feminism in college essay

Essay on Feminism

500 words essay on feminism.

Feminism is a social and political movement that advocates for the rights of women on the grounds of equality of sexes. It does not deny the biological differences between the sexes but demands equality in opportunities. It covers everything from social and political to economic arenas. In fact, feminist campaigns have been a crucial part of history in women empowerment. The feminist campaigns of the twentieth century made the right to vote, public property, work and education possible. Thus, an essay on feminism will discuss its importance and impact.

Importance of Feminism

Feminism is not just important for women but for every sex, gender, caste, creed and more. It empowers the people and society as a whole. A very common misconception is that only women can be feminists.

It is absolutely wrong but feminism does not just benefit women. It strives for equality of the sexes, not the superiority of women. Feminism takes the gender roles which have been around for many years and tries to deconstruct them.

This allows people to live freely and empower lives without getting tied down by traditional restrictions. In other words, it benefits women as well as men. For instance, while it advocates that women must be free to earn it also advocates that why should men be the sole breadwinner of the family? It tries to give freedom to all.

Most importantly, it is essential for young people to get involved in the feminist movement. This way, we can achieve faster results. It is no less than a dream to live in a world full of equality.

Thus, we must all look at our own cultures and communities for making this dream a reality. We have not yet reached the result but we are on the journey, so we must continue on this mission to achieve successful results.

Impact of Feminism

Feminism has had a life-changing impact on everyone, especially women. If we look at history, we see that it is what gave women the right to vote. It was no small feat but was achieved successfully by women.

Further, if we look at modern feminism, we see how feminism involves in life-altering campaigns. For instance, campaigns that support the abortion of unwanted pregnancy and reproductive rights allow women to have freedom of choice.

Moreover, feminism constantly questions patriarchy and strives to renounce gender roles. It allows men to be whoever they wish to be without getting judged. It is not taboo for men to cry anymore because they must be allowed to express themselves freely.

Similarly, it also helps the LGBTQ community greatly as it advocates for their right too. Feminism gives a place for everyone and it is best to practice intersectional feminism to understand everyone’s struggle.

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Conclusion of the Essay on Feminism

The key message of feminism must be to highlight the choice in bringing personal meaning to feminism. It is to recognize other’s right for doing the same thing. The sad part is that despite feminism being a strong movement, there are still parts of the world where inequality and exploitation of women take places. Thus, we must all try to practice intersectional feminism.

FAQ of Essay on Feminism

Question 1: What are feminist beliefs?

Answer 1: Feminist beliefs are the desire for equality between the sexes. It is the belief that men and women must have equal rights and opportunities. Thus, it covers everything from social and political to economic equality.

Question 2: What started feminism?

Answer 2: The first wave of feminism occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It emerged out of an environment of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics. This wave aimed to open up new doors for women with a focus on suffrage.

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Essays About Feminism: Top 5 Examples Plus Prompts

When writing essays about feminism, there are a lot of aspects you can focus on. We have collected some of the best essay examples with prompts.

Feminism is a socio-political movement that is about fighting for equal rights and opportunities for all genders. While many point its beginnings to the women’s rights movements in the 19th century, when women were liberated and finally allowed to vote, feminist thinking can actually be traced back to as early as the late 14th century with the works of French writer Christine De Pizan , touted the first feminist philosopher.

Today, the definition of feminism has expanded to end discrimination, oppression and stereotyping of all genders from all walks of life. It aims to make radical reforms to eliminate cultural norms and push the legislation of equality-supporting laws.

Because feminism is a widely relevant topic, you may be asked to write an essay about feminism either as a student or a professional. However, it may be difficult to find a starting point given the broad spectrum of areas in which feminism is found relevant.

For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essays on feminism to provide inspiration:

1. Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

2. bad feminist by roxane gay, 3. civic memory, feminist future by lidia yuknavitch, 4. trickle-down feminism by sarah jaffe, 5. emily ratajkowski explores what it means to be hyper feminine by emily ratajkowski , 1. definition of feminism, 2. does feminism still matter in the workplace, 3. would you consider yourself a feminist, 4. historical evolution of feminism, 5. criticisms against feminism, 6. how can we achieve gender equality , 7. who are the feminists in your community and what are they fighting for.

“The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women — of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human.

Solnit starts with amusing narratives of real-life experiences with men who have critiqued her books wrongly. Solnit points out that men’s arrogance and tendency to explain things to women, thinking they know better, have forced women into silence and weakened their credibility even in places where their voices are crucial – such as in the court stand when women testify to being raped. Solnit, thus, emphasizes that the fight against mansplainers is important to the feminist movement. For more, check out these articles about feminism .

“I want to be independent, but I want to be taken care of and have someone to come home to. I have a job I’m pretty good at. I am in charge of things. I am on committees. People respect me and take my counsel. I want to be strong and professional, but I resent how hard I have to work to be taken seriously, to receive a fraction of the consideration I might otherwise receive. Sometimes I feel an overwhelming need to cry at work, so I close my office door and lose it.”

Gay reveals a series of secrets that make her believe she is a “bad feminst.” At first, she had tried to hide her fondness for men, fashion and thuggish rap, among many other things that gave her joy but went against the ideal feminist image etched in the mind of many. Eventually, Gay embraces the “mess of contradictions” that she is, proudly owning the label of a “bad feminist” while she speaks up on issues critical to the feminist movement and debunks myths on the unrealistic standards surrounding the sisterhood.

“There is no photo for what my father did to his daughters. It came into our bodies as a habit of being, a structure of consciousness, a way of life. Maybe it is akin to feeling discovered and conquered and colonized. Maybe the first colonizations are of the bodies of women and children, and from there they extend like the outstretched hand of a man grabbing land. Cultures.”

Yuknavitch highlights her rage against “fathers” both in her personal life and in each political administration that she survived. Yuknavitch described how these fathers and father images try to take control of others’ bodies and lives and crush others’ spirits. In her confrontation and memory of such men, however, Yuknavitch also learned to create art and find her feminist purpose.

“Women may be overrepresented in the growing sectors of the economy, but those sectors pay poverty wages. The public sector job cuts that have been largely responsible for unemployment remaining at or near 8 percent have fallen disproportionately on women (and women of color are hit the hardest). Those good union jobs disappear, and are replaced with a minimum-wage gig at Walmart—and even in retail, women make only 90 percent of what men make.”

Jaffe gives an in-depth view of the gains and impasse in the fight to improve women’s working opportunities. She stresses that women’s breakthroughs in the workplace may not always be a cause for celebration if these do not translate to long-term and more concrete changes for women to be treated better in the workplace. Jaffe encouraged feminists to continue organizing themselves to focus on solutions that can address the continued low wages of women, gender pay gaps and the minimal choice of professions offered to women.

“I often think about this. Why, as a culture, do we insist on separating smart and serious from sexy? Give women the opportunity to be whatever they want and as multifaceted as they can be.”

American model Ratajkowski writes a candid memoir on what it means to be hyper feminine in a society that represses and shames sexuality. She recounts how a misogynistic culture heavily influenced her early adventures on exploring her feminine side, how she took it to her advantage and turned being “sexy” into her strength. Ratajkowski also reveals how she feels about feminism today and women, in general, having their own decision and choices.

Writing Prompts on Essays about Feminism

For more help in picking your next essay topic, check out these seven essay prompts that can get you started:

Feminism is largely believed to be women’s fight against the patriarchy. Could it be a fight against all forms of oppression, discrimination, objectification and stereotyping? Could it be something more? You may even investigate some common myths about feminism. You might be interested in our list of adjectives for strong women .

Essays about Feminism: Does feminism still matter in the workplace?

Now that several women are climbing to the top of corporate ladders, have the right to vote and could get a doctorate, does feminism remain relevant?

Your article can explore the continued challenges of women in the workplace. You may also interview some working women who have faced obstacles toward certain goals due to discrimination and how they overcame the situation.

This would tie in closely to the topic on the definition of feminism. But this topic adds value and a personal touch as you share the reasons and narratives that made you realize you are or are not a feminist.

A common misconception is that only women can be feminists.

The First Wave of feminism started in the 19th century as protests on the streets and evolved into today’s Fourth Wave where technologial tools are leveraged to promote feminist advocacies. Look at each period of feminism and compare their objectives and challenges.

While feminism aims to benefit everybody, the movement has also earned the ire of many. Some people blame feminism for enabling hostility towards men, promiscuity and pornography, among others. You can also touch on the more controversial issue on abortion which feminists fight for with the popularizd slogan “My body, my choice.” You can discuss the law of abortion in your state or your country and what feminist groups have to say about these existing regulations.

Gender equality is pursued in various fields, especially where women have had little representation in the past. One example is the tech industry. Choose one sector you relate closely with and research on how gender equality has advanced in this area. It may be fun to also interview some industry leaders to know what policy frameworks they are implementing, and what will be their strategic direction moving forward.

Everyone surely knows a handful of feminists in their social media networks. Interview some friends and ask about feminist projects they have worked on or are working on. Of course, do not forget to ask about the outcomes or targets of the project and find out who has benefitted from the cause. Are these mothers or young women?

WRITING TIPS: Before you head on to write about feminism, check out our essay writing tips so you can have a struggle-free writing process.

If writing an essay still feels like a lot of work, simplify it. Write a simple 5 paragraph essay instead

Yna Lim is a communications specialist currently focused on policy advocacy. In her eight years of writing, she has been exposed to a variety of topics, including cryptocurrency, web hosting, agriculture, marketing, intellectual property, data privacy and international trade. A former journalist in one of the top business papers in the Philippines, Yna is currently pursuing her master's degree in economics and business.

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334 Feminism Essay Topics & Examples

If you’re looking for original feminist topics to write about, you’re in luck! Our experts have collected this list of ideas for you to explore.

📝 Key Points to Use to Write an Outstanding Feminism Essay

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You may find yourself confused by various theories, movements, and even opinions when writing a feminism essay, regardless of your topic. Thus, producing an excellent paper becomes a matter of more than merely knowing your facts.

You should be able to explain difficult concepts while coincidentally touching upon fundamental points of feminist theory. Here are some starter examples of crucial essay-writing points, which can make your work better:

Research and create a bibliography before beginning to write. There are various book and journal titles available both online and in libraries, and using them defines your essay’s credibility. You may use both books published long ago, such as “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir, and modern-day publications. Referencing reliable sources throughout your work will help you convince your readers that your approach is factual and in line with the main trends of the academic community.
Writing a feminism essay outline beforehand will save you precious time. Not only because it is a tool to get your thoughts in order before beginning to write but also because it allows you to judge whether you have covered the subject thoroughly. Furthermore, structuring beforehand enables you to understand possible drawbacks of your previous research, which you can promptly correct.
Explain the history behind your problem. Doing so allows you to set the scene for your essay and quickly introduce it to an audience, who may not be as well versed in feminism essay topics as you. Furthermore, you can use your historical introduction later as a prerequisite to explaining its possible future effects.
Be aware of the correct terminology and use it appropriately. This action demonstrates a profound knowledge of your assigned issue to your readers. From women’s empowerment and discrimination to androcentrism and gynocriticism, track the terms you may need to implement throughout your work.
Do not overlook your title as a tool to gain your readers’ attention. Your papers should interest people from the beginning and making them want to read more of your work. Writing good feminism essay titles is a great start to both catching their attention and explaining what your central theme is.
Read available feminism essay examples to understand the dos and don’ts that will help you write your own paper. Plagiarism and inspiration are different concepts, and you can get great ideas from others’ work, so long as you do not copy them!

After you have done your research, drafted an outline, and read some sample works, you are ready to begin writing. When doing so, you should not avoid opposing opinions on topics regarding feminism, and use them to your advantage by refuting them.

Utilizing feminist criticism will allow you to sway even those with different perspectives to see some aspects worthy of contemplation within your essay. Furthermore, it is a mark of good academism, to be able to defend your points with well-rounded counterarguments!

Remember to remain respectful throughout your essay and only include trusted, credible information in your work. This action ensures that your work is purely academic, rather than dabbling in a tabloid-like approach.

While doing the latter may entertain your readers for longer, the former will help you build a better demonstration of your subject, furthering good academic practices and contributing to the existing body of literature.

Find more points and essays at IvyPanda!

