ABSTRACT
In this chapter we consider so-called ‘emancipatory social theories’: feminism, queer theory and postcolonial theory. We refer to these as social theories, rather than ‘sociological theories’, to mark the fact, noted in earlier chapters, that conventional disciplinary boundaries are increasingly viewed as artificial, limiting and redundant. Indeed, leading thinkers in all three branches of emancipatory theory are as likely to be formally associated with disciplines such as philosophy, English or history as with sociology. Furthermore, as we will show, the transgression of boundaries, intellectual as well as social, is a central theme and strategy of contemporary emancipatory theorising. Indeed, theorists wish to emancipate us not only from disciplines, but also from the traditional distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ theory. Since these approaches focus around specific categories of social actors and the social features that define those categories, they might be described as ‘applied theory’. The categories in question include women, gays and lesbians, racial and ethnic minorities in Western nations, and the inhabitants of the ‘developing world’, this last designation being condemned as an expression of patronising and hierarchical prejudice. Furthermore, these theories are committed to the cause of the category that the theory concerns; they are designed to emancipate the occupants of these categories, if not from the categories themselves, then from all unnecessary impositions upon them as women, gays or other ‘minorities’ that result from the social regulation of the categorisation of people in society. Nevertheless, the theorists whose ideas we will be discussing would emphatically reject the label of applied theory. It is their view that moving these categories to the centre of the sociological stage involves reorienting social inquiry around a new set of master themes: gender, sexuality, and ‘race’ and ethnicity. Furthermore, this move is meant to be nothing less than a paradigm shift, involving new ways of thinking about the very nature of sociology, even though, as we shall see, their line of thought follows from, owes much to and elaborates upon selected strategies of critical theory. The emergence of this kind of emancipatory theorising reflects the sidelining of social class as a single, central axis of injustice.
