Feminism

Feminism is a big tent, but most (maybe all?) feminists would agree that "it is the radical notion that women are people".

For this site, let's start with anything relating to

• gender relations
• sex roles
• sexual & reproductive biology
• women's history
• feminist perspectives & analyses

"Feminism" might better be described as "feminisms", and it would include a number of different trends, identities, politics, and historical tendencies:

• First Wave Feminism
• Second Wave Feminism
• Third Wave Feminism
• Difference Feminism
• Radical Feminism
• Power Feminism

The WisCon version (at http://www.wiscon.info/faq.php) is also applicable:

We define "feminist" broadly to include race and class issues, gay/bisexual/lesbian/transgender issues, 
and anything else that touches on strong women (authors, artists, readers, characters) 
in science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

At the FSFwiki, we are also concerned with the ways in which gender operates with or in relation to other establishments of hierarchy and privilege/oppression based on, for instance, race & ethnicity, nationality, wealth & class, language, education, marital status, sexual preference/orientation/behavior, age, and other physical attributes such as dis/ability, size, "beauty", etc.

Some hyphenated-feminisms are defined in order to differentiate adherents from other categories of feminist. For instance, "difference feminism" and "equality feminism". Some times, these categories of feminism may not be self-identified, but may in fact by labels assigned by detractors or critics. For instance, so-called "victim feminism", which allegedly focuses too much or solely on the ways in which women are victimized by men or sexism. Such labels can potentially be helpful in identifying threads or strains within some feminist analysis, including over-simplifications within analysis. However, such labels can sometimes be simply harmful, a way of setting up a "straw-feminist" to argue with. One potentially constructive approach is to take a label which has been created (as "victim feminism" was created by anti-feminists) and set up an alternative (such as "power feminism"). The caution would be to not allow anti-feminists to delegitimize entire analyses simply by creating a negative-sounding label; however, to the extent that there is useful analylsis in the label (even if intended to delegitimize feminist analysis), reconfiguring the language with a useful new label may be a way to recapture and frame the debate.

Bibliography

Foundational Works of Feminist Theory

• "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" by Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)
• Seneca Falls Declaration (1848)
• "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf (1929)
• The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963)

Introductions & Overviews & Feminism 101 Collections

• Feminisms, ed. Warhol & Price Herndel