ) will allow for a more complete understanding of how gender-related cultural expectations may affect both men and women. By placing both female and male gender issues within ecological frameworks that address individual, interpersonal, and social structural dimensions, it will become increasingly possible to build useful connections between the rich, parallel literatures supporting the psychologies of men and women (Enns, 2008 ).

Exploring parallels between feminist or gender-aware therapy by and/or for men and women is likely to be another productive avenue. Previous research about the attitudes and practices of male feminist therapists (Baird, Szymanski, & Ruebelt, 2007 ; Szymanski, Baird, & Kornman, 2002 ) suggests that the attitudes and self-reported behaviors of male feminist therapists are similar to those of self-identified female feminist therapists. A recent qualitative study (Baird et al., 2007 ) identified some of the important formative experiences for these men as including personal experiences with social change movements, personal relationships with women and others who had influenced their individual and professional development, professional training and experiences relevant to feminism and multiculturalism, and awareness of male privilege and political aspects of psychology (e.g., diagnostic practices, feelings of isolation and difference from other men), among others. Brown’s ( 2010 ) recent book identifies feminist therapy as “not for women only.” Building on that theme, further explorations of the intersections between feminist psychotherapies for men and women merit attention (Philpot, Brooks, Lusterman, & Nutt, 1997 ).

A fourth area for future development is the global practice of feminist counseling. The problems for which individuals seek feminist counseling, such as violence and gendered oppression, are global concerns, and there are growing efforts to link feminist counselors and activists across national boundaries as co-learners, co-mentors, and co-constructors of knowledge (Enns, 2004 ; Horne & Mathews, 2006 ; Norsworthy & Khuankaew, 2004 , 2006 ). Western psychologies are often exported to other parts of the globe with minimal consideration of cultural factors (APA, 2004 ; Norsworthy & Khuankaew, 2006 ; Rice & Ballou, 2002 ), and there will be many challenges ahead as Western feminists work toward implementing mutually enriching partnerships that truly enact the egalitarian values they espouse, and act as learners who are respectful of indigenous forms of expertise.

Western feminists have often been slow to recognize forms of privilege and power that may cloud their thinking, including the power to “orientalize, exoticize, ethnicize, racialize, or sexualize members of other nations or groups” (Mackie, 2001 , p. 182). To create an egalitarian transnational psychology of women, it will be necessary to “shift the axis” and emphasize “world traveling” (Lugones, 1987 ). World traveling consists of three interrelated awareness-building activities that focus on seeking insight about cultural practices that have created “us” (e.g., recognizing how systems of oppression have influenced the West, and how these oppressions may parallel or be different from experiences of people around the globe), looking at “what it is to be ourselves in their eyes” (p. 18) (e.g., by understanding our country’s role in colonization and how we may inadvertently perpetuate colonizing attitudes in our relationships with others), and working toward seeing people from various parts of the world as they see themselves. World traveling calls for an attitude of humility and a willingness to value the expertise of women as they speak in their own voices. Through egalitarian interaction, North American feminists may gain new lenses for evaluating Western feminist models and therapies and learning from the insights and practices of theorists and practitioners around the globe.

In light of these issues, participants in a recent working group on global aspects of feminist practice (Enns & Machizawa, 2008 ) noted that feminist therapy concepts such as consciousness-raising, empowerment, identity development, personal goals, personal power, assertiveness, and collaboration, are typically embedded in Western indigenous, individualistic frameworks and need to be deconstructed and transformed to be relevant beyond North American borders. Furthermore, the hegemony of English and expectations that our partners will communicate in English limit opportunities for full power-sharing collaborations. Third, although problems such as violence and gendered oppression are universal, these issues are manifested through specific cultural lenses that are shaped by many factors such as colonial histories, imperialism, religious beliefs, family structures, educational options, ethnicity, economic realities, and legal and governmental systems. The “insider” perspectives and expertise of transnational feminists are essential for understanding the complexity of issues in specific contexts and intervening effectively at both individual and social change levels. The APA Resolution on Gender and Culture Awareness in Psychology ( 2004 ) provides initial direction and calls on psychologists to build respect for pluralism and cultural difference (without implicitly condoning gendered oppressions), incorporate an analysis of power and the reduction of power asymmetries in partnerships, implement a critical analysis of Western perspectives, and emphasize the sociocultural realities that influence individual realities (Rice & Ballou, 2002 ).

