liberal feminism essay

Liberal Feminism: Definition, Theory & Examples

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

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Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Liberal feminism asserts that equality for women can be achieved through legal means and social reform within current social systems, rather than an overhaul of the systems themselves. It focuses on individual rights, legal equality, and ending sex-based discrimination.

Key Takeaways

• Liberal feminism believes that equality should be brought about through education and policy changes. They try to change the system from within.
• Liberal feminism has been criticized for being too optimistic about the amount of progress that has been made. It has been accused of dealing with the effects of patriarchy and not the causes.
• Marxist and Radical feminists also argue that liberal feminists fail to challenge the underlying causes of women’s oppression and changing the law is not enough to bring about equality, there needs to be a fundamental change in social structures.

What Is Liberal Feminism?

Liberal feminism is a prominent branch of feminism that aims to advocate for women’s legal and political rights. It was born in western countries and emphasizes the value of freedom which can be achieved through political and legal reform.

The ideas of liberal feminism are rooted in liberalism, a political philosophy that encourages the development of freedom, particularly in the political and economic spheres. These key ideas of liberalism include individual freedom, democracy, equal opportunities, and equal rights.

Liberal feminists apply liberalism to gender equality and claim that the oppression of women lies in their lack of political and civil rights. Liberal feminism emphasizes the rights of the individual woman and aims to grant access to equal rights and representation through legislation.

Accordingly, women’s ‘liberation’ would be achieved by putting an end to discriminatory practices and by pushing for equal rights. Liberal feminists have fought for women’s right to vote, to work, to an education, and to have equal pay.

Many liberal feminists think that their fight for these rights is largely won, but others believe that there are still issues to work on such as the gender pay gap, representation in politics, and in the media.

What Are The Principles Of Liberal Feminism?

Gender equality.

While they may not deny there may be biological differences between men and women, liberal feminists do not see these differences as justification for inequalities between the sexes.

Thus, their main principle is for women to be treated as equals to men.

This can include having the same social and political rights, having equal pay for doing the same job as men, and being equals in marriage and partnership.

Equality in women’s representation

Liberal feminists believe that women have the right to be as active in society as men, and thus be equally represented in the workplace, politics, and in the media.

This may mean that they would want to be equally represented in higher career positions such as CEOs and directors. They would also want to be equally represented in political roles such as having more women world leaders.

Moreover, they would want to be better represented in film and television, by having more female leading actors and more female directors and producers.

Reforming the system

Liberal feminists do not necessarily question the system of society as a whole, but instead, believe in its capacity to reform.

They believe that gender justice is best achieved by modifying existing social institutions and political systems. They rely on the state to gain equality and support affirmative action and legislation which grants equal rights and opportunities to both men and women.

For instance, liberal feminists would generally be supportive of employers and educational institutions which make special attempts to include women as serious applicants.

Individualistic

Liberal feminism is individualistic rather than group based. This means that the rights are granted to individual women who are assumed to be equal and thus equally deserving, rather than granting rights to a whole group.

The concept of sexism

Liberal feminists are thought to have popularized the concept of ‘sexism’ to refer to ideas and social practices that keep women in a subordinate role.

They believe that sexism is rooted in the idea of biological determinism, which is the idea that certain behaviors or abilities are inherent to women or men and are derived from biological characteristics.

Sexism, liberal feminists believe, is the fundamental cause of discrimination against women.

What Are The Goals Of Liberal Feminism?

Equality in the public sphere.

The primary goal of liberal feminism is gender equality in the public sphere. This includes equal access to education, equal pay, ending job sex segregation, and better working conditions for women. All of these are believed to be achieved through legal change.

While early liberal feminists sought to gain the right to vote and access to education for women, modern liberal feminists aim to secure equal social, political, and economic opportunities, equal civil liberties, and sexual freedoms. If there is gender inequality in existing institutions, then liberal feminists seek to eradicate this to create a fair and just society.

Equality in the private sphere

Liberal feminists also suggest that gender equality should be present in the home as well as in public life. The family can be seen as a social institution and thus should be an equal structure according to liberal feminists.

They tend to support marriage as long as it is an equal partnership. In an equal partnership, men and women share the household chores, cooking, house management, and childcare as equally as possible.

Liberal feminists also generally support abortion and other reproductive rights that are related to the control of one’s life and autonomy. They also believe that ending domestic violence and sexual harassment removes obstacles to women achieving on an equal level with men.

Examples of Liberal Feminism Today

Since liberal feminism was traditionally focused on legal equality, it could be considered almost fully achieved in some Western countries.

In practice, however, gender equality in law and legislation does not necessarily mean that there is real and productive equality, which is why liberal feminism still exists.

In the family

Feminists are critical of the family as a social institutions. They believe that the family is a tool of female oppression and in particular the nuclear family serves the needs of men rather than women. This is through issues such as unequal division of domestic labor and domestic violence.

Liberal feminists argue that families are slowly becoming more equal through changes in law and social attitudes. They do not believe that full equality has been achieved but the process is well underway.

For example, they show how parents are now socializing their children in more gender-neutral ways, with similar aspirations for both sons and daughters and chores not being determined by gender.

In the workplace

While there may be more equality in the number of women in the workplace, liberal feminists argue that there are inequalities within.

Typically, women are over-represented in positions which are traditionally ‘feminine’ roles such as nursing, teaching, and social care. These are positions which are often underpaid compared to jobs which are typically male-dominated such as in science, law, and medicine.

Likewise, there is often still a gender wage gap in many countries where women still earn less on average than a man for the same job.

While there are more women represented in sectors that were once considered ‘male’, they are often confined to lower positions in the hierarchy and there are disproportionately less women CEOs, vice-presidents, and directors. Liberal feminists would like to see more women in these higher positions.

In politics

While there may now be more women involved in politics, there is still an under-representation in the number of women in political roles.

Particularly, men still dominate political leadership such as in the United States where there has never been a female president, or in the United Kingdom where there have only been two female prime ministers.

Men still make a lot of the decisions and laws in society meaning that less women’s voices are heard. Liberal feminists would suggest that having more women in positions of power would trigger positive changes to make their views understood.

In the media

In film and television, female characters are under-represented, with women less likely to play the protagonist character. Women in film and television often play the love interest to the main male character or play a smaller role with fewer speaking parts.

There is a test known as the Bechdel test which aims to examine the presence of women in film and highlights the sexism that persists.

To pass the Bechdel test, the film must contain two named, speaking female characters who have a conversation with each other where the topic of conversation is not related to a man. There are still many films released today that do not pass the Bechdel test.

There are also fewer female directors in films. Liberal feminists suggest that having more female directors would allow for more female actors and less female stereotyped characters.

The History Of Liberal Feminism

Liberal feminism is thought to have emerged in the 18th and 19th century with the rise of the political philosophy known as classical liberalism. This was a period of great social change in western countries alongside the rise of capitalism .

Mary Wollstonecraft

Early feminist scholars drew inspiration from Mary Wollstonecraft, especially from her notable writing of A Vindication of the Rights of Women , published in 1792. Wollstonecraft was a passionate advocate of educational and social equality for women.

In her writings, she makes the case that women need to be educated just as well as men so that they can grow up to be moral and autonomous human beings. She called for the improvement of women’s status through such political change as the reform of national educational systems.

John Stuart Mill

A century after Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill defended the civic and legal equality of women and their right to vote in his essay titled > On the Subjection of Women , published in 1869. He argued that women’s social and political equality was rooted in liberal principles.

Mill suggested that the central problem encountered by women is that they are denied a free and rational choice as to how they are to lead their lives – that they are denied the autonomy of the individual.

He claimed that the capacities of women cannot be known until they enjoy equal access to education and the vote.

First Wave Feminism

There was a gradual rise of the liberal feminist movement over time, but the first major advancements in gender equality did not happen until the first wave of feminism hit the 20th century in the west.

The women’s suffrage movement fought for the right for women to vote.

This struggle was mainly led by liberal feminists although more revolutionary feminists also took part in the movement. This movement is known as the first victory of liberal feminists toward having equal rights to men.

Second Wave Feminism

Second wave feminism took off in the 1960s, a period marked by the civil rights movement. Although women at the time had the right to vote, and more were entering the workplace, this did not automatically result in equal rights.

Liberal feminists now demanded the right to equal pay. Women of this time also faced employment discrimination, unequal pay, legal inequalities, and poor support services for working women.

Through this wave of feminism, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 was introduced. Moreover, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was amended to prevent employers from discriminating on the basis of sex.

Strengths And Criticisms Of Liberal Feminism

A strength of liberal feminism is that it is a relatively popular branch of feminism, and the goals are ones that support a lot of public opinion.

For instance, it is easy for most people to support equal rights for both men and women to vote and work – it would be difficult to justify otherwise. Likewise, the major victories of liberal feminists are rarely questioned. For example, not many would suggest that the vote should be taken away from women.

Liberal feminists have helped to bring forward legislature which helps to protect more women. They cannot be discriminated against on the basis of their sex in the workplace, they have more rights, and they can own property. Also, liberal feminism extends its principles into the private sphere so as to protect more women from the forms of oppression specific to this sphere

Since liberal feminism is the oldest version of the feminist movement, it faces a lot of criticism, especially from other feminists.

It is argued that liberal feminists overlook how differences of race, class, and sexual orientation, among others, can intersect to create different levels of women’s oppression. Liberal feminists are accused of being ‘white feminists’ which means that they assume that the issues facing white, mostly western women are issues that all women face.

Much of the work of liberal feminism has been carried by white privileged women whose fight has mainly been for other white women.

They may question the number of women in politics, for instance, but may not argue for more women of color, or working-class women in this field. The suffrage movement saw the vote granted to women in the early 20th century as a win, despite many women of color not being granted the vote until decades later.

Many liberal feminists would celebrate a woman being promoted to a position of power without considering the values of the person.

They may overlook the fact that the woman in power has goals that are oppressive and immoral, because as long as she is in power, it is a win for the liberal feminists.

Liberal feminism does not really consider the root cause of gender inequality. Marxist feminists would argue that liberal feminists ignore the systemic discrimination – that women’s oppression coming from the patriarchy and capitalism. Instead, liberal feminists do not see the need to overthrow the system, and in fact, may even promote capitalism.

Liberal feminism often faces additional criticism for the notion of trying to make women ‘superheroes’, capable of successfully combining marriage, motherhood, and career.

While many women may desire this, it can be considered as more oppressive towards women as they are now expected to succeed in a male-dominated workplace while simultaneously managing their roles as housewife and mother.

Women who do not have the desire or time for a successful career may feel judged by liberal feminists for not living up to the male standards of success.

Cottais, C. (2020). Liberal feminism. Gender in Geopolitics Institute. Retrieved 2022, August 16 from: https://igg-geo.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IGG_CCottais_Liberal_feminism2020.pdf

Donner, W. (1993). John Stuart Mill”s liberal feminism. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 69(2/3), 155-166.

Friedan, B. (1963). The feminine mystique. WW Norton & Company.

Gerson, G. (2002). Liberal feminism: Individuality and oppositions in Wollstonecraft and Mill. Political Studies, 50(4), 794-810.

Mill, J. S. (2006). The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill.

Oxley, J. C. (2011). Liberal feminism. Just the Arguments, 100, 258262.

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Introduction: A Feminist Liberalism

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This chapter sets out the concept of feminist liberalism and distinguishes it from liberal feminism. Liberal feminism is a type of feminism that is sometimes described as ‘just about equality’; in addition, it understands freedom primarily in terms of choice. Feminist liberalism, in contrast, argues that a deeper conception of feminism is necessary for liberalism to secure the freedom and equality that are its core values. Feminism is necessary to counteract liberalism’s over-reliance on choice as a normative transformer: something that changes the normative character of a situation or inequality from unjust to just. The chapter also summarises the work to come.

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Liberal Feminism

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• History Of Feminism
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In 1983, Alison Jaggar published Feminist Politics and Human Nature where she defined four theories related to feminism:

• Liberal feminism
• Radical feminism
• Socialist feminism

Her analysis was not completely new; the varieties of feminism had begun to emerge as early as the 1960s. Jaggar's contribution was in clarifying, extending and solidifying the various definitions, which are still often used today.

Goals of Liberal Feminism

Jagger described liberal feminism as theory and work that concentrates more on issues such as equality in the workplace, in education, and in political rights. Liberal feminism also focuses on how private life impedes or enhances public equality.

Thus, liberal feminists tend to support marriage as an equal partnership, and more male involvement in child care. Support for abortion and other reproductive rights  have to do with control of one's life and autonomy. Ending domestic violence and sexual harassment remove obstacles to women achieving on an equal level with men.

Liberal feminism's primary goal is gender equality in the public sphere, such as equal access to education, equal pay, ending job sex segregation, and better working conditions. From this standpoint, legal changes would make these goals possible.

Private sphere issues are of concern mainly as they influence or impede equality in the public sphere. Gaining access to and being paid and promoted equally in traditionally male-dominated occupations is an important goal.

What do women want? Liberal feminists believe they want the same things men want:

• to get an education
• to make a decent living
• to provide for one's family.

Means and Methods

Liberal feminism tends to rely on the state to gain equality—to see the state as the protector of individual rights.

Liberal feminists, for example, support affirmative action legislation requiring employers and educational institutions to make special attempts to include women in the pool of applicants, on the assumption that past and current discrimination may simply overlook many qualified women applicants.

Passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) has been a key goal for liberal feminists. From the original women's suffrage proponents who moved to advocate a federal equality amendment to many of the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s in organizations including the National Organization for Women , each generation viewed the amendment as necessary to create a more just society.

The amendment is one state shy of the 38 needed for passage, but ERA supporters in 2019 saw renewed hope as the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage approached.

A vote that could have made Virginia the 38th state to ratify the ERA missed by a single vote in early 2019. But the U.S. Supreme Court upheld new redistricting lines in the state later in 2019 and a move was underway in Congress to officially extend the ratification deadline .

The text of the Equal Rights Amendment, as passed by Congress and sent to the states in the 1970s, is classical liberal feminism:

"Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."

While not denying there may be biologically-based differences between men and women, liberal feminism cannot see these differences as adequate justification for inequality, such as the wage gap between men and women.

