Patricia Cain's Feminist Theory

Improved Essays
Patricia Cain critiques the history/ development of feminist theory. Cain explores the lack of lesbian experiences in many different feminist legal scholarships and how it can skew the perception of a women’s reality. Feminist methods come from women listening to other women. Cain describes that as being the best way to understand other women’s experiences is by it being listened to by women’s themselves. But a limitation to that is the lack of different experiences being told and taken into consideration, more notably lesbian experiences. Cain talks about the exclusion of lesbian experiences by analyzing the three feminist legal scholarship stage. Sometimes once out as lesbian, their own feminist sisterhood disowned during the first stages.

Related Documents

  • Great Essays

    Anne Spencer and Modern Feminism Anne Spencer was a lot of things; a poet, a teacher, a daughter, a wife, an artist, a scholar, a mother, a black activist, and she was recently recognized as a feminist. She is known today for the extremely modern ideologies that she believed in and communicated in her works. The feminist messages expressed by Anne Spencer and the modern feminists of today showcase a multitude of similarities; however the audiences and the methods used to share those ideals are vastly different. The Message…

    • 1516 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    This source shows Ruth Mountaingrove’s early motivation for starting a lesbian separatist community later in her life, important in understanding the goals and ideals of the lesbian separatist community as…

    • 852 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    This evidence will make the ways in which Mab Segrest blurs the lines of being an ally to people of a certain identity with actually having that identity for oneself. In addition to this, readings from other authors will show evidence displaying the ways in which this thinking proves to be problematic (Garza, 2). To begin, early on in her autobiography, Mab Segrest establishes herself as a lesbian, and she cites this as her entry point into activism, furthermore, after getting active in the battle for gay rights she moves into the fight against racist hate crimes (Segrest, 47). In the chapter “Coming Out” Segrest writes, “I was doing work on racism and anti-semitism because it was the right thing to do, and once I laid out the case about homophobia, the people I was working with would do the same for me and mine.” (Segrest, 49)…

    • 1753 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    But the women’s liberation went farther than sexuality. In the Sisterhood Is Powerful women wrote essays, manifestos and personal accounts from events in their lives. Each document touched different topics, ranging from violence against women to inequalities in the law, church, workplaces, and family…

    • 732 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    While women involved in the black and non-white feminism movement were concerned with their race, mainstream feminism never had to cross that barrier. In the identities of the women the groups differed. The difference in their goals are apparent when works featured in Nancy MacLean’s The American Women’s Movement, 1945-2000, a chapter by Michelle Wallace from Gloria T. Hull’s All the Women Are White, All the Men Are Black, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women 's Studies, and Kimberle Crenshaw’s…

    • 1271 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Betty Friedan, a Feminist Leader Betty Friedan was a women’s rights activist and author in the 20th century. One of her most influential books was The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963. The Feminine Mystique, and Friedan’s other books, drew national attention to the unhappiness of women with their traditional role in society. Betty Friedan changed the American way of life by reviving the feminist movement through writing books and founding organizations which still aid women today. Betty Friedan contributed to society by writing books and helping to found organizations, which brought back feminism.…

    • 757 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Although sexual harassment still remains to be a problem in Australia, The Female Eunuch and Reclaim the Night are examples that greatly influence feminist activists today and will continue to influence feminists for many years to…

    • 1042 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Her “queer impulse,” just like her deafness, is something she had been stifling since she was a young child, yet, even in the face of her sexual experiences, she continually pushes her insistent belief that “lesbianism … was [simply] a passing thing” (90-133). In light of her consecutive breakdowns mid-text, this is ultimately deemed false. “I was bound to come undone,” Galloway writes, referring to both the strain of her hearing guise, as well as her “scarily pent-up sexuality” (103). She notes the crux of her struggles as being in her sophomore year of university, having to spend “three days in the university clinic, crying like a baby” after bursting out into tears during a biology exam for what seemed to be no explicit reason (103). It was at this specific point in time that Galloway admits she gave up one portion of her act.…

    • 1196 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Lesbians on a daily gets judged for who they are and expressing themselves, in reality they are just the same as everyone else. This section is in contrast to section 7 “The Historian as Curanda [Healer] because the author seeks to restore traumatized people to the history that has been taken away from them by colonizing power. Unlike section 6 their history on what they believed in was never taken away from them, but only…

    • 501 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Due to the negative connotation concerning these terms, non-heterosexual communities are rejected through preconceived notions of difference. Stereotypical assumptions construct a distinction between heterosexual and non-heterosexual behavior. “Rather than identify as a lesbian, [Djuna Barnes] preferred to say that she ‘just loved Thelma.’ Gertrude Stein reputedly made similar claims” (Nelson, 12). Nelson mentions how Barnes as well as Stein would rather express their love than categorize it.…

    • 885 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    La Guera Summary

    • 1017 Words
    • 5 Pages

    As for this week’s reading assignments, I was introduced to two pieces of readings: Judith Lorber’s “Night to His Day,” and Cherrie Moraga’s “La Guera.” Having read and thinking about the issues of the readings, I was aware of the process that the society has used to construct gender over the years (in “Night to His Day”) and how mistreatment, like racial discrimination or gender inequality, is involved in the construction of gender (in “La Guera”). Let’s talk about Lorber’s article. As I read, I noticed what the author indicates: “For individuals, gender means sameness,” and “for society, gender means difference;” I believed that it was true. From my perspective, each individual in this society complies with his [or her] group’s expectations…

    • 1017 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    What every lecture, reading, and website taught me, I hope to take with me in my everyday life beyond college. When I walked into class the first day, I considered myself to be a well informed individual, I was wrong. My sense of Women’s and Gender Studies was that it focused solely on feminism, my only grasp on feminism was ‘equal rights for men and women’. Yes that is sort of true, but I was only skimming the surface. Until now, as I write this essay, I was not able to admit that my view on social justice was narrow.…

    • 1097 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    The moral philosophy of feminism is a big part of today's world socially. Women feel that they are not treated the same as men on a social level considering that men do not receive the same consequences that women do when they do not accept their traditional gender role. In “Feminist Criticism” an article by Lois Tyson from 2006, Tyson talks about what traditional gender roles are in today's society. She compares the ways in which men and women are seen in society and how women can be seen as “bad girls” meaning they don't accept their gender role. The traditional roles are seen as girls are emotional and weak while men are strong and rational.…

    • 1889 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Great Essays

    Sociologists need theory. Theory is the building block in our area of study. Theory gives us particular ways of looking at the world. Theory gives us the language to describe, explain, and critique our social world. Overall, theory helps us as sociologist with conceptualizing our research and developing our own argument or framework.…

    • 1713 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    This chapter is going to shed light on two distinctive feminist standpoint theorists: Dorothy E. Smith and Patricia Hill Collins. Among other feminist standpoint theorists, the feminist critiques of these two women stand out for me as applicable when analyzing Umm Zakiyyah's trilogy If I Should Speak. The mutuality Smith and Collins have is that they have sought a sociology which takes women's experience as a vantage point where they could see the full picture of society. They are empiricists who experienced marginalization in the patriarchal or racist society whether as housewives or professional and academic women, and of course for Collins as an African-American woman.…

    • 822 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays