A Glossary Of Feminist Theory PDF
Preview A Glossary Of Feminist Theory
A Glossary of Feminist Theory A Glossary of Feminist Theory Sonya Andermahr University College, Northampton and Terry Lovell Carol Wolkowitz University of Warwick A member of the Hodder Headline Group LONDON Co-published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ' First published in Great Britain in 2000 This impression reprinted in 2002 by Arnold, a member of the Hodder Headline Group, 338 Euston Road, London NWI 3BH http://www.arnoldpublishers.com Co-published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press Inc., 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © 2000 Sonya Andermahr, Terry Lovell and Carol Wolkowitz All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanicaJly, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. ln the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licencing Agency: 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WI P OLP. The advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of going to press, but neither the author[s] nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions. British library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0 340 76279 9 .. • 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd., 100% EOU, Delhi - 110 040 What do you think about this book? Or any other Arnold title? Please send your comments to feedback.amold @ hodder.co.uk Acknowledgements We would like to thank our friends. families and colleagues for their help and support. A special thank you is due to Pauline Wilson for her work on the manuscript. . , • ' Introduction Concepts and Theory in Feminism Dictionaries are produced and, with a show of authority no less confident because it is usually so limited in place and tin1e, ,vhat is called a proper meaning is attached ... when we go beyond these to the historical dictionaries, and to essays in historical and contemporary semantics, we are quite beyond the range of 'proper meanings'. We find a history and cotnplexity of 1neanings; conscious changes or consciously different uses; innovation, obsolescence, specialization, extension, overlap, transfer; or changes that are masked by a nominal continuity. (Raymond Williams, Keywords). Keywords (Williams 1983a) was to be a different kind of dictionary, one which aimed to capture concepts on the move in history, in order to reveal ' ... not concepts but problems .. . ' (Williams 1977a: 11 ). This seems to us to be exactly wbat is required in a glossary of contemporary feminist · theory, since contemporary feminism draws so heavily on what Edward Said (1983) has named 'travelling theory'. 'Like people and schools of criticism, ideas and theories travel - from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another', and as theory travels, so it is 'transformed by its new uses, its new position in a new time and place' (226-7). Feminist theory has grown exponentially since the late 1960s. Its first impetus came from the emergent women's movements in the USA and Europe, and it became entrenched in contemporary intellectual life as feminist courses began to appear on the curriculum in higher education and in other educational settings. It is tied then, to the fortunes of Western 'academic feminism' - courses in women's studies and gender studies which may be taught as part of degree programmes within orthodox disciplines or in specialist interdisciplinary centres. It is further reinforced by the publishing industry. There is scarcely a publishing house in the 1990s that does not have its women's studies/gender studies list. This development was partly the result of the coincidence, variably in different national contexts, of the expansion of higher education, the increasing participation rates of women as part of that expansion, and the emergence of the 'second wave' of the women's movement. The disciplines in which feminist theory and scholarship first appeared were those which attracted a high 2 Introduction proportion of these new women students, and which attracted women who defined themselves as feminists. In the USA, it was above all in literary criticism that feminism began to flourish, not without considerable resistance. In Europe, including Britain, it is probably true to say that on balance the social sciences provided the main sites for feminist theory. Sociology, a major beneficiary of the expansion in higher education (in Britain 17 new departments of sociology were set up between 1960 and 1970, and the number of degrees in sociology attained between 1962 and I 967 had increased by 389%) , and the new field of cultural studies which dated only from the mid-l 960s, were of particular significance. The terms of feminism were drawn from the new femini~t language that began to be produced by radical feminists in the USA, which involved reworking and reclaiming terms that had been used to denigrate women ('crone', 'dyke', and more fundamentally, 'woman'), and inventing new terms. But the concepts that began to inform feminist theorizing tended to be created through the critique and appropriation of sociological theory, for example 'patriarchy', 'ideology', 'socialization', 'sex-roles'. The radicalism of the 1960s was marked in sociology by a shift away from the dominant paradigm of the 1950s, sociological structural-functionalism, in favour of twentieth-century Marxism and sociological phenomenology, the dominant sources of 'travelling theory' at that time. Twentieth-century Marxism was a Marxism of the superstructure which was concerned to avoid the most I discredited fonns of economic reductionism. The 'keyword' at this time was 'ideology', and it was this concept above all which was appropriated for feminist theory to conceptualize 'patriarchy'. 'Ideology' was used as the organizing concept in discussions of sexual divisions and hierarchies, and for the analysis of culture, including literature and the visual arts. It was therefore placed under intense pressure, made to cover a great deal of ground, inside and outside of feminism. However, the term represented one of the weaker links in the conceptual repertoire of Marxism, and it became evident very early on that _additional theoretical resources were required to tackle the work it was being asked to do. Literary and cultural studies required a more adequate account of language than was generally available within the Marxist frame, and feminists in all fields of study urgently required a more plausible theory of sexuality than Marxism could offer. All the new resources for feminist theory were centred upon language. The 'linguistic turn' had affected all the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences between the mid-l 960s and the mid-I 970s, and the theories wtlich 'travelled' from this period included structuralist linguistics and semiology, sociological and anthropological strµcturalism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, decpnstructionism. and poststructuralism. This swathe of theory was centred in phi.losophy and critical theory rather than in sociology, and so the undertow for those who travelled with travelling theory pulled ~way from sociology and history to some degree.
The list of books you might like
