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introduction
A yearning to understand and transform hierarchical power relations, and specifically the domination of women by men, fuelled both early second-wave feminist theorizing and women's political action. Radical feminists, in particular, placed patriarchal power relations - the system of male domination and women's subordination - at the centre of analysis. For example, the Redstockings famously proclaimed:
We identify the agents of our oppression as men. Male supremacy is the oldest, most basic form of domination. All other forms of exploitation and oppression (racism, capitalism, imperialism, etc.) are extensions of male supremacy: men dominate women, a few men dominate the rest. All power structures throughout history have been male-dominated and male-oriented. Men have controlled all political, economic and cultural institutions and backed up this control with physical force. They have used their power to keep women in an inferior position. All men receive economic, sexual, and psychological benefits from male supremacy. All men have oppressed women. (Redstockings Collective, 1969)1
Freedom for women would result only by eliminating patriarchy itself, by destroying the malignant structure at its very root.
Some 40 years later, this statement is refreshing in its willingness to 'call out' men as the agents of women's domination. At the same time, as a result of developments within feminist theory over the last several decades, it seems to us too simple. For example, black, postcolonial, and Third World feminists have shown that the early concept of 'patriarchy' was formed around white women's experiences. In contrast, an intersectional perspective (Crenshaw, 1998) shows that one's experience of gender (and gender domination) is inseparable from one's experience of race, class, and sexuality; additionally, it shows that women may oppress other women, and some women, based on race or class privilege, have power over some men (Higginbotham, 1992; King, 1998; hooks, 2000). Intersectionality thus raises serious doubts about treating 'patriarchy' as the primary form of oppression and the category of 'women' as unitary. A perhaps more damaging critique, though, has been levelled by feminists employing poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, or social constructivist methodologies to show how patriarchal power comes to be installed in our very subjectivities, a process Judith Butler refers to as 'subjectivation' (Butler, 1997). When power relations are understood to function in such subtle and insidious ways,...