21st Century Patriarchy.
Third Wave Feminism.
Men in the Movement.
Gender Roles in Sports.
Femininity in Media.
The History of Feminist Slogans.
Must-Read Feminist Books.
Feminist Perspective in Politics.
Gender Equality in Patriarchal Society.
Feminism & Contemporary Art.
Feminism in “A Doll’s House” by Henrik Ibsen Nora is referred by her husband as a songbird, a lark, a squirrel, names that suggest how insignificant she is to her.
Feminism: Benefits over Disadvantages They believe that feminists make the importance of family less critical than it used to be, which affects children’s lives and their psychological state.
Feminist Approach to Health In general feminist recognize gender as an important aspect and believe that gender inequality essentially exist.
Feminist Perspective: “My Last Duchess”, “To His Coy Mistress”, and “The Secretary Chant” He thinks such behavior is offensive to his position and his power, this is why this woman is in the past, and the other one is waiting for him downstairs to enlarge Duke’s collection of […]
Third-World Feminism Analysis Although the primary aim of western feminists is centered on the issues women face, the beliefs of the third world consist of various tenets compared to western feminist interpretations.
The Great Gatsby: Analysis and Feminist Critique The feminist critique is an aspect that seeks to explore the topic of men domination in the social, economic, and political sectors.
Feminism in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Mary Wollstonecraft expressly makes her stand known in advocating for the rights of the women in her novel, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but her daughter is a bit reluctant to curve a […]
Hedda Gabler: Feminist Ideas and Themes Central to the female world was the woman with knowledge.”Think of the sort of life she was accustomed to in her father’s time.
Feminism in “The Introduction” and “A Nocturnal Reverie” by Finch One of Anne Finch’s poems, “The Introduction,” talks about female writers of her time in the first twenty lines of her text.
Feminism in “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood Religion in Gilead is the similar to that of the current American society especially, the aspect of ambiguity which has been predominant with regard to the rightful application of religious beliefs and principles.
Top Themes About Feminism It’s a movement that is mainly concerned with fighting for women’s rights in terms of gender equality and equity in the distribution of resources and opportunities in society.
Female Characters in Shakespeare’s “Othello”: A Feminist Critique This shows that Desdemona has completely accepted and respected her role as a woman in the society; she is an obedient wife to Othello.
“We Should All Be Feminists” Adichie’s TED Talk For Adichie, the only thing necessary to qualify as a feminist is recognizing the problem with gender and aspiring to fix it, regardless of whether a person in question is a man or woman. This […]
Feminist Criticism in Literature: Character of Women in Books Wright The unimportance of women in the play is a critical factor for the women should follow all the things that their men counterparts impose on them.
Feminist Therapy: Gwen’s Case Study The application of a feminist perspective in Gwen’s case is different from other theoretical frameworks as the approach highlights the impact of gender and associated stressors on the client’s life.
Feminist Theory of Delinquency by Chesney-Lind One of the core ideas expressed by Chesney-Lind is that girls are highly susceptible to abuse and violent treatment. At the same time, scholars note that girls do not view delinquency as the “rejection of […]
Metropolis’ Women: Analysis of the Movie’s Feminism & Examples This film is an endeavor to examine the image of the female depicted, the oppression that they have to endure before they are liberated, as well as the expectations of men with regard to the […]
Race, Class and Gender: Feminism – A Transformational Politic The social construction of difference in America has its historical roots in the days of slavery, the civil war, the civil rights movement, and the various shades of affirmative action that have still not managed […]
Feminist Connotations in Susan Glaspell’s “Trifles” It is a call to reexamine the value of women in a patriarchal society; through their central role in the drama, the female characters challenge traditional notions about women’s perspective and value.
Feminism in Advertisements of the 1950s and Today In the paper, the author discussed how the whole process of advertising and feminism is depicted in print advertisements. The common characteristic is the advertisements’ illustration of feminism in the media.
Character Analysis in Pride and Prejudice From the Feminist Perspective Darcy is a character who is able to evolve over the span of the story, and eventually, he recognizes his mistakes.Mr.
Feminism in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler Hedda Gabler, upon the discovery that her imaginary world of free-living and noble dying lies in shivers about her, no longer has the vitality to continue existence in the real world and chooses self-annihilation. At […]
Hello Kitty as a Kitsch and Anti-Feminist Phenomenon In this scenario, Hello Kitty is linked to the notion of kitsch because it connects adult men and women that are attached to the cute image to constant consumerism.
Yves Klein’s Works From a Feminist Perspective The images were painted in the 20th century in the backdrop of the rising pressure in many parts of the globe for the government to embrace gender equality.
Feminism in the 20th Century: a Literature Perspective. Research Summaries For years, the sphere of political, social and economical life of people all over the world was dominated by men, while women’ were restricted to the household domain; more to the point, women were not […]
Feminism in “Heart of Darkness” and “Apocalypse Now” However, one realizes that she is voiceless in the novel, which highlights the insignificance of role of women in Heart of Darkness.
Feminism in The Yellow Wallpaper In an attempt to free her, she rips apart the wallpaper and locks herself in the bedroom. The husband locks her wife in a room because of his beliefs that she needed a rest break.
The Fraternal Social Contract on Feminism and Community Formation The contract was signed by men to bring to an end the conditions of the state of nature. Life was anarchic and short lived which forced men to sign a social contract that could bring […]
Gender Issues: Education and Feminism These experiences in many times strongly affects the individual’s understanding, reasoning, action about the particular issue in contention In this work two issues of great influence and relevance to our societies are discussed.
Feminism in the “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath This piece of writing reveals the concept of gender in general and “the role of female protagonists in a largely patriarchal world” in particular. In Plath’s novel, the bell jar is a metaphor used to […]
Feminist Research Methods The study of methods and methodology shows that the unique differences are found in the motives of the research, the knowledge that the research seeks to expound, and the concerns of the researchers and the […]
Mary Rowlandson’s Feminism and View on Women’s Role The sort of power developed by Rowlandson was such that it set her apart from the traditional roles of the Puritan women in her time and within her culture.
Shifting the Centre: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing About Motherhood The author is very categorical in that it is necessary to put the role of the woman of color in the same position as that of the white one since this ensures that cultural identity […]
Feminist View of Red Riding Hood Adaptations The Brothers Grimm modified the ending of the story, in their version the girl and her grandmother were saved by a hunter who came to the house when he heard the wolf snoring.
Feminist Approach: Virginia Woolf In “A room of ones own” Virginia Woolf speaks about the problems of women, gender roles, and the low social position of women writers in society.
Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde: The Black Feminist Poets The themes of double discrimination are developed in the poems “Woman Work” and “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou and poems “A Meeting of Minds” and “To the Poet Who Happens to Be Black and […]
Feminism in Canadian Literature First of all, the female author of the article considered by Cosh is evidently a supporter of the equality of rights for men and women, and her account on the women liberation movement in the […]
Feminist Ethics Concept This point of view therefore leaves the patriarchal society as the only repairable institution and this is where radical feminist concurs with the fact that feminist ethics are centered on changing the social perceptions of […]
Feminism Builds up in Romanticism, Realism, Modernism Exploring the significance of the theme as well as the motifs of this piece, it becomes essential to understand that the era of modernism injected individualism in the literary works.
A Feminist Life Lesson in “Sula” by Toni Morrison This essay is going to review gender and love and sexuality as the key themes that intertwined with Nel and Sula’s friendship, while also explaining how these influenced each of the two main characters. On […]
Feminism in the Past and Nowadays The definition of liberal feminism is the following: “a particular approach to achieving equality between men and women that emphasizes the power of an individual person to alter discriminatory practices against women”.
Feminist Critique of Jean Racine’s “Phedre” Racine view Phedre as in a trap by the anger of gods and her destiny due to the unlawful and jealous passion that resulted into the deaths of Hippolytus and Oenone.
Feminist Theory and Postmodern Approaches It seems to me that such technique can be quite helpful because it helps to get to the root of the problem.
Charlotte Gilman’s feminism theory Because of the many issues that women face, feminism movements’ seeks equality between men and women in the society. Throughout, the paper will discuss Gilman’s feminism theory and relate it to the issues of women […]
Feminist Theory in “A Family Thing” Movie Discrimination and disregard of someones basic rights are one of the central causes for the emergence of significant psychological problems and the gradual deterioration of the quality of life.
Third World Feminism and Its Challenges As a conclusion, Sa’ar states that “it is rooted in the code of familial commitment, which is primarily masculine and includes women only secondarily,” which makes it difficult for women to commit to the family, […]
Willa Cather and Feminism Ability to work and/or supervise oneself as a woman is also quietly depicted through the girl who is able to work in the absence of her father. Cather depicts most of the women in her […]
Emotion and Freedom in 20th-Century Feminist Literature The author notes that the second layer of the story can be found in the antagonism between the “narrator, author, and the unreliable protagonist”.
Importance of Feminism in Interpersonal Communication in “Erin Brockovich” In this presentation, the theme of feminism in interpersonal communication will be discussed to prove that it is a good example of how a woman can fight for her rights.
Feminist Theory of Family Therapy The purpose of this paper is to review and evaluate the feminist theory based on its model, views on mental health, goals, and the role of the counselor in the process.
“Frida Kahlo: A Contemporary Feminist Reading” by Liza Bakewell The purpose of this action was to bring her closer to the revolution and identify her with it. Kahlo’s rise to iconic status was due to her experiences and occurrences of the time.
The Picture of Arabic Feminist Najir’s father’s taking of her sexually excludes her from chances at a marriage of her own, because she is deprived of her virginity, and exposes the young woman to the risk of a pregnancy which […]
The Adoption of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism Basics in Feminist Cultural Theory On the contrary, post structuralism is opposite to such an assumption and uses the concept of deconstruction in order to explain the relations and the position of women in the society.
A Feminist Reading of “Wild Nights” and “Death Be Not Proud” From the feminist perspective, the key feature of the speaker’s stance in “Death Be Not Proud” that sets it apart from “Wild Nights” is the speaker’s persona, which is openly and unequivocally male.
Feminism and Nationalism: The Western World In this case, we find that feminism has been a different that all the time and therefore, it is impossible to predict the trend of feminism in future.
Feminism in ‘Trifles’ by Susan Glaspell The Feminist Movement, also called the Women’s Movement and the Women’s Liberation Movement, includes a series of efforts by women in the world to fight for the restoration of gender equality.
“Feminism and Religion: The Introduction” by R. Gross Gross critically in order to see the essence of the book and the competence of the author in the current issue.
Black Feminism: A Revolutionary Practice The Black Feminist Movement was organized in an endeavor to meet the requirements of black women who were racially browbeaten in the Women’s Movement and sexually exploited during the Black Liberation Movement.
Popular Culture From the Fifties to Heroin Chic: Feminism The women have become aware of their legal rights and disabilities as a consequence of the inclusion of educated women in movements to repair the legal disabilities.
Empowerment and Feminist Theory Therefore, it can be concluded that the song “Unstoppable,” which is performed by Sia, transfers the main ideas of empowerment and feminist theory.
Feminist Perspective: “The Gender Pay Gap Explained” Another issue that needs to be discussed is that it is suggested that the elimination of the wage gap would help to enhance the economy and living conditions of many families.
Feminism: “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir According to post-structural feminism structures in society still hold the woman back.de Beauvoir states that this is because structures still exist in the minds of people as to the place of women in society.
Feminism and Roles in “A Raisin in the Sun” Play These are such questions as: “What does Beneatha’s conduct reveal about her intentions?”, “How does the character treat female’s role in society?”, “How does Beneatha regard poor people?”, “How does the heroine explain her choice […]
“First Wave” Feminist Movement The reading explicitly details the pathways used by women and men in the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries to advocate for the realization of equality of rights across a wide spectrum of […]
Feminist Analysis of Gender in American Television The analysis is guided by the hypothesis that the media plays a role in the propagation of antagonistic sexual and gender-based stereotypes.
Feminism and Respect for Culture A crucial gender aspect that continues to trouble the unity of the people across the world is gender bias, which seems to encourage the formation of the feminist campaigns.
“Othello” Through the Lens of Feminist Theory It depicts female characters in a state of submission and obedience and shows the disbalance in the distribution of power between men and women.
The Feminist Theory in Nursing Since nursing has traditionally been a women’s profession, it is important to understand the oppression of women to gain insight into some of the most pressing issues in nursing.
Historical Development of Feminism and Patriarchy Women in the United States have always encountered challenges that interfere with their individual fulfillment in society.
Feminist Theory in Psychotherapy This theory puts women at the first place, and this place is reflected in three aspects: the first is its main object of study – the situation and difficulties faced by women in society, and […]
The Concept of Feminist Epistemology The analysis starts with an overview of the evolutions process of standpoint epistemology; then, the philosophical movement is defined and the major ideas and arguments embedded into the theory are discussed.
A Feminist Analysis on Abu Ghraib Moreover, these tortures were intended to become public with the help of demonstrations at Abu Ghraib and taking photographs that accentuated the loss of prisoners’ masculine power.[4] According to Foucault’s views, public torture is an […]
Feminist Perspective in “Ruined” Play by Nottage This is a story about the issues of women in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the civil war. The comments of ‘Anonymous’ published as a response to the review of Jill Dolan, demonstrate the […]
Ecological Feminism and Environmental Ethics Because of the effects that the process of globalization has had on the environment, including the increase in the speed of global warming and the scope of its outcomes, environmental ethics has gained significance.
“Feminism and Modern Friendship” by Marilyn Friedman Individualism denies that the identity and nature of human beings as individuals is a product of the roles of communities as well as social relationships.
Women’s Health and Feminism Theory For a woman to be in charge of her reproductive health, she has to know some of the stages and conditions in her life.
Feminist Pro-Porn During Sex Wars In particular, this group was determined to fight for the rights of the lesbians as they realised that the arguments of the anti-porn feminists were against their freedom.
Comparing Views on the Feminism of Wollstonecraft and Martin Luther King This means that if women are given and encouraged to have the same level of education as the men than the society would be a much better place as both the female and male genders […]
Comparing Mainardi and Kollantai on Housework and Women’s Oppression Mainardi and Kollantai argue that women should be liberated from chores for the sake of the future. Nonetheless, the two feminists have different views on the way liberation can be achieved.
Bell Hooks’ Article Analysis With Regard to Women and Minorities Feminism is meant to stop sexist oppression. The major aim of these movements has not yet been achieved. Bell Hooks promotes the knowledge of feminist theory as essential portion of the development of self-actualization.
Equal Society: Antebellum Feminism, Temperance, and Abolition It is characterized by the emergence of a women’s rights movement that was spearheaded by activists who sought to secure the rights of women to vote, own property, and participate in education and the public […]
Feminism in the “Lorraine Hansberry” Film Her activism aligns with the fundamental tenets of women of color feminism, which emphasizes the intersecting nature of oppression and the importance of centering the experiences of marginalized groups in social justice movements.
Gloria Steinem: Political Activist and Feminist Leader Thesis: Gloria Steinem’s direct, bold, argumentative, and explicit style of conveying her ideas and values is the result of her political activism, feminist leadership, and her grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem.
The Myntra Logo from a Feminist Perspective The first feature of the Myntra logo that comes under the scrutiny of transnational feminism is the commercialization of female sexuality.
Feminist Geography and Women Suppression Tim Cresswell’s feminist geography explores how the patriarchal structures of our society have silenced women’s voices and experiences in the field of geography for centuries and how recent changes in the field have allowed for […]
Feminism from a Historical Perspective Accordingly, the discontent facilitated the development of reform-minded activist organizations across Europe and the United States and the subsequent rise of the Modern or New Women’s Movement.
The Feminist Theory in Modern Realities The theory and culture of feminism in modern philosophy and the development of society play a significant role in cultural and social development.
Feminist Accountability Approach Therefore, the feminist accountability approach involves the collective responsibility to fight social injustices regardless of gender and race. Therefore, integrating the global approach to social injustice promotes the aspect of universality and unity in promoting […]
Alice Walker’s Statement “Womanist Is to Feminist…” In her short tale “Perspectives Past and Present,” author and poet Alice Walker famously uses the statement “Womanist Is to Feminist as Purple Is to Lavender,” meaning that womanist is a larger ideological framework within […]
Feminist Perspective on Family Counselling The author of the article considers the study and the data obtained as a result of it as information reporting not only about the specifics of homosexual relationships but also about their perception in American […]
The Feminist and Gender Theory Influence on Nursing That is, gender and feminist theories are still relevant in the modern world. This is explained by the fact that women are struggling to demonstrate their professionalism in order to receive the same recognition and […]
Modern Feminism and Its Major Directions Radical feminism views patriarchy as the reason men have more rights than women and attempts to fight against it. Liberal, intersectional, and radical feminism differ in many ways as they have various perspectives on women’s […]
Feminist Theory and Its Application Alice Walker advocated for the rights of women of color at the end of the 20th century, creating a feminist branch named womanism. The feminist theory is one of the most known and popular theories […]
Discussion of Feminist Movements The feminist movements have been behind a sequence of political and social movements that champion the equal rights of women in all aspects of life.
Feminists on the Women’s Role in the Bible The author of the article uses the term intertextuality, which plays a significant role in the text analysis, including from the feminist aspect.
The Incorporation of Feminism in Literature By focusing on the character, the book portrays the demand for feminism in society to allow females to have the ability and potential to undertake some responsibilities persevered by their male counterparts. The belief in […]
Feminist Contribution to International Relations Moreover, it will be shown that the concept of gender is important as it helps to shed light on the power dynamics in the sphere of international relations and explain female exclusion from politics.
Emotional Revival in Feminist Writers’ Short Stories This paper aims to discuss the emotional revival of heroines in the short stories of Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.”The Story of an Hour” is a very short story that describes a woman’s experience […]
The Cyborg Term in the Context of Feminist Studies In other words, during the transition of identity from the individual to the collective level, people, especially women, may encounter inequalities manifested in the collective space.
