Although any general definition of feminism would no doubt becontroversial, it seems undeniable that much work in feminist theoryis devoted to the tasks of critiquing gender subordination, analyzingits intersections with other forms of subordination such as racism,heterosexism, and class oppression, and envisioning prospects forindividual and collective resistance and emancipation. Insofar as theconcept of power is central to each of these theoretical tasks, poweris clearly a central concept for feminist theory as well. And yet,curiously, it is one that is not often explicitly thematized infeminist work (exceptions include Allen 1998, 1999, Caputi 2013,Hartsock 1983 and 1996, Yeatmann 1997, and Young 1992). Indeed, WendyBrown contends that “Power is one of those things we cannotapproach head-on or in isolation from other subjects if we are tospeak about it intelligently” (Brown 1988, 207). This poses aunique challenge for assessing feminist perspectives on power, asthose perspectives must first be reconstructed from discussions ofother topics. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify three main waysin which feminists have conceptualized power: as a resource to be(re)distributed, as domination, and as empowerment. After a briefdiscussion of the power debates in social and political theory, thisentry will survey each of these feminist conceptions.

• 1. Defining power
• 2. Power as Resource: Liberal Feminist Approaches
• 3. Power as Domination
  • 3.1 Phenomenological Feminist Approaches
  • 3.2 Radical Feminist Approaches
  • 3.3 Socialist Feminist Approaches
  • 3.4 Intersectional Approaches
  • 3.5 Poststructuralist Feminist Approaches
  • 3.6 Postcolonial and Decolonial Feminist Approaches
  • 3.7 Analytic Feminist Approaches
• 4. Power as Empowerment
• 5. Concluding thoughts
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Defining power

In social and political theory, power is often regarded as anessentially contested concept (see Lukes 1974 and 2005, and Connolly1983). Although this claim is itself contested (see Haugaard 2010 and2020, 4–10; Morriss 2002, 199–206 and Wartenberg 1990,12–17), there is no doubt that the literature on power is markedby deep, widespread, and seemingly intractable disagreements over howthe term should be understood.

One such disagreement pits those who define power as getting someoneelse to do what you want them to do, that is, as an exercise ofpower-over others, against those who define it as an ability or acapacity to act, that is, as a power-to do something. The classicformulation of the former definition is offered by Max Weber, whodefines power as “the probability that one actor within a socialrelationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despiteresistance…” (1978, 53). Similarly, Robert Dahl offerswhat he calls an “intuitive idea of power” according towhich “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to dosomething that B would not otherwise do” (1957, 202–03).Dahl’s discussion of power sparked a vigorous debate thatcontinued until the mid-1970s, but even his sharpest critics seemed toconcede his definition of power as an exercise of power-over others(see Bachrach and Baratz 1962 and Lukes 1974). As Steven Lukes notes,Dahl’s one-dimensional view of power, Bachrach andBaratz’s two-dimensional view, and his own three-dimensionalview are all variations of “the same underlying conception ofpower, according to which A exercises power over B when A affects B ina manner contrary to B’s interests” (1974, 30). Similarly,but from a very different theoretical background, MichelFoucault’s highly influential analysis implicitly presupposesthat power is a kind of power-over; and he puts it, “if we speakof the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as wesuppose that certain persons exercise power over others” (1983,217). Notice that there are two salient features of this definition ofpower: power is understood in terms of power-over relations, and it isdefined in terms of its actual exercise.

Classic articulations of power understood as power-to have beenoffered by Thomas Hobbes – power is a person’s“present means…to obtain some future apparent Good”(Hobbes 1985 (1641), 150) – and Hannah Arendt – power is“the human ability not just to act but to act in concert”(1970, 44). Arguing in favor of this way of conceptualizing power,Hanna Pitkin notes that the word “power” is relatedetymologically to the Frenchpouvoir and the Latinpotere, both of which mean to be able. “Thatsuggests,” she writes, “that power is a something –anything – which makes or renders somebody able to do, capableof doing something. Power is capacity, potential, ability, orwherewithal” (1972, 276). Similarly, Peter Morriss (2002) andLukes (2005) define power as a dispositional concept, meaning, asLukes puts it, that power “is a potentiality, not an actuality– indeed a potentiality that may never be actualized”(2005, 69). (Note that this statement amounts to a significantrevision of Lukes’s earlier analysis of power, in which heargued against defining power as power-to on the grounds that such adefinition obscures “the conflictual aspect of power – thefact that it is exercised over people” and thus fails to addresswhat we care about most when we decide to study power (1974, 31). Forhelpful discussion of whether Lukes’s embrace of thedispositional conception of power is compatible with his othertheoretical commitments, see Haugaard (2010)). Some of the theoristswho analyze power as power-to leave power-over entirely out of theiranalysis. For example, Arendt distinguishes power sharply fromauthority, strength, force, and violence, and offers a normativeaccount in which power is understood as an end in itself (1970). AsJürgen Habermas has argued, this has the effect of screening anyand all strategic understandings of power (where power is understoodin the Weberian sense as imposing one’s will on another) out ofher analysis (Habermas 1994). (Although Arendt defines power as acapacity, she also maintains that “power springs up between menwhen they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse”(1958, 200); hence, it is not clear whether she fully accepts adispositional view of power). Others suggest that both aspects ofpower are important, but then focus their attention on eitherpower-over (e.g., Connolly 1993) or power-to (e.g., Morriss 2002).Still others define power-over as a particular type of capacity,namely, the capacity to impose one’s will on others; on thisview, power-over is a derivative form of power-to (Allen 1999, Lukes2005). However, others have argued power-over and power-to refer tofundamentally different concepts and that it is a mistake to try todevelop an account of power that integrates them (Pitkin 1972,Wartenberg 1990).

Another way of carving up the power literature is to distinguishbetween action-theoretical conceptions – that is, those thatdefine power in terms of either the actions or the dispositionalabilities of individual actors – and broader systemic orconstitutive conceptions – that is, those that view power assystematically structuring possibilities for action, or, morestrongly, as constitutive of social actors and the social world inwhich they act. On this way of distinguishing various conceptions ofpower, Hobbes and Weber are on the same side, since both of themunderstand power in primarily instrumentalist, individualist, andaction-theoretical terms (Saar 2010, 10). The systemic conception, bycontrast, views power as “the ways in which given social systemsconfer differentials of dispositional power on agents, thusstructuring their possibilities for action” (Haugaard 2010, 425;see Clegg 1989). The systemic conception thus highlights the ways inwhich broad historical, political, economic, cultural, and socialforces enable some individuals to exercise power over others, orinculcate certain abilities and dispositions in some actors but not inothers. Saar argues, however, that the systemic conception of powershould be understood not as an alternative to the action-theoreticalconception of power, but rather as a more complex and sophisticatedvariant of that model. For, as he says, its “basic scenarioremains individualistic at the methodological level: power operates onindividuals as individuals, in the form of a ‘bringing toaction’ or external determination” (Saar 2010, 14).

The constitutive conception of power pushes the insight of thesystemic conception further by focusing on the constitutiverelationships between power, individuals, and the social worlds theyinhabit. The roots of this constitutive conception can be traced backto Spinoza (2002a and 2002b; Saar 2013), but variants of this view arealso found in the work of more contemporary theorists such as Arendtand Foucault. Here it is important to note that Foucault’s workon power contains both action-theoretical and constitutive strands.The former strand is evident in his claim, cited above, that “ifwe speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is onlyinsofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power overothers” (Foucault 1983, 217), whereas the latter strand isevident in his definition of power as “the multiplicity of forcerelations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and whichconstitute their own organization; as the processes which, throughceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, orreverses them;…thus forming a chain or system” (Foucault1979, 92).

What accounts for the highly contested nature of the concept of power?One explanation is that how we conceptualize power is shaped by thepolitical and theoretical interests that we bring to our study of it(Lukes 1986, Said 1986). For example, democratic theorists areinterested in different things when they study power than are socialmovement theorists or critical race theorists or postcolonialtheorists, and so on. Thus, a specific conceptualization of powercould be more or less useful depending on the specific disciplinary ortheoretical context in which it is deployed, where usefulness isevaluated in terms of how well it “accomplishes the task thetheorists set for themselves” (Haugaard 2010, 426). On thisview, if we suppose that feminists who are interested in power areinterested in understanding and critiquing gender-based relations ofdomination and subordination as these intersect with other axes ofoppression and thinking about how such relations can be transformedthrough individual and collective resistance, then we would concludethat specific conceptions of power should be evaluated in terms of howwell they enable feminists to fulfill those aims.

Lukes suggests another, more radical, explanation for the essentiallycontested nature of the concept of power: our conceptions of powerare, according to him, themselves shaped by power relations. As heputs it, “how we think about power may serve to reproduce andreinforce power structures and relations, or alternatively it maychallenge and subvert them. It may contribute to their continuedfunctioning, or it may unmask their principles of operation, whoseeffectiveness is increased by their being hidden from view. To theextent that this is so, conceptual and methodological questions areinescapably political and so what ‘power’ means is‘essentially contested’…” (Lukes 2005, 63).The thought that conceptions of power are themselves shaped by powerrelations is behind the claim, made by many feminists, that theinfluential conception of power as power-over is itself a product ofpatriarchal domination (for further discussion, see section 4below).

