Feminism is a range of social movements, political movements, and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that societies prioritize the male point of view, and that women are treated unjustly within those societies. Efforts to change that include fighting against gender stereotypes and establishing educational, professional, and interpersonal opportunities and outcomes for women that are equal to those for men.
Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that calls for a radical reordering of society in which male supremacy is eliminated in all social and economic contexts, while recognizing that women's experiences are also affected by other social divisions such as in race, class, and sexual orientation. The ideology and movement emerged in the 1960s.
Gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing gender identity and gendered representation. It includes women's studies, men's studies and queer studies. Its rise to prominence, especially in Western universities after 1990, has been noted as a success of deconstructionism. Sometimes, gender studies is offered together with study of sexuality. These disciplines study gender and sexuality in the fields of literature, linguistics, human geography, history, political science, archaeology, economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, cinema, musicology, media studies, human development, law, public health and medicine. It also analyzes how race, ethnicity, location, class, nationality, and disability intersect with the categories of gender and sexuality.
Feminist sociology is a conflict theory and theoretical perspective which observes gender in its relation to power, both at the level of face-to-face interaction and reflexivity within a social structure at large. Focuses include sexual orientation, race, economic status, and nationality.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society is a peer-reviewed feminist academic journal. It was established in 1975 by Jean W. Sacks, Head of the Journals Division, with Catharine R. Stimpson as its first editor in Chief, and is published quarterly by the University of Chicago Press. Signs publishes essays examining the lives of women, men, and non-binary people around the globe from both historical and contemporary perspectives, as well as theoretical and critical articles addressing processes of gendering, sexualization, and racialization.
The men's movement is a social movement that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, primarily in Western countries, which consists of groups and organizations of men and their allies who focus on gender issues and whose activities range from self-help and support to lobbying and activism.
Cynthia Holden Enloe is a feminist writer, theorist, and professor. She is best known for her work on gender and militarism and for her contributions to the field of feminist international relations. She has also had major impact on the field of feminist political geography, in particular feminist geopolitics. In 2015, the International Feminist Journal of Politics, in conjunction with the academic publisher Taylor & Francis, created the Cynthia Enloe Award "in honour of Cynthia Enloe's pioneering feminist research into international politics and political economy, and her considerable contribution to building a more inclusive feminist scholarly community."
Amrita Basu is an American academic and political scientist. She currently is a professor at Amherst College where she holds affiliations in the departments of Political Science, Sexuality, Women's, & Gender Studies, Asian Languages & Civilizations, and Black Studies.
Feminism is a broad term given to works of those scholars who have sought to bring gender concerns into the academic study of international politics and who have used feminist theory and sometimes queer theory to better understand global politics and international relations.
Feminist constructivism is an international relations theory which builds upon the theory of constructivism. Feminist constructivism focuses upon the study of how ideas about gender influence global politics. It is the communication between two postcolonial theories; feminism and constructivism, and how they both share similar key ideas in creating gender equality globally.
A variety of movements of feminist ideology have developed over the years. They vary in goals, strategies, and affiliations. They often overlap, and some feminists identify themselves with several branches of feminist thought.
Feminist political theory is a diverse subfield of feminist theory working towards three main goals:
- To understand and critique the role of gender in how political theory is conventionally construed.
- To re-frame and re-articulate conventional political theory in light of feminist issues.
- To support political science presuming and pursuing gender equality.
Kristen Rogheh Ghodsee is an American ethnographer and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is primarily known for her ethnographic work on post-Communist Bulgaria as well as being a contributor to the field of postsocialist gender studies.
Feminist ethics is an approach to ethics that builds on the belief that traditionally ethical theorizing has undervalued and/or underappreciated women's moral experience, which is largely male-dominated, and it therefore chooses to reimagine ethics through a holistic feminist approach to transform it.
Shirin M. Rai, is a political scientist, known for her research on the intersections between globalisation, post-colonial governance, processes of democratisation and gender regimes. She is the Director of the Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament Programme, a four-year interdisciplinary project funded by the Leverhulme Trust that studies the performances of ritual, ceremony, symbolism and affect in the British, Indian and South African parliaments.
Ecofeminist thinkers draw on the concept of gender to analyse the relationships between humans and the natural world. The term was coined by the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974). Ecofeminist theory asserts a feminist perspective of Green politics that calls for an egalitarian, collaborative society in which there is no one dominant group. Today, there are several branches of ecofeminism, with varying approaches and analyses, including liberal ecofeminism, spiritual/cultural ecofeminism, and social/socialist ecofeminism. Interpretations of ecofeminism and how it might be applied to social thought include ecofeminist art, social justice and political philosophy, religion, contemporary feminism, and poetry.
Drude Dahlerup is a Danish-Swedish professor of Political Science at Stockholm University. Her main research area is gender and politics. She is an international consultant on the empowerment of women in politics and a specialist on the implementation of gender quota systems. Spokesperson for the EU-critical center-left June Movement during four Danish referenda in the 1990s.
Multiracial feminist theory is a feminist theory thought to have gained momentum in the 1970s by feminist women of color, like Black, Chicanx, Asian, Native women and anti-racist white women. Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill wrote “Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism” in 1996, a piece emphasising intersectionality and the application of intersectional analysis in feminist discourse.
Anna Schober is an Austrian historian and University Professor of Visual Culture at the Institute for Cultural Analysis of the Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt.
The anti-gender movement is an international movement which opposes what it refers to as "gender ideology", "gender theory", or "genderism". These concepts do not have a coherent definition and cover a variety of issues; "gender ideology" has been described as an "empty signifier" or catch-all term "for all that conservative Catholics despise". The movement derives from Catholic theology beginning in the 1990s, but the protests which brought the movement to attention did not start until around 2012–2013. It often includes opposition to same-sex marriage and transgender rights.
