Work and Leisure

Gender, work and leisure 77Stanley and Wise (2000) began by expressing their concern with the developmentof feminist meta-theory which was not subsumed within mainstream/malestream social theory. They highlighted three recent changes to the organisationalcontext in which the conjunction of ‘feminism/theory’ takes place,as follows:• The relationship between feminist theory and practice has changedmarkedly as a consequence of the institutionalising or mainstreaming offeminism in some areas of government, private enterprise, welfare bodiesand education.• ‘Social theory’ and its feminist theory parallel have become much moremarked by claims to multidisciplinarity or post-disciplinarity: ‘travellingtheorists’ characterise this tendency.• Theorising in the formal sense has increasingly become the province ofspecialist groupings of academics rather than of feminists in general,with the effect that feminist practice is now considerably more on theperiphery of feminist theory than it was previously.A contrast pertinent for this chapter is their analysis of the differences inthree distinct areas between when ‘feminism entered the academy’ and thecurrent situation.In the first area, originally, feminism recognised the legitimacy of thecoexistence of different and contending points of view, as highlighted atthe beginning of this chapter. There were different theoretical positions aboutthe idea of women’s oppression, each of which was seen as independent andlegitimate but not as separate, self-reproductive or securely dominant. Therewas a considerable critique of ‘Theory’ of a mainstream kind because itsgeneralising failed to see women’s lives. Feminism theory on the other handattempted to theorise the whole range of feminist practice. There had been a‘collective forgetting’ of the earlier feminist critique of ‘Theory’. Instead,there was the constitution of a homogenous notion of ‘feminist Theory’ outof the ashes of the ‘theory wars’ of the past. Contrary bodies of theory werecharacterised as wrong, misguided, outdated, or even essentialist, rather thanas precisely ‘contenders’. This amounted to passing judgement and exercisingexclusion in ways that were common among positivist masculine theorists.The debate about women’s leisure in a postmodernist framework is anexample of this tendency.In the second area, the range of contending theoretical positions thatoriginally existed:were seen as the product of a collective endeavour symbiotically linkedto feminist politics; theorists were seen as codifying and interpretingcollective ideas rather than being the source, the fount, of feministthought; and feminist theory was seen as the provenance of all feminists,