Feminism: A Road Map to Overcoming COVID-19 and Climate Change By exposing how individuals relate to one another as humans, institutions, and organizations, feminism aids in the identification of these frequent dimensions of suffering.
White Privilege in Conflict and Feminist Theories They see how the privilege of whiteness and denial of non-whiteness are connected to the social and political meaning of race and ethnicity.
Women’s Role in Society From Feminist Perspective Also, in Hartsock’s opinion, that the whole society would benefit if women were allowed to have a role equal with men in a community.
The Feminist Theory and IR Practice Focusing on how international relations theorists explained some concepts, such as security, state, and superiority that led to gender bias, feminists felt the need to develop and transform the international relations practice and theory.
Intersectionality and Feminist Activism Therefore, I hope to study the academic literature to discuss the existing tendencies and difficulties to contribute to the understanding of the identified topic in terms of gender and female studies.
Feminism: Reflection of Cultural Feminism If they found that the gases were harmful and may lead to complications in their body, they would approve the employer’s right to prohibit women from working in the company.
Feminist Theoretical Perspectives on Rape There is a number of theoretical perspectives aimed at explaining what stands behind rape, that is, how rape is reinforced by, why it is more widespread in specific concepts, and what a rapist’s motivations for […]
Feminist Film Theory Overview The presence of women on the screen is commonly accomplished by the sexualization and objectivization of female characters. Along with that, sadism and fetishism toward the physical beauty of the object and the representation of […]
“Daddy-long-Legs”: Why Jerusha Is a Feminist Heroine Jerusha is a feminist because she uses the letters to communicate the inequalities she feels in her relationship with Daddy-long-legs and her limits.
Homosexuality and Feminism in the TV Series The depiction of these complex topics in the TV series of the humoristic genre implies both regressive and progressive impulses for the audience.
Popular Feminism in Video Post of Emma Watson According to Emma Watson, now feminism is increasingly associated with hatred of men, although in reality it only implies the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities.
Contingent Foundations: Feminism and Postmodernism Feminism offers women theoretical bases on which to interrogate the issues of womanhood while Postmodernism takes this away by arguing for the “death of subjects”.abolition of the foundations of the ideals of reality.
The Feminist Theory, Prostitution, and Universal Access to Justice In the essay, it is concluded that the theory is a key component of the reforms needed in the criminal justice system with respect to prostitution. In this essay, the subject of prostitution is discussed […]
Art, Pornography and Feminism and Internet Influence The purpose of pornography is not the desire to admire the human body and respect physical intimacy. Indeed, society can say that women themselves agree to such rules, but the choice of a minority forms […]
The Contemporary Image of Feminism Following the initial surge of the movement, governments finally came to acknowledge the magnitude of the situation and satisfied the demands of the female population.
Gould’s and Sterling’s Feminist Articles Critique The focal point of this paper is to prepare a critical reflection on the articles by Stephen Jay Gould named “Women’s Brains” in The Panda’s Thumb and by Anne Fausto-Sterling named “The biological Connections,” from […]
Core Aspects of Black Feminist and Womanist Thoughts Compared to Jones, who believes in “unparalleled advocates of universal suffrage in its true sense,” Lindsey does not support the relegation of the “voices and experiences of women of color to the background”.
Barbara and Beverly Smith: Black Feminist Statement Sexism was an explicit element of the African American Civil Rights Movement. Fight against segregation was rather single-sided.
Feminist Contributions to Understanding Women’s Lives This gave women a clear picture of the daily realities in their lives. The success of feminism is evident at all levels of human interaction since there is a better understanding of women and their […]
As We Are Feminist Campaign’s Strategic Goals The present paper is devoted to the analysis of the goals of a feminist campaign As We Are that is aimed at challenging gender stereotypes that are being promoted by the media and society in […]
Feminist Ethics in Nursing: Personal Thoughts The concept of feminist ethics emphasizes the belief that ethical theorizing at the present is done from a distinctly male point of view and, as such, lacks the moral experience of women.
Feminism: Kneel to the Rest of Life, or Fight for the Fairness It seems that the law is not perfect, and the public opinion of sexual harassment might influence a woman’s life negatively.
Feminist Perspective Influence on Canadian Laws and Lawmakers The change in the statistics is attributed to social changes, which include increase of women in the labor force, conflict in female-male relations, increase in alcohol consumption and increase in the rate of divorce. Feminists […]
Blog Post: Arab Feminism in Contemporary World Women of the Arab world have struggled to overcome inequality, oppression, and rights deprivation by state authorities, which takes the discussion of the Islamic feminist movement to the political domain. According to Sharia, the unity […]
Feminist Movement and Recommendations on Women’s Liberation According to Nawal El-Saadawi In Egypt, the feminist movement was started by Nawal El-Saadawi, and her article “The Arab Women’s Solidarity Association: The Coming Challenge” has historical importance as it addresses the plight of women in the community.
Technological Progress, Globalization, Feminism Roots However, the work becomes more complicated when the time distance of the events and processes is shorter, and the stories are unfinished.
Race at the Intersections: Sociology, 3rd Wave Feminism, and Critical Race Theory In this reading, the author examines the phenomenon of racism not merely as an issue but a systematic, institutionalized, and cultural phenomenon that is hard to eliminate.
The Feminist Performers: Yoko Ono, Marina Abramovic, Gina Pane The feminist artists ccontributed to the women’s image, its role in society, and exposed the passiveness and submissiveness the women are obliged to endure.
Feminism and Multiculturalism for Women The foundation of liberalism is having an interest in all the minority cultures that are put together to form the larger special group.
“The Great Gatsby” by Fitzgerald: Betrayal, Romance, Social Politics and Feminism This work seeks to outline the role of women in the development of the plot of the book and in relation to the social issues affecting women in contemporary society.
Pornography’s Harm as a Feminist Fallacy In this scenario, scientific research has proven the argument not to be true. It is weakened by the fact that people are not forced to watch the video.
Feminism in Mourning Dove’s “Cogewea, the Half-Blood” The patriarchal practices embraced by the Indian community and the subsequent system of governance humiliated the writer; hence, the use of Cogewea in the passage was aimed to imply the abilities that were bestowed upon […]
Feminist Film Strategy: The Watermelon Women These techniques have the capabilities of shifting meaning away from the narrative as the source of meaning to the audience’s background knowledge in making meaning.
The Emerging Feminism in India and Their Views on God as a Feminist However, among the explanation of the cause of the phenomenon for this lack of agreement is the tendency for people to define religion too narrowly, and in most cases from the perspective of their own […]
Feminist Psychology in Canada The introduction of the article gives the purposes of the research that include the historical and present condition of the psychology of women field of interest.
American Art Since 1945 Till Feminism The entire movement represented the combination of emotional strength and the self-expression of the European abstract schools: Futurism, the Bauhaus and Synthetic Cubism.
Modernist Art: A Feminist Perspective Clarke limited the definition of modernism even further by his restriction of it to the facets of the Paris of Manet and the Impressionists, a place of leisure, pleasure, and excesses, and it seems that […]
Enlightenment, Feminism and Social Movements As a result of Enlightenment, the creative entrepreneurs as well as thinkers enjoyed the high freedom benefits that were brought in by the Enlightenment thinkers, enabling them to apply the newly acquired liberty to invent […]
“Our Journey to Repowered Feminism” by Sonja K. Foss Foss tried to work out a new conception of repowered feminism in the article “Our Journey to Repowered Feminism: Expanding the Feminist Toolbox”.
Feminism in ‘Telephone Video’ To demonstrate how feminist theory in communication is relevant to music, the paper will analyze the depiction of females, the vocal arrangements, representation of female roles and their visual appearance in Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” music […]
Feminist Position on Prostitution and Pornography The only requirement is that it should not violate the norms of the law. On the other hand, one of the suggestions for feminists is to envisage individual cases of enslaving women as prostitutes.
The Politics of Feminism in Islam by Anouar Majid Considering the work The Politics of Feminism in Islam by Anouar Majid written in 1998, it should be noticed that the main point of this article is the Muslim feminism and the relation of West […]
The Feminist Art Movement in the 1970s and Today The feminist art movement emerged in the 1960s and from that time the women had taken much interest in what causes them to be different from the male gender and particularly, what causes the art […]
Feminist Theory. Modes of Feminist Theorizing The second point of conflict is the acknowledgment that most of the feminist ideas are part and parcel of our culture yet these ideas might be presented in a way that is hard for us […]
Australian Feminism Movements The fact that feminism movements do not have a great following in Australia is because they are not generally seen to address issues that women and the society are facing.
Understanding of Feminism: Philosophical and Social Concepts The vision that emerges, in the narrative as in the world it represents, is of a whole composed of separate, yet interdependent and interrelating, parts.
Geoffrey Chaucer: A Founder of English Literature as a Feminist Despite the distorted interpretation of gender in the patriarchal society, Chaucer’s vision of women contradicts the orthodox view of the biological distinction of males and females as the justification for gender inequality.
Feminist Activism for Safer Social Space by Whitzman The scientist pays special attention to the municipal parks, mainly High Park in Toronto, from the point of view of feminists trying to make women involved into the discourse concerning different aspects of the park.
Western Feminism as Fighters Against Oppression For postmodern feminists and post-colonial feminists, the second component of the new women’s ideology is the idea of the responsibility of the state to rule and administer both genders on the basis of their interpretation […]
Perils and Possibilities of Doing Transnational Feminist Activism These have promoted awareness of human rights among women and other masses, ensured and led to the adoption of the rules and regulations recognizing women rights and that supports ending of women violations and participated […]
The Feminist Gendering Into International Relations These are early female contributions to IR academic and the In terms of conferences, the theme of gender and politics was being explored in conferences.
Western Feminists and Their Impact on the Consciousness and Self-Identity of Muslim Women One of the main objectives of the Western feminism is to give to the citizen of the new nation a feeling of dignity and importance resulting from that citizenship and from his ethnic origin, and […]
Feminism – Women and Work in the Middle East The history of feminism consists of different movements and theories for the rights of women. The first wave of this phenomenon began in the 19th century and saw the end only in the early 20th […]
Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Marianne Weber: Feminist Sociologists Through her writings she always advocated for the equal rights of women with men and remarked the importance of financial self-sufficiency among women in the society. She observed the role of women in society and […]
English Language in the Feminist Movement In addition to that, it is of the crucial importance to explore the underlying causes of this phenomenon. Now that we have enumerated the research methods, that can be employed, it is of the utmost […]
Feminist Ideas in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” One of these issues and the subject of this paper is the theme of feminism in Shelley’s novel. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners”.- Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the […]
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Works and Feminism The woman’s role is depicted ever so poignantly in the works of Divakaruni and this also reflects the importance of reclaiming the understanding of the role of women in society.
Positive Changes That Feminism Brought to America And when, in 1919, the American Constitution was amended such that the women in all the States were given the right to vote, it was then that the first period of feminism officially ended, their […]
Are Feminist Criticisms of Militarism Essentialist? In the following essay, I will trace the essentialist feminists and their juxtaposition to the extent of their deep thoughts and activities toward the militaristic attitude and the changing perception of women in the militarism […]
Western Feminist Critics and Cultural Imperialism To be able to fulfill the above-provided task, it would be necessary to discuss and analyze the issues of race, gender, sexuality, the oppression of multiculturalism, cultural relativism, the attitude of the feminists toward the […]
Social Justice and Feminism in America So as to make a change in this situation, the feminists in America took efforts to improve the condition of women.
American Women in History: Feminism and Suffrage
Wendy McElroy: A Feminist Defense of Men’s Rights
Modern Feminism as the Part of Intellectual Life
Feminist Movements in Contemporary Times
Feminist Critiques of Medicine
Shakespeare: A Feminist Writer
Kate Chopin’s Feminist Short Stories and Novels
Liberal Feminism Movement Analysis
Feminism and Support of Gender Equality
Feminism: Liberal, Black, Radical, and Lesbian
Women and Law. Feminist Majority Foundation
“The Historical Evolution of Black Feminist Theory and Praxis” by Taylor
Postcolonial Feminism Among Epistemological Views
Feminist Theory: Performing and Altering Bodies
Feminist Theories by Bordo, Shaw & Lee, Shildrick & Price
Feminist Examination of Science
Race, Sex and Knowledge From Feminist Perspective
Colonialism and Knowledge in Feminist Discourse
Feminism and the Relational Approach to Autonomy
Feminism and Sexuality in the “Lila Says” Film
Second Wave of Feminist Movement
Feminist Approach in Literary Criticism
Education and Feminism in the Arabian Peninsula
Black Women in Feminism and the Media
Spiritual and Educational Feminist Comparison
Feminist Theoretical Schools in Various Cultures
The Application of Psychoanalysis in Feminist Theories
Feminism: Exposing Women to the Public Sphere
Feminist Psychoanalysis From McRobbie’s Perspective
Feminist Films: “Stella Dallas” and “Dance Girl, Dance”
Ageism and Feminism in Career and Family Expectations
“Feminist Geopolitics and September 11” by Jenifer Hyndman
The History of Feminism in the 1960
Feminism in Tunisia and Jordan in Comparison
Feminism and Gender Studies in Science
Feminism in the United Arab Emirates
Conceptualization of Difference in Feminism
Feminist Political Theory, Approaches and Challenge
Feminism in Latin America
Planet B-Girl: Community Building and Feminism in Hip-Hop
Methods of Feminism Education and Its Modern Theories
Feminism in Lorrie Moore’s “You’re Ugly, Too”
Anti-Feminism and Heteropatriarchal Normativity
Feminist Archaeologists’ Interpretations of the Past
The Theory of Feminism Through the Prism of Time
Development of Feminism in Chile
Elena Poniatowska and Her Feminism
Feminism in Laura Esquivel’s “Like Water for Chocolate”
Concept of “Western Feminism”
Marxism vs. Feminism: Human Nature, Power, Conflict
Feminism in Lorber’s, Thompson’s, Hooks’s Views
Prison and Social Movement in Black Feminist View
Great Awakening, American Civil War, and Feminism
Feminist Miss America Pageant Protest of 1968
Black Feminist Perspectives in Toni Morrison’s Works
Feminist Movement as an Attempt to Obtain Equal Rights
Axel Honneth Views on Feminism
Activist and Feminist Rose Schneiderman
Feminist Deceit in Short Stories
Post-Feminism in the Wonder Bra Commercial
Feminist Movement Influence on the Arab Film Industry
Feminism in the Story “Lord of the Rings”
Feminism: the Contraception Movement in Canada
Beyonce and Assata Shakur Feminism Ideas Comparison
Feminism in “‘Now We Can Begin” by Crystal Eastman
Gender Studies of Feminism: Radical and Liberal Branches
Feminism and Film Theory
The Realization of Third-wave Feminism Ideals
Sexuality as a Social and Historical Construct
Modern Feminist Movements
Feminist Theories in Relation to Family Functions
Rebecca Solnit’s Views on Feminism
Judith Butler’s Feminist Theory
“Old and New Feminists in Latin America: The Case of Peru and Chile” by Chaney E.M.
Chinese Feminism in the Early 20th Century
Feminism and Modern Friendship
Historical Development of Feminism and Patriarchy
Women and Their Acceptance of Feminism
Women, Religion, and Feminism
The History of the Pill and Feminism
Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
Challenges to Build Feminist Movement Against Problems of Globalization and Neoliberalism
Feministic Movement in Iron Jawed Angels
Hillary Clinton: Furthering Political Agenda Through Feminism
Feministic View of McCullers’ “The Member of the Wedding”
“Feminism, Peace, Human Rights and Human Security” by Charlotte Bunch
Feminism in China During the Late Twentieth Century
Feminist Political Change
Antonio Gramsci and Feminism: The Elusive Nature of Power
Changes That Feminism and Gender Lenses Can Bring To Global Politics
Feminism Has Nothing to Tell Us About the Reality of War, Conflict and Hard, Cold Facts
Feminism in the works of Susan Glaspell and Sophocles
Cross Cultural Analysis of Feminism in the Muslim Community
The Adoption of Feminist Doctrine in Canada
Feminist Movement in Canada
The Feminist Power and Structure in Canada
Feminism and Gender Mainstreaming
Feminist Movement: The National Organization for Women
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Raunch Culture and Feminism
Feminist Analysis of the Popular Media: The Sexualization Process Takes Its Toll on the Younger Female Audience
Seven Variations of Cinderella as the Portrayal of an Anti-Feminist Character: a Counterargument Against the Statement of Cinderella’s Passiveness
Women in the Field of Art
The Reflection of the Second-Wave Feminism in Scandinavia: “Show Me Love” and “Together”
Liberal and Socialist Feminist Theories
What Does Feminism Stand For? Who are These Creatures who call themselves Feminists?
Full Frontal Feminism – What is Still Preventing Women from Achieving Equality?
The Ordeal of Being a Woman: When Feminist Ideas Dissipate
Comparison and Contrast of Spiritual and Educational Feminists
Gender Issue and the Feminist Movement
Dorothy E. Smith and Feminist Theory Development
Feminist Movement Tendencies
Feminist Literature: “The Revolt of Mother” by Mary E. Wilkins
Scholars Comment on Gender Equality
The Smurfette Principle in the Modern Media: Feminism Is over?
Feminist Challenge to Mainstream International Relations Theory
The Feminist Movement
Feminism and Evolution or Emergence of Psychology
Reasons Why the Black Women Population Did Not Consider Themselves a Part of the Ongoing Feminist Movements
Black Women and the Feminist Movement
Feminism and Patriarchy
Feminism Interview and the Major Aim of Feminism
Gender and Religion: Women and Islam
World Politics: Realist, Liberals, and Feminists Theories
Concept and History of the Liberal Feminism
Feminism and Women’s History
Feminist Criticism in “The Story of an Hour” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Obesity: Health or Feminist Issue?
Feminism in Roger and Dodger Film
Anarchy, Black Nationalism and Feminism
Concepts of Feminism in the Present Societies
Gender Issues and Feminist Movement
“Just Say No? The Use of Conversation Analysis in Developing a Feminist Perspective on Sexual Refusal” by Kitzinger and Frith: Summary
How Did African Feminism Change the World?
Why Might Feminism and Poststructuralism Be Described as an Uneasy Alliance?
Does Feminism and Masculinity Define Who People Are Today?
How Did Feminism Change New Zealand?
Can Feminism and Marxism Come Together?
How Did Second Wave Feminism Affect the Lives of Women?
Does Arab Feminism Exist?
How Does Chivalry Affect Feminism?
Has Feminism Achieved Its Goals?
How Does the French Feminism Theory Manifest Itself?
Does Feminism Create Equality?
How Has Feminism Changed the Lives of Women, Men, and Families?
Has Feminism Benefited the American Society?
How Does Feminism Explain Gender Differences in Comparison to the Mainstream Psychology?
Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men?
How Does Feminism Harm Women’s Health Care?
Does Feminism Really Work?
How Does Feminism Threaten Male Control and Alters Their Dominance in Society?
What Are the Basic Traits of Liberal Feminism?
How Has Economic Development and Globalization of South Korea Influenced the Role of Feminism?
What Are the Concepts of Marxism and Feminism?
How Has Feminism Developed?
What Are the Main Theoretical and Political Differences Between First and Second Waves of Feminism?
Why Should Men Teach Feminism?
How Does Popular Fiction Reflect Debates About Gender and Sexuality?
When Does Feminism Go Wrong?
How Do Teenage Magazines Express the Post-feminism Culture?
Why Has Patriarchy Proved Such a Contentious Issue for Feminism?
What Are the Main Contributions of Feminism to the Contemporary Lifestyle?
Can Modern Feminism Start the Discrimination of Men?
Motherhood Ideas
Gender Stereotypes Essay Titles
Women’s Role Essay Topics
Sociological Perspectives Titles
Gender Discrimination Research Topics
Masculinity Topics
Activist Essay Titles
Gender Issues Questions
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✍️Essay on Feminism for Students: Samples 150, 250 Words

