Political implications
29. People can and do experience oppression across numerous dimensions. The key theoretical insight and political contribution of feminism has been to highlight the various ways in which biological sex acts as an axis of oppression, and the ways in which living in a female body in a male-dominated society is accompanied by a range of injustices. Some of these injustices are directly connected to the material conditions of female biology, such as lack of access to contraception, abortion and obstetric healthcare, lack of research into and medical treatment for female diseases, under-provision of maternity benefits and employment rights, female genital mutilation. Some are less directly connected to female biology, but are a result of being read as female and living in the subordinate sex role, such as sexual and physical violence, sexual harassment, unequal pay, lack of political representation, unequal division of domestic labour, and many, many more. All are products of, and manifestations of, a social order organised to perpetuate male dominance and supremacy and female passivity and subordination – what feminists call patriarchy.
30. Sex-based oppression will intersect with other axes of oppression, including race, disability, and socio-economic class. So white women will be privileged in comparison to women of colour with respect to race, while being oppressed in comparison with men of all races on the axis of sex. We must always be sensitive to the ways in which various axes of oppression interact to produce unique experiences for different individuals, depending on the specific features of their identities. However, the fact that women of different races, classes or abilities will have different perspectives and experiences of injustice does not negate the fact that sex is an axis of oppression in its own right. Nobody suggests that because black men will have a different experience of racism to black women, this means that we cannot coherently talk about race as an axis of oppression. Feminism as a movement, and as a political label that individuals adopt, is predicated on the belief that there are some shared experiences among women, and that despite their differences and diversity, we can conceptualise women as a coherent political class. It makes little sense to refer to oneself as a feminist, if one does not believe that there is sufficient commonality and shared experience among women for them to constitute a coherent political class.
Continue reading “What I believe about sex and gender: part 4” →
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