Critics of liberal feminism point to a lack of critique of basic gender relationships, a focus on state action which links women's interests to those of the powerful, a lack of class or race analysis, and a lack of analysis of ways in which women are different from men. Critics often accuse liberal feminism of judging women and their success by male standards.

"White feminism" is a kind of liberal feminism which assumes that the issues facing white women are the issues all women face, and unity around liberal feminist goals is more important than racial equality and other such goals.  Intersectionality was a theory developed in criticism of liberal feminism's common blindspot on race.

In more recent years, liberal feminism has sometimes been conflated with a kind of libertarian feminism, sometimes called equity feminism or individual feminism. Individual feminism often opposes legislative or state action, preferring to emphasize developing the skills and abilities of women to compete better in the world as it is. This feminism opposes laws that give either men or women advantages and privileges.

Resources and Further Reading

• Alison M. Jaggar. Feminist Politics and Human Nature .
• Drucilla Cornell. At the Heart of Freedom: Feminism, Sex, and Equality .
• Josephine Donovan. Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions of American Feminism .
• Elizabeth Fox-Genovese . Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism .
• Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique
• Catharine MacKinnon. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State .
• John Stuart Mill . The Subjection of Women .
• Mary Wollstonecraft . A Vindication of the Rights of Woman .
• Socialist Feminism vs. Other Types of Feminism
• Cultural Feminism
• Socialist Feminism Definition and Comparisons
• Feminist Philosophy
• What Is Radical Feminism?
• The Women's Liberation Movement
• Simone de Beauvoir and Second-Wave Feminism
• The Core Ideas and Beliefs of Feminism
• An Overview of Third-Wave Feminism
• Top 20 Influential Modern Feminist Theorists
• What Is 'The Second Feminist Wave?'
• 10 Important Feminist Beliefs
• The Golden Notebook
• Goals of the Feminist Movement
• Womanist: Definition and Examples
• Key Events of United States Feminism During the 1960s

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Liberal Feminism

FEMINISM, LIBERAL. Emphasizing equal individual rights and liberties for women and men and downplaying sexual differences, liberal feminism is the most widely accepted social and political philosophy among feminists. Liberal feminists defend the equal ration-ality of the sexes and emphasize the importance of structuring social, familial, and sexual roles in ways that promote women's autonomous self-fulfillment. They emphasize the similarities between men and women rather than the average differences between them, attribute most of the personality and character differences between the sexes to the social construction of gender, and tend to promote a single set of androgynous virtues for both women and men. While rejecting strong claims of sexual difference that might underwrite different and potentially hierarchical rights and social roles, liberal feminists otherwise avoid the promotion of particular conceptions of the good life for either men or women, instead defending a broad sphere of neutrality and privacy within which individuals may pursue forms of life most congenial to them. While liberal feminists acknowledge that some choices made by women are questionable because conditioned by sexist social practices , they also tend to avoid maternalism and any second-guessing of those choices made without coercion, or threats. Fully informed and mentally competent adult women are assumed to be the final judges,of their own best interests. Thus liberal feminists tend to resist legislative intervention that would gainsay the judgment of women. The preeminence of this perspective owes much to the fact that it encompasses a wide range of related but distinct views that fit comfortably within the framework of political liberalism. It does not fundamentally challenge capitalism or heterosexuality; nor does it recommend separatism, as do more radical feminists. Instead, it aims to extend the full range of freedoms in a liberal democratic society to women, criticizing practices that deny women equal protection under the law as well as laws that de facto discriminate against women. Liberal feminists reject utopian visions of an ideal society in favor of one that eliminates coercion and promotes autonomous choices among all its citizens.

Related Papers

Julinna Oxley

The Cambridge Companion to Liberalism

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“Feminist Critiques of Liberalism,” The Cambridge Companion to Liberalism, ed. Steven Wall (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 355-380.

Nitish Yadav

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Lori Watson

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Feminism is back in fashion. From female celebrities to male politicians, it seems almost everyone is keen to use the f-word. But are there limits to this 'pop feminist' approach to liberation? Taking on topics from pornography and prostitution to female genital mutilation, from women's magazines and marriage to sexual violence, contributors in this collection argue that the kind of liberal feminism currently rising to prominence does little to challenge the status quo. Aiming to revive a more radical analysis, the chapters in this book confront the dangers of reducing feminism to a debate about personal choice and offer the possibility of change through collective action. http://www.amazon.co.uk/FREEDOM-FALLACY-LIMITS-LIBERAL-FEMINISM/dp/1925138542

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Liberal Feminism Movement Analysis Essay

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Feminism is best described as a structured movement that endorses the idea of equality for women and minorities in the economic, social and political arenas. No one would question that women have historically been subjugated to second-class citizen status and oppressive tactics simply due to their gender in the dominant patriarchal society.

Feminists believe this subjugation continues today even after the gains made by the feminist movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The outcome of eradicating the concept of a patriarchy can only result in the liberation of women, gays, minorities and men as well. Women, minorities and gays are oppressed and do not enjoy equal opportunities in a patriarchal society as evidenced throughout history. Liberal feminism is the type most identified with the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s. The focal point of their viewpoint is that all people, including men, are entitled to equal rights and considerations. Liberal feminists believe the oppression of women begins the way both genders are socialized.

Aggressiveness by boys are encouraged by society but girls are generally taught to be ‘ladylike’ which promotes the patriarchal system allowing men to retain their power and control over women. Liberal feminists have been instrumental in producing and supporting laws which eradicate social barriers women have historically endured. These laws have sought equal rights and opportunities for women in the workplace, educational system and through social and health programs. By legislating equality for all, the traditional patriarchal ideologies are challenged and broken down while liberating women at the same time. Liberal feminists have been criticized for concentrating only on the legal aspects in the struggle against the patriarchal system but not the social aspects of the inequality problem. In addition, liberal feminists generally discount class and racial concerns. The goal of realizing equal rights and opportunities are shared by both radical and liberal feminists; however, the methods are dissimilar. Radical feminists advocate social changes while liberal feminists look more to individual rights.

Liberal feminists believe it wrong to enact ‘morality laws’ designed to restrict the free will of women, which only serves to further oppress women. Liberal feminism believes women should be free agents, allowed to choose any vocation they wish. Women have historically been restricted in their choice of profession such as in areas of education, politics and business [often referred to as the ‘glass ceiling’] and their right to choose should not be limited by legislation or condemnation by those who are unwilling to modify their point of view. Liberal feminists do not consider prostitutes to be victims and realize the reasons to choose the sex profession as a multi-layered, complex and individualized decision. Liberal feminists submit that decriminalizing prostitution would permit women the chance to pursue their career choice without being punished, choice should be a fundamental right for all. Liberal feminists argue that legalization would make the profession safer and would allow for them to collect governmental benefits such as social welfare and could unionize instead of fearing punitive actions based solely on moral grounds.

Works Cited

Knuttila, Murray “Introducing Sociology: A Critical Perspective” The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology.

• “We Should All Be Feminists” Adichie’s TED Talk
• The Personal and Political Issues of Broken Verses
• The Theme of Vocation in “Apology” by Plato
• The Multilayered Nature of Hemingway's Literature
• Legalization of Prostitution in America
• Feminism in “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker
• Feminism and Support of Gender Equality
• Feminism: Liberal, Black, Radical, and Lesbian
• Women and Law. Feminist Majority Foundation
• Empowerment and Feminist Theory
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Feminist Perspectives on Power

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

1. Defining power

2. power as resource: liberal feminist approaches, 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, other internet resources, related entries.

In social and political theory, power is often regarded as an essentially contested concept (see Lukes 1974 and 2005, and Connolly 1983). Although this claim is itself contested (see Haugaard 2010 and 2020, 4–10; Morriss 2002, 199–206 and Wartenberg 1990, 12–17), there is no doubt that the literature on power is marked by deep, widespread, and seemingly intractable disagreements over how the term should be understood.

One such disagreement pits those who define power as getting someone else to do what you want them to do, that is, as an exercise of power-over others, against those who define it as an ability or a capacity to act, that is, as a power-to do something. The classic formulation of the former definition is offered by Max Weber, who defines power as “the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance…” (1978, 53). Similarly, Robert Dahl offers what he calls an “intuitive idea of power” according to which “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do” (1957, 202–03). Dahl’s discussion of power sparked a vigorous debate that continued until the mid-1970s, but even his sharpest critics seemed to concede 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 and Baratz’s two-dimensional view, and his own three-dimensional view are all variations of “the same underlying conception of power, according to which A exercises power over B when A affects B in a manner contrary to B’s interests” (1974, 30). Similarly, but from a very different theoretical background, Michel Foucault’s highly influential analysis implicitly presupposes that power is a kind of power-over; and he puts it, “if we speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others” (1983, 217). Notice that there are two salient features of this definition of power: power is understood in terms of power-over relations, and it is defined in terms of its actual exercise.

Classic articulations of power understood as power-to have been offered 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 related etymologically to the French pouvoir and the Latin potere , both of which mean to be able. “That suggests,” she writes, “that power is a something – anything – which makes or renders somebody able to do, capable of doing something. Power is capacity, potential, ability, or wherewithal” (1972, 276). Similarly, Peter Morriss (2002) and Lukes (2005) define power as a dispositional concept, meaning, as Lukes 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 significant revision of Lukes’s earlier analysis of power, in which he argued against defining power as power-to on the grounds that such a definition obscures “the conflictual aspect of power – the fact that it is exercised over people” and thus fails to address what we care about most when we decide to study power (1974, 31). For helpful discussion of whether Lukes’s embrace of the dispositional conception of power is compatible with his other theoretical commitments, see Haugaard (2010)). Some of the theorists who analyze power as power-to leave power-over entirely out of their analysis. For example, Arendt distinguishes power sharply from authority, strength, force, and violence, and offers a normative account in which power is understood as an end in itself (1970). As Jürgen Habermas has argued, this has the effect of screening any and all strategic understandings of power (where power is understood in the Weberian sense as imposing one’s will on another) out of her analysis (Habermas 1994). (Although Arendt defines power as a capacity, she also maintains that “power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse” (1958, 200); hence, it is not clear whether she fully accepts a dispositional view of power). Others suggest that both aspects of power are important, but then focus their attention on either power-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 this view, power-over is a derivative form of power-to (Allen 1999, Lukes 2005). However, others have argued power-over and power-to refer to fundamentally different concepts and that it is a mistake to try to develop an account of power that integrates them (Pitkin 1972, Wartenberg 1990).

Another way of carving up the power literature is to distinguish between action-theoretical conceptions – that is, those that define power in terms of either the actions or the dispositional abilities of individual actors – and broader systemic or constitutive conceptions – that is, those that view power as systematically structuring possibilities for action, or, more strongly, as constitutive of social actors and the social world in which they act. On this way of distinguishing various conceptions of power, Hobbes and Weber are on the same side, since both of them understand power in primarily instrumentalist, individualist, and action-theoretical terms (Saar 2010, 10). The systemic conception, by contrast, views power as “the ways in which given social systems confer differentials of dispositional power on agents, thus structuring their possibilities for action” (Haugaard 2010, 425; see Clegg 1989). The systemic conception thus highlights the ways in which broad historical, political, economic, cultural, and social forces enable some individuals to exercise power over others, or inculcate certain abilities and dispositions in some actors but not in others. Saar argues, however, that the systemic conception of power should be understood not as an alternative to the action-theoretical conception of power, but rather as a more complex and sophisticated variant of that model. For, as he says, its “basic scenario remains individualistic at the methodological level: power operates on individuals as individuals, in the form of a ‘bringing to action’ or external determination” (Saar 2010, 14).

The constitutive conception of power pushes the insight of the systemic conception further by focusing on the constitutive relationships between power, individuals, and the social worlds they inhabit. The roots of this constitutive conception can be traced back to Spinoza (2002a and 2002b; Saar 2013), but variants of this view are also found in the work of more contemporary theorists such as Arendt and Foucault. Here it is important to note that Foucault’s work on power contains both action-theoretical and constitutive strands. The former strand is evident in his claim, cited above, that “if we speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over others” (Foucault 1983, 217), whereas the latter strand is evident in his definition of power as “the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the processes which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them;…thus forming a chain or system” (Foucault 1979, 92).

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

Lukes suggests another, more radical, explanation for the essentially contested nature of the concept of power: our conceptions of power are, according to him, themselves shaped by power relations. As he puts it, “how we think about power may serve to reproduce and reinforce power structures and relations, or alternatively it may challenge and subvert them. It may contribute to their continued functioning, or it may unmask their principles of operation, whose effectiveness is increased by their being hidden from view. To the extent that this is so, conceptual and methodological questions are inescapably political and so what ‘power’ means is ‘essentially contested’…” (Lukes 2005, 63). The thought that conceptions of power are themselves shaped by power relations is behind the claim, made by many feminists, that the influential conception of power as power-over is itself a product of patriarchal domination (for further discussion, see section 4 below).

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

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

Although she doesn’t discuss Okin’s work explicitly, Young offers a compelling critique of this view, which she calls the distributive model of power. First, Young maintains that it is wrong to think of power as a kind of stuff that can be possessed; on her view, power is a relation, not a thing that can be distributed or redistributed. Second, she claims that the distributive model tends to presuppose a dyadic, atomistic understanding of power; as a result, it fails to illuminate the broader social, institutional and structural contexts that shape individual relations of power. According to Young, this makes the distributive model unhelpful for understanding the structural features of domination. Third, the distributive model conceives of power statically, as a pattern of distribution, whereas Young, following Foucault (1980), claims that power exists only in action, and thus must be understood dynamically, as existing in ongoing processes or interactions. Finally, Young argues that the distributive model of power tends to view domination as the concentration 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 in contemporary industrial societies such as the United States (Young 1990a, 31–33). On her view, in contemporary industrial societies, power is “widely dispersed and diffused” and yet it is nonetheless true that “social relations are tightly defined by domination and oppression” (Young 1990a, 32–33).

