Feminist Theory 101 GRADED A+

What are the basic questions of feminism? What is explored within each one? -1. And what about the women?/Where are women are the women in any situated being investigated?/How do they experience the situation? Answer: Women are present in most social situations (Academic, legislative, public, social actors), when they are not it is due to deliberate action to exclude them. Women's role are present but are different, less privileged, and subordinate to roles of men. Invisibility=Inequality 2. Why is women's situation as it is? 3. What about the differences between women? (Currently most significant) Answer: Invisibility, inequality, and role differences in relation to men that characterize women's lives are impacted by their social locations (race, class, age, physical ability, affectional preference, marital status, religion, ethnicity, global location) 4. How can we change and improve the social world to make it a more just place for all people? Social transformation in the interest of justice 5. How and why does gender inequality persist in the modern world? 6. What is really to be understood by the category "gender"? Sources include neoliberalism and postmodernism. Neocolonialism, capitalism. Gender Difference Theory --Women's location in and experience of most situations is different from that of men in the situation -must confront "essentialism argument that fundamental differences between man and woman are immutable traceable to 1. Biology, 2. existential or phenomenological need of human beings to produce an 'other' as part of the act of self determination, 3. different cultures women and men create, 4. Social institutional needs for men and women to fill different roles (family), 5. production of gender differences out of the process of interaction itself -difference as a process that masculine culture both creates and uses to constitute itself, while pushing women's experience and ways of knowing themselves to the very margins of conceptual framing. In its most intense form, this process creates a construct of the woman as "the Other," an objectified being who is assigned traits that represent the opposite of the agentic, subject male.