Updated on
Nov 2, 2023

In a society, men and women should be considered equal in every aspect. This thought is advocated by a social and political movement i.e. feminism . The word feminism was coined by the French Philosopher Charles Fourier in 1837. He was known for his strong belief in equal rights for women as men in every sector, be it the right to vote, right to work, right to decide, right to participate in public life, right to own property, etc. Feminism advocates the rights of women with respect to the equality of gender . There are different types of feminism i.e. liberal, radical, Marxist, cultural, and eco-feminism. Stay tuned and have a look at the following sample essay on feminism!

Also Read: Popular Struggles and Movements

Essay on Feminism 150 Words

India is a land of diversity of which 52.2% are women as per an estimate for the year 2023. This doesn’t mean that every woman is getting basic fundamental rights in society. We should not neglect the rights of women and treat them as a weaker sex. Women are equally strong and capable as men. To advocate this thought a movement called Feminism came into existence in 1837. Feminism is a movement that advocates the equality of women in social, political, and economic areas.

India is up eight notches in #WorldEconomicForum ’s annual gender ranking. And Iceland is #1 for women, again, for the 14th year in a row. @namitabhandare ’s newsletter, #HTMindtheGap looks at why. Plus the week’s other gender stories https://t.co/9Fen6TaEnb Subscribe here… pic.twitter.com/r6XfFMINO0 — Hindustan Times (@htTweets) June 25, 2023

Traditionally, women were believed to stay at home and there were severe restrictions imposed on them. They were not allowed to go out, study, work, vote, own property, etc. However, with the passage of time, people are becoming aware of the objective of feminism. Any person who supports feminism and is a proponent of equal human rights for women is considered a feminist.

Feminism is a challenge to the patriarchal systems existing in society. Despite this strong movement burning in high flames to burn the orthodox and dominant culture, there are still some parts of the world that are facing gender inequality. So, it is our duty to make a world free of any discrimination.

Essay on Feminism 250 Words

Talking about feminism in a broader sense, then, it is not restricted only to women. It refers to the equality of every sex or gender. Some people feel offended by the concept of feminism as they take it in the wrong way. There is a misconception that only women are feminists. But this is not the case. Feminists can be anyone who supports the noble cause of supporting the concept of providing equal rights to women.

Feminism is not restricted to single-sex i.e. women, but it advocates for every person irrespective of caste, creed, colour, sex, or gender. As an individual, it is our duty to help every person achieve equal status in society and eradicate any kind of gender discrimination .

Equality helps people to live freely without any traditional restrictions. At present, the Government of India is also contributing to providing equal rights to the female sector through various Government schemes like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, Pradhan Mantri Mahila Shakti Kendra, One Stop Center, and many more.

Apart from these Government policies, campaigns like reproductive rights or abortion of unwanted pregnancy also give women the right to choose and lead their life without any external authority of a male.

Feminism has also supported the LGBTIQA+ community so that people belonging to this community could come out and reveal their identity without any shame. The concept of feminism also helped them to ask for equal rights as men and women. Thus, it could be concluded that feminism is for all genders and a true feminist will support every person to achieve equal rights and hold a respectable position in society.

Check Out: Women Equality Day

Kajal Thareja

Hi, I am Kajal, a pharmacy graduate, currently pursuing management and is an experienced content writer. I have 2-years of writing experience in Ed-tech (digital marketing) company. I am passionate towards writing blogs and am on the path of discovering true potential professionally in the field of content marketing. I am engaged in writing creative content for students which is simple yet creative and engaging and leaves an impact on the reader's mind.

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5 Essays About Feminism

On the surface, the definition of feminism is simple. It’s the belief that women should be politically, socially, and economically equal to men. Over the years, the movement expanded from a focus on voting rights to worker rights, reproductive rights, gender roles, and beyond. Modern feminism is moving to a more inclusive and intersectional place. Here are five essays about feminism that tackle topics like trans activism, progress, and privilege:

“Trickle-Down Feminism” – Sarah Jaffe

Feminists celebrate successful women who have seemingly smashed through the glass ceiling, but the reality is that most women are still under it. Even in fast-growing fields where women dominate (retail sales, food service, etc), women make less money than men. In this essay from Dissent Magazine, author Sarah Jaffe argues that when the fastest-growing fields are low-wage, it isn’t a victory for women. At the same time, it does present an opportunity to change the way we value service work. It isn’t enough to focus only on “equal pay for equal work” as that argument mostly focuses on jobs where someone can negotiate their salary. This essay explores how feminism can’t succeed if only the concerns of the wealthiest, most privileged women are prioritized.

