| Title | : | 50 Key Concepts in Gender Studies (SAGE Key Concepts series) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0761970363 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780761970361 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 216 |
| Publication | : | First published March 1, 2004 |
50 Key Concepts in Gender Studies (SAGE Key Concepts series) Reviews
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This book is rather a very good introduction to 50 very critical concepts of feminism, than a deep interrogation of those concepts. Drawing from various feminist movements and traditions, it reflects the multi-pronged approach that contemporary feminism takes now. Not a historical perspective, but a conceptual one that would familiarize in very simple, lucid terms the entire history of feminism to an uninitiated layperson. It draws from the schools of Marxism, Semiotics, Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies, apart from the usual sources. However, it is a major drawback of the book, in that it has completely eschewed Gayatri Chakarvorty Spivak, a seminal postmodern Marxist feminist. It absolutely shocked me.
It is also, by its own honest admission, an account of feminism from the White, middle-class, industrialized West-centric approach, particularly the British nation. This disclaimer at the very beginning calms down any apprehensions of its inclusive nature. It speaks only for itself.
However, if you are looking for a truly deep text, skip this, go for
Key Concepts in Feminist Theory and Research.
Some of the concepts were quite interesting - though most of them overlapped with others at some point - since elucidating 50 concepts is a mammoth task I am rather disinclined to perform, I will provide only a basic idea of some important concepts that were dealt well. Rather than reaching any conclusions, the text only explores the concepts as they have been already explored, refraining from adding any conclusions of its own, thus leaving the ground open for the readers to proceed.
ANDROCENTRISM
A relatively obscure body of knowledge with feminism, it arose from studies of men’s moral development. Morality has been constructed as being concerned with justice and fairness, and moral development has been seen as the understanding of rights and rules. In this moral code, the individual self is paramount and personal achievement, autonomy and separatism are orienting values. On the basis of her research, Gilligan argues that women’s morality and self–other relationships may differ. In women’s constructions, morality tends to be centred around an ethic of care, of responsibility for others, so that moral conflicts or problems must be resolved with a view to maintaining relationships with others.
It also raises the problematics of applying male-specific pronouns to sexless concepts - Mankind for Humankind...
BODY
Body, along with mind, is now a major feminist tool and object of study - various feminists have alternatively labelled the body as Biologically produced, Culturally Produced and as Embodiment (both biologically and socially constructed).
CITIZENSHIP
A more constructive way forward, argues Lister, is a conception of citizenship that combines elements of the gender-neutral and gender-differentiated approaches, employed strategically, while at the same time remaining sensitive to the differences that exist between women. Prokhovnik proposes an understanding of citizenship as a social status based on a set of ethically grounded activities: ‘Citizenship is first and foremost a moral relationship’ (1998: 85). Thus conceptualized, citizenship can incorporate the range of activities people engage in, differentiated by gender (and ethnicity), within both the private and the public spheres.
CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING (CR)
Important element of second wave feminism – closed group of women who would relate their own experiences without generalizing, and a search for common threads/grounds would be conducted through these personalized, singular narratives.
The text reveals a key contradiction in the whole CR process: as much as it was geared towards collectivizing women’s experiences and gaining understanding in order to provide a more global analysis of women’s oppression, it made women relate to feminism as a deeply personal process. For many of them it might subsequently become difficult to decide whether their feminism was about the way it changed their own lives or about the way potentially it might change the lives of women as a whole.
CYBORG
For Haraway, a full cyborg entity is, as yet, a largely mythical creature. Its importance lies more in its symbolic value, via its potential as a strategy for a postmodernist reconceptualization of social relations previously predicated on dualisms, divisions and differences. The cyborg, as a hybrid of organism/nature and machine/culture, is a creature of ‘permanently partial identities’. As such, it presents an image of ‘transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as part of much needed political work’.
Cyborgs are hybrid entities that are neither wholly technological nor completely organic, which means that the cyborg has the potential not only to disrupt persistent dualisms that set the natural body in opposition to the technologically recrafted body, but also to refashion our thinking about the theoretical construction of the body as both a material entity and a discursive process.
The cyborg provides a framework for studying gender identity as it is technologically crafted simultaneously from the matter of material bodies and cultural fictions. (Better read
A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism - a stunning text.)
DIFFERENCE
Rita Felski concludes that:
Rather than endorse a metaphysical vision of woman as invariably and eternally other, feminism can more usefully conceptualize the position of women in terms of a difference within sameness and a sameness within difference, a form of interference with the purity of such categories that is variously and contingently actualized. Such a perspective remains more open to the multiple and mutable concerns of feminism than does the appeal to incommensurability and otherness, an otherness that necessarily leaves the realm of the same untouched. (Felski 1997: 21)
DOUBLE STANDARDS
‘A girl’s standing can be destroyed by insinuations about her sexual morality, a boy’s reputation in contrast is usually enhanced by his sexual exploits.’ Terms like ‘slag’ and ‘tart’ were especially important ways through which girls’ sexuality was socially controlled and regulated. Lees found that this language of sexual reputation was applied exclusively to girls and there was no equivalent label set applied to boys. In their efforts to avoid being labelled as a slag or a tart, girls had permanently to monitor and check their sexuality, including their style of dress, their friendliness with boys and their number and frequency of sexual encounters.