2. Power as Resource: Liberal Feminist Approaches

Those who conceptualize power as a resource understand it as apositive social good that is currently unequally distributed. Forfeminists who understand power in this way, the goal is toredistribute this resource so that women will have power equal to men.Implicit in this view is the assumption that power is, as Iris MarionYoung puts it, “a kind of stuff that can be possessed byindividuals in greater or lesser amounts” (Young 1990, 31).

The conception of power as a resource is arguably implicit in the workof some liberal feminists (Mill 1970, Okin 1989). For example, inJustice, Gender, and the Family, Susan Moller Okin arguesthat the modern gender-structured family unjustly distributes thebenefits and burdens of familial life amongst husbands and wives. Okinincludes power on her list of the benefits, which she calls“critical social goods.” As she puts it, “when welook seriously at the distribution between husbands and wives of suchcritical social goods as work (paid and unpaid), power, prestige,self-esteem, opportunities for self-development, and both physical andeconomic security, we find socially constructed inequalities betweenthem, right down the list” (Okin, 1989, 136). Here, Okin seemsto presuppose that power is a resource that is unequally and unjustlydistributed between men and women; hence, one of the goals of feminismwould be to redistribute this resource in more equitable ways.

Although she doesn’t discuss Okin’s work explicitly, Youngoffers a compelling critique of this view, which she calls thedistributive model of power. First, Young maintains that it is wrongto think of power as a kind of stuff that can be possessed; on herview, power is a relation, not a thing that can be distributed orredistributed. Second, she claims that the distributive model tends topresuppose a dyadic, atomistic understanding of power; as a result, itfails to illuminate the broader social, institutional and structuralcontexts that shape individual relations of power. According to Young,this makes the distributive model unhelpful for understanding thestructural features of domination. Third, the distributive modelconceives of power statically, as a pattern of distribution, whereasYoung, following Foucault (1980), claims that power exists only inaction, and thus must be understood dynamically, as existing inongoing processes or interactions. Finally, Young argues that thedistributive model of power tends to view domination as theconcentration of power in the hands of a few. According to Young,although this model might be appropriate for some forms of domination,it is not appropriate for the forms that domination takes incontemporary industrial societies such as the United States (Young1990a, 31–33). On her view, in contemporary industrialsocieties, power is “widely dispersed and diffused” andyet it is nonetheless true that “social relations are tightlydefined by domination and oppression” (Young 1990a,32–33).

3. Power as Domination

Young’s critique of the distributive model points toward analternative way of conceptualizing power, one that understands powernot as a resource or critical social good, but instead views it as arelation of domination. Although feminists have often used a varietyof terms to refer to this kind of relation – including“oppression,” “patriarchy,”“subjection,” and so forth –the common thread inthese analyses is an understanding of power as an unjust orillegitimate power-over relation. In the remainder of this entry, Iuse the term “domination” simply to refer to unjust oroppressive power-over relations. In this section, I discuss thespecific ways in which feminists with different political andphilosophical commitments – influenced by phenomenology, radicalfeminism, Marxist socialism, intersectionality theory,post-structuralism, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and analyticphilosophy – have conceptualized domination.

3.1 Phenomenological Feminist Approaches

Thelocus classicus of feminist phenomenological approachesto theorizing male domination is Simone de Beauvoir’sTheSecond Sex. Beauvoir’s text provides a brilliant analysisof the situation of women: the social, cultural, historical, andeconomic conditions that define their existence. Her diagnosis ofwomen’s situation relies on the distinction between beingfor-itself – self-conscious subjectivity that is capable offreedom and transcendence – and being in-itself – theun-self-conscious things that are incapable of freedom and mired inimmanence. Beauvoir argues that whereas men have assumed the status ofthe transcendent subject, women have been relegated to the status ofthe immanent Other. As she puts it in a famous passage from theIntroduction toThe Second Sex: “She is defined anddifferentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her;she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. Heis the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other”(Beauvoir, xxii). This distinction – between man as Subject andwoman as Other – is the key to Beauvoir’s understanding ofdomination or oppression. She writes, “every time transcendencefalls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation ofexistence into the ‘en-soi’ – the brutish life ofsubjection to given conditions – and liberty into constraint andcontingence. This downfall represents a moral fault if the subjectconsents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration andoppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil” (Beauvoir,xxxv). Although Beauvoir suggests that women are partly responsiblefor submitting to the status of the Other in order to avoid theanguish of authentic existence (hence, they are in bad faith) (seeBeauvoir xxvii), she maintains that women are oppressed because theyare compelled to assume the status of the Other, doomed to immanence(xxxv). Women’s situation is thus marked by a basic tensionbetween transcendence and immanence; as self-conscious human beings,they are capable of transcendence, but they are compelled intoimmanence by cultural and social conditions that deny them thattranscendence (see Beauvoir, chapter 21).

Some feminists have criticized Beauvoir's conception of oppression forits reliance on a problematic analogy between race and gender (see,for example, her claim that “there are deep similarities betweenthe situation of woman and that of the Negro,” (Beauvoir,xxix)). Beauvoir's frequent use of such analogies, critics contend,erases the experience of Black women by implicitly coding all women aswhite and all Blacks as male (Gines (Belle) 2010 and 2017, Collins2019, 194–198, and Simons 2002). As Kathryn T. Gines (now KathrynSophia Belle) argues further, Beauvoir's analysis deploys“comparative and competing frameworks of oppression”(Gines (Belle) 2014a). At times, Beauvoir treats not just sexism andracism but also antisemitism, colonialism, and class oppressioncomparatively, arguing that they rest of similar dynamics of Othering.Her comparative analysis of race and gender is most problematic in herfrequent analogy between the situation of women and that of the slave.As Belle argues, this analogy not only obscures the experiences ofBlack female slaves, it also leads Beauvior to “engage in anappropriation of Black suffering in the form of slavery to advance herphilosophical discussion of woman's situation” (265). At othertimes, Beauvoir treats racism, sexism, antisemitism, colonialism, andclass oppression as competing frameworks and argues that gendersubordination is the most significant and constitutive form ofoppression. Both moves are problematic, according to Belle, the formerfor its erasure of the oppression of Black women and the latter forits privileging of gender oppression over other forms ofoppression.

Feminist phenomenologists have engaged critically with Beauvoir's workwhile extending her insights into power. For example, Young arguesthat Beauvoir pays relatively little attention to the role that femaleembodiment plays in women’s oppression (Young 1990b,142–3). Although Beauvoir does discuss women’s bodies inrelation to their status as immanent Other, she tends to focus onwomen’s physiology and how physiological features such asmenstruation and pregnancy tie women more closely to nature, thus, toimmanence. In her essay, “Throwing Like a Girl,” Youngdraws on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analysis ofthe lived body to analyze “the situatedness of the woman’sactual bodily movement and orientation to its surroundings and itsworld” (Young 1990b, 143). She notes that girls and women oftenfail to use fully the spatial potential of their bodies (for example,they throw “like girls”), they try not to take up too muchspace, and they tend to approach physical activity tentatively anduncertainly (Young 1990b, 145–147). Young argues that femininebodily comportment, movement, and spatial orientation exhibit the sametension between transcendence and immanence that Beauvoir diagnoses inThe Second Sex. “At the root of thosemodalities,” Young writes, “is the fact that the womanlives her body as object as well as subject. The source of this isthat patriarchal society defines woman as object, as a mere body, andthat in sexist society women are in fact frequently regarded by othersas objects and mere bodies” (Young 1990b, 155). And yet womenare also subjects, and, thus, cannot think of themselves as merebodily objects. As a result, woman “cannot be in unity withherself” (Young 1990b, 155). Young explores the tension betweentranscendence and immanence and the lack of unity characteristic offeminine subjectivity in more detail in several other essays thatexplore pregnant embodiment, women’s experience with theirclothes, and breasted experience (See Young 1990b, chapters9–11).

Much important work in feminist phenomenology follows Young in drawinginspiration from Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of embodiment andintercorporeality (see Heinamaa 2003, Weiss 1999); like Young, theseauthors use a Merleau-Pontyian approach to phenomenology to explorethe fundamental modalities of female embodiment or feminine bodilycomportment. Feminists have also mined the work of Edmund Husserl, thefounder of phenomenology, for useful resources for feministphenomenology (Al-Saji 2010 and Oksala 2016).