Sarah Jaffe writes about organizing, social movements, and the economy with publications like Dissent, the Nation, Jacobin, and others. She is the former labor editor at Alternet.

“What No One Else Will Tell You About Feminism” – Lindy West

Written in Lindy West’s distinct voice, this essay provides a clear, condensed history of feminism’s different “waves.” The first wave focused on the right to vote, which established women as equal citizens. In the second wave, after WWII, women began taking on issues that couldn’t be legally-challenged, like gender roles. As the third wave began, the scope of feminism began to encompass others besides middle-class white women. Women should be allowed to define their womanhood for themselves. West also points out that “waves” may not even exist since history is a continuum. She concludes the essay by declaring if you believe all people are equal, you are a feminist.

Jezebel reprinted this essay with permission from How To Be A Person, The Stranger’s Guide to College by Lindy West, Dan Savage, Christopher Frizelle, and Bethany Jean Clement. Lindy West is an activist, comedian, and writer who focuses on topics like feminism, pop culture, and fat acceptance.

“Toward a Trans* Feminism” – Jack Halberstam

The history of transactivsm and feminism is messy. This essay begins with the author’s personal experience with gender and terms like trans*, which Halberstam prefers. The asterisk serves to “open the meaning,” allowing people to choose their categorization as they see fit. The main body of the essay focuses on the less-known history of feminists and trans* folks. He references essays from the 1970s and other literature that help paint a more complete picture. In current times, the tension between radical feminism and trans* feminism remains, but changes that are good for trans* women are good for everyone.

This essay was adapted from Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability by Jack Halberstam. Halberstam is the Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is also the author of several books.

“Rebecca Solnit: How Change Happens” – Rebecca Solnit

The world is changing. Rebecca Solnit describes this transformation as an assembly of ideas, visions, values, essays, books, protests, and more. It has many layers involving race, class, gender, power, climate, justice, etc, as well as many voices. This has led to more clarity about injustice. Solnit describes watching the transformation and how progress and “ wokeness ” are part of a historical process. Progress is hard work. Not exclusively about feminism, this essay takes a more intersectional look at how progress as a whole occurs.

“How Change Happens” was adapted from the introduction to Whose Story Is it? Rebecca Solnit is a writer, activist, and historian. She’s the author of over 20 books on art, politics, feminism, and more.

“Bad Feminist” extract – Roxane Gay

People are complicated and imperfect. In this excerpt from her book Bad Feminist: Essays , Roxane Gay explores her contradictions. The opening sentence is, “I am failing as a woman.” She goes on to describe how she wants to be independent, but also to be taken care of. She wants to be strong and in charge, but she also wants to surrender sometimes. For a long time, she denied that she was human and flawed. However, the work it took to deny her humanness is harder than accepting who she is. While Gay might be a “bad feminist,” she is also deeply committed to issues that are important to feminism. This is a must-read essay for any feminists who worry that they aren’t perfect.

Roxane Gay is a professor, speaker, editor, writer, and social commentator. She is the author of Bad Feminist , a New York Times bestseller, Hunger (a memoir), and works of fiction.

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About the author, emmaline soken-huberty.

Emmaline Soken-Huberty is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. She started to become interested in human rights while attending college, eventually getting a concentration in human rights and humanitarianism. LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, and climate change are of special concern to her. In her spare time, she can be found reading or enjoying Oregon’s natural beauty with her husband and dog.

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Feminist persuasive speech topics

108 feminist persuasive speech topics

- the top current women's rights & feminist issues.

By: Susan Dugdale | Last modified: 07-20-2022

There are 108 persuasive speech topics here covering many current feminist issues. For example:

that copy-cat fast fashion reinforces the relentless consumer cycle and the poverty trap,
that the advertising industry deliberately manufactures and supports body image insecurities to serve its own ends,
that gendered language reinforces the patriarchal structure of society...

They're provocative and challenging topics raising issues that I like to think should be of concern to us all!

Use the quick links to find a topic you want to explore

25 feminist persuasive speech topics about beauty and fashion
16 the media and feminism topics
8 the role of language and feminism speech ideas

8 feminist speech ideas about culture and arts

9 topics on education and gendered expectations, 27 feminist topics about society & social inequality, 8 business & work related feminist speech topics.

Resources for preparing persuasive speeches
References for feminism

What is 'feminism'?

Feminism is defined as belief in and advocacy of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes, expressed especially through organized activity on behalf of women's rights and interests.

(See: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/feminism )

Return to Top

25 feminist speech topics about beauty & fashion

that from puberty onward a woman is targeted by cosmetic companies
that the shape of woman’s body is valued over its health
that physical beauty in a woman is conferred by popular beliefs
that striving for what is regarded as the epitome of female physical perfection destroys women
that physical perfection is a myth
that compassion and collaboration is needed between women (and men) rather than competition and comparison
that beauty, fashion and feminism can co-exist
that clothing reflects social position or class
that the fashionable clothing of any era reflects its dominate cultural beliefs
that a modern feminist does not need to ban either the bra or the razor
that prescriptive beauty norms (PBNs) reinforce sexism, racism, colorism, classism, ableism, ageism, and gender norms
that western feminine beauty standards dominate globally
that there is no legitimate historical or biological justification for the ‘white’ beauty myth
that modern beauty standards were used as “political weapons" against women’s advancement (see Naomi Wolfe - The Beauty Myth )
that the beauty industry cynically and callously exploits women through “self-empowerment” campaigns – eg L'Oreal's “Because you're worth it”
that beauty shaming of any sort is shameful
that health and beauty need to work together for the empowerment of women
that beauty and fashion role models need to be independent of major brands
that fashion and cosmetic industries have a moral responsibility to use the immense power they have in shaping people’s lives for their betterment
that the unfair balance of power between the consumers of fashionable clothing and those who make it is a feminist issue
that copy-cat fast fashion reinforces the relentless consumer cycle and the poverty trap
that genuinely sustainable fashion is only responsible way forward
that clothing/fashion can make a feminist statement. For example: the 1850s “freedom” or “bloomer” dress named after women’s rights and temperance advocate Amelia Bloomer , the wearing of trousers, shorts, or mini skirts by women, or skirts and dresses by men
that boss dressing for women is unnecessary and toxic
that establishing superiority through wearing elitist fashion is an age old ploy

16 the media and feminism speech topics

that feminism in mainstream media is often misrepresented through lack of understanding
that some media deliberately encourages a narrow polarizing definition of feminism to whip up interest and drama for its own sake
that mainstream media plays a significant role in keeping women marginalized
that social media has created an independent level playing field for feminists globally
that the #metoo movement reaffirmed the need for community and solidarity amongst feminists
that the advertising industry deliberately manufactures and supports ongoing body image insecurities to serve its own ends
that the advertising industry decides and deifies what physical perfection looks like
that the ideal cover girl body/face is a myth
that eating disorders and negative body image problems are increased by the unrealistic beauty standards set by mainstream media
that women get media coverage for doing newsworthy things and being beautiful. Men get media coverage for doing newsworthy things.
that social media gives traditionally private issues a platform for discussion and change: abortion, domestic abuse, pay equity
that print media (broadsheets, magazines, newspapers...) have played and continue to play a vital role in feminist education
that ‘the women’s hour’ and similar radio programs or podcasts have been and are an important part in highlighting feminist issues
that ‘feminist wokeness’ has been hijacked by popular media
that social media reinforces prejudices rather than challenges them because the smart use of analytics means we mainly see posts aligned with our viewpoints
that social media has enabled and ‘normalized’ the spread of pornography: the use of bodies as a commodity to be traded

8 the role language and feminism speech ideas

that frequently repeated platitudes (eg. girls will be girls and boys will be boys) are stereotypical straitjackets stifling change
that the derogatory words for females and female genitalia frequently used to vent anger or frustration demonstrate the worth and value placed on women
that feminism is neither male nor female
that gendered language reinforces the patriarchal structure of society
that sexist language needs to be called out and changed
that gendered language limits women’s opportunities
that gendered languages (French, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi...) need to become more inclusive
that the real enemy of feminism is language
that limitations in any arena (work, sports, arts) placed on woman because they are women need challenging
that male bias in the organizations awarding major awards and grants needs to change
that the ideal woman in art is a figment of a male imagination
that historically art has objectified women
that heroic figures should be celebrated and honored for their deeds – not for what they look like or their gender
that strong feisty female characters in literature can inspire change eg. Elizabeth Bennet from Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre from Charlotte Bronte’s novel of the same name, and Offred from Margaret Atwood’s The Hand Maiden’s Tale.
that the role of feminist art in any field: literature, film, theatre, dance, sculpture..., is to transform and challenge stereotypes. Examples of feminist artists: Judy Chicago, Miriam Shapiro, Barbara Kruger (More: feminist art )
that feminist musicians have used their influence as agents of change, and to inspire: Beyonce, Queen Latifah, Pussy Riot, Lorde, Aretha Franklin, Carole King, Nina Simone
that there no subjects more suitable for boys than girls, or subjects more suitable for girls than boys
that toys, clothing, and colors should be gender neutral
that student achievement and behavioral expectations should be gender free
that feminism should be actively modelled in the classroom
that eligibility for educational institutions should be merit based
that boys should not ‘punished’ or blamed for our patriarchal history
that gendered performance is actively supported and encouraged by some educational philosophies and schools in order to maintain the status quo
that the belief that ‘male’ and ‘female’ intelligence are different and that male intelligence is superior is false
that education is vital for the advancement of black feminism
that rigidly adhered to gendered workplace and domestic roles sustain and support inequalities
that domestic violence is typically a male gendered crime
that patriarchal attitudes toward women make sexual harassment and rape inevitable
that a safe legal abortion is a fundamental right for every person who wants one
that humiliation and control either by fear and threat of rape, or rape itself, is an act toxic entitlement
that a person is never ever ‘asking for it’: to be sexually harassed, or to be raped
that safe methods of birth control should be freely available to whomever wants them
that full sexual and reproductive health and rights for all people is an essential precondition to achieving gender equality
that men should not have control over woman's sexual and reproductive decision-making
that the increase in sperm donation is a feminist victory
that a person can be a domestic goddess and a feminist
that there is a positive difference between assertive and aggressive feminism
that the shock tactics of feminist anarchists is justified
that powerful feminist role models open the way for others to follow
that intersectional feminism is essential to fully understand the deep ingrained inequalities of those experiencing overlapping forms of oppression
that a feminist’s belief and practices are shaped by the country they live in, its dominant religious and cultural practices
that female circumcision is an example of women’s oppression disguised as a cultural tradition
that honor crimes are never justifiable
that period poverty and stigma is a global feminist issue
that we need to accept that some women want to remain protected by patriarchal practices and beliefs
that environmental issues are feminist issues
that everybody benefits from feminism
that feminism works towards equality, not female superiority
that anti-feminist myths (that feminists are angry women who blame men for their problems, that feminists are anti marriage, that feminists have no sense of humor, that feminists are not ‘natural’ mothers, that feminists are anti religion, that feminists are actually all lesbians ...) are desperate attempts to maintain the patriarchal status quo
that toxic femininity is a by-product of fear and insecurity eg. The need to ridicule another woman in order to impress a man, shaming a man for not being ‘manly’, raging against a women for being seen to be powerful, competent and successful in a leadership position ...
that blaming the patriarchy is far too simple
that one can hold religious beliefs and be feminist
that gendered jobs and job titles belong in the past
that pay scales should be based on merit, not gender
that adequate maternity and child care plus parental leave provisions should be mandatory
that flexible working hours benefits both the business and its employees
that token feminism is not enough
that corporate feminism is for wealthy white women
that feminism and capitalism are in conflict
that women in power owe it to other women to work for their empowerment

Useful resources

The first three resources below provide an excellent starting point to get a broad overview of feminism: its history, development and current issues.

I've included the fourth link because I'm a New Zealander, and proud of what its women's suffrage movement achieved: the vote for women in 1893.

