Gender Oppression and Structural Oppression Theories of Feminism

Abstract

This chapter discusses gender oppression theories including feminist psychoanalytic theory and radical feminism. The former explains the oppression of women in terms of psychoanalytic descriptions of the male psychic drive to dominate and the latter in terms of men's ability and willingness to use violence to subjugate women. The chapter also discusses structural oppression theories including Marxist feminism, socialist feminism, and intersectionality feminism. Socialist feminism describes oppression as arising from a patriarchal and a capitalist attempt to control social production and reproduction. Intersectionality theories trace the consequences of class, race, gender, affectional preference, and global location for lived experience, group standpoints, and relations among women. The chapter closes by briefly looking at the relationship between feminism and postmodernism.