In informal codes of expected behaviour, ‘reverse’ double standards may also be identified – leniency to female criminals as against males for the same nature of crime (though, IMHO, it is not always true, and I beg to differ with the author).
While prolific sexual activity by heterosexual men may be condoned, the alleged prolific sexual activity of gay men is vilified and forms an important part of homophobic discourse.
FEMINISMS
Socialist/Marxist feminists are always mindful of the ways society is riven by class and race distinctions as well as those of gender and that it is more useful to consider oppression as multi-pronged and inter-related rather than arguing that one form is more destructive than others. In common with liberal feminism, socialist feminism, because of its links to Marxist thought, suggests a necessary link with men and an acceptance perhaps that men are part of any movement for change.
Radical feminism, Black feminism, Postmodern/Post-structuralist feminism, explained later, are some of the feminisms mentioned.
IDENTITY POLITICS
In the 1990s, queer theory further challenged the politics of identity by denying the need for fixed sexual identities, identifying ‘queer’ as the badge of the sexual radical. Queer is a way of denying the normalcy of heterosexuality by blurring the gay/straight binary opposition and celebrating the plurality of responses that are made available. It’s playfully disruptive of the old boundaries, yet some feminists remain skeptical of its political reach.
MEN’S STUDIES
CR groups for men emerging during the early 1970s, generally had a benign relationship with feminism and women in general. Some felt that gender oppresses all individuals and that men need liberation from masculinity, just as much as women need to be liberated from the thrall of patriarchy.
Explains for how gays came under the purview of feminism.
PATRIARCHY
Three of the most important theories in which patriarchy is a central concept are those commonly labelled as ‘radical feminist’, ‘Marxist feminist’ and ‘dual systems theory’.
In ‘radical feminist’ analyses, patriarchy is regarded as the primary and fundamental social division in society. In some radical feminist analyses, the institution of the family is identified as a key means through which men’s domination is achieved (Millet 1977). In other radical feminist accounts of patriarchy, the control men have over women’s bodies is regarded as important.
In a further grouping of feminist analyses, often labelled as ‘Marxist feminism’, patriarchy is argued to arise from the workings of the capitalist economic system: it requires, and benefits from, women’s unpaid labour in the home. The subordination of women to men in society therefore tends to be regarded as a by-product of capital’s subordination of labour.
Class inequality is argued to be the central feature of society and is seen to determine gender inequality (Barrett 1988). A third grouping of feminist perspectives gives theoretical priority to two systems – capitalism and patriarchy – in the explanation of patriarchy. Often referred to as ‘dual systems theory’, this perspective in many ways represents a synthesis of Marxist and radical feminist accounts of gender relations.
PORN
The crux of the argument was that these images affect men’s behavior towards women, so that they are likely to treat them as merely decorative objects, things to be circulated as status symbols without concern for their individuality or humanity.
Women supposedly respond to them by desiring to be like the object of desire, even when the representation may be impossible to emulate – often depicting improbably thin, post-adolescent, white women. While the subject of pornography was part of the whole ‘images of women’ debate, the point was to draw attention to the ways in which women were represented and challenge them on the basis that these images hurt all women by profoundly affecting the way they are treated in their daily lives as well as suggesting that women are primarily judged by their physical attributes and sexual attractiveness.
Vance in particular feels that danger of sexuality for women has been overstated, which ‘runs the risk of making speech about sexual pleasure taboo. Feminists are easily intimidated by the charge that their own pleasure is selfish, as in political rhetoric which suggests that no woman is entitled to talk about sexual pleasure while any woman remains in danger – that is – never’ (Vance 1992: 7).
Elizabeth Wilson concurs with Vance in her view that ‘there has been a shift from the attempt to understand how we respond sexually as women and how we internalize oppressive notions of femininity and female sexual response, to a simpler position which lays the blame squarely on pornography for creating a climate of sexual violence and terrorizing women'.
POSTCOLONIAL
The term ‘post-colonial’ was originally used in the 1970s to refer to nations who moved beyond imperialist rule after the Second World War and later came to be used to reflect on how all cultures had been affected by European imperialism up until the present day.
A feminist perspective not only facilitates a re-evaluation of the way ‘third world women’ have been homogenised in post-colonial discourse, but also reviews the relationships of power between women as colonisers and colonised.
As Anne McClintock notes, ‘white women were not the hapless onlookers of empire, but were ambiguously complicit both as colonizers and colonized, privileged and restricted, acted upon and acting’.