What’s the definition of feminism? 12 TED talks that explain it to you
An overview of feminist philosophy – Stanford University, USA
Britannica: an excellent over of the history and development of feminism
The symbolism of a white camellia and the Suffrage Movement in New Zealand

How to choose a good persuasive speech topic and preparing a great speech

For a more in-depth discussion about choosing a good persuasive topic, and crafting a persuasive speech please see:

persuasive speech ideas and read all the notes under the heading “What make a speech topic good?"
writing a persuasive speech . You’ll find notes covering:
setting a speech goal,
audience analysis,
evidence and empathy (the need for proof or evidence to back what you’re saying as well as showing you understand, or empathize with, the positions of those for and against your proposal),
balance and obstacles (to address points against your proposal, the obstacles, in a fair and balanced way),
varying structural patterns (ways to organize you material) and more. And click this link for hundreds more persuasive speech topic suggestions . ☺

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101 Feminism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Feminism is a powerful and important movement that has been shaping the world for centuries. It has brought about significant changes in society and continues to push for gender equality and women's rights. If you are tasked with writing an essay on feminism but are struggling to come up with a topic, fear not! Here are 101 feminism essay topic ideas and examples to help inspire you:

The history of feminism and its impact on society
The different waves of feminism and their significance
The portrayal of feminism in popular culture
Feminism and the media: How women are represented in the media
Intersectionality and feminism: The importance of considering race, class, and sexuality in feminist discourse
Feminism and reproductive rights
The wage gap and feminism: How women are still paid less than men for the same work
Feminism and body image: The pressure on women to conform to unrealistic beauty standards
Feminism and motherhood: The challenges faced by working mothers
Feminism and sexual harassment: The #MeToo movement and its impact on society
Feminism and the LGBTQ+ community: How feminism intersects with queer rights
Feminism and education: The importance of empowering girls and women through education
Feminism and politics: The representation of women in government
Feminism and environmentalism: How women are disproportionately affected by climate change
Feminism and technology: The lack of diversity in the tech industry
Feminism and healthcare: The impact of gender bias in medical treatment
Feminism and literature: The portrayal of women in classic and contemporary literature
Feminism and sports: The challenges faced by female athletes
Feminism and religion: How different religions view women's rights
Feminism and fashion: The objectification of women in the fashion industry
Feminism and art: How women artists are often marginalized in the art world
Feminism and mental health: The stigma surrounding women's mental health issues
Feminism and domestic violence: The prevalence of domestic violence against women
Feminism and sex work: The debate over whether sex work can be empowering for women
Feminism and technology: How women are underrepresented in STEM fields
Feminism and aging: The challenges faced by older women in society
Feminism and disability rights: The intersection of feminism and disability advocacy
Feminism and social media: The role of social media in the feminist movement
Feminism and global activism: How women around the world are fighting for their rights
Feminism and language: The importance of using gender-inclusive language
Feminism and the law: The fight for legal protections for women
Feminism and reproductive justice: The right of all women to make decisions about their own bodies
Feminism and sex education: The importance of comprehensive sex education for girls and boys
Feminism and mental health: The impact of gender roles on mental health
Feminism and social justice: How feminist activism intersects with other social justice movements
Feminism and race: The experiences of women of color in the feminist movement
Feminism and disability rights: The unique challenges faced by disabled women
Feminism and body positivity: The movement to embrace all body types
Feminism and sex work: The rights of sex workers and the need for decriminalization
Feminism and the workplace: The fight for equal pay and opportunities for women
Feminism and reproductive rights: The impact of restrictive abortion laws on women's health
Feminism and education: The importance of empowering girls through education
Feminism and media representation: The portrayal of women in the media
Feminism and LGBTQ+ rights: How feminism intersects with queer rights
Feminism and reproductive justice: The fight for the right of all women to make decisions about their own bodies

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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.

Feminism Essay: How to Write a Powerful Paper on Women’s Rights

A feminism essay or paper takes an in-depth look at what the word means, how women have been historically treated and the work still to be done toward equality.

A feminist essay can examine women’s rights from the perspective of several different disciplines, such as gender studies, history and sociology.

Regardless of your topic, writing a feminist essay requires you to be well informed on the topic and knowledgeable about your resources, so you can provide accurate facts and persuasive arguments to support your ideas.

Read on for a step-by-step breakdown of how to write a strong essay about feminism.

Define the topic for your feminism essay

To define your topic, first, start with defining feminism and its many facets.

Feminism is defined as the political, economic and social equality of all genders; however, it has come to mean much more than that.

For instance, there are now intersectional feminists who study issues related to race and sexual orientation alongside those related to gender.

There are also two waves of feminism.

First Wave feminism focused mainly on women’s suffrage, voting rights and reproductive rights while Second Wave feminism encompassed these topics while adding societal changes like workplace discrimination and rape culture.

Feminist movements often focus on specific marginalized groups such as trans people, Black Lives Matter activists and queer folks.

To help you narrow down your definition of feminism and decide which topics will best suit your needs, ask yourself a few questions.

What is my definition of feminism? What issue would I like to explore? Is this issue restricted to gender? What does my definition allow me to explore? What does my definition limit me from exploring?

Once you answer these questions, you’ll know which area best suits your topic and what information should go into each paragraph.

Researching the Topic For your feminism essay

This step is perhaps the most important part of writing a powerful feminist essay.

You need to gather facts and statistics about your topic, but don’t stop there!

Find articles, essays and interviews with experts in the field to get perspectives that are both traditional and outside the box.

Sometimes looking up just one source can change your entire understanding of something; always try to read multiple perspectives before making any conclusions.

Additionally, pay attention to sources because not all are created equal.

Some may be biased, some may contain factual inaccuracies and some may not even use credible sources at all.

The only way to tell if a resource is credible or not is by evaluating the author’s credentials (e.g., their academic background), whether they cite their sources properly and the opinions of other scholars in the field.

If a scholarly article was published in a peer-reviewed journal, chances are good that the writer’s statements are based on sound evidence and expert opinion.

However, if the article was published elsewhere, do your research to make sure the writer is qualified and can back up their claims.

Create an outline for your Feminism paper

An outline for your Feminine paper should have the following parts: introduction, argument, conclusion, and bibliography.

The introduction should be a brief overview of what you are going to be talking about in the essay.

Arguments should consist of your points as they relate to feminism. The conclusion should summarize your points and draw conclusions from them.

The bibliography is where you will list all sources used in the paper.

Remember the outline is not necessarily set in stone – feel free to change it if you want.

For example, if you think that two paragraphs would work better than one paragraph then by all means do so.

A good Feminine essay outline should not be detailed; instead, it is meant to highlight the topics which are going to be covered in the essay.

You can also use subheadings within your body paragraphs to help make things clearer or give more information when necessary.

Remember, there are no right or wrong ways to create an outline, just what works best for you!

Writing Your feminist essay Argument

There are many ways to structure your argument depending on the nature of your topic and style of the essay.

It is important to remember that a solid introduction and conclusion are the foundation of your essay, and without them, you won’t be able to establish your thesis.

In the introduction, you want to give your reader a broad idea of what you’re going to be discussing in the essay and why it matters.

Remember, though, that introductions are short- keep your brief.

An effective feminism essay argues in favour of women’s rights while providing examples of how women are currently disadvantaged.

A simple essay may argue that feminism is necessary to fight against gender inequality, while a more complex essay might argue that feminism is necessary in order to dismantle patriarchy.

Be sure to address your topic, include examples, and provide a thesis statement in your introduction and conclusion.

The body of the essay about feminism will be divided into three paragraphs.

The first should cover the definition of feminism and provide context for the following paragraphs.

The second paragraph should introduce an example of how women are currently being disadvantaged, while the third paragraph will discuss solutions to these problems.

For example, in the first paragraph, you could talk about the definition of feminism and mention that it includes fighting for gender equality.

The second paragraph could mention some issue like male violence against women and child marriage that is happening around the world. The third paragraph could then be dedicated to possible solutions to these problems.

For example, you could talk about campaigns like HeForShe and UN Women’s call to end violence against women and girls.

It is important to know that when you are citing resources, you must also include a bibliography as well as citations within the text of your paper so readers know where they can find more information.

Hitting the Right Tone

Once you’ve written your essay, take a few moments to reflect on your tone.

This is the final check to make sure that your paper is being communicated in the appropriate manner.

One easy way to determine your tone is to ask yourself who you are talking to and what they already know about the subject.

For instance, someone who has never heard of feminism would be reading this article from a very different perspective than someone who has spent years studying feminist theory.

The former may have a lot of questions about the topic and its implications, while the latter is likely to be more familiar and comfortable with the language.

This means that you’ll have to approach your writing in two different ways, tailoring your argument to your audience’s level of knowledge.

Think carefully about whether or not you’re using too much jargon or speaking too broadly, and make adjustments accordingly. You want to strike the right balance between accessible and academic writing. When people start reading your essay, their minds should light up with understanding; if they don’t understand something immediately, you need to find a way to explain it more clearly or change your word choice.

Tips for Writing a College Feminism Essay

Write strong introductions and conclusions

The introduction of the feminist essay should be informative, yet concise.

This is your chance to inform the reader of your thoughts and reasoning.

Do not feel obligated to present every detail, just enough to tell the story you wish to share.

Give an explanation of what you plan to say in the rest of your essay.

Next, conclude by bringing back your point one last time and summarizing the main points of your argument.

This is your opportunity to touch on the importance of feminism and remind the reader of what you’re trying to accomplish.

Consider your tone

It is essential to consider the tone of your essay, which refers to the attitude that a writer takes towards their subject. Tones are usually classified in terms of formal and informal or objective and subjective.

The formal tone is more reserved, with less personal input on the author’s part.

This tone is often seen in research papers and thesis papers.

The informal tone, on the other hand, is more conversational and casual. This tone is found in blogs, news articles, and editorials.

The formal tone is typically preferred in scholarly essays due to the seriousness of the subject matter.

However, both styles can be used effectively depending on your purpose and intended audience.

If you use the wrong tone in your essay it might sound preachy or off-putting to your readers.

Keep sentences simple, clear and concise

One important element of your essay is sentence structure.

Avoid unnecessarily complicated or difficult sentences. Your writing will be much easier to read if you keep things straightforward and concise.

There are times when complex sentences are appropriate, but only when it serves your purpose.

Generally speaking, simpler sentences are better as they help readers connect better with what you’re trying to say.

A feminism essay’s sentences should be as direct and clear as possible. Using short, to-the-point sentences helps the reader better understand your point of view.

This doesn’t mean you should avoid using long sentences occasionally, just be mindful of what you’re saying.

Too many big words or sentences that are too complicated won’t make your essay more credible.

In general, you want to convey your ideas in a clear and engaging manner. Make it easy on your reader!

Use the active voice and descriptive verbs

It’s a good idea to mix the active voice with passive sentences, especially when you’re telling a story or describing events.

Active voice, in essence, is where the subject of the sentence is doing the action that is expressed in the verb.

Passive voice, on the other hand, places more emphasis on what happens to someone or something rather than who does it.

Feminist papers should be written in an active voice because it focuses on what the subject is doing rather than what is happening to them.

This is crucial for avoiding ambiguity and confusing language.

Use concrete language

One way to improve your writing style is by using specific language and examples.

Concrete language relates more closely to objects, actions, and details that people can see or experience.

For example, instead of saying I wanted, try I wanted.

Specifics are always better than vague statements that may cause misunderstanding.

In feminist writing, the focus is on the woman and how she has to break down barriers in order to succeed.

As a result, language should be specific and accurate.

Address counterarguments

One of the goals of a persuasive feminist essay is to convince the reader that your position is correct.

This means you must acknowledge any valid arguments against your viewpoint and provide a response. This response could include evidence, logical explanations, or qualifications.

You also need to show that you’ve considered all aspects of your topic before making any claims about it. This is necessary in order to present a fair and balanced perspective on the subject.

Provide sources

One of the most common mistakes in an essay is not citing your sources.

Citing your sources is one way to back up what you are arguing or stating.

It gives credibility to your argument while demonstrating that you are informed about the topic.

One important way you need to cite your sources is by listing them at the end of your essay.

Doing so also allows readers who are interested in knowing more about your topic easy access to relevant information.

It’s true that some writers prefer to use footnotes, but it is generally accepted that the referencing system used at the end of your paper is the preferred method.

Avoid sexist language

Sexist language refers to words and phrases used primarily to refer to either women or men.

Examples of sexism include referring to a group of men as gentlemen, calling women sweethearts, or asking someone when they’re going to start a family.

Avoid these types of language in your writing because it is offensive and dismissive. Instead, replace gendered language with gender-neutral terms.

This will help to create a less biased and therefore, more effective essay.

A few ideas of gender-neutral terms to use in place of feminine language include driver, employee, human being, and student.

The tone and language you choose should be a reflection of your intended audience. To do this, you have to know what your audience is looking for.

Men are typically more interested in facts, figures, and straight talk whereas women are more receptive to emotional stories that make the point.

This means that if you’re writing a feminist essay on a political issue such as health care, you might want to take the latter approach. This strategy is more likely to lead to a successful essay.

Proofread, proofread, proofread!

Once you’re sure your paper has addressed all of these points and that it is perfect, it’s time to proofread your essay.

This step will help you ensure that there are no typographical or grammatical errors.

Even one typo can take away from what you’re saying and ultimately detract from your argument.

To check for mistakes, print out your essay then read it aloud to yourself, using different voices for different parts of the writing if possible.

This will help you catch any misspellings, misuse of punctuation and other mistakes that can otherwise be difficult to spot.

Next, ask a friend or colleague to proofread your essay for you.

Their opinion is often more objective than yours and this way you can be confident that your essay is the best it can be.

Feminine essay topics Examples

Essay topics for a feminist essay can be based on a wide range of issues.

For example, how feminism is perceived in America, the impact of feminism on male and female relationships, or the role of feminism in politics.

Here is a list of a few essay topics that a writer might consider, in order to write a powerful paper on the rights of women:

What is your opinion of feminism and its effect on society?
What does feminism mean to you?
What is the feminist movement today, and where is it headed?
Do feminists fight only for the rights of females, or are they working to protect everyone’s rights?
Why is it important for girls to embrace feminism?
How has feminism helped you personally?
Why is it important for boys to become feminists too?
When did you first become aware of the feminist movement, and why was this moment so significant to you?
You’ve said that feminism is about fighting for the rights of both males and females. Could you elaborate on what this entails?
In your own experience, which types of struggles have been the most challenging to overcome, and which ones have been the easiest?
Explain the importance of feminism to a woman’s daily life.
Explain the importance of feminism to a man’s daily life.
Would you like to live in a world without any form of discrimination?
Which is more important – personal happiness, or fighting for the rights of others?
In your opinion, is achieving equal rights worth the struggle?
If someone asked you to define feminism in just one sentence, what would you say?
What advice do you have for young people who want to know how to get involved with the feminist movement?
Discuss some ways that men can support their wives’ goals and dreams.
Is sexism against men an issue as well as sexism against women?
What are some long-term goals of the feminist movement, such as equality at home and work, or improved health care access?
Who should we thank for getting us this far in the feminist movement, and what do we need to thank them for?
What does feminism mean to you, and how has it impacted your life?

Writing a Feminine essay Final remarks

Feminine papers are usually focused on specific aspects of feminism, and arguments for the rights of women.

Topics for a feminine paper could include the effect of feminism on American culture, the significance of feminism to female relationships, and the role feminism plays in politics.