More generally, Oksala defends the importance of feministphenomenology as an exploration of gendered experience againstpoststructuralist critics who find such a project hopelesslyessentialist. While Oksala acknowledges that essentialism is a dangerfound in some work in feminist phenomenology – for example, sheis critical of Sonia Kruks (2001) for “considering ‘femaleexperience’ as an irreducible given grounded in a femalebody” (Oksala 2016, 72) – she also insists that aphenomenological analysis of experience is crucial for feminism. Asshe puts it, “it is my contention that feminist theory must‘retrieve experience’, but this cannot mean returning to apre discursive female experience grounded in the commonalities ofwomen’s embodiment” (40). On her view, experience isalways constructed in such a way that it “reflects oppressivediscourses and power relations” (43); and yet, experience andthought or discourse are not co-extensive. This means that there isalways a gap between our personal experience and the linguisticrepresentations that we employ to make sense of that experience, andit is this gap that provides the space for contestation and critique.Thus, Oksala concludes, “experiences can contest discourses evenif, or precisely because, they are conceptual through andthrough” (50). For Oksala, experience plays a crucial role inreinforcing and reproducing oppressive power relations, but radicalreflection on our experience opens up a space for individual andcollective resistance to and transformation of those powerrelations.

The concept of experience is also central to Mariana Ortega's analysisof Latina feminist phenomenology (Ortega 2016). Ortega reads theprominent Latina feminists Gloria Anzaldúa and MaríaLugones as phenomenologists “whose writings are deeply informedby their lived experience, specifically by their experience ofmarginalization and oppression as well as their experience ofresistance” (7). By highlighting the experience of marginalizedand oppressed selves who live their lives at the borderlands or in astate of in-betweenness, Latina feminist phenomenology, as Ortegareads it, offers an important corrective to and expansion of thecritique of modern subjectivity in the European phenomenologicaltradition.

For other influential feminist-phenomenological analyses of dominationsee Bartky 1990, 2002, Bordo 1993, and Kruks 2001. For helpfuloverviews of feminist phenomenology, see Fisher and Embree 2000, andHeinamaa and Rodemeyer 2010. For a highly influential articulation ofqueer phenomenology, drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger,Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon, see Ahmed (2006). For a compellingphenomenological analysis of transgender experience, see Salamon(2010).

3.2 Radical Feminist Approaches

Unlike liberal feminists, who view power as a positive social resourcethat ought to be fairly distributed, and feminist phenomenologists,who understand domination in terms of a tension between transcendenceand immanence, radical feminists tend to understand power in terms ofdyadic relations of dominance/subordination, often understood onanalogy with the relationship between master and slave.

For example, in the work of legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon,domination is closely bound up with her understanding of genderdifference. According to MacKinnon, gender difference is simply thereified effect of domination. As she puts it, “difference is thevelvet glove on the iron fist of domination. The problem is not thatdifferences are not valued; the problem is that they are defined bypower” (MacKinnon 1989, 219). If gender difference is itself afunction of domination, then the implication is that men are powerfuland women are powerless by definition. As MacKinnon puts it,“women/men is a distinction not just of difference, but of powerand powerlessness….Power/powerlessness is the sexdifference” (MacKinnon 1987, 123). (In this passage, MacKinnonglosses over the distinction, articulated by many second-wavefeminists, between sex – the biologically rooted traits thatmake one male or female, traits that are often presumed to be naturaland immutable – and gender – the socially and culturallyrooted, hence contingent and mutable, traits, characteristics,dispositions, and practices that make one a woman or a man. Thispassage suggests that MacKinnon, like Judith Butler (1990) and othercritics of the sex/gender distinction, thinks that sex difference, noless than gender difference, is socially constructed and shaped byrelations of power.) If men are powerful and women powerless as such,then male domination is, on this view, pervasive. Indeed, MacKinnonclaims that it is a basic “fact of male supremacy” that“no woman escapes the meaning of being a woman within a genderedsocial system, and sex inequality is not only pervasive but may beuniversal (in the sense of never having not been in some form”(MacKinnon 1989, 104–05). For MacKinnon, heterosexualintercourse is the paradigm of male domination; as she puts it,“the social relation between the sexes is organized so that menmay dominate and women must submit and this relation is sexual –in fact, is sex” (MacKinnon 1987, 3). As a result, she tends topresuppose a dyadic conception of domination, according to whichindividual women are subject to the will of individual men. If maledomination is pervasive and women are powerless by definition, then itfollows that female power is “a contradiction in terms, sociallyspeaking” (MacKinnon 1987, 53). The claim that female power is acontradiction in terms has led many feminists to criticize MacKinnonon the grounds that she denies women’s political agency andpresents them as helpless victims (for exemplary versions of thiscriticism, see Brown 1995 and Butler 1997a).

Marilyn Frye likewise offers a radical feminist analysis of power thatseems to presuppose a dyadic model of domination. Frye identifiesseveral faces of power, one of the most important of which is access.As Frye puts it, “total power is unconditional access; totalpowerlessness is being unconditionally accessible. The creation andmanipulation of power is constituted of the manipulation and controlof access” (Frye 1983, 103). If access is one of the mostimportant faces of power, then feminist separatism, insofar as it is away of denying access to women’s bodies, emotional support,domestic labor, and so forth, represents a profound challenge to malepower. For this reason, Frye maintains that all feminism that is worththe name entails some form of separatism. She also suggests that thisis the real reason that men get so upset by acts of separatism:“if you are doing something that is so strictly forbidden by thepatriarchs, you must be doing something right” (Frye 1983, 98).Frye frequently compares male domination to a master/slaverelationship (see, for example, 1983, 103–105), and she definesoppression as “a system of interrelated barriers and forceswhich reduce, immobilize, and mold people who belong to a certaingroup, and effect their subordination to another group (individuallyto individuals of the other group, and as a group, to thatgroup)” (Frye 1983, 33). In addition to access, Frye discussesdefinition as another, related, face of power. Frye claims that“the powerful normally determine what is said and sayable”(105). For example, “when the Secretary of Defense callssomething a peace negotiation…then whatever it is that hecalled a peace negotiation is an instance of negotiating peace”(105). Under conditions of subordination, women typically do not havethe power to define the terms of their situation, but by controllingaccess, Frye argues, they can begin to assert control over their ownself-definition. Both of these – controlling access anddefinition – are ways of taking power. Although she does not goso far as MacKinnon does in claiming that female power is acontradiction in terms, Frye does claim that “if there is onething women are queasy about it is actually taking power” (Frye1983, 107).

A similar dyadic conception of male domination can arguably be foundin Carole Pateman’sThe Sexual Contract (1988)(although Pateman's work is heavily influenced by socialist feminism,her account of power is closer to radical feminism). Like MacKinnon,Pateman claims that gender difference is constituted by domination; asshe puts it, “the patriarchal construction of the differencebetween masculinity and femininity is the political difference betweenfreedom and subjection” (Pateman 1988, 207). She also claimsthat male domination is pervasive, and she explicitly appeals to amaster/subject model to understand it; as she puts it, “inmodern civil society all men are deemed good enough to bewomen’s masters” (Pateman 1988, 219). In Pateman’sview, the social contract that initiates civil society and providesfor the legitimate exercise of political rights is also a sexualcontract that establishes what she calls “the law of malesex-right,” securing male sexual access to and dominance overwomen (1988, 182). As Nancy Fraser has argued, on Pateman’sview, the sexual contract “institutes a series of male/femalemaster/subject dyads” (Fraser 1993, 173). Fraser is highlycritical of Pateman’s analysis, which she terms the“master/subject model,” a model that presentswomen’s subordination “first and foremost as the conditionof being subject to the direct command of an individual man”(1993, 173). The problem with this dyadic account of women’ssubordination, according to Fraser, is that “gender inequalityis today being transformed by a shift from dyadic relations of masteryand subjection to more impersonal structural mechanisms that are livedthrough more fluid cultural forms” (1993, 180). Fraser suggeststhat, in order to understand women’s subordination incontemporary Western societies, feminists will have to move beyond themaster/subject model to analyze how women’s subordination issecured through cultural norms, social practices, and other impersonalstructural mechanisms. (For Pateman’s response to Fraser’scriticism, see Pateman and Mills (2007, 205–06)).

Although feminists such as Fraser, Judith Butler, and Wendy Brown havebeen highly critical of the radical feminist account of domination,analytic feminists have found this account more productive. Forexample, Rae Langton (2009) has used speech act theory to defendMacKinnon's claims that pornography both causes and constituteswomen's subordination. More generally, Langton (2009) and SallyHaslanger (2012) have drawn on MacKinnon's work to develop an accountof sexual objectification and to explore the ways that objectificationis often obscured by claims to objectivity (for further discussion ofHaslanger's work, see section 3.7 below).

3.3 Socialist Feminist Approaches

According to the traditional Marxist account of power, domination isunderstood on the model of class exploitation; domination results fromthe capitalist appropriation of the surplus value that is produced bythe workers. As many second wave feminist critics of Marx have pointedout, however, Marx’s categories are gender-blind (see, forexample, Firestone 1970, Hartmann 1980, Hartsock 1983, Rubin 1976).Marx ignores the ways in which class exploitation and gendersubordination are intertwined; because he focuses solely on economicproduction, Marx overlooks women’s reproductive labor in thehome and the exploitation of this labor in capitalist modes ofproduction. As a result of this gender-blindness, second wave Marxistor socialist feminists argued that Marx’s analysis of classdomination must be supplemented with a radical feminist critique ofpatriarchy in order to yield a satisfactory account of women’soppression; the resulting theory is referred to as dual systems theory(see, for example, Eisenstein 1979, Hartmann 1980). As Young describesit, “dual systems theory says that women’s oppressionarises from two distinct and relatively autonomous systems. The systemof male domination, most often called ‘patriarchy’,produces the specific gender oppression of women; the system of themode of production and class relations produces the class oppressionand work alienation of most women” (Young 1990b, 21). AlthoughYoung agrees with the aim of theorizing class and gender domination ina single theory, she is critical of dual systems theory on the groundsthat “it allows Marxism to retain in basically unchanged formits theory of economic and social relations, on to which it merelygrafts a theory of gender relations” (Young 1990b, 24). Youngcalls instead for a more unified theory, a truly feminist historicalmaterialism that would offer a critique of the social totality.

