In the early 1980s law became subject to a variety of new and influential critiques. The foremost being the culmination of feminism. The vindications of women’s rights lead to a prominent movements, whereby, contextualisation of domestic violence, rape, sexual objectification, oppression, sexual discrimination, marriage and sexual marginalisation became scrutinized against the social normality, and new discourses of investigation, known as feminist scholarship, appeared to the general populace.
Key Disciplines:
Liberal feminism
- Contrasts the inequality of sexes and the ideology of equality.
Difference Feminism
- Contrasts the differences between male and female roles and how women are under-appreciated within society.
Radical Feminism
- Develops ideas to overcome patriarchy and analyse the notion of phallocentric domination.
Queer Theory
- Although not directly feminism queer theory demonstrates the inequality of sexual orientation and gives a voice to those outside contemporary feminism.
Postmodern Femisism
- Contrasts gender structure which inevitably mitigate against gender equality.
The objective of feminism is to demonstrate the disproportionate treatment of women in society. It epitomizes the equality that women have been denied, and envelops a voice of freedom; regardless of race, sexuality, or class, and that, through the removal of oppressive male-dominated patriarchal societies, holistically, the entirety of humanity benefits. Gender is a social construct based upon male dominance and the subordination of women. It develops through the marginalisation of sex, and is not a fixed biological characteristic, but, rather, a dynamic and evolutionary structure that develops as a response to various environmental factors. Rather than purely looking at the public and private dichotomy as independent, liberalism recognises the public-private divide, abstaining from interference in familial and domestic life. As a result, governmental intervention is minimal within the private sphere, which inadequately protects civil autonomy and rights. This view was originally adopted from John Stuart Mill’s corollary of the importance of societal divide. By asserting that the divide between legitimate and illegitimate interventions in the rights of individuals rests upon the competing interests of social cohesion and individual autonomy, police have been ‘powerless’ to control the rise of violence subjected to women. So, although intervention is possible in the outer-sphere of society, domestic violence is harboured within the home and leads to the exploitation of women as a commodifiable entity, or utility, of man.
Liberal feminism is a political framework which can be applied to reveal the unequal treatment of men and women. Rather than treated as rational, autonomous individual, sexuality becomes the point of marginalisation, as male standard and social normality against which women are defined. Its key attributes underline the equality given amongst men, education, work, and voting rights and becomes reactionary to difficulties facilitated against women. Postmodern feminism purports to detract from previous convoluted theories to give a succinct essence of what direct feminism is. Language is essential to meaning, and although meaning is conveyed as a constructed medium, its abstraction leads to parallel dichotomy, whereby, ‘Gender is a violent hierarchy, the dominant term of which, masculinity, oppressed the subordinate term, femininity’ (Davies). But, rather than looking to enact laws directly to sex, the endorsement of fairer existing laws which maximise equality could be assumed to neither disproportion justice to one sex.
Radical Feminism proposes that oppression is a direct result of limited recognition of women’s issues and predominantly patriarchal frameworks. Mackinnon characterised her ‘dominance theory’ which purported to criticise liberal and Marxist feminism for disregarding the exploitation of women. This similar exploitation, of class, known as antagonism, envisaged by Marx, results in ‘labour’ or ‘sex’ discrimination, dissembling individual possibility and viability to women; without the possibility to interrupt the disproportionate social dogma of feminism as a critique lacking practicability. It is argued that since the system itself is oppressing women it is not possible to modify existing social structures so as to accommodate women. This is due to the interlinked structures as the primary sources of continuing subordination. It is demonstrated within society in as direct and indirect discrimination: from school education through to legal doctrines. It is, thereby, possible to render the systematic oppression of women as a guise inescapable of resurrection due to the patriarchal pyramids. Considered the ‘Grand Theory’, it subordinates men, as it contends to destroy all male jurisprudence on the premise it is merely an extension of male superiority, and therefore conjectures nothing hitherto than the yardstick of maleness.