There is a wide variety of different feminist essay topics so writers can choose whichever topic suits them best.

Whether readers are interested in looking at how feminism is portrayed in popular culture, the effects of feminism on femininity and masculinity, or exploring ways to join the movement themselves there will be something here for every type of audience member.

Finally, always follow your professor’s specific instructions for writing this kind of paper.

Some professors may ask students to discuss ideas from readings in class, while other instructors may require students to use certain resources.

It is a good idea to follow the guidelines of the instructor because if not, the student may end up receiving a lower grade for violating these instructions

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — A Rose For Emily — A Feminist Approach to “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner

A Feminist Approach to "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner

Categories: A Rose For Emily

About this sample

Words: 544 |

Published: Jan 30, 2024

Words: 544 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Feminist critique of "a rose for emily", feminist themes in "a rose for emily", impact and significance of a feminist reading.

Johnson, Claudia D. "Faulkner’s 'A Rose for Emily.'" The Explicator, vol. 56, no. 1, 1997, pp. 55–57.
Strand, Kristin Jacobson. "A Rose for 'A Rose for Emily'." The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 1, 1996, pp. 101-114.
West, Ray B. "The Death of Emily Grierson: A Structural Comparison of "A Rose for Emily" and "Metamorphosis."" Renascence, vol. 59, no. 2, 2007, pp. 111-124.

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44 Student Essay Example: Feminist Criticism

The following student essay example of femnist criticism is taken from Beginnings and Endings: A Critical Edition . This is the publication created by students in English 211. This essay discusses Ray Bradbury’s short story ”There Will Come Soft Rains.”

Burning Stereotypes in Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains”

By Karley McCarthy

Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” takes place in the fallout of a nuclear war. The author chooses to tell the story though a technologically advanced house and its animatronic inhabitants instead of a traditional protagonist. The house goes about its day-to-day as if no war had struck. It functions as though its deceased family is still residing in its walls, taking care of the maintenance, happiness, and safety of itself and the long dead family. On the surface, Bradbury’s story seems like a clear-cut warning about technology and humanity’s permissiveness. Given that the short story was written in the 1940s, it’s easy to analyze the themes present and how they related to women of the time. Bradbury’s apt precautionary tale can be used as a metaphor for women’s expectations and role in society after World War II and how some women may have dealt with the fallout of their husbands coming back home with psychological trauma.

To experience “There Will Come Soft Rains” from a feminist perspective, readers must be aware of the societal norms that would have shaped Bradbury’s writing. “Soft Rains” takes place in the year 2026. Yet the house and norms found throughout were, “modeled after concept homes that showed society’s expectations of technological advancement” (Mambrol). This can be seen in the stereotypical nuclear family that once inhabited the house as well as their cliché white home and the hobbies present. According to writer Elaine Tyler May’s book Homeward Bound, America’s view of women’s role in society undertook a massive pendulum swing during the World War II era as the country transitioned through pre-war to post-war life. For example, in a matter of decades support for women joining the workforce shifted from 80% in opposition to only 13% (May 59). Despite this shift, the men coming back from the war still expected women to position themselves as the happy housewife they had left behind, not the newfound career woman architype. Prominent figures of the 40s, such as actress Joan Crawford, portrayed a caricature of womanhood that is subservient to patriarchal gender roles, attempting to abandon the modern idea of a self-sufficient working-class woman (May 62-63). Keeping this in mind, how can this image of the 1940s woman be seen in Bradbury’s work?

Throughout Bradbury’s life he worked towards dismantling clichés in his own writing. A biography titled simply “Ray Bradbury” mentions that even in his earlier work, he was always attempting to “escape the constrictions of stereotypes” found in early science fiction (Seed 13). An example of him breaking constrictions could be his use of a nonhuman protagonist. Instead, Bradbury relies on the personification of the house and its robotic counterparts. Bradbury describes the house as having “electric eyes” and emotions such as a, “preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia,” something that would make the house quiver at the sounds of the outside world (2-3). While these descriptions are interesting, Bradbury’s use of personification here is a thought-provoking choice when one breaks down what exactly the house is meant to personify.

One analysis of this story notes that the house’s personification, “replaces the most human aspects of life,” for its inhabitants (Mambrol). Throughout the story, the house acts as a caretaker, records a schedule, cooks, cleans, and even attempts to extinguish an all-consuming fire. While firefighting is not a traditionally feminine career or expectation from the 1940s (more on that later), most of the house’s daily tasks are replacing jobs that were traditionally held by a household’s matriarch. Expanding further on this dichotomy of male/woman tasks, a chore mentioned in the story that is ‘traditionally’ accepted as a masculine household duty—mowing the law—is still assigned as a male task. This is feels intentional to the house’s design as Bradbury is, “a social critic, and his work is pertinent to real problems on earth” (Dominianni 49). Bradbury’s story is not meant to commentate on just an apocalypse, but society at large. Bradbury describes the west face of the house as, “black, save for five places” (Bradbury 1-2). These “five places” are the silhouettes of the family who had been incinerated by a nuclear bomb. The family’s two children are included playing with a ball, but the mother and father’s descriptions are most important. The mother is seen in a passive role, picking flowers, while the father mows the lawn. The subtext here is that the man is not replaceable in his mundane and tedious task. Only the woman is replaced. While this is a small flash into the owners’ lives, what “human aspect” or autonomy of the father’s life has been replaced by the house’s actions if the house is mainly personifying only the traditional 1940s female-held positions? The message here is that a man’s position in society is irreplaceable while a woman’s is one of mere support.

While this dynamic of husband vs subordinate is harmful, wives supporting their partners is nothing new. Homeward Bound explains that life after World War II for many women meant a return to their previous position as a housewife while many men came home irreparably damaged by years of warfare. PTSD, known then as shellshock, affected countless men returning from the war. Women were often expected to mend the psychological damage as part of their domestic responsibilities, even if they were unprepared for the realities of the severe trauma their husbands had faced (May 64-65). The psychological effects of the war came crashing into women’s lives the same way that the tree fell into the autonomous house in “Soft Rains”. As mentioned earlier, firefighting is not a task someone from the 40s would expect of women, but the house’s combustion and its scramble to save itself can be seen as a metaphor for women attempting to reverse the cold reality that the war had left them with. The picturesque family they had dreamed of would forever be scarred by the casualties that took place overseas. While Bradbury may not have meant for women to be invoked specifically from this precautionary tale, it’s obvious that him wanting his science fiction to act as, “a cumulative early warning system against unforeseen consequences,” would have impacted women of the time as much as men (Seed 22). The unforeseen consequences here is the trauma the war inflicted on families.

While men were fighting on the front lines, women back home and in noncombat positions would still feel the war’s ripples. In “Soft Rains” the nuclear tragedy had left, “a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles” (Bradbury 1). Despite the destruction, the house continues its routine as though nothing had happened. This can be seen as a metaphor for how women responded to the trauma their husbands brought back from the war. Women were urged to, “preserve for him the essence of the girl he fell in love with, the girl he longs to come back to. . .The least we can do as women is to try to live up to some of those expectations” (May 64). Following this, many could have put their desires and personal growth to the side to act as a secondary character in their husband’s lives.

The final line can be read as the culmination of similarities between post-war women and Bradbury’s house. The violence and destruction that fell upon the house in its final moments leaves little standing. What’s remarkable is how the house still attempts to continue despite its destruction. The final lines of the short story exemplify this: “Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: ‘Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…’” (Bradbury 5). The house is acting just like the women from the 40s, clinging to their past in an attempt to preserve something that had already been lost, society’s innocence. One analysis points out that, “The house is depicted in this way because it represents both humanity and humanity’s failure to save itself” (Mambrol). While it might be wrong to say that women were unable to save themselves in this situation, this quote does touch on an idea present in the feminist metaphor for “Soft Rains”. The preservation of “the essence of the girl he fell in love with, the girl he longs to come back to” was a failure (May 64). The same way that the house cannot preserve itself from destruction, women cannot preserve an image of themselves that had already dissolved. As mentioned earlier, women had already entered the workforce, a huge step towards removing sexist stereotypes around women’s worth. After garnering work-based independence, it seems impossible that the idea of women solely as men’s support would not immolate.

While Bradbury’s “Soft Rains” can be viewed as an apt precautionary tale with real modern world issues at hand, in many ways it is a period piece. As a writer in the 1940s, it’s hard to imagine that Bradbury’s story would not have been influenced by the framework of a nuclear family and the stereotypical expectations of this time. Bradbury’s use of personification opens dialogue about gender roles in the 1940s and how war had complicated patriarchal expectations. Despite his attempt to bypass science fiction stereotypes, his story is full of metaphor for gender stereotypes. Using a feminist lens to analyze the story allows it to be read as a metaphor for war and its effects on married women. The standard analysis appears to say that, “machine no longer served humanity in “There Will Come Soft Rains”; there humanity is subservient to machinery” (Dominianni 49). From a feminist perspective, instead of machine, the house represents patriarchy and gender norms. While men suffered greatly during World War II, women often put their wants and futures on hold to support their husbands. This is a selfless act that shows the resilience of women despite their society’s wish to downplay their potential and turn them into mere support.

Works Cited

Bradbury, Ray. “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains.” Broome-Tioga BOCES, 1950, pp. 1-5. btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf.

Dominianni, Robert. “Ray Bradbury’s 2026: A Year with Current Value.” The English Journal , vol. 73, no. 7, 1984, pp. 49–51. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/817806

Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains.” Literary Theory and Criticism , 17 Jan. 2022.

May, Elaine Tyler. “War and Peace: Fanning the Home Fires.” Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. 20th ed., Basic Books, 2008, pp. 58-88.

Seed, David. “Out of the Science Fiction Ghetto.” Ray Bradbury (Modern Masters of Science Fiction). University of Illinois, 2015, pp. 1-45.

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Feminist Identity in College Women

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First Online: 13 January 2021
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Carly K. Friedman 2 &
Melanie M. Ayres 3

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Feminist identity is support of equal rights for women and men. It may include private and public acceptance of the feminist label.

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College is where many young women are exposed to feminist viewpoints, or support for gender equality , for the first time in much depth. This may occur through experiences in women’s and gender studies or other courses as well as interactions with other students and mentors. As a consequence, some college women develop a feminist identity. Research finds that feminist identification is related to various aspects of women’s well-being.

Models of Feminist Identity

Researchers have varied in how they conceptualize and measure feminist identity. At least three different approaches can be noted. One of them is the stage model, which posits that women transition through a series of stages toward a feminist identity (see Downing Hansen 2002 ). Although there are different stage models, they similarly characterize feminist identity as a...

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Friedman, C.K., Ayres, M.M. (2021). Feminist Identity in College Women. In: Maggino, F. (eds) Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69909-7_4133-2

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69909-7_4133-2

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College essay about feminism?

Someone please tell me if this topic is too sensitive and if i should write it if i’m planning to apply to a really selective university.

I want to write about feminism, but in a way how i have experienced it not in a cliche way, what i mean is, i had an experience where i was misjudged for being a girl while attending to an all boys club. How i have growth from that experience and how i want to help other women to raise their voice, BUT the problem is that i’m planning majoring in Biology, nothing related to it. But i’m planning to minor in gender, sexuality and feminism studies. Can my essay be about this topic if my major is not nearly close to it but my minor is? Is it too controversial? I’m really inspired about this essay but i’m really i don’t know if it’s the right one due to controversy

Your essay does not need to relate to your intended major.

This. Your essay is about you, and it should tell the AOs something about you as a person. Writing about something that is important to you is a great way to do so. The topic is definitely not controversial, enough so that you should make sure to avoid clichés.

So it should be personal, in your voice, about you, not about feminism, and, remember, Show, Don’t Tell.

Controversial issues can be an effective theme for an application essay if well written and revealing of certain traits. Your proposed topic is not considered to be a controversial topic in my view.

As shared above, one’s college application essays do not need to relate to one’s intended major.

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Historic faculty hiring: Meet Kyla Tompkins

By GRACE GERASS

Published January 24, 2024

This fall, UB welcomed 154 new full-time faculty in what is believed to be the largest cohort of new faculty since the university joined SUNY in the 1960s. The historic initiative, “Advancing Top 25: Faculty Hiring,” is considered transformative and has already attracted some of the most promising and established researchers and scholars from across the country.

UBNow sat down with one of those new faculty members — Kyla Tompkins, professor and chair of the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, College of Arts and Sciences — to learn more about her research, why she chose UB and what it means to work here during this exciting time of growth.

Can you talk about your research?

Feminist studies is the place where it’s possible to discuss gender, race, sexuality, class, disabilities and other topics that impact us every day and are also at the level of local and global political patterns. In this field, you get the tools to understand and analyze how the world works at different scales, and the methodology can be applied to almost every research area.

I study the history of race in the U.S. with a specific focus on cultures of food and eating, art, aesthetics and sexuality. I look at how the histories of diet, nutrition and science have contributed to the history of racial difference. Most recently I have turned toward more public-facing writing. A recent essay published in the Los Angeles Review of Books won a James Beard award. My next book looks at how taste was shaped by the history of racial modernity.

What made you want to grow your research at UB?

A huge personal goal of mine was to experience my career with a public university. I’m a first-generation college student, and UB’s mission to serve students like me fundamentally aligns with my values. I really believe in the work being done at UB — and I want to serve those same educational goals in my career.

I was familiar with UB because I grew up in Toronto, but also because I have colleagues here that I know from my own field, and even all the way back to undergraduate and graduate school. UB has made some amazing recent hires, in addition to existing talented faculty, which made me want to work here. We are really booming!

What are you most looking forward to as department chair?