In a later essay, Young offers a more systematic analysis ofoppression, an analysis that is grounded in her earlier call for acomprehensive socialist feminism. Young identifies five faces ofoppression: economic exploitation, socio-economic marginalization,lack of power or autonomy over one’s work, cultural imperialism,and systematic violence (Young 1992, 183–193). The first threefaces of oppression in this list expand on the Marxist account ofeconomic exploitation, and the last two go beyond that account,bringing out other aspects of oppression that are not well explainedin economic terms. According to Young, being subject to any one ofthese forms of power is sufficient to call a group oppressed, but mostoppressed groups in the United States experience more than one ofthese forms of power, and some experience all five (Young 1992, 194).She also claims that this list is comprehensive, both in the sensethat “covers all the groups said by new left social movements tobe oppressed” and that it “covers all the ways they areoppressed” (Young 1992, 181; for critical discussion, see Allen2008b).

Nancy Hartsock offers a different vision of feminist historicalmaterialism in her bookMoney, Sex, and Power:Toward aFeminist Historical Materialism (1983). In this book, Hartsock isconcerned with “(1) how relations of domination along lines ofgender are constructed and maintained and (2) whether socialunderstandings of domination itself have been distorted by men’sdomination of women” (Hartsock 1983, 1). Following Marx’sconception of ideology, Hartsock maintains that the prevailing ideasand theories of a time period are rooted in the material, economicrelations of that society. This applies, in her view, to theories ofpower as well. Thus, she criticizes theories of power in mainstreampolitical science for presupposing a market model of economicrelations – a model that understands the economy primarily interms of exchange, which is how it appears from the perspective of theruling class rather than in terms of production, which is how itappears from the perspective of the worker. She also argues that powerand domination have consistently been associated with masculinity.Because power has been understood from the position of the sociallydominant – the ruling class and men – the feminist task,according to Hartsock, is to reconceptualize power from a specificallyfeminist standpoint, one that is rooted in women’s lifeexperience, specifically, their role in reproduction. Conceptualizingpower from this standpoint can, according to Hartsock, “pointbeyond understandings of power as power over others” (Hartsock1983, 12). (We’ll come back to this point in section 4).

Socialist feminism fell largely out of fashion during the latter partof the 20th century, fueled in part by the rise of poststructuralism,the prominence of identity and recognition based politics, and theemergence of a neoliberal consensus (for a trenchant critique of thesedevelopments, see Fraser 1996 and 2013). However, in the wake of theglobal financial crisis of 2008, socialist feminism, now oftenreferred to as Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), has made a comeback.SRT has a long history, with important early contributions by SilviaFederici (1975) and Maria Mies (1986) and connections to the Italianwages for housework campaign that began in the 1970s; for more recentdiscussions, see Tithi Bhattacharya (2017), Federici (2014 and 2019),and Alessandra Mezzadri (2019). SRT is a Marxist feminist project thatorients itself to a question that remains implicit in Marx's theory ofvalue: how is labor power, which is the source of value and thus ofexploitation in Marx's account, itself produced, reproduced, andmaintained? SRT maintains that labor power is produced and reproducedoutside of the official economy, largely through women's unpaid laborwithin the family or domestic sphere. For social reproductiontheorists, the production of goods and services is thus possible onlyon the basis of (largely) unpaid social reproduction, which includeschildbirth, domestic work, caring for children, the elderly and otherswho cannot work for wages, and so on. For Federici, this represents anongoing process of expropriation akin to Marx's notion of primitiveaccumulation (Federici 2014). Social reproduction theorists understandproduction and reproduction as parts of an integrated system; indeed,they view the distinction between the two as ultimately misleadinginasmuch as it obscures the ways in which social reproduction isitself productive of value (Mezzadri 2019). For a related attempt tounderstand capitalism as a social totality whose relations ofproduction are made possible by the expropriation of sociallyreproductive labor, environmental resources, and the labor ofdispossessed and colonized peoples, see Fraser in Fraser and Jaeggi(2018).

3.4 Intersectional Approaches

Theories of intersectionality highlight the complex, interconnected,and cross-cutting relationships between diverse modes of domination,including (but not limited to) sexism, racism, class oppression, andheterosexism. The project of intersectional feminism grew out of Blackfeminism, which, as scholars have recently noted, has a long traditionof examining the interconnections between racism and sexism,stretching back to the writing and activism of late 19th and early20th century black feminists such as Maria W. Stewart, Ida. B. Wells,Anna Julia Cooper, and Sojourner Truth (see Gines 2014b and Cooper2016). Because these thinkers and activists did not use the termintersectionality, Gines (now Belle) characterizes their work asproto-intersectional, which she defines as follows: “identifyingand combating racism and sexism – through activist organizing andcampaigning – not only as separate categories impacting identity andoppression, but also as systems of oppression that work together andmutually reinforce one another, presenting unique problems for blackwomen who experience both, simultaneously and differently than whitewomen and/or black men” (Gines 2014b, 14). Other importantantecedents to contemporary intersectionality theory include theCombahee River Collective’s notion of “interlockingsystems of oppression” (CRC 1977), Deborah King’s analysisof multiple jeopardy and multiple consciousness (King 1988), and thework from the 1980s of Black feminists such as Audre Lorde (1984),Angela Davis (1984), and bell hooks (1981). As Mariana Ortega hasargued (2016), there are also important conceptions ofintersectionality developed in Latina feminism, particularly inAnzaldúa's account of the borderlands and mestiza consciusness(Anzaldúa 1987) and Lugones's account of the intermeshedness ofrace, sex, gender, sexual orientation, and class (Lugones 2003).

In other words, the concept of intersectionality has a long historyand a complex genealogy (for discussions, see Cooper 2016, Collins2011 and 2019, 123–126, and Nash 2019). Still, it is widelyacknowledged that the contemporary discussion and use of the termintersectionality was sparked by the work of legal theorist KimberleCrenshaw (Crenshaw 1991a and 1991b), specifically, by her critique ofsingle-axis frameworks for understanding domination in the context oflegal discrimination. A single-axis framework treats race and genderas mutually exclusive categories of experience. In so doing, such aframework implicitly privileges the perspective of the most privilegedmembers of oppressed groups – sex or class-privileged Blacks inrace discrimination cases; race or class-privileged women in sexdiscrimination cases. Thus, a single-axis framework distorts theexperiences of Black women, who are simultaneously subject to multipleand intersecting forms of subordination. As Crenshaw explains,“the intersection of racism and sexism factors into Blackwomen’s lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by lookingat the race or gender dimensions of those experiencesseparately” (Crenshaw 1991b, 1244).

In the thirty years since the publication of Crenshaw’s essayson intersectionality, this framework has become extraordinarilyinfluential in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Indeed,it has been called “the most important contribution thatwomen’s studies, in conjunction with other fields, has made sofar” (McCall 2005, 1771). However, feminist philosophers havenoted that this influence has yet to be felt within the mainstream ofthe discipline of philosophy, where “intersectionality islargely ignored as a philosophical theme or framework” (Goswami,O’Donovan and Yount 2014, 6). Moreover, intersectionality is notwithout its feminist critics.

Some sympathetic critics of intersectionality have suggested that theconcept is limited in that it focuses primarily on theaction-theoretical level. A full analysis of the intertwining ofracial, gender, and class-based subordination also requires, on thisview, a systemic or macro-level concept that corresponds to theconcept of intersectionality. Echoing the Combahee River Collective(CRC 1977), Patricia Hill Collins proposes the term“interlocking systems of oppression” to fulfill this role.As she explains, “the notion of interlocking oppressions refersto the macro-level connections linking systems of oppression such asrace, class, and gender. This is the model describing the socialstructures that create social positions. Second, the notion ofintersectionality describes micro-level processes – namely, howeach individual and group occupies a social position withininterlocking structures of oppression described by the metaphor ofintersectionality. Together they shape oppression” (Collinset al. 2002, 82).

Others have worried that discussions of intersectionality tend tofocus too much on relations and sites of oppression and subordination,without also taking into account relations of privilege and dominance.As Jennifer Nash has argued, this has led to “the question ofwhetherall identities are intersectional or whether onlymultiply marginalized subjects have an intersectional identity”(Nash 2008, 9). Although some feminist scholars claim thatintersectionality encompasses all subject positions, not just thosethat are marginalized or oppressed, Nash notes that “theoverwhelming majority of intersectional scholarship has centred on theparticular positions of multiply marginalized subjects” (Nash2008, 9–10). The over-emphasis on oppression in theories ofintersectionality leads theorists “to ignore the intimateconnections between privilege and oppression,” for example, by“ignor[ing] the ways in which subjects might be both victimizedby patriarchy and privileged by race” (Nash 2008, 12). Inresponse to this concern, philosophers such as Ann Garry have offereda broader, more inclusive conception of intersectionality thatemphasizes both oppression and privilege (see Garry 2011).

