ABSTRACT
The trend toward increasing subtlety and nuance in feminist analysis makes it unnecessary to seek a single theory or practice that might characterize the feminist folklife of the 1990s. Seeking commonality, however, folklorist Cathy Lynn Preston in American Folklore (1996) discerns several “points of affinity” in the body of scholarship from the decade: (1) gender, whether biologically inherited or culturally constructed, is understood as fundamental to lived experience; (2) feminist scholarship seeks to read texts and events in ways
that will show how received cultural constructions of them are shaped and dominated by male perspectives; and (3) a female theory and language of aesthetics may (among other things) help retrieve female expression hidden in ethnographic reporting. In the twenty-first century, discussions of feminist theory have centered on the continuing need to encompass multivocal perspectives in a feminist view of the world. Finally, it is accepted that multiculturalism as a principle in public education and in the capitalist workplace would not exist without the prior work of, and the theoretical underpinning provided by, feminists, attesting to the far-reaching effect of the theoretical and practical tools of feminism.