UB has one of the first women’s studies programs in the country and I’m excited to be a part of that history. As chair, I want to support everyone in the department in flourishing, while also helping to shape the department’s future. We’re already having conversations about what we want this department to look like 10-15 years from now. Global Gender and Sexuality Studies should and will be competitive with the top gender studies departments in the country.

Gender and women’s studies departments have long been an important site for diverse groups of students to have conversations about making a more just world. But our departments, particularly when run with an eye to intersectional feminist work, are drivers of inclusive excellence in the university and nationally. That is the gift we give to universities, although it is often under-valued. I look forward to partnering with colleagues in the fields of Indigenous studies, Africana and American studies, Latina/Latino studies and other disciplines to continue to shape and protect these important fields.

What do you believe makes UB stand out in the academic community?

I’m so proud to be working with the amazing faculty in my department — they’re incredibly research-forward, while also being phenomenal teachers who are dedicated to furthering feminist studies.

There are also a lot of research opportunities at the university. I’ve received tremendous support in my meetings with Sambandamurthy Ganapathy, our associate dean for research administration. I love that you can say, ‘Hey, I have an idea and want to find funding,’ and there’s a whole office of people to say, ‘Yes, here’s how you can do that.’ When you go to administration with a big idea, there’s a high chance they’ll support you.

How does it feel to be working at UB during this period of historic faculty hiring?

I’m really happy to be here. I’m so excited by the new colleagues who joined with me and those who have been working here. There’s incredible talent everywhere you look. I’m already so impressed by these students — they have good instincts, and I’m eager to be around the next generation as they figure out how to make the world more just.

Also, President Tripathi and Provost Weber’s mission to make sure the world knows how excellent UB already is — not just its potential — really inspires me. It’s a great opportunity to have gotten here at this moment of explosive growth.

How do you like living in Buffalo so far?

I’ve spent my life living in major cities — San Francisco, Los Angeles, Toronto, New York — but I love how much Buffalonians love Buffalo. It’s so sweet and fantastic. I’ve been inspired by the fierce admiration people have for this little city and how much its residents value community activism. Buffalo is a secretly awesome place to live and work, and I’m so lucky to be here.

One of the things I appreciate is being so close to the American/Canadian border — you can literally see the Peace Bridge from my apartment. There’s a fine line between who is American and Canadian. I love that very tight cultural exchange between Canada and the U.S.

Plus, as a Torontonian who grew up attaching tin foil to my radio antennas to get WBLK because we didn’t have an R&B station, it’s great to have easy access to that station now.

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5 strategies to unlock your winning college essay.

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CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS - JUNE 29: People walk through the gate on Harvard Yard at the Harvard ... [+] University campus on June 29, 2023 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that race-conscious admission policies used by Harvard and the University of North Carolina violate the Constitution, bringing an end to affirmative action in higher education. (Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images)

The college application season is upon us, and high school students everywhere are staring down at one of the most daunting tasks: the college essay. As someone who has guided countless applicants through the admissions process and reviewed admissions essays on an undergraduate admissions committee, I've pinpointed the essential ingredient to a differentiated candidacy—the core of your college admissions X-factor .

The essential ingredient to your college admissions X-factor is your intellectual vitality. Intellectual vitality is your passion for learning and curiosity. By demonstrating and conveying this passion, you can transform an average essay into a compelling narrative that boosts your chances of getting accepted to your top schools. Here are five dynamic strategies to achieve that goal.

Unleash Your Authentic Voice

Admissions officers sift through thousands of essays every year. What stops them in their tracks? An authentic voice that leaps off the page. Forget trying to guess what the admissions committee wants to hear. Focus on being true to yourself. Share your unique perspective, your passions, and your values. Authenticity resonates deeply with application reviewers, making your essay memorable and impactful. You need not have experienced trauma or tragedy to create a strong narrative. You can write about what you know—intellectually or personally—to convey your enthusiasm, creativity, and leadership. Intellectual vitality shines through when you write with personalized reflection about what lights you up.

Weave A Captivating Story

Everyone loves a good story, and your essay is the perfect place to tell yours. The Common Application personal statement has seven choices of prompts to ground the structure for your narrative. The most compelling stories are often about the smallest moments in life, whether it’s shopping at Costco or about why you wear socks that have holes. Think of the Common Application personal statement as a window into your soul rather than a dry list of your achievements or your overly broad event-based life story. Use vivid anecdotes to bring your experiences to life. A well-told story can showcase your growth, highlight your character, and illustrate how you've overcome challenges. Intellectual vitality often emerges in these narratives, revealing how your curiosity and proactive approach to learning have driven you to explore and innovate.

Reflect And Reveal Insights

It's not just about what you've done—it's about what you've learned along the way. When you are writing about a specific event, you can use the STAR framework—situation, task, action, and result (your learning). Focus most of your writing space on the “R” part of this framework to dive deeply into your experiences and reflect on how they've shaped your aspirations and identity.

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The most insightful college-specific supplement essays demonstrate depth of thought, and the ability to connect past experiences with your future life in college and beyond. Reflecting on your intellectual journey signals maturity and a readiness to embrace the college experience. It shows admissions officers that you engage deeply with your studies and are eager to contribute to the academic community.

Highlight Your Contributions—But Don’t Brag

Whether it's a special talent, an unusual hobby, or a unique perspective, showcasing what you can bring to the college environment can make a significant impact. Recognize that the hard work behind the accomplishment is what colleges are interested in learning more about—not retelling about the accomplishment itself. (Honors and activities can be conveyed in another section of the application.) Walk us through the journey to your summit; don’t just take us to the peak and expect us know how you earned it.

Intellectual vitality can be demonstrated through your proactive approach to solving problems, starting new projects, or leading initiatives that reflect your passion for learning and growth. These experiences often have a place in the college-specific supplement essays. They ground the reasons why you want to study in your major and at the particular college.

Perfect Your Prose

Great writing is essential. Anyone can use AI or a thesaurus to assist with an essay, but AI cannot write your story in the way that you tell it. Admissions officers don’t give out extra credit for choosing the longest words with the most amount of syllables.

The best essays have clear, coherent language and are free of errors. The story is clearly and specifically told. After drafting, take the time to revise and polish your writing. Seek feedback from teachers, mentors, or trusted friends, but ensure the final piece is unmistakably yours. A well-crafted essay showcases your diligence and attention to detail—qualities that admissions officers highly value. Intellectual vitality is also reflected in your writing process, showing your commitment to excellence and your enthusiasm for presenting your best self.

Crafting a standout college essay is about presenting your true self in an engaging, reflective, and polished manner while showcasing your intellectual vitality. Happy writing.

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An illustration of Hansa Mehta sitting on a wooden chair by a window with her legs crossed. She is wearing a pink sari over a white blouse. Her head is partly covered, and a bindi appears between her eyebrows.

Overlooked No More: Hansa Mehta, Who Fought for Women’s Equality in India and Beyond

For Mehta, women’s rights were human rights, and in all her endeavors she took women’s participation in public and political realms to new heights.

A postcard depicting Hansa Mehta. Her work included helping to draft India’s first constitution as a newly independent nation. Credit... via Mehta family

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By Radha Vatsal

While researching this article, Radha Vatsal discovered that she and Hansa Mehta both descended from the 19th-century novelist Nandshankar Mehta.

May 31, 2024

This article is part of Overlooked , a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

Human rights has long been considered a Western concept, but recent scholarship has been uncovering the influence of women from the global south. Women like Hansa Mehta.

Mehta stood up against the British government during India’s struggle for independence. She campaigned for women’s social and political equality and their right to an education. And she fought for her ideals during the framing of the constitution for a newly independent India.

A black and white photo of Mehta wearing a head covering and a jacket while smiling and standing next to a seated Eleanor Roosevelt, who is wearing a blouse and jacket and sitting in front of a desk covered with papers while smiling at Mehta.

For Mehta, women’s rights were human rights. This conviction was best exemplified at a 1947 meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, to which she had been appointed as one of just two women delegates, alongside Eleanor Roosevelt. Mehta boldly objected to the wording of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the commission was tasked with framing.

It read: “All men are born free and equal in dignity and rights, they are endowed by nature with reason and conscience, and should act towards one another like brothers.”

Mehta pointed out that the phrase “all men” was out of date and could be interpreted to exclude women.

Roosevelt countered that the use of the word “men” was “generally accepted to include all human beings,” according to minutes of the meeting. But Mehta — a soft-spoken, slight woman who dressed in traditional saris — held her ground, insisting that the language should be changed to “human beings.”

The declaration was adopted with her suggestion the next year, and it has been used as the foundation for treaties around the world.

Two years earlier, Mehta was one of three women who drafted the Indian Women’s Charter of Rights and Duties, which affirmed that women have equal rights to education, suffrage, pay and distribution of property, as well as the same rights as men in marriage and divorce. When the panel that became the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women in 1946 was forming its guiding principles, it turned to her ideas.

In her work for the U.N., as in all her endeavors, Mehta took women’s participation in public and political realms to new heights.

Hansa Mehta was born on July 3, 1897, in Surat (now in the northwestern state of Gujarat), to Harshadagauri and Manubhai Mehta. Her father, Manubhai, was a philosophy professor at Baroda College (now Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda ); he later became the prime minister of the state of Baroda.

Hansa’s paternal grandfather, Nandshankar Mehta, was headmaster of an English-language school, a civil servant and the author of the historical novel “Karan Ghelo”(1866), about the 13th-century ruler of Gujarat whose foolishness resulted in the loss of his kingdom. It is considered the first novel written in the Gujarati language.

“I was fortunate enough to be born in a family which had liberal ideas on all questions of life,” Mehta said in 1972 in an oral history at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi.

At a time when she estimated that only 2 percent of Indian women were literate, Mehta attended a high school for girls that had been set up by Baroda’s progressive ruler. She read widely, including novels by Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper. She was one of a handful of young women to receive a bachelor’s degree, hers in philosophy, from Baroda College.

Mehta continued her education in England, where she met the poet and political activist Sarojini Naidu . Naidu took her under her wing and brought her to the International Woman Suffrage Alliance conference in Geneva in 1920.

Naidu “made me do things I otherwise would not have dreamt of doing,” like speaking in public, Mehta wrote in “Indian Woman,” a 1981 collection of her essays.

In 1923, she traveled alone to the United States, a rare undertaking for women at the time, and visited colleges and universities to learn about American women’s education.

She met Mohandas K. Gandhi when he was in jail in India in the 1920s, and in 1930 she responded to his call for women to join the freedom movement. She picketed stores that sold English rather than Indian-made cloth and helped lead protests, landing in jail three times.

As a founder of the All India Women’s Conference, and later its president, Mehta tied the political struggle for India’s independence with the fight to improve the condition of her countrywomen. “If we wish to build up a democratic state, it will not pay the state to keep half the number of its citizens uneducated,” she wrote in “Indian Woman .” But she opposed special quotas; she wanted to level the playing field between men and women.

Mehta was appointed to the Commission on the Status of Women in 1946 and to the Commission on Human Rights in 1947 — the same year that India gained its independence — and served until 1952. In 1946, she was one of about 15 women to join India’s Constituent Assembly, which met to write a constitution for the new nation.

As an assembly member she lobbied for a civil code that would eventually supersede religious laws and ensure gender equality, and she strengthened the language on what are known as “directive principles” — guidelines that are unenforceable by the courts but nonetheless crucial in governing a multiethnic and multireligious secular democracy.

In 1924, Mehta married Jivraj Mehta (a common surname in India), the chief medical officer in Baroda. The marriage was regarded as controversial because he was of a lower caste. She said in her oral history that her own community wanted to expel her from her caste, “but then I told them I was going out of the caste myself, as I did not believe in caste.”

She and her husband had two children. He became the first chief minister of Gujarat in 1960 and, in 1963, the Indian high commissioner to the United Kingdom, a post equivalent to an ambassadorship.

Mehta was vice chancellor of the Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey Women’s University (commonly known as S.N.D.T.) from 1946 to 1948 and vice chancellor of the University of Baroda from 1949 to 1958. At Baroda, she was the first woman to hold that title at an Indian coed university. The library there is named after her. In 2021, the U.N. held the inaugural Dr. Hansa Mehta Dialogue , a discussion on the fundamental importance of women’s empowerment.

Throughout her life, Mehta wrote essays and translated stories and plays into Gujarati. She died at 98 on April 4, 1995.

In the oral history, when she was asked why India, although it was largely conservative in its attitude toward women, had more women in the public and political sphere than many Western nations, Mehta spoke of Shakti, the female personification of divine power. “Historical reasons,” she replied, “because from the beginning we have always considered woman as a competent person. ‘Shakti’ — she is always worshiped as ‘Shakti.’”

Radha Vatsal’s historical novel “No. 10 Doyers Street,” about a woman journalist from India who becomes embroiled in the case of a Chinatown gangster in 1900s New York, will be published in March 2025.

Overlooked No More

Since 1851, white men have made up a vast majority of new york times obituaries. now, we’re adding the stories of other remarkable people..

Lizzie Magie: Magie’s creation, The Landlord’s Game, inspired the spinoff we know today: Monopoly. But credit for the idea long went to someone else .

Henrietta Leavitt: The portrait that emerged from her discovery , called Leavitt’s Law, showed that the universe was hundreds of times bigger than astronomers had imagined.

Miriam Solovieff: She led a successful career as a violinist despite coping with a horrific event: witnessing the killing of her mother and sister at the hands of her father at 18.

Beatrix Potter: She created one of the world’s best-known characters for children and fought to have the book published, but she never sought celebrity status .

Cordell Jackson: A pioneering record-label owner and engineer, she played guitar in a raw and unapologetically abrasive way .

Ethel Lindgren: The anthropologist is best remembered for importing reindeer to the Scottish Highlands, centuries after they were hunted to extinction.

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