This changes the perception of feminism as it highlights the necessity to alter the gender roles and gender identity. Additionally, Macdonald (2005), explains transgender individuals experience discrimination from their reassigned gender community and their previous gender community. For instance, women who transition to a man appear as though they are abandoning womanhood. Whereas, men who transition to become a woman are disregarded as truly being a woman who can participate in the feminist movement. This signifies the continued limited scope feminism abides under.
Introduction The word feminism can bring up several images to our minds at once. Some may be of the suffragette women, others of the punk bands Bikini Kill or Huggy Bear from the feminist punk rock bands who promoted women’s liberation through their music (Moakes 2008). Yet others may have a more negative connotation, and this has lead to a development for both sides. While some claim that feminism is nothing but a movement to promote women’s domination instead of liberation, it is difficult to judge without knowing the background and history of a movement. This essay looks at the beginnings of feminism and the women who brought it through each of its successive stages.
Feminism is linked to a historical time, in which women fought for the equality of women against men. Although feminism is linked to that time frame, many writers, and authors use the word differently. There are many variations for the word feminism because of the different topics that the word has expanded into. A feminist role in society is to actively recognize the need for, and work towards creating equality for all women. Feminism is purely a movement which intends to enlighten people with a goal of improving gender equality and strengthening women 's status in society.
Feminism emerged as a reaction to a ‘ubiquitous androcentric’ international system. Evolving from fighting for universal adult suffrage, the second wave of feminism emerged during the 80s to criticize ‘malestream’ International Relations (IR). As a theoretical approach, feminism has blossomed and made its presence known. Feminists portray women as have been misrepresented throughout history and that their roles in the international system are in fact critical but often neglected based on the male dominated system. 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.
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.
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
Feminist researchers also treat knowledge as situated because they make the assumption that particular structures are defined as facts external to and constraining upon people. In addition, feminist researchers are aware of the varying degrees of oppression in relation to a woman's social location and in relation to men, thus necessitating prising apart the category men and women's experiences of different men in different times, places and circumstances .Feminist research differs from mainstream research in that it rejects using research to colonize material differences among women. This is done by presenting a social constructionist and non-essentialist notion
Feminism is allowing women to be many things they weren’t able to be before. Whilst looking into the complexities of feminism through politics, the workforce, and education from the 70s to present day, it is apparent that middle class white women are fighting to define and
Women right activist groups today, however, are very politically alienated as compared to the 1960s. Feminists emphasized, and continue to emphasize, that gender roles are social constructions that amount to a system of oppression. Feminists argued for equality, both political and social, for women, as well as fundamental changes in their roles in the home. The questions raised about gender also paved the way for entirely new movements, such as the movement for gay rights. Some of the issues taking frontline in discussions for women rights in mainstream Western societies today include reproductive rights, pay equality, and equality of educational
Liberal feminist tries to bring forward the issues of subordinate position of women in the society but at the same time is committed to investigate the causes of this subordination within a positivist framework. They argue that they are being excluded from many important aspects of the modern society. However, they only challenge the content but not the epistemological assumptions of the conventional IR. Liberal feminists highlight the various problems like they investigated the problems of refuge women’s subordination, income inequalities between women and men, and human rights violations incurred disproportionately by women such a trafficking and rape in war. They basically deal with highlighting women’s under representation in IR and tries