POST-FEMINISM
Ann Brooks - the term ‘post-feminism’ ‘is now understood as a useful conceptual frame of reference encompassing the intersection of feminism with a number of other anti-foundational movements including postmodernism, post-structuralism and post-colonialism’.
POST-STRUCTURALISM
Post-structuralism emphasizes the importance of language in structuring our experience of the world – meanings are not inherent in the thing or action itself but are created by words and their relationship to other words. Meanings, it is argued, cannot be fixed or remain stable, but are endlessly remade through the process of reading/speaking and changes in social life. At the heart of the post-structuralist perspective lies the principle that language produces social reality, which varies across cultures and time.
A post-structuralist perspective, it is argued, allows us not just to evaluate the material possibilities available to women, but it also gives us a sophisticated account of how ideology (or discourse) makes these choices impossible or contradictory.
For example, Weedon notes how feminists have traditionally responded to the family and illustrates some central tensions: ‘the positions of wife and mother, though subject to male control, also offer forms of power – the power to socialize children, to run the house, and to be the power behind the throne’ (Weedon 1987: 19).
Althusser’s theory of ideology was crucial to the development of poststructuralist thinking, particularly in the concept of interpellation, where subjectivity is perceived as constructed through ideology – the individual recognizes herself but does not recognize the ways in which the subject position is constructed and ‘assumes that she is the author of the ideology which constructs her subjectivity’.
PSYCHOANALYTICAL FEMINISM
Feminism’s early relationship to psychoanalysis was largely a critical one. Kate Millett, considering the legacy of its founder, Sigmund Freud, in her best-selling Sexual Politics, contends that his understanding of the female is based upon his idea of penis envy, which results in the inevitable conceptualization of woman as lack. For Millett this means that Freud’s theories are essentially conservative, working in the interests of patriarchy.
According to Freud, “The image of women as ‘castrated’ men who must prepare themselves for a passive sexual role conveys the idea of their secondary status to men – that their lack of the penis is translated in social terms as lack of power, status and authority. Simone de Beauvoir critically picked up on this image of the castrated woman in The Second Sex.
Luce Irigaray’s work on Freud, as well as Julia Kristeva’s, picked up on a more maternal model of psychoanalytical thinking and their appropriations of Freud owe a debt to the work of Jacques Lacan.
QUEER
Foucault’s writings on sexuality and his notion that the body is immersed in discourse and given meaning by it have made a huge contribution to the development of queer theory. Adopting a ‘queer’ position amounts to a celebration of one’s ‘outlaw’ status as well as actively denying the meanings attached to sexual identity: this is not a plea for the assimilation of ‘gay’ culture into ‘straight’, but rather a celebration of continuing marginality which then holds the ‘centre’ (heterosexuality) up for scrutiny.
SEXUALITY
Within this framework, early second wave feminists were beginning to demand the right to be sexually active without censure and to find ways to portray women as desiring subjects rather than as objects of desire.
STANDPOINT
Standpoint theory, which explains our perceptions as a direct result of our positioning in the discourse. Hartsock draws on Marx’s argument that understanding and knowledge are structured by location in material (or economic) life.
These are some major concepts explored, and the text is strictly a collection of concepts and major reactions to the concepts - not very insightful, but a very good reference for collated, to the point material. -
Detailed and informative, though it might better be titled 50 Key Concepts in Women's Studies or Feminist Studies. It shows its age (published 2004) in leaving out today's hotly-discussed concepts such as transgender, cis-gender, asexuality, and intersex. Time for a new edition?
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Very well-written.
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"50 Key Concepts in Gender Studies" says it all in its title. It is about key concepts in gender studies. Actually 50 of them. And it does a great job at introducing all of these concepts in an easy to understand manner, and with extra reading material if anyone wants to dwell further in any of them. It also offers an easy way to relate the concepts, so if you read about "patriarchy" it tells you that you can read about "gender order", as it is related. So, apart from just reading the book from start to finish, one can check one concept and the ones related to it.
And does it a good job in explaining the concepts? It does, and lots of information are offered, with clear concepts and good explanations. Totally worth reading it. Nonetheless a couple of aspects should be taken into account. The first is obvious. It has 50 concepts, so it can become a little bit repetitive as some of the aspects interrelate to one another and it goes a little bit in circles. Related to this, some of the concepts are not just (and should not be just) Gender Studies related. But seeing them in relation to Gender Studies is a great plus. The second aspect is that it can become a little bit convoluted, as with so much information from so many authors it is difficult to follow all the aspects that appear. It will leave you wanting to know more and in more detail, but at the same time it can be a little bit tiring.
A good introduction, though.
6/10 -
A very good book -as a gateway- that leads you to Gender Studies' world.
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i want to study so that i could get a good knowledge on feminism.
