An Introduction to Feminism

There are two main ways of interpreting the question, ‘What is feminism?’ The first is to interpret it as asking what the general flavour of the thing is – what is its content? What is it about? What does it stand for? But another, equally important, question to ask is the question of what sort of thing feminism is, in a more basic sense. All sorts of objects can have ‘content’, or be ‘about’ something – books, films, utterances, gestures. What kind of thing is feminism?

A likely answer to this is that feminism is a form of theory: the theory which identifies and opposes what it calls sexism, misogyny or patriarchy. But feminism is not just a matter of words; it is also a way of living and struggling against the status quo. This aspect is often treated as secondary, in the order of meanings offered in dictionary entries for the word ‘feminism’, and also in terms of where political philosophers tend to place emphasis – feminism may be acknowledged to have a practical aspect, but the focus of philosophers is on feminist theory (with practice regarded as primarily a matter of the application of theoretical insights). Against this, some feminists have chosen to emphasise feminism as a practical struggle. bell hooks, for example, has defined it as ‘a movement to end sexism and sexist oppression’ and as a ‘liberation movement’. This book sides with hooks in mounting some resistance to the dominant approach, and emphasising the practical side of feminism. But in order to see more clearly what it even means to take sides on the issue of ‘theory versus practice’, it's useful to say something more about the notions of theory and practice, and about the relationship between them.

Theory and practice are not two cleanly separate types of feminism, or alternative forms that feminism can take: the protest and the treatise. To expound a theory is also an action, and sometimes an important political intervention – as we'll see, the insight that to say something is to do something has been an extremely important one for some feminists. The radical feminist Andrea Dworkin asserts the self-conscious status of her own writing, her theory, as practice with unmistakeable force in the opening lines of her first book, […]