The principles of feminist counseling approaches are well-established. As we move further into the 21st century, the applications of feminist counseling will continue to diversify. As the purview of feminist therapy has grown, new directions have emerged, and new possibilities for integrating feminist values with other frameworks in psychology are multiplying. During the past 40 years, great progress toward achieving equality has occurred, and these gains have the potential to benefit the mental health of all. However, the resurgence of old oppressions and the emergence of more subtle forms of discrimination call for even more creative feminist counseling responses and social change efforts. New cultural issues continue to emerge in a world in which oppression also intersects with new technologies, media forces, and global conflict (APA, 2007 ). A major challenge involves reinforcing core values of feminist thought while recognizing the diversity of human experience that calls for flexibility in the application of these values, and the need to respond to new gender-related opportunities and problems that emerge in this rapidly changing society.

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Further Reading

Ballou, M., Hill, M., & West, C. (Eds.). ( 2008 ). Feminist therapy theory and practice: A contemporary perspective . New York: Springer.

Brown, L. S. ( 1994 ). Subversive dialogues: Theory in feminist therapy. New York: Basic Books.

Evans, K. M., Kincade, E. A., & Seem, S. R. ( 2011 ). Introduction to feminist therapy: Strategies for social and individual change . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Hill, M., & Ballou, M. ( 2005 ). The foundation and future of feminist therapy . New York: Haworth.

Kopala, M., & Keitel, M. A. (Eds.). ( 2003 ). Handbook of counseling women . Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Landrine, H., & Russo, N. F. (Eds.). ( 2010 ). Handbook of diversity in feminist psychology . New York: Springer.

Worell, J., & Goodheart, C. D. (Eds.). ( 2006 ). Handbook of girls’ and women’s psychological health . New York: Oxford.

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About Feminism and Feminist Theories

Rebecca West famously answered the question "What is feminism?" by responding, "I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat."  ( Philosophy of Education: An Encyclopedia )

Feminism is a concept that takes many different forms, and definitions of what constitutes "Feminism" vary depending on the political and philosophical attitude of the person defining the term.  In general, however, feminism is concerned with the achievement of equal political and social rights for women as well as the elimination of sexism. Different philosophies of feminism include ecofeminism, Marxist feminism, radical feminism, and more.

• Lesbian Feminism From Encyclopedia of Gender and Society Lesbian feminism is a term introduced in the United States in the 1960s. It refers to a theory, an identity, and a political struggle. As a social movement, lesbian feminism emerged out of movements for women’s liberation, gay liberation, and the sexual revolution.
• Ecofeminism From Encyclopedia of Environment and Society Ecofeminism posits that the same masculinist habits of thinking and behavior that devalue, oppress, and exploit women also do so to nature; and are mutually reinforcing hegemonic processes pivoting around artificial Western binary oppositions interpreted by religion, science, government, and other androcentric agencies.
• Marxist Feminism From Feminist Philosophies A-Z Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family (1884/1972), a fundamental text in Marxist feminism, argued that the move to private property included a shift from matriarchy to patriarchy and was the initiating point for women’s subordination and oppression.
• Feminist Political Philosophy From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , this page discusses both the historical context and developments of feminist political philosophy and a number of contemporary approaches, including radical feminism, poststructuralist feminisms, and more.
• Feminist Art From Encyclopedia of American Studies Feminist art was not regarded as a movement per se but a revolutionary strategy intended to challenge received assessments of modernism, formal values, and stylistic hierarchies.
• Feminist Literary Criticism From The Reader's Companion to US Women's History Feminist literary criticism can be defined as the study of literature by women, or the interpretation of any text written with an attention to gender dynamics or a focus on female characters.
• Feminist Social Theory From The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology In general terms, feminist social theory is concerned to understand and explain the subordinate position of women in society by reference to gender differences and specifically in terms of a theory of patriarchy.
• Feminist Theology From The Reader's Companion to US Women's History Feminist theology is not primarily reflection on special “feminine” themes in theology and does not intend to create a special subcategory of theology relevant primarily to women. Rather, feminist theology arises from a recognition that traditional theology in Christianity (and other major religions) has been created almost exclusively by males.
• Methods for Studying Gender From Encyclopedia of Women and Gender Following a brief history of feminist stances on methodological issues, this article reviews a number of features or standards that characterize feminist approaches to the study of gender: these include concerns with redefining objectivity, exploring reflexivity and subjectivity, expanding psychology's diversity, attending to power relations in the research process, giving benefits to participants, fostering social change, and accepting methodological plurality.
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