ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we will discuss trends in feminist symbolic interactionism and offer a critique of some of the recent work. Specifically, we will address scholarship that highlights expressions of ‘individual agency’ and ‘personal choice’ while ignoring how those choices are shaped and constrained by women’s subordination in the gender order as well as in racial and class hierarchies. What are the negative consequences of some of those ‘choices’ for women as a class? There are scholars who celebrate identities and the practices tied to those identities (for example, BDSM, ‘sex work’, and pornography), treating them as liberatory rather than analysing how those behaviours contribute to the sexual objectification of women and other social harms. We will also show how scholarship that asserts women’s ‘empowerment’ in unexamined ways sidesteps false consciousness, women’s internalised sexism, and the relationship between the rhetoric of empowerment and the collective oppression of women under patriarchy. In addition to examining these trends, we will highlight feminist scholarship that has not lost sight of ‘the personal is political’, including reflexivity of the researcher in analyses of gender. In this (misnamed) era of post-feminism, symbolic interactionism can be combined with principles of feminist scholarship to examine the intricacies of the reproduction of patriarchy.
