PREFACE
I did not decide to become a sociology student lightly. My undergraduate
education was in women's studies, and I have a strong fondness for what
is called radical feminist theory
as a world-view and explanatory framework. At first glance, the notion that
I want to study society from a theoretical framework would seem to make
sociology the ideal place for me, but I had been worried that perhaps feminist
theory would not be welcome, that the discipline and its various departments
would have a tendency to exclude it from the range of viable theoretical
paradigms. After all, I was warned! A fundamental primer for first-year
undergraduate students of women's studies includes the observation that
feminist studies programs have had to utilize the euphemistic term "women's
studies" precisely because such programs,
...both academic and nonacademic, are often met with derision or intolerance,
if not outright hostility. The same forces that limit the freedom, status,
and power of women in the wider world limit women within academea pro-woman
stance is very threatening to traditional attitudes and structures. The
very word feminism carries a fearful connotation for many people and evokes
a defensive response.
(Ruth, 1980, p. 5)
Well, one of the first sociology classes I took was a class in feminist
theory, and for that class I wrote a paper for the professor in which I
utilized radical feminist theory to derive my perspective on the subject
matter, and received comments that ran something like this:
You show a good comprehension of radical feminist theory, but what is
odd is that you chose it in the first place. Radical feminist knowledge
depends on women's intuition, an emotional body-based process of transcending
patriarchal ideology that is available only to women, who are blessedly
in touch with nature because they have wombs and menstruate and give birth--hardly
a scientific basis for social knowledge! There's no point of entry for men,
the universal oppressor, so it can't be used as a tool for understanding
and addressing men's oppression. It ignores the power of structured class
interests and encourages liberation through essentially apolitical personal
individual action instead of focusing around collective social change efforts.
The reason we teach radical feminist theory is because it makes such a good
critique of classical Marxism, which is grounded in the limited notion that
class stratification is the source of all oppression. But radical feminism
is just as much a mono-theory, since it posits sex stratification as the
source of all oppression, and, furthermore, it's a bad mono-theory. Not
only does it ignore the fact that what we feel and how we interpret feelings
in certain situations is socially constructed and certainly not objective,
it also represents another form of the naturalistic fallacy of Rousseau
in that it sees woman as nature and man as culture, labels all social problems
"culture", and then advocates overthrowing culture for the liberation
of women. This is clearly presociological thinking. You should take a closer
look at socialist feminist theory. I think you'll find it much less problematic.
"In other words", I thought to myself, "we'll pretend
that we're acknowledging feminist theory in sociology as long as everyone
agrees that we actually mean repackaged Marxism. We'll make no attempt to
use feminism's own distinctive theory, which puts feminist analysis at the
root of social understanding. On the other hand, at least the door is open
now. Radical feminist theory was discussed in the class, and I can write
my next paper as a reply to his charges and objections."
This paper is the result of that attempt to address the areas of disagreement
between conventional sociological perspectives and the perspectives of radical
feminism as I understood them. It has been completely rewritten four times
since the original version, and even this fifth version has been modified
and edited on several occasions to a lesser degree. Version four was accepted
by the abovementioned professor and the department as a "track paper"
(something along the lines of a miniature Master's thesis). Version five
was my first real opportunity to write the paper with no distracting concern
about the need to meet informal criteria for a theoretical track paper.
Freed from the pressure to make a single, well-defined assertion that can
be explained in the first paragraph and then developed and defended in subsequent
pages (the linear declarative paper model), I returned to the original project
of defending an entire world-view as an alternative to the operant world-view
that informs sociology, because the answers that a radical feminist might
give to almost any one of the professor's objections would invite further
objections unless they were developed along with answers to the other objections,
all more or less at the same time. From the level of major theoretical visions
of what the social world is all about to the level of largely unexamined
axioms about what makes good theories good in the first place-indeed, even
the criteria for what constitutes a good, well-developed, properly-written
academic paper-one's responses to a theorist's assertions may depend in
large part upon which of these two world-views comes closest to that which
one happens to hold. This has made the process of explaining difficult.
It is my hope that in this fifth version I've succeeded in finding a starting
place where most of those who read this can follow from the beginning, and
that from there I've chosen a pathway through the heart of this world-view
that will enable you to see what I'm trying to say.
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