Radical feminism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that calls for a radical reordering of society in which male supremacy is eliminated in all social and economic contexts.
Radical feminists view society as fundamentally a patriarchy in which men dominate and oppress women, and seek to abolish the patriarchy in order to liberate everyone from an unjust society by challenging existing social norms and institutions. This includes opposing the sexual objectification of women, raising public awareness about such issues as rape and violence against women, and challenging the very notion of gender roles. Shulamith Firestone wrote in The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970): "[T]he end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally."
Early radical feminism, arising within second-wave feminism in the 1960s, typically viewed patriarchy as a "transhistorical phenomenon" prior to or deeper than other sources of oppression, "not only the oldest and most universal form of domination but the primary form" and the model for all others. Later politics derived from radical feminism ranged from cultural feminism to more syncretic politics that placed issues of class, economics, etc. on a par with patriarchy as sources of oppression.
Radical feminists locate the root cause of women's oppression in patriarchal gender relations, as opposed to legal systems (as in liberal feminism) or class conflict (as in anarchist feminism, socialist feminism, and Marxist feminism). Gail Dines, an English radical feminist, spoke in 2011 about the appeal of radical feminism to young women: "After teaching women for 20-odd years, if I go in and I teach liberal feminism, I get looked [at] blank ... I go in and teach radical feminism, bang, the room explodes."
See also
- D. A. Clarke
- Feminist views on transgender and transsexual people
- Florence Rush
- Identity politics
- Gloria Steinem
- New York Radical Women
- Nikki Craft
- Kate Millett
- Rosetta Reitz
- Shulamith Firestone
- The Gender War (2005) Evin Rubar
- Valerie Solanas