Judith Butler is an American philosopher and feminist who in her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity, explore the idea whether we are assigned our gender or do we perform it based on what values we have learnt. She seeks to radically reconceptualize, challenge and help alter our ideas on how we understand gender and sex. She starts off by saying that existing feminist movement are limited in how they define gender. She says that this definition is outdated but still reflected by the world’s treatment of gender as a set of binary categories, this means that when we are born we are distinctively placed into one of the two categories i.e. male of female and these categories define how we behave.
It is undeniable that female empowerment is imperative. More importantly, the establishment of feminist movements has created a platform for women to assemble as a community to combat the patriarchal system that continues to exist in society. Consequently, women uniting to dispute sexism, acknowledges a component that can hinder their progress and success in society. Yet, this idea of feminism is over simplified, it disregards the diverse and intricate experiences women face in actuality. Therefore, the consequence of generalizing the feminist political practice results in an assumption that women uniformly experience a single oppression, this ignores the reality of the multiple oppressions women can encounter.
Liberal feminist aims to show that as a human being the capacities of man and women are equal and it fights for the political, legal and economic equality for women. Liberal Feminism is rich with content concerning the unjust and oppressive nature of patriarchy and gender
In a third and final point, we’ll consider that both gender studies and feminism should be studied separately because gender studies goes further and takes into account sexual characteristics and oppression in general rather than only social oppression towards a biological sex, being women. Gender is something different from social movements. Indeed, in general, gender studies bring to a reflexion on what is being a male and what is being a female according to time and places. The main goal of these studies is to observe how a sex is supposed to reproduce a common thinking and acting according to its societal past. According to Joan Scott, one of the main and first theorists of gender studies: "In grammar, gender is understood to be a way of classifying phenomena, a socially agreed upon system of distinctions rather than an objective description of inherent traits.
Here, second wave feminists use Gilligan’s findings to advocate for a feminist ethic of care, therefore, overcoming the male bias status quo. By doing this, second wave feminists cite cognitive, value and experiential differences between men and women, for instance, women act with empathy, inclusion and protection from harm with a focus on personal relationships while men act with reason, individuality and act on universal
Therefore it can be surmised that feminism in IR is meant to reveal the existing masculine predispositions embedded in traditional IR theories and recreate an unbiased gender stance in IR. But have feminist made a breakthrough in the field of International Relations or is the field still dominated by ‘hegemonic masculinity’ ? The following paper will discuss the ontological and epistemological agendas of feminism as well as the methodology used to support their claims. It will also assess their major contributions to the field of International Relations, including some of its cognate disciplines; and conclude by critically assessing its impact and value in International Relations. Feminism may be described as fissiparous in nature due to the varied strands in the discipline.
The speaker also says how genders both play a game of whose responsibility is whose based on their sex. Adichie notes that feminism is usually viewed as a negative baggage, though she’s hopeful that men and women will soon understand that there’s a problem with gender and everyone should change it to better. In all aspects, Adichie is correct. According to the experiences of the speakers described by Goodman and Lara, society views women as objects and expects men to be the provider. The New Bedford barroom rape indicates Adichie’s point that people think of women as inherently guilty.
As well, majority of the current international relation theories are masculine in nature, feminism is a political tool that struggles to free all women from the oppressive nature of patriarchy. Because feminism is a political tool for equality and
The assumption is that gender is socially constructed category that comes of out whole systems and layers of meaning that is structured into the way in which the world works and can be unstructured or deconstructed. In that sense, feminism is a part of a constructivist agenda. However, there are tensions between feminist and constructivist works. One of the interesting areas of this is that some constructivists have started to take gender seriously as a kind of cause or variable, and started to talk about the way that gender can influence the actors and people involved in international politics. For example, during the evacuation of people in the wars that lead to the splitting of Yugoslavia in the mid 1990s, It is argued that because of the way that some humanitarian organizations and other organizations took for granted certain assumptions about gender, they failed to notice that it was the men who were the most vulnerable category of the population that were most under threat from the invading forces, and the priority was given to the old, the sick, the women and the children by
These marches are meant to empower young women and break sexually-biased chains that are placed upon them. The protesters say our country, nay, our world has done them a dishonor. They throw around terms such as sexism and patriarchy, all of which come with a load of negative connotations and prejudices. This movement has been dubbed 'feminism ', something seen as a radical new way of thinking in our society. They want to "break gender roles and stereotypes, secure women 's rights, and move the country forward" (A Lady 's Luxury), but how far can we go before we fall off the edge?