Feminist theory
A body of ideas and methods examining how gender shapes power, inequality, identity, and social institutions, and how those structures can be changed.
Gender: Social meanings, roles, identities, and relations associated with sex and gender categories. Feminist theories examine how gender is produced, experienced, and organized.
Mary Wollstonecraft: An eighteenth-century English writer whose works argued for women's education and political equality. Her arguments helped establish an enduring case for women’s equal rational and civic standing.
Simone de Beauvoir: A French philosopher and writer whose work examined women's social position and existential freedom. Her analysis of woman as socially constituted shaped later debates about gender and subjectivity.
Liberal feminism: A feminist tradition pursuing equality through legal rights, equal opportunity, and reform of existing institutions. It contrasts with approaches that seek more fundamental changes to economic or social structures.
Feminist legal theory: The study of how law reflects, sustains, or can challenge gendered power relations. It applies feminist concepts to legal rules, institutions, and claims of equality.
Patriarchy: A social system in which men as a group hold structural power over women and gender minorities. The concept names a recurring structure of gendered power that feminist theories analyze.
The Second Sex: Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 book analyzing women’s social situation and the making of woman as other. Its account of becoming a woman became a foundational resource for feminist theories of gender.
bell hooks: An American writer and theorist whose work addressed race, gender, class, and education. Her accessible critiques connected feminist politics to race, class, love, and everyday culture.
Radical feminism: A feminist tradition that treats male dominance and patriarchy as foundational systems of oppression. Its emphasis on patriarchy differs from theories centered primarily on class or institutional reform.
Feminist epistemology: The study of how gender and power shape knowledge, inquiry, and standards of evidence. It turns feminist analysis toward the production and authority of knowledge itself.