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Feminist political theory involves distinctive modes of critique engaging both the classic texts in Western political theory and the inequitable and unjust conditions of women’s existence. Investigating androcentric bias in key concepts and practices such as freedom, justice, order, sovereignty, autonomy, democracy, liberalism, nationalism, the state, war, and peace, feminist political theory seeks to illuminate the barriers and constraints that circumscribe women’s lives, explain their dynamics and persistence, and identify mechanisms for change.

Working within particular philosophical traditions, feminist theorists have identified omissions and distortions circulating in philosophical texts that generate noxious representations of women. They have demonstrated that classical and mainstream philosophers often violate disciplinary standards of argument and evidence when making claims about women, that their contradictory assertions about women undermine the internal consistency of their claims about human nature, and that they routinely fail to notice that the hypotheses advanced about women are inadequately warranted.

Conceptualizing Gender Justice And Injustice: Alternative Approaches

Feminist political theories articulate claims of justice that do not fit the models of justice as restitution, reparation, or rectification developed in the Western philosophical literature. Since Aristotle advanced his conception of compensatory justice as a rectifying or reparatory transaction between one person and another, Western philosophers have argued that both wrongdoing and its rectification must be tied to specific historical events. But the systematic inequities that women experience in particular times and places do not conform to the model of injury or the possibilities for rectification that Aristotle envisioned. As such, mainstream philosophy denies any possibility for rectification: how can justice dispel something that cannot be accounted for by a verdict? How can women be accorded sovereignty when it is not a matter of restoration precisely because women have never had it? How can justice address the micro-inequities that permeate women’s daily lives when they are not unlawful or illegal?

Feminist theorists have developed analytic strategies and conceptual vocabularies necessary to make the injustice of male domination and women’s subordination visible and to refigure conceptions of justice so that rectification becomes possible. In an effort to denaturalize social relations and social roles of women and men, liberal feminist theorists have argued that women’s nature is an altogether artificial thing, the result of forced repression of certain capacities and excessive stimulation of other capabilities. They have emphasized the role of law in excluding women from educational and occupational opportunities, from legal standing and constitutional rights, and from participation in politics and public life, thereby producing women as inferior beings. As early as the 1830s, black feminist theorists in the United States also pointed out that state and federal laws deprived black women and men of the status of human beings, denying them rights of self-determination and constitutional protections in ways that differed significantly from the deprivations experienced by white American women. Contrary to dominant beliefs, feminists argued that the subordination of women and the systematic dehumanization of blacks was the effect of the legal code, a socially produced and sustained hierarchy, not a reflection of natural aptitudes and abilities. Within this liberal framework, laws that served as the instrument of sexual and racial oppression were targeted for change. Thus, one strain of feminist and critical race theorizing has consistently focused on the transformation of the state and its legal apparatus as a primary mechanism for social change.

Socialist feminist theorists construe the causes of women’s oppression and the strategies for social change quite differently, suggesting that a full understanding of the woman question requires conceptualization of exploitative divisions of labor within capitalist industrial production, unequal roles in physical and social reproduction sanctioned by marriage practices and kinship systems, commodity fetishism, and modes of circulation, trade, and exchange. Arguing that the overthrow of capitalism and the achievement of socialism are essential to the feminist project in the long run, socialist feminist theorists advance specific prescriptions for social transformation in the domestic labor debates, proliferating versions of materialist feminism, and in dual systems theory, which explores the intricate relations between capitalism and patriarchy.

While some feminist theorists problematize women’s exclusion from the major institutions of the public world (social, political, economic, religious, academic), others focus on difference as a primary category of analysis (women’s differences from men as well as systemic differences among women based on race, class, nationality, sexuality, historicity), and yet others embrace the postmodern refusal of categorization, deploying deconstructive and genealogical methods to interrogate binaries and investigate power-knowledge constellations of particular concepts. Suspicious of the will to truth embedded in quests for analytic precision and totalizing metanarratives, postmodern feminist theorists urge transformative strategies designed to destabilize boundaries, fixities, and givens and to resist normalizing practices.

Western feminist political theorists have challenged received views about the nature of political life, particularly concerning the assumed neutrality of the state. They have demonstrated how the mutual constitution of public and private realms has marginalized women and undermined their full citizenship; how conceptions of politics, power, freedom, and order have been tied to male experiences of embodiment that exclude women; how social contract theory presupposes an exploitive sexual contract prior to the creation of the state, which the state then enforces; how conceptions of proper femininity have been used to fix meaning and escape instability by making the unfamiliar familiar and the unknown known; how the state functions as a mechanism to shore up particular conceptions of race and nation tied to practices of kinship; and how dominant paradigms of power continue to neglect gender power embedded in organizational rules, routines, and policies that sustain prohibitions, exclusions, denigrations, and obstructions that circumscribe women’s lives while normalizing male dominance and rendering women, along with their needs and interests, invisible.

Feminist Theory In The Global South

Postcolonial feminist theorists have advanced persuasive critiques of ethnocentric universalism, a mode of structural domination that suppresses the heterogeneity of women and men in the global South. Replicating patter ns of Western hegemony, dominant assumptions about the public/private distinction fail to recognize that enslaved and colonized peoples had no private sphere sanctioned by the state; every aspect of existence was subject to intervention by the state and its representatives. Gendered divisions of labor such as the male breadwinner–female homemaker model taken for granted by Western theorists are at odds with women’s role in the production of subsistence in much of the global South and occlude inequalities created when Western development agencies imposed an ill-fitting male-breadwinner model in many parts of the world. Western analyses of class dynamics fail to comprehend how class relations can be complicated by caste even decades after the legal abolition of castes. To avoid prescriptions for social transformation advanced in ignorance of the specificities of women’s needs and circumstances and without consultation with women in the global South, postcolonial feminist theorists insist that the politics of representation, the question of who speaks for whom and what is said, must become central to feminist political theorizing.

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