3. Power as Domination

Young’s critique of the distributive model points toward an alternative way of conceptualizing power, one that understands power not as a resource or critical social good, but instead views it as a relation of domination. Although feminists have often used a variety of terms to refer to this kind of relation – including “oppression,” “patriarchy,” “subjection,” and so forth –the common thread in these analyses is an understanding of power as an unjust or illegitimate power-over relation. In the remainder of this entry, I use the term “domination” simply to refer to unjust or oppressive power-over relations. In this section, I discuss the specific ways in which feminists with different political and philosophical commitments – influenced by phenomenology, radical feminism, Marxist socialism, intersectionality theory, post-structuralism, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and analytic philosophy – have conceptualized domination.

The locus classicus of feminist phenomenological approaches to theorizing male domination is Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex . Beauvoir’s text provides a brilliant analysis of the situation of women: the social, cultural, historical, and economic conditions that define their existence. Her diagnosis of women’s situation relies on the distinction between being for-itself – self-conscious subjectivity that is capable of freedom and transcendence – and being in-itself – the un-self-conscious things that are incapable of freedom and mired in immanence. Beauvoir argues that whereas men have assumed the status of the transcendent subject, women have been relegated to the status of the immanent Other. As she puts it in a famous passage from the Introduction to The Second Sex : “She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other” (Beauvoir, xxii). This distinction – between man as Subject and woman as Other – is the key to Beauvoir’s understanding of domination or oppression. She writes, “every time transcendence falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation of existence into the ‘en-soi’ – the brutish life of subjection to given conditions – and liberty into constraint and contingence. This downfall represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil” (Beauvoir, xxxv). Although Beauvoir suggests that women are partly responsible for submitting to the status of the Other in order to avoid the anguish of authentic existence (hence, they are in bad faith) (see Beauvoir xxvii), she maintains that women are oppressed because they are compelled to assume the status of the Other, doomed to immanence (xxxv). Women’s situation is thus marked by a basic tension between transcendence and immanence; as self-conscious human beings, they are capable of transcendence, but they are compelled into immanence by cultural and social conditions that deny them that transcendence (see Beauvoir, chapter 21).

Some feminists have criticized Beauvoir's conception of oppression for its reliance on a problematic analogy between race and gender (see, for example, her claim that “there are deep similarities between the 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 as white and all Blacks as male (Gines (Belle) 2010 and 2017, Collins 2019, 194–198, and Simons 2002). As Kathryn T. Gines (now Kathryn Sophia Belle) argues further, Beauvoir's analysis deploys “comparative and competing frameworks of oppression” (Gines (Belle) 2014a). At times, Beauvoir treats not just sexism and racism but also antisemitism, colonialism, and class oppression comparatively, arguing that they rest of similar dynamics of Othering. Her comparative analysis of race and gender is most problematic in her frequent analogy between the situation of women and that of the slave. As Belle argues, this analogy not only obscures the experiences of Black female slaves, it also leads Beauvior to “engage in an appropriation of Black suffering in the form of slavery to advance her philosophical discussion of woman's situation” (265). At other times, Beauvoir treats racism, sexism, antisemitism, colonialism, and class oppression as competing frameworks and argues that gender subordination is the most significant and constitutive form of oppression. Both moves are problematic, according to Belle, the former for its erasure of the oppression of Black women and the latter for its privileging of gender oppression over other forms of oppression.

Feminist phenomenologists have engaged critically with Beauvoir's work while extending her insights into power. For example, Young argues that Beauvoir pays relatively little attention to the role that female embodiment plays in women’s oppression (Young 1990b, 142–3). Although Beauvoir does discuss women’s bodies in relation to their status as immanent Other, she tends to focus on women’s physiology and how physiological features such as menstruation and pregnancy tie women more closely to nature, thus, to immanence. In her essay, “Throwing Like a Girl,” Young draws on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analysis of the lived body to analyze “the situatedness of the woman’s actual bodily movement and orientation to its surroundings and its world” (Young 1990b, 143). She notes that girls and women often fail to use fully the spatial potential of their bodies (for example, they throw “like girls”), they try not to take up too much space, and they tend to approach physical activity tentatively and uncertainly (Young 1990b, 145–147). Young argues that feminine bodily comportment, movement, and spatial orientation exhibit the same tension between transcendence and immanence that Beauvoir diagnoses in The Second Sex . “At the root of those modalities,” Young writes, “is the fact that the woman lives her body as object as well as subject. The source of this is that patriarchal society defines woman as object, as a mere body, and that in sexist society women are in fact frequently regarded by others as objects and mere bodies” (Young 1990b, 155). And yet women are also subjects, and, thus, cannot think of themselves as mere bodily objects. As a result, woman “cannot be in unity with herself” (Young 1990b, 155). Young explores the tension between transcendence and immanence and the lack of unity characteristic of feminine subjectivity in more detail in several other essays that explore pregnant embodiment, women’s experience with their clothes, and breasted experience (See Young 1990b, chapters 9–11).

Much important work in feminist phenomenology follows Young in drawing inspiration from Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of embodiment and intercorporeality (see Heinamaa 2003, Weiss 1999); like Young, these authors use a Merleau-Pontyian approach to phenomenology to explore the fundamental modalities of female embodiment or feminine bodily comportment. Feminists have also mined the work of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, for useful resources for feminist phenomenology (Al-Saji 2010 and Oksala 2016).

More generally, Oksala defends the importance of feminist phenomenology as an exploration of gendered experience against poststructuralist critics who find such a project hopelessly essentialist. While Oksala acknowledges that essentialism is a danger found in some work in feminist phenomenology – for example, she is critical of Sonia Kruks (2001) for “considering ‘female experience’ as an irreducible given grounded in a female body” (Oksala 2016, 72) – she also insists that a phenomenological analysis of experience is crucial for feminism. As she puts it, “it is my contention that feminist theory must ‘retrieve experience’, but this cannot mean returning to a pre discursive female experience grounded in the commonalities of women’s embodiment” (40). On her view, experience is always constructed in such a way that it “reflects oppressive discourses and power relations” (43); and yet, experience and thought or discourse are not co-extensive. This means that there is always a gap between our personal experience and the linguistic representations that we employ to make sense of that experience, and it is this gap that provides the space for contestation and critique. Thus, Oksala concludes, “experiences can contest discourses even if, or precisely because, they are conceptual through and through” (50). For Oksala, experience plays a crucial role in reinforcing and reproducing oppressive power relations, but radical reflection on our experience opens up a space for individual and collective resistance to and transformation of those power relations.

The concept of experience is also central to Mariana Ortega's analysis of Latina feminist phenomenology (Ortega 2016). Ortega reads the prominent Latina feminists Gloria Anzaldúa and María Lugones as phenomenologists “whose writings are deeply informed by their lived experience, specifically by their experience of marginalization and oppression as well as their experience of resistance” (7). By highlighting the experience of marginalized and oppressed selves who live their lives at the borderlands or in a state of in-betweenness, Latina feminist phenomenology, as Ortega reads it, offers an important corrective to and expansion of the critique of modern subjectivity in the European phenomenological tradition.

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

Unlike liberal feminists, who view power as a positive social resource that ought to be fairly distributed, and feminist phenomenologists, who understand domination in terms of a tension between transcendence and immanence, radical feminists tend to understand power in terms of dyadic relations of dominance/subordination, often understood on analogy 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 gender difference. According to MacKinnon, gender difference is simply the reified effect of domination. As she puts it, “difference is the velvet glove on the iron fist of domination. The problem is not that differences are not valued; the problem is that they are defined by power” (MacKinnon 1989, 219). If gender difference is itself a function of domination, then the implication is that men are powerful and women are powerless by definition. As MacKinnon puts it, “women/men is a distinction not just of difference, but of power and powerlessness….Power/powerlessness is the sex difference” (MacKinnon 1987, 123). (In this passage, MacKinnon glosses over the distinction, articulated by many second-wave feminists, between sex – the biologically rooted traits that make one male or female, traits that are often presumed to be natural and immutable – and gender – the socially and culturally rooted, hence contingent and mutable, traits, characteristics, dispositions, and practices that make one a woman or a man. This passage suggests that MacKinnon, like Judith Butler (1990) and other critics of the sex/gender distinction, thinks that sex difference, no less than gender difference, is socially constructed and shaped by relations of power.) If men are powerful and women powerless as such, then male domination is, on this view, pervasive. Indeed, MacKinnon claims that it is a basic “fact of male supremacy” that “no woman escapes the meaning of being a woman within a gendered social system, and sex inequality is not only pervasive but may be universal (in the sense of never having not been in some form” (MacKinnon 1989, 104–05). For MacKinnon, heterosexual intercourse is the paradigm of male domination; as she puts it, “the social relation between the sexes is organized so that men may dominate and women must submit and this relation is sexual – in fact, is sex” (MacKinnon 1987, 3). As a result, she tends to presuppose a dyadic conception of domination, according to which individual women are subject to the will of individual men. If male domination is pervasive and women are powerless by definition, then it follows that female power is “a contradiction in terms, socially speaking” (MacKinnon 1987, 53). The claim that female power is a contradiction in terms has led many feminists to criticize MacKinnon on the grounds that she denies women’s political agency and presents them as helpless victims (for exemplary versions of this criticism, see Brown 1995 and Butler 1997a).

Marilyn Frye likewise offers a radical feminist analysis of power that seems to presuppose a dyadic model of domination. Frye identifies several faces of power, one of the most important of which is access. As Frye puts it, “total power is unconditional access; total powerlessness is being unconditionally accessible. The creation and manipulation of power is constituted of the manipulation and control of access” (Frye 1983, 103). If access is one of the most important faces of power, then feminist separatism, insofar as it is a way of denying access to women’s bodies, emotional support, domestic labor, and so forth, represents a profound challenge to male power. For this reason, Frye maintains that all feminism that is worth the name entails some form of separatism. She also suggests that this is the real reason that men get so upset by acts of separatism: “if you are doing something that is so strictly forbidden by the patriarchs, you must be doing something right” (Frye 1983, 98). Frye frequently compares male domination to a master/slave relationship (see, for example, 1983, 103–105), and she defines oppression as “a system of interrelated barriers and forces which reduce, immobilize, and mold people who belong to a certain group, and effect their subordination to another group (individually to individuals of the other group, and as a group, to that group)” (Frye 1983, 33). In addition to access, Frye discusses definition 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 calls something a peace negotiation…then whatever it is that he called a peace negotiation is an instance of negotiating peace” (105). Under conditions of subordination, women typically do not have the power to define the terms of their situation, but by controlling access, Frye argues, they can begin to assert control over their own self-definition. Both of these – controlling access and definition – are ways of taking power. Although she does not go so far as MacKinnon does in claiming that female power is a contradiction in terms, Frye does claim that “if there is one thing women are queasy about it is actually taking power” (Frye 1983, 107).

A similar dyadic conception of male domination can arguably be found in Carole Pateman’s The 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; as she puts it, “the patriarchal construction of the difference between masculinity and femininity is the political difference between freedom and subjection” (Pateman 1988, 207). She also claims that male domination is pervasive, and she explicitly appeals to a master/subject model to understand it; as she puts it, “in modern civil society all men are deemed good enough to be women’s masters” (Pateman 1988, 219). In Pateman’s view, the social contract that initiates civil society and provides for the legitimate exercise of political rights is also a sexual contract that establishes what she calls “the law of male sex-right,” securing male sexual access to and dominance over women (1988, 182). As Nancy Fraser has argued, on Pateman’s view, the sexual contract “institutes a series of male/female master/subject dyads” (Fraser 1993, 173). Fraser is highly critical of Pateman’s analysis, which she terms the “master/subject model,” a model that presents women’s subordination “first and foremost as the condition of being subject to the direct command of an individual man” (1993, 173). The problem with this dyadic account of women’s subordination, according to Fraser, is that “gender inequality is today being transformed by a shift from dyadic relations of mastery and subjection to more impersonal structural mechanisms that are lived through more fluid cultural forms” (1993, 180). Fraser suggests that, in order to understand women’s subordination in contemporary Western societies, feminists will have to move beyond the master/subject model to analyze how women’s subordination is secured through cultural norms, social practices, and other impersonal structural mechanisms. (For Pateman’s response to Fraser’s criticism, see Pateman and Mills (2007, 205–06)).

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

According to the traditional Marxist account of power, domination is understood on the model of class exploitation; domination results from the capitalist appropriation of the surplus value that is produced by the workers. As many second wave feminist critics of Marx have pointed out, however, Marx’s categories are gender-blind (see, for example, Firestone 1970, Hartmann 1980, Hartsock 1983, Rubin 1976). Marx ignores the ways in which class exploitation and gender subordination are intertwined; because he focuses solely on economic production, Marx overlooks women’s reproductive labor in the home and the exploitation of this labor in capitalist modes of production. As a result of this gender-blindness, second wave Marxist or socialist feminists argued that Marx’s analysis of class domination must be supplemented with a radical feminist critique of patriarchy in order to yield a satisfactory account of women’s oppression; the resulting theory is referred to as dual systems theory (see, for example, Eisenstein 1979, Hartmann 1980). As Young describes it, “dual systems theory says that women’s oppression arises from two distinct and relatively autonomous systems. The system of male domination, most often called ‘patriarchy’, produces the specific gender oppression of women; the system of the mode of production and class relations produces the class oppression and work alienation of most women” (Young 1990b, 21). Although Young agrees with the aim of theorizing class and gender domination in a single theory, she is critical of dual systems theory on the grounds that “it allows Marxism to retain in basically unchanged form its theory of economic and social relations, on to which it merely grafts a theory of gender relations” (Young 1990b, 24). Young calls instead for a more unified theory, a truly feminist historical materialism that would offer a critique of the social totality.

In a later essay, Young offers a more systematic analysis of oppression, an analysis that is grounded in her earlier call for a comprehensive socialist feminism. Young identifies five faces of oppression: 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 three faces of oppression in this list expand on the Marxist account of economic exploitation, and the last two go beyond that account, bringing out other aspects of oppression that are not well explained in economic terms. According to Young, being subject to any one of these forms of power is sufficient to call a group oppressed, but most oppressed groups in the United States experience more than one of these forms of power, and some experience all five (Young 1992, 194). She also claims that this list is comprehensive, both in the sense that “covers all the groups said by new left social movements to be oppressed” and that it “covers all the ways they are oppressed” (Young 1992, 181; for critical discussion, see Allen 2008b).

