ABSTRACT
Oppression has been a central political category for contemporary social movements including the 'second wave' women's movement, the gay and lesbian movements, and the various anti-racist movements. This oppression, in turn, is viewed as a social relationship whereby a dominant group or groups subordinate and exploit another group or groups. The dynamic of emancipatory social movements is always determined by the historical context in which they operate. In turn, these movements assume an historical force which enters into and changes the specificity of oppressive relationships. The development of the formal universals of personhood is a peculiarly modern condition. Even while Greek and Roman antiquity elaborated a conception of the citizen, it did not disturb the fundamental division between slave and free. Women, children, indigenous peoples and the colonised have all been interpellated as potentially but not fully human within the modern universalistic discourse of freedom and equality.
