Читать книгу Companion to Feminist Studies - Группа авторов - Страница 53

As a cornerstone of patriarchy and also a manifestation of it, gender is viewed by radical feminists as socially constructed and used to create, and maintain, a sex‐class, something Jaggar discusses:

Instead of appearing as an alterable feature of our social organization, gender constitutes the unquestioned framework in terms of which we perceive and interpret the world. Gender constitutes the spectacles whose influence on our vision goes unnoticed until they are removed. Radical feminism seeks to remove the spectacles.

(Jaggar 1983, p. 85)

For radical feminists, the existence of gender means that women are subordinated based on factors including their biology and, notably, their fertility (Firestone 1970; Rich 1976; Daly 1978). While biology might be relatively fixed, in practice, the invented and performed categories of masculinity and femininity are viewed as social and have been assigned deficits and strengths, something Sheila Jeffreys critiques in Gender Hurts:

[Gender] is the foundation of the political system of male domination. “Gender” in traditional patriarchal thinking, ascribes skirts, high heels and a love of unpaid domestic labour to those with female biology, and comfortable clothing, enterprise and initiative to those with male biology.

(Jeffreys 2014, pp. 1–2)

Saulnier also discusses these ideas, observing that radical feminists have viewed “Women's personalities and their sexuality … as having been constructed to meet men's needs, rather than women's … Rigid sex‐role prescriptions not only distort people, but they also lead to sex‐based oppression” (Saulnier 1996, p. 333).

Some of the earliest radical feminist activism centered on campaigns against gender: the late 1960s Miss America Pageant protests for example, saw radical feminists publicly trashing objects associated with femininity – and which served as metonyms for subordination – including bras and fashion magazines.

A variety of means to abolish gender have been advocated by radical feminists. Millett (1970) for example, pioneered the term “unisex” to advocate for a kind of androgyny or genderlessness. More recently, scholars like Jeffreys have argued that feminizing beauty practices such as makeup and high heels remain pivotal to the maintenance of women's subordination (Jeffreys 2005).