Nancy Hartsock offers a different vision of feminist historical materialism in her book Money, Sex, and Power : Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (1983). In this book, Hartsock is concerned with “(1) how relations of domination along lines of gender are constructed and maintained and (2) whether social understandings of domination itself have been distorted by men’s domination of women” (Hartsock 1983, 1). Following Marx’s conception of ideology, Hartsock maintains that the prevailing ideas and theories of a time period are rooted in the material, economic relations of that society. This applies, in her view, to theories of power as well. Thus, she criticizes theories of power in mainstream political science for presupposing a market model of economic relations – a model that understands the economy primarily in terms of exchange, which is how it appears from the perspective of the ruling class rather than in terms of production, which is how it appears from the perspective of the worker. She also argues that power and domination have consistently been associated with masculinity. Because power has been understood from the position of the socially dominant – the ruling class and men – the feminist task, according to Hartsock, is to reconceptualize power from a specifically feminist standpoint, one that is rooted in women’s life experience, specifically, their role in reproduction. Conceptualizing power from this standpoint can, according to Hartsock, “point beyond understandings of power as power over others” (Hartsock 1983, 12). (We’ll come back to this point in section 4).

Socialist feminism fell largely out of fashion during the latter part of the 20th century, fueled in part by the rise of poststructuralism, the prominence of identity and recognition based politics, and the emergence of a neoliberal consensus (for a trenchant critique of these developments, see Fraser 1996 and 2013). However, in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008, socialist feminism, now often referred to as Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), has made a comeback. SRT has a long history, with important early contributions by Silvia Federici (1975) and Maria Mies (1986) and connections to the Italian wages for housework campaign that began in the 1970s; for more recent discussions, see Tithi Bhattacharya (2017), Federici (2014 and 2019), and Alessandra Mezzadri (2019). SRT is a Marxist feminist project that orients itself to a question that remains implicit in Marx's theory of value: how is labor power, which is the source of value and thus of exploitation in Marx's account, itself produced, reproduced, and maintained? SRT maintains that labor power is produced and reproduced outside of the official economy, largely through women's unpaid labor within the family or domestic sphere. For social reproduction theorists, the production of goods and services is thus possible only on the basis of (largely) unpaid social reproduction, which includes childbirth, domestic work, caring for children, the elderly and others who cannot work for wages, and so on. For Federici, this represents an ongoing process of expropriation akin to Marx's notion of primitive accumulation (Federici 2014). Social reproduction theorists understand production and reproduction as parts of an integrated system; indeed, they view the distinction between the two as ultimately misleading inasmuch as it obscures the ways in which social reproduction is itself productive of value (Mezzadri 2019). For a related attempt to understand capitalism as a social totality whose relations of production are made possible by the expropriation of socially reproductive labor, environmental resources, and the labor of dispossessed and colonized peoples, see Fraser in Fraser and Jaeggi (2018).

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, and heterosexism. The project of intersectional feminism grew out of Black feminism, which, as scholars have recently noted, has a long tradition of examining the interconnections between racism and sexism, stretching back to the writing and activism of late 19th and early 20th century black feminists such as Maria W. Stewart, Ida. B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and Sojourner Truth (see Gines 2014b and Cooper 2016). Because these thinkers and activists did not use the term intersectionality, Gines (now Belle) characterizes their work as proto-intersectional, which she defines as follows: “identifying and combating racism and sexism – through activist organizing and campaigning – not only as separate categories impacting identity and oppression, but also as systems of oppression that work together and mutually reinforce one another, presenting unique problems for black women who experience both, simultaneously and differently than white women and/or black men” (Gines 2014b, 14). Other important antecedents to contemporary intersectionality theory include the Combahee River Collective’s notion of “interlocking systems of oppression” (CRC 1977), Deborah King’s analysis of multiple jeopardy and multiple consciousness (King 1988), and the work from the 1980s of Black feminists such as Audre Lorde (1984), Angela Davis (1984), and bell hooks (1981). As Mariana Ortega has argued (2016), there are also important conceptions of intersectionality developed in Latina feminism, particularly in Anzaldúa's account of the borderlands and mestiza consciusness (Anzaldúa 1987) and Lugones's account of the intermeshedness of race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, and class (Lugones 2003).

In other words, the concept of intersectionality has a long history and a complex genealogy (for discussions, see Cooper 2016, Collins 2011 and 2019, 123–126, and Nash 2019). Still, it is widely acknowledged that the contemporary discussion and use of the term intersectionality was sparked by the work of legal theorist Kimberle Crenshaw (Crenshaw 1991a and 1991b), specifically, by her critique of single-axis frameworks for understanding domination in the context of legal discrimination. A single-axis framework treats race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience. In so doing, such a framework implicitly privileges the perspective of the most privileged members of oppressed groups – sex or class-privileged Blacks in race discrimination cases; race or class-privileged women in sex discrimination cases. Thus, a single-axis framework distorts the experiences of Black women, who are simultaneously subject to multiple and intersecting forms of subordination. As Crenshaw explains, “the intersection of racism and sexism factors into Black women’s lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking at the race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately” (Crenshaw 1991b, 1244).

In the thirty years since the publication of Crenshaw’s essays on intersectionality, this framework has become extraordinarily influential in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Indeed, it has been called “the most important contribution that women’s studies, in conjunction with other fields, has made so far” (McCall 2005, 1771). However, feminist philosophers have noted that this influence has yet to be felt within the mainstream of the discipline of philosophy, where “intersectionality is largely ignored as a philosophical theme or framework” (Goswami, O’Donovan and Yount 2014, 6). Moreover, intersectionality is not without its feminist critics.

Some sympathetic critics of intersectionality have suggested that the concept is limited in that it focuses primarily on the action-theoretical level. A full analysis of the intertwining of racial, gender, and class-based subordination also requires, on this view, a systemic or macro-level concept that corresponds to the concept 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 refers to the macro-level connections linking systems of oppression such as race, class, and gender. This is the model describing the social structures that create social positions. Second, the notion of intersectionality describes micro-level processes – namely, how each individual and group occupies a social position within interlocking structures of oppression described by the metaphor of intersectionality. Together they shape oppression” (Collins et al . 2002, 82).

Others have worried that discussions of intersectionality tend to focus 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 of whether all identities are intersectional or whether only multiply marginalized subjects have an intersectional identity” (Nash 2008, 9). Although some feminist scholars claim that intersectionality encompasses all subject positions, not just those that are marginalized or oppressed, Nash notes that “the overwhelming majority of intersectional scholarship has centred on the particular positions of multiply marginalized subjects” (Nash 2008, 9–10). The over-emphasis on oppression in theories of intersectionality leads theorists “to ignore the intimate connections between privilege and oppression,” for example, by “ignor[ing] the ways in which subjects might be both victimized by patriarchy and privileged by race” (Nash 2008, 12). In response to this concern, philosophers such as Ann Garry have offered a broader, more inclusive conception of intersectionality that emphasizes both oppression and privilege (see Garry 2011).

Rather than supplementing the notion of intersectionality with a macro-level concept of interlocking systems of oppression or broadening it to include relations of oppression and privilege, Naomi Zack argues that feminists should move beyond it. Zack maintains that intersectionality undermines its own goal of making feminism more inclusive. It does this, on Zack’s view, by dividing women into smaller and smaller groups, formed by specific intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and so forth. As Zack puts it, “as a theory of women’s identity, intersectionality is not inclusive insofar as members of specific intersections of race and class create only their own feminisms” (Zack 2005, 2). Because it tends toward “the reification of intersections as incommensurable identities,” Zack maintains that “intersectionality has not borne impressive political fruit” (Zack 2005, 18).

From a very different perspective, queer theorists such as Lynne Huffer and Jasbir Puar have also criticized intersectionality as a theory of identity. Unlike Zack, however, their concern is not with the proliferation of incommensurable identities but rather with the ways in which the notion of intersectionality remains, as Puar says, “primarily trapped within the logic of identity” (Puar 2012, 60). As Huffer puts the point: “the institutionalization of intersectionality as the only approach to gender and sexuality that takes difference seriously masks intersectionality’s investment in a subject-making form of power-knowledge that runs the risk of perpetuating precisely the problems intersectionality had hoped to alleviate” (Huffer 2013, 18). Puar argues further that the primary concepts of intersectionality, including gender, race, class, and sexuality, are themselves the product of Eurocentric, modernist, and colonial discourses and practices and, as such, are problematic from the point of view of postcolonial and transnational feminism (Puar 2012).

Finally, Anna Carastathis has argued that the problem with intersectionality theory lies in its very success (Carastathis 2013 and 2014). Intersectionality has been, on her view, too easily appropriated by white-dominated feminist theory, cut off from its roots in Black and women of color feminism, and incorporated into a self-congratulatory progressivist narrative according to which “intersectionality is celebrated as a methodological triumph over ‘previous’ essentialist and exclusionary approaches to 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 that intersectionality’s reach is wide but not very deep, and suggests that this may be the result of aversive racism – that is, a desire to assert or establish racial innocence, but without really coming to terms with their own internalized racism – on the part of white feminists (Carastathis, 2014, 68–69).

In response to these sorts of criticisms of intersectionality, some scholars have attempted to reformulate the concept by understanding it as a family resemblance concept (Garry 2011) or by highlighting its provisionality (Carastathis, 2014). Others have argued for an expansion of the intersectional framework to better account for the experiences of diasporic subjects (Sheth 2014) or for a rethinking of this framework in relation to a Deleuzian notion of assemblage (Puar 2007 and 2012). Collins (2019) has proposed the development of intersectionality as a critical social theory through a reflection on its genealogy, epistemology, and methodology.

Most of the work on power done by post-structuralist feminists has been inspired by Foucault. In his middle period works (Foucault 1977, 1978, and 1980), Foucault analyzes modern power as a mobile and constantly shifting set of force relations that emerge from every social interaction and thus pervade the social body. As he puts it, “power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere” (1978, 93). Foucault endeavors to offer a “micro-physics” of modern power (1977, 26), an analysis that focuses not on the concentration of power in the hands of the sovereign or the state, but instead on how power flows through the capillaries of the social body. Foucault criticizes previous analyses of power (primarily Marxist and Freudian) for assuming that power is fundamentally repressive, a belief that he terms the “repressive hypothesis” (1978, 17–49). Although Foucault does not deny that power sometimes functions repressively (see 1978, 12), he maintains that it is primarily productive; as he puts it, “power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” (1977, 194). It also, according to Foucault, produces subjects. As he puts it, “the individual is not the vis-à-vis of power; it is, I believe, one of its prime effects” (1980, 98). According to Foucault, modern power subjects individuals, in both senses of the term; it simultaneously creates them as subjects by subjecting them to power. As we will see in a moment, Foucault’s account of subjection and his account of power more generally have been extremely fruitful, but also quite controversial, for feminists interested in analyzing domination.

It should come as no surprise that so many feminists have drawn on Foucault’s analysis of power. Foucault’s analysis of power has arguably been the most influential discussion of the topic over the last forty years; even those theorists of power who are highly critical of Foucault’s work acknowledge this influence (Lukes 2005 and, in a somewhat backhanded way, Morriss 2002). Moreover, Foucault’s focus on the local and capillary nature of modern power clearly resonates with feminist efforts to redefine the scope and bounds of the political, efforts that are summed up by the slogan “the personal is political.” At this point, the feminist work that has been inspired by Foucault’s analysis of power is so extensive and varied that it defies summarization (see, for example, 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, Sawicki 1990, and Young 1990). I will concentrate on highlighting a few central issues from this rich and diverse body of scholarship.

Several of the most prominent Foucaultian-feminist analyses of power draw on his account of disciplinary power in order to critically analyze normative femininity. In Discipline and Punish , Foucault analyzes the disciplinary practices that were developed in prisons, schools, and factories in the 18th century – including minute regulations of bodily movements, obsessively detailed time schedules, and surveillance techniques – and how these practices shape the bodies of prisoners, students and workers into docile bodies (1977, 135–169). In a highly influential essay, Sandra Bartky criticizes Foucault for failing to notice that disciplinary practices are gendered and that, through such gendered discipline, women’s bodies are rendered more docile than the bodies of men (1990, 65). Drawing on and extending Foucault’s account of disciplinary power, Bartky analyzes the disciplinary practices that engender specifically feminine docile bodies – including dieting practices, limitations on gestures and mobility, and bodily ornamentation. She also expands Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham’s design for the ideal prison, a building whose spatial arrangement was designed to compel the inmate to surveil himself, thus becoming, as Foucault famously put it, “the principle of his own subjection” (1977, 203). With respect to gendered disciplinary practices such as dieting, restricting one’s movement so as to avoid taking up too much space, and keeping one’s body properly hairless, attired, ornamented and made up, Bartky observes “it is women themselves who practice this discipline on and against their own bodies….The woman who checks her make-up half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara run, who worries that the wind or rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stocking have bagged at the ankle, or who, feeling fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate in the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy” (1990, 80).

As Susan Bordo points out, this model of self-surveillance does not adequately illuminate all forms of female subordination – all too often women are actually compelled into submission by means of physical force, economic coercion, or emotional manipulation. Nevertheless, Bordo agrees with Bartky that “when it comes to the politics of appearance, such ideas are apt and illuminating” (1993, 27). Bordo explains that, in her own work, Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power has been “extremely helpful both to my analysis of the contemporary disciplines of diet and exercise and to my understanding of eating disorders as arising out of and reproducing normative feminine practices of our culture, practices which train the female body in docility and obedience to cultural demands while at the same time being experienced in terms of power and control” (ibid). Bordo also highlights and makes use of Foucault’s understanding of power relations as inherently unstable, as always accompanied by, even generating, resistance (see Foucault 1983). “So, for example, the woman who goes into a rigorous weight-training program in order to achieve the currently stylish look may discover that her new muscles give her the self-confidence that enables her to assert herself more forcefully at work” (1993, 28).

