Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

7 Gender and
sexuality
Feminisms
‘One of the most striking changes in the humanities in the 1980s has been the rise of
gender as a category of analysis’ (Showalter, 1990: 1). This is the opening sentence in
Elaine Showalter’s introduction to a book on gender and literary studies. There can be
no doubt that without the emergence of feminism (the second wave) in the early 1970s
this sentence could not have been written. It is feminism that has placed gender on the
academic agenda. However, the nature of the agenda has provoked a vigorous debate
within feminism itself. So much so that it is really no longer possible, if it ever was, to
talk of feminism as a monolithic body of research, writing and activity; one should
really speak of feminisms.
There are at least four different feminisms: radical, Marxist, liberal and what Sylvia
Walby (1990) calls dual-systems theory. Each responds to women’s oppression in a
different way, positing different causes and different solutions. Radical feminists
argue that women’s oppression is the result of the system of patriarchy, a system of
domination in which men as a group have power over women as a group. In Marxist
feminist analysis the ultimate source of oppression is capitalism. The domination of
women by men is seen as a consequence of capital’s domination over labour. Liberal
feminism differs from both Marxist and radical feminisms in that it does not posit
a system – patriarchy or capitalism – determining the oppression of women. Instead,
it tends to see the problem in terms of male prejudice against women, embodied in
law or expressed in the exclusion of women from particular areas of life. Dual-systems
theory represents the coming together of Marxist and radical feminist analysis in the
belief that women’s oppression is the result of a complex articulation of both patriarchy
and capitalism. There are of course other feminist perspectives. Rosemary Tong
(1992), for example, lists: liberal, Marxist, radical, psychoanalytic, socialist, existentialist
and postmodern.
Feminism, like Marxism (discussed in Chapter 4), is always more than a body of
academic texts and practices. It is also, and perhaps more fundamentally so, a political
movement concerned with women’s oppression and the ways and means to empower
women – what the African-American critic bell hooks (1989) describes as ‘finding a
voice’.