Rather than supplementing the notion of intersectionality with amacro-level concept of interlocking systems of oppression orbroadening it to include relations of oppression and privilege, NaomiZack argues that feminists should move beyond it. Zack maintains thatintersectionality undermines its own goal of making feminism moreinclusive. It does this, on Zack’s view, by dividing women intosmaller and smaller groups, formed by specific intersections of race,class, gender, sexuality, and so forth. As Zack puts it, “as atheory of women’s identity, intersectionality is not inclusiveinsofar as members of specific intersections of race and class createonly their own feminisms” (Zack 2005, 2). Because ittends toward “the reification of intersections asincommensurable identities,” Zack maintains that“intersectionality has not borne impressive politicalfruit” (Zack 2005, 18).

From a very different perspective, queer theorists such as LynneHuffer and Jasbir Puar have also criticized intersectionality as atheory of identity. Unlike Zack, however, their concern is not withthe proliferation of incommensurable identities but rather with theways in which the notion of intersectionality remains, as Puar says,“primarily trapped within the logic of identity” (Puar2012, 60). As Huffer puts the point: “the institutionalizationof intersectionality as theonly approach to gender andsexuality that takes difference seriously masksintersectionality’s investment in a subject-making form ofpower-knowledge that runs the risk of perpetuating precisely theproblems intersectionality had hoped to alleviate” (Huffer 2013,18). Puar argues further that the primary concepts ofintersectionality, including gender, race, class, and sexuality, arethemselves the product of Eurocentric, modernist, and colonialdiscourses and practices and, as such, are problematic from the pointof view of postcolonial and transnational feminism (Puar 2012).

Finally, Anna Carastathis has argued that the problem withintersectionality theory lies in its very success (Carastathis 2013and 2014). Intersectionality has been, on her view, too easilyappropriated by white-dominated feminist theory, cut off from itsroots in Black and women of color feminism, and incorporated into aself-congratulatory progressivist narrative according to which“intersectionality is celebrated as a methodological triumphover ‘previous’ essentialist and exclusionary approachesto theorizing identity and power relations” (Carastathis 2014,59; for related critiques, see Nash 2008 and 2019 and Puar 2012).Carastathis cites Kimberle Crenshaw’s lament thatintersectionality’s reach is wide but not very deep, andsuggests that this may be the result of aversive racism – thatis, a desire to assert or establish racial innocence, but withoutreally coming to terms with their own internalized racism – onthe part of white feminists (Carastathis, 2014, 68–69).

In response to these sorts of criticisms of intersectionality, somescholars have attempted to reformulate the concept by understanding itas a family resemblance concept (Garry 2011) or by highlighting itsprovisionality (Carastathis, 2014). Others have argued for anexpansion of the intersectional framework to better account for theexperiences of diasporic subjects (Sheth 2014) or for a rethinking ofthis framework in relation to a Deleuzian notion of assemblage (Puar2007 and 2012). Collins (2019) has proposed the development ofintersectionality as a critical social theory through a reflection onits genealogy, epistemology, and methodology.

3.5 Poststructuralist Feminist Approaches

Most of the work on power done by post-structuralist feminists hasbeen inspired by Foucault. In his middle period works (Foucault 1977,1978, and 1980), Foucault analyzes modern power as a mobile andconstantly shifting set of force relations that emerge from everysocial interaction and thus pervade the social body. As he puts it,“power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, butbecause it comes from everywhere” (1978, 93). Foucault endeavorsto offer a “micro-physics” of modern power (1977, 26), ananalysis that focuses not on the concentration of power in the handsof the sovereign or the state, but instead on how power flows throughthe capillaries of the social body. Foucault criticizes previousanalyses of power (primarily Marxist and Freudian) for assuming thatpower is fundamentally repressive, a belief that he terms the“repressive hypothesis” (1978, 17–49). AlthoughFoucault does not deny that power sometimes functions repressively(see 1978, 12), he maintains that it is primarily productive; as heputs it, “power produces; it produces reality; it producesdomains of objects and rituals of truth” (1977, 194). It also,according to Foucault, produces subjects. As he puts it, “theindividual is not the vis-à-vis of power; it is, I believe, oneof its prime effects” (1980, 98). According to Foucault, modernpower subjects individuals, in both senses of the term; itsimultaneously creates them as subjects by subjecting them to power.As we will see in a moment, Foucault’s account of subjection andhis account of power more generally have been extremely fruitful, butalso quite controversial, for feminists interested in analyzingdomination.

It should come as no surprise that so many feminists have drawn onFoucault’s analysis of power. Foucault’s analysis of powerhas arguably been the most influential discussion of the topic overthe last forty years; even those theorists of power who are highlycritical of Foucault’s work acknowledge this influence (Lukes2005 and, in a somewhat backhanded way, Morriss 2002). Moreover,Foucault’s focus on the local and capillary nature of modernpower clearly resonates with feminist efforts to redefine the scopeand bounds of the political, efforts that are summed up by the slogan“the personal is political.” At this point, the feministwork that has been inspired by Foucault’s analysis of power isso extensive and varied that it defies summarization (see, forexample, Allen 1999 and 2008a, Bartky 1990, Bordo 2003, Butler 1990,1993, 1997, Diamond and Quinby (eds) 1988, Fraser 1989, Hekman (ed)1996, Heyes 2007, McLaren 2002, McNay 1992, McWhorter 1999, Sawicki1990, and Young 1990). I will concentrate on highlighting a fewcentral issues from this rich and diverse body of scholarship.

Several of the most prominent Foucaultian-feminist analyses of powerdraw on his account of disciplinary power in order to criticallyanalyze normative femininity. InDiscipline and Punish,Foucault analyzes the disciplinary practices that were developed inprisons, schools, and factories in the 18th century – includingminute regulations of bodily movements, obsessively detailed timeschedules, and surveillance techniques – and how these practicesshape the bodies of prisoners, students and workers into docile bodies(1977, 135–169). In a highly influential essay, Sandra Bartkycriticizes Foucault for failing to notice that disciplinary practicesare gendered and that, through such gendered discipline, women’sbodies are rendered more docile than the bodies of men (1990, 65).Drawing on and extending Foucault’s account of disciplinarypower, Bartky analyzes the disciplinary practices that engenderspecifically feminine docile bodies – including dietingpractices, limitations on gestures and mobility, and bodilyornamentation. She also expands Foucault’s analysis of thePanopticon, Jeremy Bentham’s design for the ideal prison, abuilding whose spatial arrangement was designed to compel the inmateto surveil himself, thus becoming, as Foucault famously put it,“the principle of his own subjection” (1977, 203). Withrespect to gendered disciplinary practices such as dieting,restricting one’s movement so as to avoid taking up too muchspace, and keeping one’s body properly hairless, attired,ornamented and made up, Bartky observes “it is women themselveswho practice this discipline on and against their ownbodies….The woman who checks her make-up half a dozen times aday to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara run, who worriesthat the wind or rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently tosee if her stocking have bagged at the ankle, or who, feeling fat,monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmatein the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed torelentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form ofobedience to patriarchy” (1990, 80).

As Susan Bordo points out, this model of self-surveillance does notadequately illuminate all forms of female subordination – alltoo often women are actually compelled into submission by means ofphysical force, economic coercion, or emotional manipulation.Nevertheless, Bordo agrees with Bartky that “when it comes tothe politics of appearance, such ideas are apt and illuminating”(1993, 27). Bordo explains that, in her own work, Foucault’sanalysis of disciplinary power has been “extremely helpful bothto my analysis of the contemporary disciplines of diet and exerciseand to my understanding of eating disorders as arising out of andreproducing normative feminine practices of our culture, practiceswhich train the female body in docility and obedience to culturaldemands while at the same time being experienced in terms of power andcontrol” (ibid). Bordo also highlights and makes use ofFoucault’s understanding of power relations as inherentlyunstable, as always accompanied by, even generating, resistance (seeFoucault 1983). “So, for example, the woman who goes into arigorous weight-training program in order to achieve the currentlystylish look may discover that her new muscles give her theself-confidence that enables her to assert herself more forcefully atwork” (1993, 28).