Whereas Bartky and Bordo focus on Foucault’s account of disciplinary power, Judith Butler draws primarily on his analysis of subjection. For example, in her early and massively influential book, Gender Trouble (1990), Butler notes that “Foucault points out that juridical systems of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent. Juridical notions of power appear to regulate political life in purely negative terms…..But the subjects regulated by such structures are, by virtue of being subjected to them, formed, defined, and reproduced in accordance with the requirements of those structures” (1990, 2). The implication of this for feminists is, according to Butler, that “feminist critique ought also to understand how the category of ‘women’, the subject of feminism, is produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought” (1990, 2). This Foucaultian insight into the nature of subjection – into the ways in which becoming a subject means at the same time being subjected to power relations – thus forms the basis for Butler’s trenchant critique of the category of women, and for her call for a subversive performance of the gender norms that govern the production of gender identity. In Bodies that Matter (1993), Butler extends this analysis to consider the impact of subjection on the bodily materiality of the subject. As she puts is, “power operates for Foucault in the constitution of the very materiality of the subject, in the principle which simultaneously forms and regulates the ‘subject’ of subjectivation” (1993, 34). Thus, for Butler, power understood as subjection is implicated in the process of determining which bodies come to matter, whose lives are livable and whose deaths grievable. In The Psychic Life of Power (1997b), Butler expands further on the Foucaultian notion of subjection, bringing it into dialogue with a Freudian account of the psyche. In the introduction to that text, Butler notes that subjection is a paradoxical form of power. It has an element of domination and subordination, to be sure, but, she writes, “if, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we harbor and preserve in the beings that we are” (1997b, 2). Although Butler credits Foucault with recognizing the fundamentally ambivalent character of subjection, she also argues that he does not offer an account of the specific mechanisms by which the subjected subject is formed. For this, Butler maintains, we need an analysis of the psychic form that power takes, for only such an analysis can illuminate the passionate attachment to power that is characteristic of subjection.

Although many feminists have found Foucault’s analysis of power extremely fruitful and productive, Foucault has also had his share of feminist critics. In a very influential early assessment, Nancy Fraser argues that, although Foucault’s work offers some interesting empirical insights into the functioning of modern power, it is “normatively confused” (Fraser 1989, 31). In his writings on power, Foucault seems to eschew normative categories, preferring instead to describe the way that power functions in local practices and to argue for the appropriate methodology for studying power. He even seems to suggest that such normative notions as autonomy, legitimacy, sovereignty, and so forth, are themselves effects of modern power (this point has been contested recently in the literature on Foucault; see Allen 2008a and Oksala 2005). Fraser claims that this attempt to remain normatively neutral or even critical of normativity is incompatible with the politically engaged character of Foucault’s writings. Thus, for example, although Foucault claims that power is always accompanied by resistance, Fraser argues that he cannot explain why domination ought to be resisted. As she puts it, “only with the introduction of normative notions of some kind could Foucault begin to answer such questions. Only with the introduction of normative notions could he begin to tell us what is wrong with the modern power/knowledge regime and why we ought to oppose it” (1989, 29). Other feminists have criticized the Foucaultian claim that the subject is an effect of power. According to feminists such as Linda Martín Alcoff and Seyla Benhabib, such a claim implies a denial of agency that is incompatible with the demands of feminism as an emancipatory social movement (Alcoff 1990, Benhabib 1992, and Benhabib et al. 1995; for a reply to this line of criticism, see Allen 2008a chs. 2 and 3). Finally, Nancy Hartsock (1990 and 1996) calls into question the usefulness of Foucault’s work as an analytical tool. Hartsock makes two related arguments against Foucault. First, she argues that his analysis of power is not a theory for women because it does not examine power from the epistemological point of view of the subordinated; in her view, Foucault analyzes power from the perspective of the colonizer, rather than the colonized (1990). Second, Foucault’s analysis of power fails to adequately theorize structural relations of inequality and domination that undergird women’s subordination; this is related to the first argument because “domination, viewed from above, is more likely to look like equality”(1996, 39; for a response to this 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 analysis of power continues to be an extremely useful resource for feminist conceptions of domination. For recent important feminist work that draws on Foucault’s genealogical method to offer an intersectional analysis of racism and gender or sexual oppression see Feder (2007) and McWhorter (2009).

Postcolonial and decolonial theory offer overlapping critiques of historical and contemporary practices and discourses of imperial and colonial domination. Yet they also have distinct lineages, theoretical commitments, and implications (for helpful discussion, see Bhambra 2014 and Ramamurthy and Tambe 2017). Postcolonial theory rose to prominence in the late 20th century, in association with the groundbreaking work of Edward Said (1979) and the Subaltern Studies Collective, and has been most influential in literary and cultural studies. Taking as its primary point of reference the northern European colonization of Southeast Asia and focusing primarily on the discursive and cultural effects of colonialism, postcolonial theory is deeply (though not uncritically) influenced by poststruturalism, particularly the work of Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Decolonial theory emerged somewhat later, in the early 2000s, in association with the Latin American and Carribean scholars in the Modernity/Coloniality group. Its primary point of reference is the colonization of the Americas that began in 1492. Heavily influenced by Latin American Marxism, world systems theory, and indigenous political struggles, decolonial theory focuses on the connections between capitalism, colonialism, and racial hierarchies. Although these two approaches are not mutually exclusive, decolonial theory is often viewed as the more radical of the two, due to its broader historical range and its calls for epistemic decolonization and delinking from capitalist modernity/coloniality (Ruíz 2021).

Gayatri Spivak's “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) is widely viewed as the watershed text in postcolonial feminism. Spivak's essay opens with a critical discussion of an exchange betweeen Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, in which they reject the idea of speaking for the oppressed, insisting instead that the oppressed should speak for themselves. The first part of her essay is devoted to a critique of this claim and of the myriad ways in which Foucault and Deleuze ignore the epistemic violence of imperialism. It is Foucault and Deleuze’s insistence that the oppressed “can speak and know their conditions” that leads Spivak to formulate her famous question, “can the subaltern speak?” (78). If, as Spivak goes on to suggest, the subaltern can not 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 in colonial India, Spivak suggests that the subaltern cannot speak because she is caught between imperialist discourse and patriarchal traditionalism, neither of which enables her to voice her experience: “Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization” (102). In other words, there is no space from which the subaltern as female can speak and no way she can be heard or read.

Another emblematic text in postcolonial feminism is Chandra Talpade Mohanty's “Under Western Eyes” (1988). Mohanty's essay is framed as a critique of Western feminist analyses of “Third World Women” for their reductive and overly simplistic understandings of power and oppression. In such discourses, as Mohanty explains, “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 are historically reductive; they are also ineffectual in designing strategies to combat oppressions” (73). By contrast, Mohanty calls for an intersectional understanding of power that refuses to homogenize or falsely universalize women's experience: “the…homogenization of class, race, religion, and daily material practices of women in the Third World can create a false sense of the commonality of oppressions, interests, and struggles between and among women globally. Beyond sisterhood there are still racism, colonialism, and imperialism” (77). Furthermore, by representing “Third World Women” as mere passive objects or victims of oppression, Western feminists implicitly position themselves 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 a pair of essays published in Hypatia (2007 and 2010). Building on the work of Anibal Quijano (2000), who argued that racialization is rooted in the structure of colonial capitalism, Lugones contends that gender itself is “a colonial concept and mode of organization of relations of production, property relations, of cosmologies and ways of knowing” (2007, 186). Seeing gender as a colonial concept enables feminists to break out of the ahistorical framework of patriarchy. As she explains: “To understand the relation of the birth of the colonial/modern gender system to the birth of global colonial capitalism–with the centrality of the coloniality of power to that system of global power–is to understand our present organization of life anew” (2007, 187). Lugones's decolonial feminist framework combines the insights of intersectionality theory with Quijano’s understanding of the coloniality of power (2007, 187–88). This brings into focus what Lugones calls the “modern/colonial gender system” (2007, 189), a system that is characterized by strict sexual dimorphism and presumed correspondence between biological sex and gender. In the later essay, Lugones simplifies her formulation somewhat: “I call the analysis of racialized, capitalist, gender oppression ”the coloniality of gender.“ I call the possibility of overcoming the coloniality of gender ”decolonial feminism“” (2010, 747).

Although most of the approaches to dominaiton discussed above have been informed by the Continental philosophical tradition, analytic feminists have made important contributions to the feminist literature on domination as well. For example, Ann Cudd (2006) draws on the framework of rational choice theory to analyze oppression (for related work 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 group condition, which states that individuals are subjected to unjust treatment because of their membership (or ascribed membership) in certain social groups (Cudd 2006, 21); 2) the harm condition, which stipulates that individuals are systematically and unfairly harmed as a result of such membership (Cudd 2006, 21); 3) the coercion condition, which specifies that the harms that those individuals suffer 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 other social groups who derive a reciprocal privilege or benefit from that unjust harm (Cudd 2006, 22–23). Cudd then defines oppression as “an objective social phenomenon” characterized by these four conditions (Cudd 2006, 23).

As Cudd sees it, the most difficult and interesting question that an analysis of oppression must confront is the “endurance question: how does oppression endure over time in spite of humans’ rough natural equality?” (Cudd 2006, 25). Any satisfactory answer to this 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 a normative concept (Cudd 2006, 26). (That oppression is a normative – rather than a purely descriptive – concept is evident from the fact that it is defined as an unjust or unfair set of power relations). Cudd argues that social-theoretical frameworks such as functionalism, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary psychology are inadequate for theorizing oppression (Cudd 2006, 39–45). Structural rational choice theory, in her view, best meets reasonable criteria of explanatory adequacy and therefore provides the best social-theoretical framework for analyzing oppression. By appealing to a structural theory of rational choice, Cudd’s analysis of oppression avoids relying on assumptions about the psychology of individual agents. Rather, as Cudd puts it, “the structural theory of rational choice assesses the objective social rewards and penalties that are consequent on” the interactions and social status of specific group members and “uses these assessments to impute preferences and beliefs to individuals based purely on their social group memberships” (Cudd 2006, 45). But, as a structural theory of rational choice , the framework assumes “that agents behave rationally in the sense that they choose actions that maximize their (induced) expected utilities” (Cudd 2006, 46). In other words, structural rational choice theory models human actions as “(basically instrumentally rational) individual choice constrained within socially structured payoffs” (Cudd 2006, 37). When utilized to analyze oppression, structural rational choice theory suggests that the key to answering the endurance question lies in the fact that “the oppressed are co-opted through their own short-run rational choices to reinforce the long-run oppression of their social group” (Cudd 2006, 21–22).

Sally Haslanger’s work on gender and racial oppression, like Cudd’s, is heavily informed by the tools of analytic philosophy, though Haslanger also situates her work within the tradition of Critical Theory (see Haslanger 2012, 22–30). Haslanger distinguishes between two kinds of cases of oppression: agent oppression, in which “a person or persons (the oppressor(s)) inflicts harm upon another (the oppressed) wrongfully or unjustly” (314) and structural oppression, in which “the oppression is not an individual wrong but a social/political wrong; that is, it is a problem lying in our collective arrangements, an injustice in our practices or institutions” (314). Having made this distinction, Haslanger then argues for a mixed analysis of oppression that does not attempt to reduce agent oppression to structural oppression or vice versa. The danger of reducing structural oppression to agent oppression – what Haslanger calls the individualistic approach to oppression – is that doing so fails to acknowledge that “sometimes structures themselves, not individuals are the problem” (320). The danger of reducing agent oppression to structural oppression – what Haslanger calls the institutionalist approach – is that such an approach “fails to distinguish those who abuse their power to do wrong and those who are privileged but do not exploit their power” (320). Haslanger’s mixed approach, by contrast, is “attentive simultaneously [and, we might add, non-reductively] to both agents and structures” (11).

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

By claiming that women are oppressed as women, Haslanger reiterates an earlier claim made by radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon (see, for example, MacKinnon 1987, 56–57). Indeed, Haslanger’s analysis is heavily indebted to MacKinnon’s work (see Haslanger 2012, 35–82), though she does not endorse MacKinnon’s strong claims about the link between objectivity and masculinity, nor does she adopt a dyadic (or, to use Haslanger’s terminology, reductively agent focused) understanding of oppression. But, like MacKinnon, Haslanger believes that “gender categories are defined relationally – one is a woman (or a man) by virtue of one’s position in a system of social relations” (58). This means that “one’s gender is an extrinsic property, and…it is not necessary that we each have the gender we now have, or that we have any gender at all” (58). Since the social relations in terms of which gender categories are defined are relations of hierarchical domination and structural oppression, “gender is, by definition, hierarchical: Those who function socially as men have power over those who function socially as women” (61). As Haslanger admits, referencing the sex/gender distinction, this does not mean that all males have power over all females – but it does mean that females who are not subordinated by males are not, strictly speaking, women, and vice versa. Moreover, as Haslanger notes, “MacKinnon’s account of gender, like others that define gender hierarchically, has the consequence that feminism aims to undermine the very distinction it depends upon. If feminism is successful, there will no longer be a gender distinction as such” because the complex of social relations of domination and structural oppression that give gender its meaning will no longer exist (62). While endorsing MacKinnon’s radical conclusion with respect to the currently existing gender categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, Haslanger’s own account offers a somewhat more nuanced view that allows for the future possibility of a kind of gender difference that would not be predicted on gender dominance: “gender can be fruitfully understood as a higher order genus that includes not only the hierarchical social positions of man and woman, but potentially other non-hierarchical social positions defined in part by reference to reproductive function. I believe gender as we know it takes hierarchical forms as men and women; but the theoretical move of treating men and women as only two kinds of gender provides resources for thinking about other (actual) genders, and the political possibility of constructing non-hierarchical genders” (235)

Up to this point, this entry has focused on power understood in terms of an oppressive or unjust power-over relationship. I have used the term “domination” to refer to such relationships, though some of the theorists discussed above prefer the terms “oppression” or “subjection,” and others refer to this phenomenon simply as “power.” However, a significant strand of feminist theorizing of power starts with the contention that the conception of power as power-over, domination, or control is implicitly masculinist. In order to avoid such masculinist connotations, many feminists from a variety of theoretical backgrounds have argued for a reconceptualization of power as a capacity or ability, specifically, the capacity to empower or transform oneself and others. Thus, these feminists have tended to understood power not as power-over but as power-to. Wartenberg (1990) argues that this feminist understanding of power, which he calls transformative power, is actually a type of power-over, albeit one that is distinct from domination because it aims at empowering those over whom it is exercised. However, most of the feminists who embrace this transformative or empowerment-based conception of power explicitly define it as an ability or capacity and present it as an alternative to 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’s examination of power…can bring new understanding to the whole concept of power” (Miller 1992, 241). Miller rejects the definition of power as domination; instead, she defines it as “the capacity to produce a change – that is, to move anything from point A or state A to point B or state B” (Miller 1992, 241). Miller suggests that power understood as domination is particularly masculine; from women’s perspective, power is understood differently: “there is enormous validity in women’s not wanting to use power as it is presently conceived and used. Rather, women may want to be powerful in ways that simultaneously enhance, rather than diminish, the power of others” (Miller 1992, 247–248).

