Radical Feminism

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it

War on patriarchal discourse!

'patriarchy is the social context'

For radical feminists you cannot separate the self from research and the position of women. The Radical Feminist motto in the 1970's onwards was the "personal is political"  if you are an A2 student you would already have covered elements of this in your methodology module. Until recently sociology has been studied with a male agenda (a patriarchal discourse) concerning itself with issues that effect men and their interests in society. Feminists like Anne Oakley and her study of 'Housework' opened new doors to subjects that had previously been ignored by malestream sociology. 

For Radical feminists the patriarchal myth of a  value-free and emotionless rationality (think research) is an identification with the  political state. You cannot separate the validity of feelings from thought. Therefore for people like Dworkin all meaning is subjective and the role of feelings in arriving at  objective as well as subjective meanings is paramount!

"I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or prostitute."

Rebecca West 1913

Hermenutics: the science of interpretation

Edmund Husserl: founder of phenomenology (Akinson & sucicide) though Kant & Hegel both used the term phenomenology 

Heidegger extends Husserl's work to say that  

"the possibilities and destinies of philosophy are bound up with man's existence, and thus with temporality and with historically"

The basic problems of Phenomenology  1954

By this he is saying that we can move from Husserl's point where we can never  obtain a state of prue consciousness (therefore we cannot obtain meanings of about the social world that would have any value). To a state where what we can determine is the meanings in the social world at a particular place & point in time. 

History

Why Radical Feminsim?

Women in the twentieth century were increasingly frustrated with the slow progress of equality being pushed by Liberal Feminists. Some were unwilling to see that a Marxist Feminists stance waiting for a socialist revolution to bring about equality was necessarily the right path. 

Radical Feminism was cutting edge theory from 1967-75 they saw women's oppression as the most fundamental form of oppression that cuts across racial, class, culture & economic lines. It was a movement based on social change rather than revolution. 

Money speaks, but it speaks with a male voice.

Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.

A commitment to sexual equality with males is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered.

''Women's fashion'' is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women.

MacKinnon 1982