POLI 417 Quiz 2 Feminist Political Theory

Question 1

Firestone Key Terms

Answer 1

Radical
sex/class war
feminist/sexual revolution
oppression 
patriarchy
historical materialism
divison of labour
means of production
psychosexual/freudian analysis

Question 2

Firestone’s Concerns

Answer 2

EARLY RADICAL FEM

• inadequacy of lib fem attempt to address sex inequality via reformist measures against sex discrimination/male privilege and through full integration of women in to the labour force
• inadequacy of Marxist analysis and its strictly economic definition of historical materialism to deal with sexuality and sexual division of labour within fam

Question 3

Firestone’s Proposed Solutions

Answer 3

EARLY RADICAL FEM

• development of materialist view of history based on sex that will include socialist one- and its dialectical, historical materialist analysis
• enlarge it by calling for a feminist sexual revolution based on:
• elimination of sex class as well as class
• elimination of the sex distinction as well as class distinction
• seizure by women of means of reproduction and socialist seize means of production

Question 4

Firestone Limitations

Answer 4

EARLY RADICAL FEM

• assumption of primacy of patriarchy/oppression of women over all other oppression, same problem as Marxist narrow focus. no intersectionality
• call to seize means of reproduction devalues women’s reproductive roles and continues Marxist assumption that tech is neutral

Question 5

Thiam Key Tems

Answer 5

EARLY RADICAL FEM

-patriarchy, liberation, exploitation, oppression, colonialism, class, capitalism, phallocratic violence

Question 6

Thiam Concerns

Answer 6

EARLY RADICAL FEM

• sexual issues affecting African women: institutionalized polygamy, FGM, forced/child marriage
• economic exploitation and colonialism
• issues related to racism: erasure of Black women by Western feminists. ex) Kate Millet: rape is to women what lynching is to blacks

Question 7

Thiam Proposed Solutions

Answer 7

EARLY RADICAL FEM

• struggle for effective economic and political independence for liberation for women
• solution for women’s problems must be collective and international but it will be a struggle both with and against women. with and against men

Question 8

Thiam Limitations

Answer 8

EARLY RADICAL FEM

• quotes Firestone on the need for a sexual and a socialist revolution but Firestone makes patriarchy the primary contradiction which Angel Davis has strongly critiqued
• no discussion of matrimonial societies in West Africa where FGM is not practiced

Question 9

Ruddick Key Terms

Answer 9

CULTURAL FEM
caring
values
peace
maternal thinking
feminist standpoint
rape
pornography

Question 10

Ruddick Concerns

Answer 10

CULTURAL FEM

• violence and militarism
• downgrading of caring labour by patriarchal society in favour of reason and objectivity. need to resist the lure of abstraction in favour of the particular knowledge that women acquire from their suffering of and resistance to oppression

Question 11

Ruddick Proposed Solutions

Answer 11

-peacefulness latent in maternal practice can, if transformed, lead to a politics of peace. maternal non violence

Question 12

Ruddick Limitations

Answer 12

CULTURAL FEM

• the mothering relationship is necessarily non reciprocal, is it then a good model for feminist political relations among adults?
• a politics modeled on mothering lends itself to a bias toward those most like oneself.
• not all women are mothers and not all mothers mother in the same way
• motherist politics really about mothering or is it about middle class domesticity
• does such a stance take in to account need to take care of themselves, negated by the practice of mothering in patriarchal society. reinforcing oppression

Question 13

Rich Key Words

Answer 13

CULTURAL FEM
-compulsory heterosexuality, woman identified patriarchy, lesbian feminism, lesbian continuum, marriage resistance, political lesbianism

Question 14

Rich Concerns

Answer 14

CULTURAL FEM

• patriarchal society enforces compulsory hetero in order to control women and keep them divided
• double life shared by closeted lesbians and women imprisoned in normal hetero relationships
• erasure of lesbian oppression as women and their woman centered sexuality through the use of the term gay

Question 15

Rich Proposed Solutions

Answer 15

CULTURAL FEM
-expand def of lesbian beyond genital sexual experience with another woman to include other forms of primary intensity and support relationships between and among women which are empowering

Question 16

Rich Limitations

Answer 16

CULTURAL FEM
-a historical
desexualized lesbianism
-individualism: liberate women through individual acts of marriage resistance
-assumes all lesbians are at least nascent feminists

Question 17

Donovan Concerns

Answer 17

CULTURAL FEM
-masculine behavior objectively destructive leading to congruence between women’s subjective experience of oppression and the objective realities of war, imperialism and corporate industrial despoliation of the environment

Question 18

Donovan Solutions

Answer 18

• reclaim female epistemology and ethic rooted in cultural domestic tradition that is non imperialistic and life affirming
• reverence for the concrete details of life not the abstract
• universal experience of oppression
• production for use not exchange
• maternal thinking, resigned patience and holding
• reject Baconian aggressive manipulation of nature, let material speak to you
• Chowdrows object relations theory, boys reject their mothers and the feminine in order to become men
• separatist cultural traditions

Question 19

Donovan Limitations

Answer 19

• assumption of universal sisterhood, contradicts anthropological findings of gender egalitarian societies
• implications for women’s reproductive rights
• is having a history of the earlier movement enough to avoid similar things happening again
• Distortion of Virgina Woolfs Outsider Society