Similarly, Virginia Held argues against the masculinist conception of power as “the power to cause others to submit to one’s will, the power that led men to seek hierarchical control and…contractual constraints” (Held 1993, 136). Held views women’s unique experiences as mothers and caregivers as the basis for new insights into power; as she puts it, “the capacity to give birth and to nurture and empower could be the basis for new and more humanly promising conceptions than the ones that now prevail of power, empowerment, and growth” (Held 1993, 137). According to Held, “the power of a mothering person to empower others, to foster transformative growth, is a different sort of power from that of a stronger sword or a dominant will” (Held 1993, 209). On Held’s view, a feminist analysis of society and politics leads to an understanding of power as the capacity to transform and empower oneself and others.

This conception of power as transformative and empowering is also a prominent theme in lesbian feminism and ecofeminism. For example, Sarah Lucia Hoagland is critical of the masculine conception of power with its focus on “state authority, police and armed forces, control of economic resources, control of technology, and hierarchy and chain of command” (Hoagland 1988, 114). Instead, Hoagland defines power as “power-from-within” which she understands as “the power of ability, of choice and engagement. It is creative; and hence it is an affecting and transforming power but not a controlling power” (Hoagland 1988, 118). Similarly, Starhawk claims that she is “on the side of the power that emerges from within, that is inherent in us as the power to grow is inherent in the seed” (Starhawk 1987, 8). For both Hoagland and Starhawk, power-from-within is a positive, life-affirming, and empowering force that 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 the prominent French feminists Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. Irigaray, for example, urges feminists to question the definition of power in phallocratic cultures, for if feminists “aim simply for a change in the distribution of power, leaving intact the power structure itself, then they are resubjecting themselves, deliberately or not, to a phallocratic order” (Irigaray 1985, 81), that is, to a discursive and cultural order that privileges the masculine, represented by the phallus. If we wish to subvert the phallocratic order, according to Irigaray, we will have to reject “a definition of power of the masculine type” (Irigaray 1985, 81). Some feminists interpret Irigaray’s work on sexual difference as suggesting an alternative conception of power as transformative, a conception that is grounded in a specifically feminine economy (see Irigaray 1981 and Kuykendall 1983). Similarly, Cixous claims that “les pouvoirs de la femme” do not consist in mastering or exercising power over others, but instead are a form of “power over oneself” (Cixous 1977, 483–84).

Along similar lines, Nancy Hartsock refers to the understanding of power “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 the work of some women who did not consider themselves to be feminists – most notably, Hannah Arendt, whose rejection of the command-obedience model of power and definition of ‘power’ as “the human ability not just to act but to act in concert” overlaps significantly with the feminist conception of power 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 community or collective empowerment (on the relationship between power and community, see Hartsock 1983, 1996). This aspect of empowerment is evident in Mary Parker Follett’s distinction between power-over and power-with; for Follett, power-with is a collective ability that is a function of relationships of reciprocity between members of a group (Follett 1942). Hartsock finds it significant that the theme of power as capacity or empowerment has been so prominent in the work of women who have written about power. In her view, this points in the direction of a feminist standpoint that “should allow us to understand why the masculine community constructed…power, as domination, repression, and death, and why women’s accounts of power differ in specific and systematic ways from those put forward by men….such a standpoint might allow us to put forward an understanding of power that points in more liberatory directions” (Hartsock 1983, 226).

The notion of empowerment has also been taken up widely by advocates of so-called “power feminism.” A reaction against a perceived over-emphasis on women’s victimization and oppression in feminism of the 1980s, power feminism emerged in the 1990s in the writings of feminists such as Camille Paglia, Katie Roiphe, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Naomi Wolf. Although this movement has had more influence 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 in her book Feminism and Power: The Need for Critical Theory (2013), power feminists reject not only the excessive focus on women’s victimization but also the claim, made by earlier empowerment theorists, that women are “sensitive creatures given more to a caring, interconnected web of human relationships than to the rugged individualism espoused by men” (Caputi 2013, 4). In contrast, power feminists endorse a more individualistic, self-assertive, even aggressive conception of empowerment, one that tends to define empowerment in terms of individual choice with little concern for the contexts within which choices are made or the options from which women are able to choose. Caputi argues that power feminism relies on and mimetically reproduces a problematically masculinist conception of power, one “enthralled by the display of ‘power over’ rather than ‘power with’…” (Caputi 2013, xv). As she puts it: “feminism must query the uncritical endorsement of an empowerment aligned with a masculinist will to power, and disown the tough, sassy, self-assured but unthinking ‘feminist’” (Caputi 2013, 17). Because of its tendency to mimic an individualistic, sovereign, and masculinist conception of power over, power feminism, according to Caputi, “does little, if anything, to rethink our conception of power” (Caputi 2013, 89). In order to prompt such a rethinking, Caputi turns to the resources of the early Frankfurt School of critical theory and to the work of Jacques Derrida.

Serene Khader’s Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment offers another rethinking of empowerment in feminist theory. Focusing on empowerment in the context of international development practice, Khader develops a deliberative perfectionist account of adaptive preferences. Rather than defining adaptive preferences in terms of autonomy deficits, Khader defines them as preferences “inconsistent with basic flourishing…that are formed under conditions nonconductive to basic flourishing and…that we believe people might be persuaded to transform upon normative scrutiny of their preferences and exposure to conditions more conducive to flourishing” (Khader 2011, 42). The perfectionism in her account leads her to emphasize the distinction between merely adaptive preferences – those formed through adaptation to existing social conditions – and what she calls “inappropriately adaptive preferences” (IAPs) – preferences that are adaptive to bad or oppressive social conditions and that are harmful to those who adopt them (52–53). She also insists that IAPs are most often selective rather than global self-entitlement deficits (109), which means that they impact individuals’ sense of their own worth or entitlement to certain goods not globally but rather in particular domains and contexts and in relation to certain specific individuals or groups. This allows her to acknowledge the psychological effects of oppression working through the mechanism of IAPs without denying the possibility of agency on the part of the oppressed.

Khader draws on her deliberative perfectionist account of IAPs to diagnose and move beyond certain controversies over the notion of empowerment that have emerged in feminist development practice and theorizing. As the concept of women’s empowerment has become central to international development practice, feminists have raised concerns about the ideological effects of this shift. While acknowledging that the language of empowerment in development practice can have ideological effects, Khader addresses these concerns by providing a clearer conception of empowerment than the one implicit in the development literature and emphasizing what she understands as the normative core of this concept, its relation to human flourishing. She defines empowerment as the “ process of overcoming one or many IAPs through processes that enhance some element of a person’s concept of self-entitlement and increase her capacity to pursue her own flourishing ” (Khader 2011, 176). This definition of empowerment enables her to rethink certain dilemmas of empowerment that have emerged in development theory and practices. For example, many development practitioners define empowerment in terms of choice, and then struggle to make sense of apparently self-subordinating choices. If choice equals empowerment, then does this mean that the choice to subordinate or disempower oneself is an instance of empowerment? Khader’s finely grained analysis provides an elegant way out of this dilemma by emphasizing the conditions under which choices are made and the tradeoffs among different domains or aspects of flourishing that these conditions may necessitate. Discussing a case of young women in Tanzania who chose to undergo clitoridectomy after receiving education about the practice aimed at empowering them, Khader writes: “Are the young women who choose clitoridectomy disempowered because they have few options for unambiguously pursuing their flourishing or are they empowered because they have exercised agential capacities by making a choice? My analysis of IAP allows us to say both” (187). For Khader, empowerment is a messy, complex, and incremental concept. Her analysis of empowerment enables us to see that “self-subordinating choices can have selective empowering effects under disempowering conditions” (189). But the normative core of her account, its deliberative perfectionism, insists that “a situation where one cannot seek one’s basic flourishing across multiple domains is a tragic one” (189).

The concept of power is central to a wide variety of debates in feminist philosophy. Indeed, the very centrality of this concept to feminist theorizing creates difficulties in writing an entry such as this one: since the concept of power is operative on one way or another in almost all work in feminist theory, it is extremely difficult to place limits on the relevant sources. Throughout, I have emphasized those texts and debates in which the concept of power is a central theme, even if sometimes an implicit one. I have also prioritized those authors and texts that have been most influential within feminist philosophy, as opposed to the wider terrain of feminist theory or gender studies, though I acknowledge that this distinction is difficult to maintain and perhaps not always terribly useful. Debatable as such framing choices may be, they do offer some much needed help in delimiting the range of relevant sources and providing focus and structure to the discussion.

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Gender Critical Feminism and Trans Tolerance in Sports

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Through a systematic review of gender critical feminist rhetoric in the realm of sports, this article excavates a rhetorical strategy of what the author calls “trans tolerance,” a strategy that is at once trans-affirming and trans-exclusionary. The author argues that three themes run across three gender critical feminist organizations: (a) nonpartisanship, (b) biofeminism, and (c) trans tolerance. In a sports world that desperately needs transformation, scholars and activists alike must sharpen analyses of violent transphobic rhetoric in a way that moves beyond a “pro-trans versus anti-trans framework.”

On February 22, 2019, the house judiciary committee for the Montana state legislature convened to vote on several house bills concerning transgender rights. House Bill 465 would have revised Montana’s anti-discrimination laws by adding gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation to its list of protected classes of persons. For the purposes of the bill, gender identity was defined as the “gender-related identity, appearance, expression, or behavior of an individual, regardless of the individual’s assigned sex at birth,” and sexual orientation was defined as “an individual’s actual or perceived romantic or sexual attraction to people of the same or different gender” ( Montana HB465, 2019 ). In effect, the new law would have prohibited discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people in employment, housing, education, and goods and services provided by the state.

During the 45-min period that opponents of the bill made their case against HB 465, Anita Milanovich, an attorney for the Montana Family Foundation, argued that the proposed bill would threaten “three key areas of American life” First, it would threaten Montanans’ first amendment rights to freedom of speech, religion, and conscience. Second, it would put the privacy and safety of Montanans—specifically women—at risk by “inviting men” into locker rooms, changing rooms, and bathrooms with women and girls. Within this area of purported threat, a change to the bill would also allow “men identifying as women” to sleep alongside women staying at domestic violence shelters. Third, it would threaten the economic safety of Montanans because it would entitle the government to regulate ideas and beliefs rather than allowing individuals to freely exchange them ( Judiciary, n.d. ).

Embedded within her argument that the proposed bill would threaten the safety of women and girls was Milanovich’s assertion that the academic and athletic achievements of women and girls would be “eviscerated, as men who profess a female identity will take spots on female teams and compete for scholarships and opportunities designated for women.” To support this rationale, she went on to position “Tennis legend Martina Navratilova” as a recent victim of the type of gender-regressive and anti-woman politics she believed would result from this bill. Milanovich explained to the judiciary committee that, having “recently raised this issue in an op-ed stating that a rule that allows trans athletes to compete according to their gender ‘rewards cheats and punishes the innocent,’” Navratilova had been “removed from the LGBTQ board for being transphobic,” despite her iconic status as a groundbreaking lesbian athlete.

[A] man can decide to be female, take hormones if required by whatever sporting organization is concerned, win everything in sight, and perhaps earn a small fortune, and then reverse his decision and go back to making babies if he so desires. It’s insane and it’s cheating. I am happy to address a transgender woman in whatever form she prefers, but I would not be happy to compete against her. It would not be fair. ( Navratilova, 2019a )

Milanovich’s deployment of Navratilova’s speech served a twofold purpose during the hearing. First, as a famous athlete with an illustrious career, Navratilova’s words and subsequent dismissal from various organizations legitimated Milanovich’s claims that adding gender identity and expression to Montana’s human rights act would harm women. Second, by describing Navratilova’s expulsion from various organizations that worked to expand trans policies, particularly for trans athletes, Milanovich illustrated that individuals who openly contest trans women and girls’ participation in sports risk being accused of transphobia and being shamed into silence—even when they are “happy to address a transgender woman in whatever form she prefers.”

The bill died in April 2019, and thus prevented gender identity or expression and sexual orientation from becoming legally protected classes. The Montana hearing, and the subsequent events that unfolded, depict an entanglement of discourses around trans embodiment, sports, and opposition to trans sportswomen who play women’s sports. It is telling that a bill intended to add gender identity to an existing nondiscrimination law was successfully opposed by way of citing a famous tennis player; especially since Navratilova herself contended that her words were taken out of context. When an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Montana branch tweeted that Navratilova’s words were used to oppose the bill, Navratilova ( 2019b ) responded in a tweet, “well that is just ridiculous—I was only speaking about professional athletic competitions—certainly not HUMAN RIGHTS and EQUAL rights for transgender people. That is totally misrepresenting what I said.” Yet despite Navratilova’s contention that her intentions had been misrepresented, it is significant that her words as a prominent—arguably legendary—sports figure were evoked to shut down a bill that was otherwise unrelated to sports.

In the following paper, I examine how opposition to trans women in sports takes on a particular rhetorical form that is at once trans-“affirming” and trans-exclusionary. I use the Montana hearing as an entry point for understanding this rhetoric, to which I will return later. But this form is not limited to the Montana hearing and, in fact, characterizes much of the contemporary opposition to trans people’s access to services, spaces, and anti-discrimination protections by self-proclaimed gender critical feminists (hereafter, GCFs). I excavate this rhetorical strategy through a systematic review of its uses and effects when deployed by GCFs, then position it squarely within this cultural and social moment surrounding gender and sports by analyzing organizations that use this rhetoric to challenge trans women’s participation in women’s sports. I provide a general overview of the GCF landscape, then provide a brief description of leading GCF organizations that focus solely on maintaining a cissexist vision for women’s sports; that is, organizations that aim to restrict access to women’s and girls’ sports so that only cis women and cis girls can participate. I argue that three themes run across three GCF organizations: (a) nonpartisanship, (b) biofeminism, and (c) what I call “trans tolerance,” a form that is both trans-affirming and trans-exclusionary. I identified these three themes because they constitute an adept and effective rhetorical maneuver that has allowed many organized GCF groups to shift from spewing violent anti-trans opinions to disseminating well-developed and seemingly objective arguments, even if these arguments are not actually grounded in widely accepted facts. To understand how this rhetoric operates, it is first necessary to contextualize gender critical feminism (GFC) within broader feminist discourses, and to provide a general overview of feminist approaches to gender and sports over the past decade.

