Table Of ContentA Glossary of Feminist
Theory
A Glossary of
Feminist Theory
Sonya Andermahr
University College, Northampton
and
Terry Lovell Carol Wolkowitz
University of Warwick
A member of the Hodder Headline Group
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First published in Great Britain in 2000
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Introduction
Concepts and Theory in Feminism
Dictionaries are produced and, with a show of authority no less confident
because it is usually so limited in place and tin1e, ,vhat is called a proper
meaning is attached ... when we go beyond these to the historical dictionaries,
and to essays in historical and contemporary semantics, we are quite beyond
the range of 'proper meanings'. We find a history and cotnplexity of 1neanings;
conscious changes or consciously different uses; innovation, obsolescence,
specialization, extension, overlap, transfer; or changes that are masked by a
nominal continuity. (Raymond Williams, Keywords).
Keywords (Williams 1983a) was to be a different kind of dictionary, one which
aimed to capture concepts on the move in history, in order to reveal ' ... not
concepts but problems .. . ' (Williams 1977a: 11 ). This seems to us to be exactly
wbat is required in a glossary of contemporary feminist · theory, since
contemporary feminism draws so heavily on what Edward Said (1983) has
named 'travelling theory'. 'Like people and schools of criticism, ideas and
theories travel - from person to person, from situation to situation, from one
period to another', and as theory travels, so it is 'transformed by its new uses, its
new position in a new time and place' (226-7).
Feminist theory has grown exponentially since the late 1960s. Its first impetus
came from the emergent women's movements in the USA and Europe, and it
became entrenched in contemporary intellectual life as feminist courses began to
appear on the curriculum in higher education and in other educational settings.
It is tied then, to the fortunes of Western 'academic feminism' - courses in
women's studies and gender studies which may be taught as part of degree
programmes within orthodox disciplines or in specialist interdisciplinary
centres. It is further reinforced by the publishing industry. There is scarcely a
publishing house in the 1990s that does not have its women's studies/gender
studies list.
This development was partly the result of the coincidence, variably in
different national contexts, of the expansion of higher education, the increasing
participation rates of women as part of that expansion, and the emergence of the
'second wave' of the women's movement. The disciplines in which feminist
theory and scholarship first appeared were those which attracted a high
2 Introduction
proportion of these new women students, and which attracted women who
defined themselves as feminists.
In the USA, it was above all in literary criticism that feminism began to
flourish, not without considerable resistance. In Europe, including Britain, it is
probably true to say that on balance the social sciences provided the main sites
for feminist theory. Sociology, a major beneficiary of the expansion in higher
education (in Britain 17 new departments of sociology were set up between 1960
and 1970, and the number of degrees in sociology attained between 1962 and
I 967 had increased by 389%) , and the new field of cultural studies which dated
only from the mid-l 960s, were of particular significance.
The terms of feminism were drawn from the new femini~t language that
began to be produced by radical feminists in the USA, which involved reworking
and reclaiming terms that had been used to denigrate women ('crone', 'dyke',
and more fundamentally, 'woman'), and inventing new terms. But the concepts
that began to inform feminist theorizing tended to be created through the
critique and appropriation of sociological theory, for example 'patriarchy',
'ideology', 'socialization', 'sex-roles'.
The radicalism of the 1960s was marked in sociology by a shift away from the
dominant paradigm of the 1950s, sociological structural-functionalism, in favour
of twentieth-century Marxism and sociological phenomenology, the dominant
sources of 'travelling theory' at that time. Twentieth-century Marxism was a
Marxism of the superstructure which was concerned to avoid the most
I
discredited fonns of economic reductionism. The 'keyword' at this time was
'ideology', and it was this concept above all which was appropriated for feminist
theory to conceptualize 'patriarchy'.
'Ideology' was used as the organizing concept in discussions of sexual
divisions and hierarchies, and for the analysis of culture, including literature and
the visual arts. It was therefore placed under intense pressure, made to cover a
great deal of ground, inside and outside of feminism. However, the term
represented one of the weaker links in the conceptual repertoire of Marxism, and
it became evident very early on that _additional theoretical resources were
required to tackle the work it was being asked to do. Literary and cultural studies
required a more adequate account of language than was generally available
within the Marxist frame, and feminists in all fields of study urgently required a
more plausible theory of sexuality than Marxism could offer.
All the new resources for feminist theory were centred upon language. The
'linguistic turn' had affected all the disciplines of the humanities and social
sciences between the mid-l 960s and the mid-I 970s, and the theories wtlich
'travelled' from this period included structuralist linguistics and semiology,
sociological and anthropological strµcturalism, Lacanian psychoanalysis,
decpnstructionism. and poststructuralism. This swathe of theory was centred in
phi.losophy and critical theory rather than in sociology, and so the undertow for
those who travelled with travelling theory pulled ~way from sociology and
history to some degree.
