ABSTRACT
Multiple feminist and feminized theories and pedagogies advocate an understanding of women’s oppression and agency in social life across various domains. Biofeminists dispute genetic arguments and reclaim the cultured self; ecofeminists examine the relation between the degradation of nature and the exploitation of women; postmodern feminists focus on the interplay between language—discourse and performative registers— and women’s identity formation; materialist feminists ground their analyses of women’s oppression in the historical and concrete dimensions of capitalist society; critical race feminists apply the lens of “race” to differentiate oppression among women; queer-feminists contest hetero-normativity and the construction of gender; and various other feminists examine the intersection of identity, power, and social relations on the subjective formation of “woman.” There is no one way to apply a feminist analysis to women’s oppression or to advocate a pedagogy, or praxis, to help establish the conditions for women to free themselves from mental (and manual and sexual) slavery (to borrow Bob Marley’s timeless lyric). Missing from the list above are postcolonial feminists, indigenous feminists, Chicana feminists, Islamic feminists, transnational feminists, socialist feminists, psychoanalytic feminists, and so the list continues. My intent on naming the various “feminisms” is not to simplify or dilute the importance of each strand of feminist theorizing. On the contrary, these “feminisms” indicate an obvious and permanent shift in global politics. For one, the oppression of women can no longer go unnoticed or unattended (even while their exploitation persists), and second, feminist theorizing has much to say about domination in general, and the coexistence of militarism, speciesism, imperialism, capitalism, colonialism, and the exploitation of women (and men) and their bodies worldwide. To the extent that feminist theory and practice can avoid liberalization and incorporation into the neoliberal project of human and earthly exploitation and to the extent that it continues to offer an oppositional and counterhegemonic praxis in our pursuit for a more socially just and humane world we are better positioned to create a world of our own making. The varied analyses and social practices that stem from feminist praxis aid our understanding of the changing roles and experiences that people encounter as the information society becomes more perverse, poverty more deep-rooted, militarism more brute, capitalism more expansive, and in some isolated cases, socialism more possible.