A Ripe Opportunity: The Transgender Tipping Point and GFC

The convergence between trans visibility and vulnerability marks the hollowness of what is now commonly known as the “transgender tipping point,” a term made famous by Laverne Cox’s appearance on the cover of Time magazine in May 2014. The logics that inform GCF are shaped by the same historical, political, and social conditions that make the concept of a transgender tipping point possible. This is not to deny that current anti-trans discourse in GCF groups is congruent with a particular strain of unapologetically anti-trans radical feminism. In fact, many GCFs label themselves as such. On the contrary, I make this distinction to establish with greater accuracy how the specific radical feminist bent of GCF groups is shaped by contemporary social and political conditions.

Enabled by biofeminism—a term coined by Madeleine Pape ( 2022 )—and a display of purported nonpartisanship, much of GCF rhetoric intimates varying degrees of trans tolerance, or reluctant and half-hearted claims that trans athletes should be supported and accommodated in their athletic endeavors. Thus, traces of both trans support and trans exclusion can be found on any well-organized and well-funded GCF website, speech, executive summary, or petition. This strategy is neither unique nor relatively new, but rather a clever contradiction that, as Jules Gill-Peterson ( 2021 ) notes, GCF do not wish to resolve, but to exploit. If scholars engaged in trans feminist sports studies ( Jones, 2021 ) envision a (sports) world that desperately needs transformation, we must scrutinize the details of how GCF, and the broader coalition of which it is a part, seeks to further constrict athletic opportunities for trans and nonbinary folks.

Much has been written about the relationship between a particular anti-trans strand of radical feminism and contemporary GCF ( Hines, 2019 ) as well as the conditions in which GCF has gained widespread popularity ( Pearce et al., 2020 ), particularly in the United Kingdom ( Hines, 2020 ) and the United States. Scholars also trace connections between the gender critical movement and what Bassi and LaFleur ( 2022 ) argue should be urgently understood as a distinctly postfascist feminism that interlaces reinforced sexual and gender normativity with white supremacist nationalism. So, while contemporary iterations of trans-exclusionary feminism bear traces of radical feminist sentiment from the 1970s, specifically a biological essentialist understanding of sex and gender ( Ferguson, 1984 ), current gender critical politics unfold against a backdrop of a larger anti-gender movement developing in Europe ( Paternotte & Kuhar 2018b ) and Latin America ( Careaga-Pérez, 2016 ) since the 1990s. This anti-gender movement, consisting of numerous disparate actors, mobilizes against a range of issues including trans rights, sex and gender education, reproductive rights, and so-called “Gender Ideology” or “Gender Theory” ( Paternotte & Kuhar, 2018a ). For the purpose of this article, I focus here on the ideological position of GCF as it relates to trans embodiment in general and then trans embodiment in sports, specifically.

In 2008, Viv Smythe, an Australian feminist blogger Viv Smythe, first used the term “TERF” (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) on her internet blog “Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog” to describe specific feminists who articulate their opposition to trans phenomena and identities through a critique of “a phenomenon they refer to as gender ideology” ( Smythe, 2018 ). But while the term “gender critical” suggests an analytically novel approach to gender, their ideas about gender are firmly grounded in biological determinism. Many GCFs are firm believers in the immutability of sex assigned at birth. Sex designation overrides gender identity. GCFs therefore believe that the systematic erosion of cis women’s rights and protections are driven by what they call “gender ideology,” or a process of pseudo-brainwashing where trans people haphazardly identify with a gender other than the one assigned at birth. As such, any form of gender transgression is framed as ranging from anything as innocuous as simple naivety to an atrocity like male violence against women (usually rape), depending on which strain of GCF one subscribes to.

Feminists who believe that trans women are inexorably male prefer the term “gender critical” over the term “TERF,” which has been assigned to them by critics. They view the term TERF as a slur that silences them and delegitimates their position ( Ahmed, 2016 ). I choose to use “gender critical feminism” (GCF) instead of TERF or other externally designated terms for two reasons. First, TERF risks homogenization of radical feminism and erasure of radical feminism’s histories of trans-inclusive and anti-racist politics ( Heaney, 2016 ). As Finn Enke ( 2018 ) argues, history is important “not because things were better (or worse) in an earlier time but because, as co-creators of collective memory, we’re all doing it one way and another, and it matters how we tell the story.” Second, GCF cites a particular form of anti-trans politics—what Jules Gill-Peterson ( 2018 ) suggests is a “highly contemporary form of anti-trans backlash that has taken the convergence of trans visibility and vulnerability as an opportunity.” While GCF is ideologically similar to anti-trans discourses that some radical feminists supported and disseminated in the 1970s, the political and cultural conditions that shape and promulgate their prevalence are different.

GCFs have staked their political positions on several issues, ranging from opposition to state and federal legislation that protects gender (trans) identity, to taking sides on legal battles over workplace discrimination to objections to drag. For example, Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) is an organization that seeks to abolish “gender ideology,” “male violence,” “commercial sexual exploitation,” and achieve “women’s reproductive autonomy.” WoLF is one of the more structured and well-resourced organizations that is aligned with GCF. The backbone of their organization is their annually elected board of directors and four task forces dedicated to “political action for women’s liberation”; women’s reproductive autonomy; “pornstitution”; gender abolition; and male violence ( WoLF, n.d. ). The group has sent formal statements in several legal battles, as well as in struggles over state and federal legislation, regarding gender identity. These include an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Aimee Stephens board member testimony in favor of South Dakota HB 1057, a bill that would have prohibited doctors from providing gender affirming health care such as surgeries, hormone therapy, and puberty blockers; and a letter to the board of directors of Hennepin County Public Library that outlines WoLF’s objection to Drag Queen Story Hour because it promotes homophobia, sexism, and an “unhealthy image” of LGB people ( Feminist Objections, n.d. ). Significantly, WoLF couches their opposition to Drag Queen Story Hour as being pro- rather than anti-LGB, a pattern that allows them to refute charges of homophobia. What is particularly troubling about an LGB politics of sport is how people’s alleged support of trans people, alongside a heavy critique of trans women’s participation in sports, has been used to justify the use of sports contexts as “obvious” examples “to prove” that trans women are not “real women.” As I will discuss in more detail, WoLF has also been involved in efforts to oppose the participation of trans women athletes in women’s sports.

Other avenues of support and idea-exchange among GCFs include blogs and sites that re-post news articles either written by GCFs or published on GCF websites. For example, “The Politics of Gender” provides background information on GCF’s stance on gender and sex; “Transcritical” re-posts over 400 online articles that critique “transgender doctrine” ( Critiquing Transgender Doctrine & Gender Identity Politics, n.d. ); “Sex Not Gender,” founded by a feminist lawyer, posts legal takes on gender identity policies ( Sex matters, n.d. ); “Gender Critical Greens” is a collective of feminists that oppose gender ideology and seek to realign feminism within green politics ( Gender Critical Greens, n.d. ); and “4th Wave Now,” created by a left-leaning mother of a teenager who came out as a trans man, challenges a medical “rush” to diagnose and help children, teens, and folks in their early 20s, to transition ( 4thWaveNow, n.d. ). One of the larger producers of articles, commentary, and other online content is The Feminist Current , which was founded by Meghan Murphy in 2012. Based in Vancouver, the website publishes content that critiques third wave feminism, gender identity politics, and the “sex industry through a socialist position” ( Feminist Current, n.d. ). In their most basic iteration, these sites maintain the position that anyone assigned male at birth is unequivocally male and therefore a man regardless of gender identification. Through this assertion, various GCF sites disseminate the argument that trans women do not belong in women’s homeless shelters, women’s bathrooms, women’s locker rooms, and other gender-segregated spaces. If trans women seek access to these spaces, GCFs claim that (cisgender) women’s right to privacy and physical safety are being violated.

• Frenemies: GCF and Conservative Affiliation

Conservative affiliations among the aforementioned GCF organizations and campaigns range from what Nancy Whittier ( 2014 ) calls “overt and substantial” to “none” to “oppositional.” Whittier’s framework for analyzing the extent of religious and secular conservative affiliations with feminist groups is useful because it maps the historical and strategic trajectories of women’s social movements alongside, and in tandem with, conservatism. Although feminist and conservative groups are generally opposed to each other, their collaborative interactions stem from a shared opposition to pornography, child sexual abuse, and violence against women that dates back to the 1970s. Whittier defines this type of relationship, where organizations within different social movements share opposition to the same issue, albeit for different reasons, as “collaborative adversarial.”

Feminist–conservative interactions in which the two groups engage as “frenemies” ( Whittier, 2018 ) against a common cause have arguably laid the groundwork for today’s right-wing Christian and secular conservative anti-trans adversarial collaborations with radical feminist organizations. For religious conservatives, the immutability of sex must be defended to protect moral society (composed of nuclear families) from becoming a sexually deviant and generally hedonistic one. Radical feminist organizations such as WoLF insist on the immutability of “biological” sex (sex assigned at birth) to protect cis women as a legally and culturally protected class and thereby establish and maintain (cis)women-only spaces, such as prisons, homeless and domestic violence shelters, bathrooms, and girls/women’s only sports teams.

Anti-trans organizations, which include GCF and conservative constituents, coalesced against the introduction of the Equality Act in March 2019. The bill would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Fair Housing Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, the Jury Selection and Services Act, and other laws pertaining to employment to explicitly include sexual orientation and gender identity. Before the bill would pass in the U.S. House of Representatives on May 17, 2019, a conglomerate of leaders from women’s groups co-signed a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urging “Congress to pass laws that protect and defend the rights and dignity of women and the gains we have made, not laws that risk our safety and our opportunities” ( Save Women’s Sports [SWS], n.d.-b ). The letter was signed by several directors of chapters of Concerned Women for America along with WoLF board member, Kara Dansky, and SWS founder, Beth Stelzer. It is signed by these women’s groups along with conservative organizations such as Alliance Defending Freedom and Family Research Council. This strategic alignment—which includes SWS—was among the first of many coalitional strategies that allow GCF groups to declare their opposition to trans women and girls in the women/girls category in a wide range of contexts where gender segregation is the norm.

The letter defines gender identity as having “no objective standard, medical diagnosis, or permanent intent” and that it is “nothing more than a person’s perception of self that can be changed at any time, for any reason, and cannot be challenged.” The Equality Act would therefore “abolish the protections of biological sex-specific practices and spaces.” The co-signers thus refuse to give up their right to “women-only” sports: “Puberty, testosterone, and innate biological differences give physical advantages to males that cannot be mitigated, disqualifying any female athlete from fair competition. To deny this is denying science.” One of the co-signers of the letter, Hands Across the Aisle Coalition (HATAC), takes what Whittier calls a “narrow neutral” approach to frenemy interaction. In a collaboration strategy that is less adversarial on the surface, a narrow neutral approach unites otherwise opposing organizations against a single issue—in this case trans-inclusive policies—and frames it as a politically nonpartisan issue. As HATAC’s website states, “We are radical feminists, lesbians, Christians, and conservatives that are tabling our ideological differences to stand in solidarity against gender identity legislation . . . we are committed to working together, rising above our differences, and leveraging our collective resources to oppose gender identity ideology” ( 2017 ). As the visual “hands across the aisle” suggests, many GCF organizations consider themselves nonpartisan or in collaboration with actors across the political spectrum. By depicting objection to “gender ideology” as nonpolitical—and ostensibly politically neutral—GCF is able to rhetorically depoliticize the political.

The frenemy relationship between GCFs and conservatives, whether narrowly neutral or adversely collaborative, has fostered a wider range of opposition to transgender policies and legal rulings. Informed by otherwise differing ideological positions, they share a belief that trans girls and trans women pose a threat to their biologically determinist understanding of the category of woman. Their opposition to transfeminine identities is expressed through various issues that impact transgender people, namely access to hormones and surgery, gender-segregated bathrooms, and sports. It is the latter two issues where opposition is most explicitly directed against trans girls and trans women because of their alleged threat to the physical safety and level playing field that ostensibly already exists for cisgender women and girls in these realms. GCFs and conservatives harness the social and political momentum that developed during controversy over bathrooms to eliminate trans girls and trans women from competing in women’s sports. In the next section, I explore in more detail the terrain upon which GCFs build their opposition to transfeminine people in women’s sports.

• GCF and Sports

While GCF has made a name for itself among a range of organizations focused on the rights of cisgender women to the exclusion of trans women, the realm of sports is a particularly fertile ground in which trans-exclusionary ideology has gained traction. Scholarly attention has increasingly focused on sports governing bodies, media coverage, and policies that severely constrict, if not eliminate entirely, eligibility for trans and intersex women and girls ( Jones & Travers 2023 ; Karkazis & Jordan-Young, 2018 ). Specifically, feminist scholars trace how trans-exclusionary policies in the name of “protecting women’s sports” ( Posbergh, 2022 ) serve to uphold not only cisgender supremacy ( Sharrow, 2021 ) but also White supremacy ( Fischer, 2023 ). Protectionist arguments are driven by tired, yet effective, tropes of racialized trans women, who prey on White girls and women in gender-segregated spaces ( Bettcher, 2007 ). For example, such was the case when Fallon Fox, a black mixed-martial arts fighter who encountered an onslaught of racism and cissexism as the first openly trans woman in women’s professional mixed-martial arts ( McClearen, 2015 ).