Whereas Bartky and Bordo focus on Foucault’s account ofdisciplinary power, Judith Butler draws primarily on his analysis ofsubjection. For example, in her early and massively influential book,Gender Trouble (1990), Butler notes that “Foucaultpoints out that juridical systems of power produce the subjects theysubsequently come to represent. Juridical notions of power appear toregulate political life in purely negative terms…..But thesubjects regulated by such structures are, by virtue of beingsubjected to them, formed, defined, and reproduced in accordance withthe requirements of those structures” (1990, 2). The implicationof this for feminists is, according to Butler, that “feministcritique ought also to understand how the category of‘women’, the subject of feminism, is produced andrestrained by the very structures of power through which emancipationis sought” (1990, 2). This Foucaultian insight into the natureof subjection – into the ways in which becoming a subject meansat the same time being subjected to power relations – thus formsthe basis for Butler’s trenchant critique of the category ofwomen, and for her call for a subversive performance of the gendernorms that govern the production of gender identity. InBodiesthat Matter (1993), Butler extends this analysis to consider theimpact of subjection on the bodily materiality of the subject. As sheputs is, “power operates for Foucault in the constitution of thevery materiality of the subject, in the principle which simultaneouslyforms and regulates the ‘subject’ of subjectivation”(1993, 34). Thus, for Butler, power understood as subjection isimplicated in the process of determining which bodies come to matter,whose lives are livable and whose deaths grievable. InThe PsychicLife of Power (1997b), Butler expands further on the Foucaultiannotion of subjection, bringing it into dialogue with a Freudianaccount of the psyche. In the introduction to that text, Butler notesthat subjection is a paradoxical form of power. It has an element ofdomination and subordination, to be sure, but, she writes, “if,following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject aswell, as providing the very condition of its existence and thetrajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose butalso, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and whatwe harbor and preserve in the beings that we are” (1997b, 2).Although Butler credits Foucault with recognizing the fundamentallyambivalent character of subjection, she also argues that he does notoffer an account of the specific mechanisms by which the subjectedsubject is formed. For this, Butler maintains, we need an analysis ofthe psychic form that power takes, for only such an analysis canilluminate the passionate attachment to power that is characteristicof subjection.

Although many feminists have found Foucault’s analysis of powerextremely fruitful and productive, Foucault has also had his share offeminist critics. In a very influential early assessment, Nancy Fraserargues that, although Foucault’s work offers some interestingempirical insights into the functioning of modern power, it is“normatively confused” (Fraser 1989, 31). In his writingson power, Foucault seems to eschew normative categories, preferringinstead to describe the way that power functions in local practicesand to argue for the appropriate methodology for studying power. Heeven seems to suggest that such normative notions as autonomy,legitimacy, sovereignty, and so forth, are themselves effects ofmodern power (this point has been contested recently in the literatureon Foucault; see Allen 2008a and Oksala 2005). Fraser claims that thisattempt to remain normatively neutral or even critical of normativityis incompatible with the politically engaged character ofFoucault’s writings. Thus, for example, although Foucault claimsthat power is always accompanied by resistance, Fraser argues that hecannot explain why domination ought to be resisted. As she puts it,“only with the introduction of normative notions of some kindcould Foucault begin to answer such questions. Only with theintroduction of normative notions could he begin to tell us what iswrong with the modern power/knowledge regime and why we ought tooppose it” (1989, 29). Other feminists have criticized theFoucaultian claim that the subject is an effect of power. According tofeminists such as Linda Martín Alcoff and Seyla Benhabib, sucha claim implies a denial of agency that is incompatible with thedemands of feminism as an emancipatory social movement (Alcoff 1990,Benhabib 1992, and Benhabib et al. 1995; for a reply to this line ofcriticism, see Allen 2008a chs. 2 and 3). Finally, Nancy Hartsock(1990 and 1996) calls into question the usefulness of Foucault’swork as an analytical tool. Hartsock makes two related argumentsagainst Foucault. First, she argues that his analysis of power is nota theory for women because it does not examine power from theepistemological point of view of the subordinated; in her view,Foucault analyzes power from the perspective of the colonizer, ratherthan the colonized (1990). Second, Foucault’s analysis of powerfails to adequately theorize structural relations of inequality anddomination that undergird women’s subordination; this is relatedto the first argument because “domination, viewed from above, ismore likely to look like equality”(1996, 39; for a response tothis critique, see Allen 1996 and 1999).

Despite these and other trenchant feminist critiques of Foucault (see,for example, Hekman, ed. 1996 and Ramazanoglu, ed. 1993), his analysisof power continues to be an extremely useful resource for feministconceptions of domination. For recent important feminist work thatdraws on Foucault’s genealogical method to offer anintersectional analysis of racism and gender or sexual oppression seeFeder (2007) and McWhorter (2009).

3.6 Postcolonial and Decolonial Feminist Approaches

Postcolonial and decolonial theory offer overlapping critiques ofhistorical and contemporary practices and discourses of imperial andcolonial domination. Yet they also have distinct lineages, theoreticalcommitments, and implications (for helpful discussion, see Bhambra2014 and Ramamurthy and Tambe 2017). Postcolonial theory rose toprominence in the late 20th century, in association with thegroundbreaking work of Edward Said (1979) and the Subaltern StudiesCollective, and has been most influential in literary and culturalstudies. Taking as its primary point of reference the northernEuropean colonization of Southeast Asia and focusing primarily on thediscursive and cultural effects of colonialism, postcolonial theory isdeeply (though not uncritically) influenced by poststruturalism,particularly the work of Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Decolonialtheory emerged somewhat later, in the early 2000s, in association withthe Latin American and Carribean scholars in the Modernity/Colonialitygroup. Its primary point of reference is the colonization of theAmericas that began in 1492. Heavily influenced by Latin AmericanMarxism, world systems theory, and indigenous political struggles,decolonial theory focuses on the connections between capitalism,colonialism, and racial hierarchies. Although these two approaches arenot mutually exclusive, decolonial theory is often viewed as the moreradical of the two, due to its broader historical range and its callsfor epistemic decolonization and delinking from capitalistmodernity/coloniality (Ruíz 2021).

Gayatri Spivak's “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) iswidely viewed as the watershed text in postcolonial feminism. Spivak'sessay opens with a critical discussion of an exchange betweeenFoucault and Gilles Deleuze, in which they reject the idea of speakingfor the oppressed, insisting instead that the oppressed should speakfor themselves. The first part of her essay is devoted to a critiqueof this claim and of the myriad ways in which Foucault and Deleuzeignore the epistemic violence of imperialism. It is Foucault andDeleuze’s insistence that the oppressed “can speak andknow their conditions” that leads Spivak to formulate her famousquestion, “can the subaltern speak?” (78). If, as Spivakgoes on to suggest, the subaltern cannot speak, then the“subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow” (83).Drawing on the example of the British banning the practice of sati incolonial India, Spivak suggests that the subaltern cannot speakbecause she is caught between imperialist discourse and patriarchaltraditionalism, neither of which enables her to voice her experience:“Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution andobject-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into apristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is thedisplaced figuration of the ‘third world woman’ caughtbetween tradition and modernization” (102). In other words,there is no space from which the subaltern as female can speak and noway she can be heard or read.

Another emblematic text in postcolonial feminism is Chandra TalpadeMohanty's “Under Western Eyes” (1988). Mohanty's essay isframed as a critique of Western feminist analyses of “ThirdWorld Women” for their reductive and overly simplisticunderstandings of power and oppression. In such discourses, as Mohantyexplains, “power is automatically defined in binary terms:people who have it (read: men) and people who do not (read: women).Men exploit, women are exploited. Such simplistic formulations arehistorically reductive; they are also ineffectual in designingstrategies to combat oppressions” (73). By contrast, Mohantycalls for an intersectional understanding of power that refuses tohomogenize or falsely universalize women's experience:“the…homogenization of class, race, religion, and dailymaterial practices of women in the Third World can create a falsesense of the commonality of oppressions, interests, and strugglesbetween and among women globally. Beyond sisterhood there are stillracism, colonialism, and imperialism” (77). Furthermore, byrepresenting “Third World Women” as mere passive objectsor victims of oppression, Western feminists implicitly positionthemselves as active subjects of resistance and revolutionary agents– which Mohanty calls “the colonialist move”(79).

Much of the agenda for decolonial feminism was set by Lugones in apair of essays published inHypatia (2007 and 2010). Buildingon the work of Anibal Quijano (2000), who argued that racialization isrooted in the structure of colonial capitalism, Lugones contends thatgender itself is “a colonial concept and mode of organization ofrelations of production, property relations, of cosmologies and waysof knowing” (2007, 186). Seeing gender as a colonial conceptenables feminists to break out of the ahistorical framework ofpatriarchy. As she explains: “To understand the relation of thebirth of the colonial/modern gender system to the birth of globalcolonial capitalism–with the centrality of the coloniality ofpower to that system of global power–is to understand ourpresent organization of life anew” (2007, 187). Lugones'sdecolonial feminist framework combines the insights ofintersectionality theory with Quijano’s understanding of thecoloniality of power (2007, 187–88). This brings into focus whatLugones calls the “modern/colonial gender system” (2007,189), a system that is characterized by strict sexual dimorphism andpresumed correspondence between biological sex and gender. In thelater essay, Lugones simplifies her formulation somewhat: “Icall the analysis of racialized, capitalist, gender oppression”the coloniality of gender.“ I call the possibility ofovercoming the coloniality of gender ”decolonialfeminism“” (2010, 747).

