Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade, was an African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor.
The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, often referred to as MWMF or Michfest, was a feminist women's music festival held annually from 1976 to 2015 in Oceana County, Michigan, on privately owned woodland near Hart Township referred to as "The Land" by Michfest organizers and attendees. The event was built, staffed, run, and attended exclusively by women, with girls, young boys and toddlers permitted.
Lesbian feminism is a cultural movement and critical perspective that encourages women to focus their efforts, attentions, relationships, and activities towards their fellow women rather than men, and often advocates lesbianism as the logical result of feminism. Lesbian feminism was most influential in the 1970s and early 1980s, primarily in North America and Western Europe, but began in the late 1960s and arose out of dissatisfaction with the New Left, the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, sexism within the gay liberation movement, and homophobia within popular women's movements at the time. Many of the supporters of Lesbianism were actually women involved in gay liberation who were tired of the sexism and centering of gay men within the community and lesbian women in the mainstream women's movement who were tired of the homophobia involved in it.
Black feminism is a branch of feminism that focuses on the African-American woman's experiences and recognizes the intersectionality of racism and sexism. Black feminism philosophy centers on the idea that "Black women are inherently valuable, that [Black women's] liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else's but because of our need as human persons for autonomy."
Barbara Smith is an American lesbian feminist and socialist who has played a significant role in Black feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s, she has been active as a scholar, activist, critic, lecturer, author, and publisher of Black feminist thought. She has also taught at numerous colleges and universities for 25 years. Smith's essays, reviews, articles, short stories and literary criticism have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Ms., Gay Community News, The Guardian, The Village Voice, Conditions and The Nation. She has a twin sister, Beverly Smith, who is also a lesbian feminist activist and writer.
Grace Atkinson, better known as Ti-Grace Atkinson, is an American radical feminist activist, writer and philosopher. She was an early member of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and presided over the New York chapter in from 1967-68, though she quickly grew disillusioned with the group. She left to form The Feminists, which she left a few years later due to internal disputes. Atkinson was a member of the Daughters of Bilitis and an advocate for political lesbianism. Atkinson has been largely inactive since the 1970s, but resurfaced in 2013 to co-author an open statement expressing radical feminists' concerns about what they perceived as the silencing of discussion around "the currently fashionable concept of gender."
Since the 19th century, men have taken part in significant cultural and political responses to feminism within each "wave" of the movement. This includes seeking to establish equal opportunities for women in a range of social relations, generally done through a "strategic leveraging" of male privilege. Feminist men have also argued alongside writers like bell hooks, however, that men's liberation from the socio-cultural constraints of sexism and gender roles is a necessary part of feminist activism and scholarship.
Meredith Jane Tax was an American feminist writer and political activist.
Feminist views on transgender topics vary widely.
Hip hop feminism is a sub-set of black feminism that centers on intersectional subject positions involving race and gender in a way that acknowledges the contradictions in being a black feminist, such as black women's enjoyment in hip hop music and culture, rather than simply focusing on the victimization of black women in hip hop culture due to interlocking systems of oppressions involving race, class, and gender.
Meghna Pant is an Indian author, journalist and speaker. She has won a variety of awards for her contribution to literature, gender issues and journalism. In 2012, she won the Muse India National Literary Awards Young Writer Award for her debut novel One-and-a-Half Wife. Her collection of short stories, Happy Birthday and Other Stories was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Award.
The socio-political movements and ideologies of feminism have found expression in various media. These media include newspaper, literature, radio, television, social media, film, and video games. They have been essential to the success of many feminist movements.
Fourth-wave feminism is a feminist movement that began around the early 2010s and is characterized by a focus on the empowerment of women, the use of Internet tools, and intersectionality. The fourth wave seeks greater gender equality by focusing on gendered norms and the marginalization of women in society.
Multiracial feminist theory is promoted by women of color (WOC), including Black, Latina, Asian, Native American, and anti-racist white women. In 1996, Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill wrote “Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism," a piece emphasizing intersectionality and the application of intersectional analysis within feminist discourse.
White feminism is a term which is used to describe expressions of feminism which are perceived as focusing on white women but are perceived as failing to address the existence of distinct forms of oppression faced by ethnic minority women and women lacking other privileges. Whiteness is crucial in structuring the lived experiences of white women across a variety of contexts. The term has been used to label and criticize theories that are perceived as focusing solely on gender-based inequality. Primarily used as a derogatory label, "white feminism" is typically used to reproach a perceived failure to acknowledge and integrate the intersection of other identity attributes into a broader movement which struggles for equality on more than one front. In white feminism, the oppression of women is analyzed through a single-axis framework, consequently erasing the identity and experiences of ethnic minority women the space. The term has also been used to refer to feminist theories perceived to focus more specifically on the experience of white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied women, and in which the experiences of women without these characteristics are excluded or marginalized. This criticism has predominantly been leveled against the first waves of feminism which were seen as centered around the empowerment of white middle-class women in Western societies.
Feminist businesses are companies established by activists involved in the feminist movement. Examples include feminist bookstores, feminist credit unions, feminist presses, feminist mail-order catalogs, and feminist restaurants. These businesses flourished as part of the second and third-waves of feminism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Feminist entrepreneurs established organizations such as the Feminist Economic Alliance to advance their cause. Feminist entrepreneurs sought three primary goals: to disseminate their ideology through their businesses, to create public spaces for women and feminists, and to create jobs for women so that they did not have to depend on men financially. While they still exist today, the number of some feminist businesses, particularly women's bookstores, has declined precipitously since 2000.
Carceral feminism is a critical term for types of feminism that advocate for enhancing and increasing prison sentences that deal with feminist and gender issues. The term criticises the belief that harsher and longer prison sentences will help work towards solving these issues. The phrase "carceral feminism" was coined by Elizabeth Bernstein, a feminist sociologist, in her 2007 article, "The Sexual Politics of the 'New Abolitionism'". Examining the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States, Bernstein introduced the term to describe a type of feminist activism which casts all forms of sexual labor as sex trafficking. She sees this as a retrograde step, suggesting it erodes the rights of women in the sex industry, and takes the focus off other important feminist issues, and expands the neoliberal agenda.
Feminism and racism are highly intertwined concepts in intersectional theory, focusing on the ways in which women of color in the Western World experience both sexism and racism.
Hood Feminism is a 2020 non-fiction book by Mikki Kendall about intersectionality and feminism.
Ratchet feminism emerged in the United States from hip hop culture in the early 2000s, largely as a critique of, and a response to, respectability politics. It is distinct from black feminism, womanism, and hip hop feminism. Ratchet feminism coopts the derogatory term (ratchet). Other terms used to describe this concept include ratchet womanism as used by Georgia Tech professor Joycelyn Wilson or ratchet radicalism used by Rutgers professor Brittney Cooper. Ratchet is an identity embraced by many millennials and Gen Z black women and girls. The idea of ratchetness as empowering, or of ratchet feminism, has been articulated by artists and celebrities like Nicki Minaj, City Girls, Amber Rose, and Junglepussy, scholars like Brittney Cooper and Mikki Kendall, and through events like Amber Rose's SlutWalk. Many view ratchet feminism as a form of female empowerment that doesn't adhere to respectability politics.