The past decade has seen increasing mobilization against trans women in women’s sports, specifically with the formation of several GCF groups that focus exclusively on sports. SWS, for example, was founded by amateur powerlifter Beth Stelzer in 2019 and is a nonpartisan “coalition that seeks to preserve biology-based eligibility standards for participation in female sports” ( Save Women’s Sports, n.d.-a ). Stelzer started SWS after USA Powerlifting (USAPL) banned JayCee Cooper and other trans powerlifters from competing in USAPL-sanctioned events, which subsequently led to a “time out” protest by Cooper, trans allies, and other trans powerlifters who opposed the ban.

Compared with GCF sites geared toward multi-issue consciousness-raising, SWS offers multiple opportunities to get involved in the movement against trans women in sports while also allowing the viewer to “review the science” and read up on the latest news articles. This action-oriented method permeates almost every location on the website. On its home page, three links provide just this: sandwiched between a link to review the science and read the “newest articles,” the viewer’s gaze centers on the middle tab, titled “Save Women’s Sports,” with a link that implores visitors to “write letters, make calls, and sign petitions.” Shortly after Governor Little of Idaho signed HB 500, which stipulates sex and gender as that which is assigned at birth, the SWS homepage summoned its viewers in giant black and white letters to “Call Gov. Brad Little at 208-334-2100 and thank him for signing HB 500!” Alongside the “Home” and “About Us” tabs at the top of the page, the viewer can click on “Males in Women’s Sport,” which leads to four subtabs. The first subtab, titled, “Males Playing as Females,” gives an alphabetical list of 59 trans women athletes followed by an alphabetized list of sports that these women play. Under each sport, the viewer sees a photo of the athlete along with a caption that deadnames and/or misgenders them. When I interviewed a trans cyclist who is well known for her athletic achievements and trans sports activist work, she pointed out that sites such as SWS tend to use the most “unflattering” photos of athletes in order to emphasize a lack of femininity, a move that visually makes the argument that someone who “looks” like a man should not play women’s sports.

Another sport-focused anti-trans group, which Madeleine Pape pinpoints as distinctly biofeminist, is Fair Play for Women (FPW). Based in the United Kingdom and founded in 2018 by Dr. Nicola Williams ( Pape, 2022 , p. 98), the campaign started as an informal blogging site intended exclusively to discuss the purported effects of trans affirming policies on (cisgender) women and girls in sports. A particular focus of this site was the Gender Recognition Act, which allows trans people to acquire documentation that legally recognizes their sex and gender identity. Extending beyond its initial parameters as an awareness campaign, FPW is now composed of “experts in science and law” with whom policy-makers can consult in order to “facilitate the much-needed factual discussion about the importance of sex-based policies for women and to provide policy makers with the guidance they need for evidence-based policy making that is fair for all” ( FPW, n.d. ). Whereas SWS is a grassroots and volunteer-based organization that spreads awareness through publicizing individual women’s and girls’ experience, FPW takes more of a structural approach that seeks to amend and institute policies that exclude trans girls and trans women from sport.

• The Rhetorics of GCF: Nonpartisanship, Biofeminism, and Trans Tolerance

SWS and FPW double down on what Madeleine Pape ( 2022 ) calls “biofeminism,” or a “variety of feminist mobilization that appeals to science in seeking to root women’s rights and gender equity in a binary, biological model of sex difference” (pp. 96–97). While all the GCF organizations that I have outlined employ a certain degree of biofeminist opposition to trans women in gender-segregating spaces, groups that focus exclusively on women’s sports rely heavily on scientific language and claims of expertise to reinforce a binary model of sex difference. Phrases such as “biological sex” and “immutable physiological sex differences” function to assert not only the veracity but the urgency to restrict women’s and girls’ sports to those assigned female at birth. As scholars in feminist Science and Technology Studies have long argued, packaging social subscriptions to gender normativity in the language of biological and other natural sciences yields an authoritative claim to legitimacy ( Haraway, 1988 ; Subramaniam & Willey, 2017 ). But as Pape rightly points out, the discursive work of biofeminism does not rely only on the scientific claims themselves, but uses these claims in conjunction with the expectation that these claims will deeply resonate with a cis audience, specifically as they are applied to cis women’s oppression.

In the following sections, I build on Pape’s concept of biofeminism to develop a more precise analysis of GCF that moves beyond a trans-exclusionary versus trans-inclusive framework. To accomplish this, I first provide excerpts from websites of three GCF organizations that encapsulate three mutually enabling rhetorical strategies that exemplify how GCF engages with trans women in sports more broadly. These strategies, 1) science and biology (biofeminism); 2) non- or bi-partisanship; and 3) a degree of what I call  “trans tolerance.” All three strategies enhance each other to craft a benevolent facade. This purported benevolence then acts as a guard against accusations that GCF adherents are anti-trans or evangelizing, thus framing their stance as a necessary and objective intervention based on the “facts” that they must take on behalf of women and girls due to the “vulnerability” of people assigned female at birth.

Returning to the Montana hearing, biofeminist approaches to trans tolerance offer at least a partial answer to the question of why efforts to add gender identity to an existing law were successfully opposed by way of citing a famous tennis player. Although Navratilova had been vocal about her opposition to trans women in sports and was therefore not a particularly random choice by Milanovich her status as an athlete was strategically useful in that sport operates as the focal point that lawmakers, gender critical groups, and even “ordinary” people turn to as the “obvious” arena that proves—once and for all—the immutable differences between men and women. This assumption is deemed so obvious as to be an almost universal source of common sense. Even Martina Navratilova, a lesbian member of the LGBT sports community who was “happy to address a transgender woman in whatever form she prefers” still said she “would not be happy to compete with her” on the basis that “it would not be fair.” Her expertise in sports, authenticated by her illustrious professional tennis career, certifies her claim that trans women playing with/against cis women is unfair. As a lesbian, she accepts transgender people—even “happy to address a transgender woman in whatever form she prefers”—except when it comes to playing women’s sports. In fact, it was Navratilova’s emphatic and patronizing attempt to draw this proverbial line that served to highlight her ostensible tolerance of trans women outside of sports, and to further validate her claims that, despite her tolerance, trans women have no place in women’s sports. In other words, Navratilova’s tolerance of trans women in general does not negate her opposition to trans women in women’s sports, but rather enhances it. This enhancement occurs because it rhetorically shows that her opposition to trans women playing women’s sports is not driven by a blanket opposition to all trans people (transphobia), but a position rooted in ideas about gender protection/equality within sports, and how this impacts fairness.

We support trans and non-conforming athletes, as we do all athletes, in their pursuit of excellence both in and out of sport. We support utilizing an open/men’s division to meet the needs of trans and non-conforming athletes seeking fair competition in sport. We support additional divisions only if they do not dilute opportunities, awards, recognition, prize money, or funding for female athletes. For example, a third category (that would typically be won by males) allows for 2/3 of champions to be male athletes and would increase discrimination against female athletes. ( ICONS General Petition, n.d. )

The juxtaposition between the first two statements suggests that “support” for trans and (gender) nonconforming athletes—a gender neutral term—includes grouping them in the “open/men’s” division. In other words, trans, gender nonconforming, nonbinary, and any other noncisgender athletes would essentially be placed in a division that is otherwise the only division in which cis men can participate. The exception to this of course is a third category, which they then debunk because it would discriminate against folks assigned female at birth. Nowhere else in the petition, nor on their website, does ICONS elaborate on what constitutes their stated “support for trans and [gender] non-conforming athletes.”

The purpose of sport categories is to exclude. The purpose of the women’s sports category is to exclude men. We resist calls for a reversal of this common sense policy, which would allow inclusion of male athletes into the female sport category. Gender ideology–akin to a religion–holds that people’s belief that they are male or female or neither (“nonbinary”) or both (“gender fluid”) should take precedence over biological facts. Adherents believe a transgender status should grant those people access to girls and women’s sports and other sex-segregated spaces . . . .We encourage equitable and inclusive accommodations for males who identify as women; gender-fluid athletes; and nonbinary athletes, so long as those accommodations do not diminish females’ sport opportunities or financial rewards, nor females’ right to fair, safe, sex-separated sports experiences . . . . We mean no disrespect to transgender people who prefer different terms. Our goal is to be clear: Sex is immutable. Sex is not fluid. Males cannot transform into females. Women are adult human females. These definitions have meaning and consequences in women’s sports, especially as they pertain to eligibility rules that allow or disallow certain people into women’s sports. ( WSPWG, n.d.-b , original emphasis)

The balance struck in the WSPWG statement allows the group to claim support for trans people, noting that members “encourage equitable and inclusive accommodations for males who identify as women; gender-fluid athletes; and nonbinary athletes” and that they “mean no disrespect to transgender people who prefer different terms.” But by referring to identities as “preferences” and “terms,” the WSPWG delegitimates trans identities in the same breath. In fact, they begin their statement by situating their logic in direct opposition to “gender ideology,” characterized as anti-scientific by describing it as being “akin to a religion,” and maintaining “that people’s belief [emphasis added] that they are male or female or neither (‘nonbinary’) or both (‘gender fluid’) should take precedence over biological facts [emphasis added].” Fractured from biological facts, trans people’s mere beliefs collapse against WSPWG’s scientific objectivity and therefore bias-free position.

Women have earned the right to our own sports category, based on the science of sex, biology, facts, rather than bigotry. The biological differences between males and females has [ sic ] always been the justification for the formal sex-segregation in sport; indeed, it is the only legal justification to permit official sex-segregation. Women are not weak or weakened males. As Title IX and the rise of women in sports has taught us, “different” does not mean “less than.” Clarifying eligibility rules does not mean that transgender athletes should be excluded from sports. They must be made to feel safe and comfortable competing in their sex category. ( Champion Women and the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group, 2023 )

As with many of the GCF groups that I highlighted earlier, these newly formed sports-focused feminist organizations explicitly state that they are non- or bi-partisan. While different in meaning, the former conveying no allegiance to a political party and the latter a collaboration between two otherwise opposing ones, the end purpose is the same: to cast their members as neutral advocates for (cis)women’s sports outside of the political realm. This lays the groundwork to then appeal to scientific facts, backed by several experts they have recruited, and keep the issue of trans women in women sports ostensibly outside of politics.

All three organizations deploy biofeminist arguments that advance biological facts (WSPWG) and restrict women’s sports to those “born female” (ICONS). They enlist a range of experts to substantiate the “truth” behind biological sex, namely that it is unequivocally binary and unable to be changed because of how a person chooses to identify. At their 2022 kickoff conference, for example, ICONS hosted a large conference with several high-profile attendees and notable GCFs: Donna deVarona, former Olympic swimmer; Dr. Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist and lecturer at Harvard University; Dr. Emma Hilton, a developmental biologist and founder of Sex Matters; Dr. Ross Tucker, an exercise physiologist and science consultant for World Rugby; and Martina Navratilova. Organized events like these are common, and as Pape’s extensive research on GCF groups suggests, these large gatherings showcase a specific kind of scientific expertise, one that appears to be more invested in repeatedly asserting its scientific authority rather than allowing the findings from any of the proclaimed rigorous studies to speak for themselves.

In all three excerpts, tolerance for trans and nonbinary athletes is expressed through phrases such as “we support,” “equitable and inclusive accommodations,” “we mean no disrespect,” and “must be made to feel safe and comfortable.” ICONS’ support for trans and nonbinary athletes even extends beyond their athletic endeavors. On their homepage, WSPWG’s subheading reads “affirming girls and women’s sport while including transgender athletes.” My pinpointing of “trans tolerance” as a rhetorical strategy is not an expression of approval nor does it warrant celebration. In these excerpts and elsewhere on these groups’ websites, seemingly inclusive language and lukewarm support for trans people occurs at the very moment that “female” is rendered exclusionary to them. To be clear, my goal is to identify how GCF can simultaneously oppose trans women in women’s sports while supporting “equitable” and “inclusive” accommodations for trans and nonbinary athletes. Moreover, identifying trans tolerance does not erase the more overt, violent forms of trans phobia that I mentioned earlier. In fact, identifying trans tolerance is crucial because anti-trans sentiment is not expressed in its obvious form.

• Conclusions

In this article, I have described the general landscape GCF with particular attention to GCFs use of sports to oppose anti-discrimination protections for trans people. I have argued it is not only that sports are leveraged to oppose anti-discrimination protections for trans people, but also how sports are leveraged, which makes the intersection between sports and GCF a particularly evocative and important cite of analysis for activists and scholars alike. To illustrate how sports is used as “proof” of gender immutability by subscribers to GCF, I analyzed public statements on trans athletes’ participation in sports from various nonprofit organizations that have used the logics of GCF to shape trans sports legislation and policies of sports governing bodies. I focused specifically on patterns of GCF advocacy work within these organizations and how they deployed three rhetorical frames: (a) repetitive circulation of scientific facts, (b) a declaration of nonpartisanship, and (c) a sentiment of what I call “trans tolerance,” or support for trans and nonbinary athletes through fleeting gestures imbued with mainstream liberal terminology. It is this last frame that is particularly strategic and worthy of further scrutiny.

Expressions of trans tolerance is a product of how GCF has consistently refined its argument against trans women playing women’s sports in the last decade in an effort to tactically participate in the conversation. Initially, their advocacy efforts materialized through overt and explicit transphobia through words and images that demonstrated a blanket opposition to trans women—but trans women in women’s sports in particular. As the debate has unfolded in the public sphere, GCF rhetoric has shifted to a focus on the irreversible effects of “male puberty” exposure, a biofeminist tactic that allowed scientific and medical experts to substantiate their claims.

While the support of cissexist expertise on gender continues, GCF’s advancement of cissexist arguments, couched in the language of mainstream liberal trans politics, represents a particular kind of discursive turn within the debate as a whole. This is what allows them to assert that they “support trans and non-conforming athletes, as we do all athletes, in their pursuit of excellence both in and out of sport” while simultaneously arguing for the exclusion of trans women from women’s sports. As I have shown, GCF advocates have effectively depicted themselves as being both supportive of and dismissive toward trans people, using sports as a strategic entry point—simultaneously advocating for trans athletes while being exclusionary toward them under the guise of scientific objectivity. As gender studies scholars within and outside of sports studies have identified political projects since the Reagan era that use benevolent language toward violent ends. It is for this reason that activists, scholars, and others working toward gender justice through sport must also sharpen our analysis of these arguments in a way that moves beyond a “pro-trans versus anti-trans framework.”

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