3.7 Analytic Feminist Approaches

Although most of the approaches to dominaiton discussed above havebeen informed by the Continental philosophical tradition, analyticfeminists have made important contributions to the feminist literatureon domination as well. For example, Ann Cudd (2006) draws on theframework of rational choice theory to analyze oppression (for relatedwork on rational choice theory and power, see Dowding 2001 and 2009;for critical discussion, see Allen 2008c).

Cudd defines oppression in terms of four conditions: 1) the groupcondition, which states that individuals are subjected to unjusttreatment because of their membership (or ascribed membership) incertain social groups (Cudd 2006, 21); 2) the harm condition, whichstipulates that individuals are systematically and unfairly harmed asa result of such membership (Cudd 2006, 21); 3) the coercioncondition, which specifies that the harms that those individualssuffer are brought about through unjustified coercion (Cudd 2006, 22);and 4) the privilege condition, which states that such coercive,group-based harms count as oppression only when there exist othersocial groups who derive a reciprocal privilege or benefit from thatunjust harm (Cudd 2006, 22–23). Cudd then defines oppression as“an objective social phenomenon” characterized by thesefour conditions (Cudd 2006, 23).

As Cudd sees it, the most difficult and interesting question that ananalysis of oppression must confront is the “endurance question:how does oppression endure over time in spite of humans’ roughnatural equality?” (Cudd 2006, 25). Any satisfactory answer tothis question must draw on a combination of empirical,social-scientific research and normative philosophical theorizing,inasmuch as a theory of oppression is an explanatory theory of anormative concept (Cudd 2006, 26). (That oppression is a normative– rather than a purely descriptive – concept is evidentfrom the fact that it is defined as an unjust or unfair set of powerrelations). Cudd argues that social-theoretical frameworks such asfunctionalism, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary psychology areinadequate for theorizing oppression (Cudd 2006, 39–45).Structural rational choice theory, in her view, best meets reasonablecriteria of explanatory adequacy and therefore provides the bestsocial-theoretical framework for analyzing oppression. By appealing toa structural theory of rational choice, Cudd’sanalysis of oppression avoids relying on assumptions about thepsychology of individual agents. Rather, as Cudd puts it, “thestructural theory of rational choice assesses the objective socialrewards and penalties that are consequent on” the interactionsand social status of specific group members and “uses theseassessments to impute preferences and beliefs to individuals basedpurely on their social group memberships” (Cudd 2006, 45). But,as a structural theory ofrational choice, the frameworkassumes “that agents behave rationally in the sense that theychoose actions that maximize their (induced) expected utilities”(Cudd 2006, 46). In other words, structural rational choice theorymodels human actions as “(basically instrumentally rational)individual choice constrained within socially structuredpayoffs” (Cudd 2006, 37). When utilized to analyze oppression,structural rational choice theory suggests that the key to answeringthe endurance question lies in the fact that “the oppressed areco-opted through their own short-run rational choices to reinforce thelong-run oppression of their social group” (Cudd 2006,21–22).

Sally Haslanger’s work on gender and racial oppression, likeCudd’s, is heavily informed by the tools of analytic philosophy,though Haslanger also situates her work within the tradition ofCritical Theory (see Haslanger 2012, 22–30). Haslanger distinguishesbetween two kinds of cases of oppression: agent oppression, in which“a person or persons (the oppressor(s)) inflicts harm uponanother (the oppressed) wrongfully or unjustly” (314) andstructural oppression, in which “the oppression is not anindividual wrong but a social/political wrong; that is, it is aproblem lying in our collective arrangements, an injustice in ourpractices or institutions” (314). Having made this distinction,Haslanger then argues for a mixed analysis of oppression that does notattempt to reduce agent oppression to structural oppression or viceversa. The danger of reducing structural oppression to agentoppression – what Haslanger calls the individualistic approach tooppression – is that doing so fails to acknowledge that“sometimes structures themselves, not individuals are theproblem” (320). The danger of reducing agent oppression tostructural oppression – what Haslanger calls the institutionalistapproach – is that such an approach “fails to distinguish thosewho abuse their power to do wrong and those who are privileged but donot exploit their power” (320). Haslanger’s mixedapproach, by contrast, is “attentive simultaneously [and, wemight add, non-reductively] to both agents and structures”(11).

Haslanger also connects her account of structural domination andoppression to her analysis of gender. Haslanger offers what she callsa “focal analysis” of gender, according to which the coreof gender is “the pattern of social relations that constitutethe social classes of men as dominant and women as subordinate”(228). Other things – such as norms, identities, symbols, etc – arethen gendered in relation to those social relations. On her analysis,gender categories are defined in terms of how one is sociallypositioned with respect to a broad complex of oppressive relationsbetween groups that are distinguished from one another by means ofsexual difference (see 229–230). As Haslanger explains, the“background idea” informing this account of gender is“that women areoppressed, and that they are oppressedas women” (231).

By claiming that women are oppressed as women, Haslanger reiterates anearlier claim made by radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon(see, for example, MacKinnon 1987, 56–57). Indeed, Haslanger’sanalysis is heavily indebted to MacKinnon’s work (see Haslanger2012, 35–82), though she does not endorse MacKinnon’s strongclaims about the link between objectivity and masculinity, nor doesshe adopt a dyadic (or, to use Haslanger’s terminology,reductively agent focused) understanding of oppression. But, likeMacKinnon, Haslanger believes that “gender categories aredefined relationally – one is a woman (or a man) by virtue ofone’s position in a system of social relations” (58). Thismeans that “one’s gender is an extrinsic property,and…it is not necessary that we each have the gender we now have, orthat we have any gender at all” (58). Since the social relationsin terms of which gender categories are defined are relations ofhierarchical domination and structural oppression, “gender is,by definition, hierarchical: Those who function socially as men havepower over those who function socially as women” (61). AsHaslanger admits, referencing the sex/gender distinction, this doesnot mean that all males have power over all females – but it doesmean that females who are not subordinated by males are not, strictlyspeaking, women, and vice versa. Moreover, as Haslanger notes,“MacKinnon’s account of gender, like others that definegender hierarchically, has the consequence that feminism aims toundermine the very distinction it depends upon. If feminism issuccessful, there will no longer be a gender distinction assuch” because the complex of social relations of domination andstructural oppression that give gender its meaning will no longerexist (62). While endorsing MacKinnon’s radical conclusion withrespect to the currently existing gender categories of‘man’ and ‘woman’, Haslanger’s ownaccount offers a somewhat more nuanced view that allows for the futurepossibility of a kind of gender difference that would not be predictedon gender dominance: “gender can be fruitfully understood as ahigher order genus that includes not only the hierarchical socialpositions of man and woman, but potentially other non-hierarchicalsocial positions defined in part by reference to reproductivefunction. I believe genderas we know it takes hierarchicalforms as men and women; but the theoretical move of treating men andwomen as only two kinds of gender provides resources for thinkingabout other (actual) genders, and the political possibility ofconstructing non-hierarchical genders” (235)

4. Power as Empowerment

Up to this point, this entry has focused on power understood in termsof an oppressive or unjust power-over relationship. I have used theterm “domination” to refer to such relationships, thoughsome of the theorists discussed above prefer the terms“oppression” or “subjection,” and others referto this phenomenon simply as “power.” However, asignificant strand of feminist theorizing of power starts with thecontention that the conception of power as power-over, domination, orcontrol is implicitly masculinist. In order to avoid such masculinistconnotations, many feminists from a variety of theoretical backgroundshave argued for a reconceptualization of power as a capacity orability, specifically, the capacity to empower or transform oneselfand others. Thus, these feminists have tended to understood power notas power-over but as power-to. Wartenberg (1990) argues that thisfeminist understanding of power, which he calls transformative power,is actually a type of power-over, albeit one that is distinct fromdomination because it aims at empowering those over whom it isexercised. However, most of the feminists who embrace thistransformative or empowerment-based conception of power explicitlydefine it as an ability or capacity and present it as an alternativeto putatively masculine notions of power-over. Thus, in what follows,I will follow their usage rather than Wartenberg’s.

For example, Jean Baker Miller claims that “women’sexamination of power…can bring new understanding to the wholeconcept of power” (Miller 1992, 241). Miller rejects thedefinition of power as domination; instead, she defines it as“the capacity to produce a change – that is, to moveanything from point A or state A to point B or state B” (Miller1992, 241). Miller suggests that power understood as domination isparticularly masculine; from women’s perspective, power isunderstood differently: “there is enormous validity inwomen’s not wanting to use power as it is presently conceivedand used. Rather, women may want to be powerful in ways thatsimultaneously enhance, rather than diminish, the power ofothers” (Miller 1992, 247–248).

Similarly, Virginia Held argues against the masculinist conception ofpower as “the power to cause others to submit to one’swill, the power that led men to seek hierarchical controland…contractual constraints” (Held 1993, 136). Held viewswomen’s unique experiences as mothers and caregivers as thebasis for new insights into power; as she puts it, “the capacityto give birth and to nurture and empower could be the basis for newand more humanly promising conceptions than the ones that now prevailof power, empowerment, and growth” (Held 1993, 137). Accordingto Held, “the power of a mothering person to empower others, tofoster transformative growth, is a different sort of power from thatof a stronger sword or a dominant will” (Held 1993, 209). OnHeld’s view, a feminist analysis of society and politics leadsto an understanding of power as the capacity to transform and empoweroneself and others.

This conception of power as transformative and empowering is also aprominent theme in lesbian feminism and ecofeminism. For example,Sarah Lucia Hoagland is critical of the masculine conception of powerwith its focus on “state authority, police and armed forces,control of economic resources, control of technology, and hierarchyand chain of command” (Hoagland 1988, 114). Instead, Hoaglanddefines power as “power-from-within” which she understandsas “the power of ability, of choice and engagement. It iscreative; and hence it is an affecting and transforming power but nota controlling power” (Hoagland 1988, 118). Similarly, Starhawkclaims that she is “on the side of the power that emerges fromwithin, that is inherent in us as the power to grow is inherent in theseed” (Starhawk 1987, 8). For both Hoagland and Starhawk,power-from-within is a positive, life-affirming, and empowering forcethat stands in stark contrast to power understood as domination,control or imposing one’s will on another.

A similar understanding of power can also be found in the work of theprominent French feminists Luce Irigaray and HélèneCixous. Irigaray, for example, urges feminists to question thedefinition of power in phallocratic cultures, for if feminists“aim simply for a change in the distribution of power, leavingintact the power structure itself, then they are resubjectingthemselves, deliberately or not, to a phallocratic order”(Irigaray 1985, 81), that is, to a discursive and cultural order thatprivileges the masculine, represented by the phallus. If we wish tosubvert the phallocratic order, according to Irigaray, we will have toreject “a definition of power of the masculine type”(Irigaray 1985, 81). Some feminists interpret Irigaray’s work onsexual difference as suggesting an alternative conception of power astransformative, a conception that is grounded in a specificallyfeminine economy (see Irigaray 1981 and Kuykendall 1983). Similarly,Cixous claims that “les pouvoirs de la femme” do notconsist in mastering or exercising power over others, but instead area form of “power over oneself” (Cixous 1977,483–84).

Along similar lines, Nancy Hartsock refers to the understanding ofpower “as energy and competence rather than dominance” as“the feminist theory of power” (Hartsock 1983, 224).Hartsock argues that precursors of this theory can be found in thework of some women who did not consider themselves to be feminists– most notably, Hannah Arendt, whose rejection of thecommand-obedience model of power and definition of ‘power’as “the human ability not just to act but to act inconcert” overlaps significantly with the feminist conception ofpower as empowerment (1970, 44). Arendt’s definition of‘power’ brings out another aspect of the definition of‘power’ as empowerment because of her focus on communityor collective empowerment (on the relationship between power andcommunity, see Hartsock 1983, 1996). This aspect of empowerment isevident in Mary Parker Follett’s distinction between power-overand power-with; for Follett, power-with is a collective ability thatis a function of relationships of reciprocity between members of agroup (Follett 1942). Hartsock finds it significant that the theme ofpower as capacity or empowerment has been so prominent in the work ofwomen who have written about power. In her view, this points in thedirection of a feminist standpoint that “should allow us tounderstand why the masculine community constructed…power, asdomination, repression, and death, and why women’s accounts ofpower differ in specific and systematic ways from those put forward bymen….such a standpoint might allow us to put forward anunderstanding of power that points in more liberatorydirections” (Hartsock 1983, 226).

The notion of empowerment has also been taken up widely by advocatesof so-called “power feminism.” A reaction against aperceived over-emphasis on women’s victimization and oppressionin feminism of the 1980s, power feminism emerged in the 1990s in thewritings of feminists such as Camille Paglia, Katie Roiphe, ChristinaHoff Sommers, and Naomi Wolf. Although this movement has had moreinfluence in mainstream media and culture than in academia –indeed, in many ways it can be read as a critique of academic feminism– it has also sparked scholarly debate. As Mary Caputi argues inher bookFeminism and Power: The Need for Critical Theory(2013), power feminists reject not only the excessive focus onwomen’s victimization but also the claim, made by earlierempowerment theorists, that women are “sensitive creatures givenmore to a caring, interconnected web of human relationships than tothe rugged individualism espoused by men” (Caputi 2013, 4). Incontrast, power feminists endorse a more individualistic,self-assertive, even aggressive conception of empowerment, one thattends to define empowerment in terms of individual choice with littleconcern for the contexts within which choices are made or the optionsfrom which women are able to choose. Caputi argues that power feminismrelies on and mimetically reproduces a problematically masculinistconception of power, one “enthralled by the display of‘power over’ rather than ‘powerwith’…” (Caputi 2013, xv). As she puts it:“feminism must query the uncritical endorsement of anempowerment aligned with a masculinist will to power, and disown thetough, sassy, self-assuredbut unthinking‘feminist’” (Caputi 2013, 17). Because of itstendency to mimic an individualistic, sovereign, and masculinistconception of power over, power feminism, according to Caputi,“does little, if anything, to rethink our conception ofpower” (Caputi 2013, 89). In order to prompt such a rethinking,Caputi turns to the resources of the early Frankfurt School ofcritical theory and to the work of Jacques Derrida.

Serene Khader’sAdaptive Preferences and Women’sEmpowerment offers another rethinking of empowerment in feministtheory. Focusing on empowerment in the context of internationaldevelopment practice, Khader develops a deliberative perfectionistaccount of adaptive preferences. Rather than defining adaptivepreferences in terms of autonomy deficits, Khader defines them aspreferences “inconsistent with basic flourishing…that areformed under conditions nonconductive to basic flourishing and…thatwe believe people might be persuaded to transform upon normativescrutiny of their preferences and exposure to conditions moreconducive to flourishing” (Khader 2011, 42). The perfectionismin her account leads her to emphasize the distinction between merelyadaptive preferences – those formed through adaptation to existingsocial conditions – and what she calls “inappropriatelyadaptive preferences” (IAPs) – preferences that areadaptive to bad or oppressive social conditions and that are harmfulto those who adopt them (52–53). She also insists that IAPs are mostoften selective rather than global self-entitlement deficits (109),which means that they impact individuals’ sense of their ownworth or entitlement to certain goods not globally but rather inparticular domains and contexts and in relation to certain specificindividuals or groups. This allows her to acknowledge thepsychological effects of oppression working through the mechanism ofIAPs without denying the possibility of agency on the part of theoppressed.

Khader draws on her deliberative perfectionist account of IAPs todiagnose and move beyond certain controversies over the notion ofempowerment that have emerged in feminist development practice andtheorizing. As the concept of women’s empowerment has becomecentral to international development practice, feminists have raisedconcerns about the ideological effects of this shift. Whileacknowledging that the language of empowerment in development practicecan have ideological effects, Khader addresses these concerns byproviding a clearer conception of empowerment than the one implicit inthe development literature and emphasizing what she understands as thenormative core of this concept, its relation to human flourishing. Shedefines empowerment as the “process of overcoming one ormany IAPs through processes that enhance some element of aperson’s concept of self-entitlement and increase her capacityto pursue her own flourishing” (Khader 2011, 176). Thisdefinition of empowerment enables her to rethink certain dilemmas ofempowerment that have emerged in development theory and practices. Forexample, many development practitioners define empowerment in terms ofchoice, and then struggle to make sense of apparentlyself-subordinating choices. If choice equals empowerment, then doesthis mean that the choice to subordinate or disempower oneself is aninstance of empowerment? Khader’s finely grained analysisprovides an elegant way out of this dilemma by emphasizing theconditions under which choices are made and the tradeoffs amongdifferent domains or aspects of flourishing that these conditions maynecessitate. Discussing a case of young women in Tanzania who chose toundergo clitoridectomyafter receiving education about thepractice aimed at empowering them, Khader writes: “Are the youngwomen who choose clitoridectomy disempowered because they have fewoptions for unambiguously pursuing their flourishing or are theyempowered because they have exercised agential capacities by making achoice? My analysis of IAP allows us to say both” (187). ForKhader, empowerment is a messy, complex, and incremental concept. Heranalysis of empowerment enables us to see that“self-subordinating choices can have selective empoweringeffects under disempowering conditions” (189). But the normativecore of her account, its deliberative perfectionism, insists that“a situation where one cannot seek one’s basic flourishingacross multiple domains is a tragic one” (189).

5. Concluding thoughts

The concept of power is central to a wide variety of debates infeminist philosophy. Indeed, the very centrality of this concept tofeminist theorizing creates difficulties in writing an entry such asthis one: since the concept of power is operative on one way oranother in almost all work in feminist theory, it is extremelydifficult to place limits on the relevant sources. Throughout, I haveemphasized those texts and debates in which the concept of power is acentral theme, even if sometimes an implicit one. I have alsoprioritized those authors and texts that have been most influentialwithin feminist philosophy, as opposed to the wider terrain offeminist theory or gender studies, though I acknowledge that thisdistinction is difficult to maintain and perhaps not always terriblyuseful. Debatable as such framing choices may be, they do offer somemuch needed help in delimiting the range of relevant sources andproviding focus and structure to the discussion.

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