Watch out for literary critics. They can get feisty.
We've already mentioned that feminist theory involves a lot of internal debates, and they aren't always friendly. But isn't the real enemy patriarchy, you ask? Good for you, quick study! Still, there're tons of arguments to bite into, so let's take a look at some of the toothiest issues.
Against Essentialism
Remember way back when we defined essentialism and said that essentialist views of women can be dangerous because they assume that they all experience things like life, love, oppression, and high heels in pretty much the same ways?
Yup, essentialism is an issue that has haunted feminist theory for decades, and although it has some practical uses like getting everyone together for the parade on the right day, it can also come with some pretty nasty territory.
One of the nastiest bits of territory that comes with essentialist thinking is its habit of sweeping important differences under the rug. If your feminist movement is all about celebrating sisterhood and solidarity and fighting the good fight against menfolk, what happens to the feminists who aren't willing to give up their ties to male peers? Do they still count as feminists, or does it all depend on who's doing the counting?
This issue got explosive in the 1970s and '80s, when it came to be pretty clear that mainstream feminist movements were assuming that the experiences of white, middle-class, and upper-middle-class women were the definitive issues for women. Which they weren't.
That's why black feminists like the members of The Combahee River Collective argued that white women's calls for sisterhood and separatism weren't going to work for them. Since the Combahee women's unique experiences of oppression were based on racism as well as sexism, they knew they needed to work with men against racism, dealing with the problem of sexism while they were at it.
Similarly, postcolonial feminists like Chandra Talpade Mohanty pointed out that Western feminists had gotten into the really bad habit of talking about "Third World" women as if they had no voices or political agency of their own. However well-intentioned they might have been, educated women in the West were acting like the guardians and interpreters of women's experiences and lives everywhere.
And that was an approach that was just as privileged, and just as oppressive, as the exploitative patriarchy they were trying to fight.
When it comes down to it, the problem with essentialism isn't just that it assumes that everyone's experience is more or less the same: at the heart of it is the fact that only the most powerful get to decide whose experience speaks for all. This is why you'll sometimes see liberal, or "mainstream," feminism being referred to as "hegemonic feminism"—something that doesn't really help with the fight against racism and other forms of oppression. The word "hegemony" refers to deeply engrained structural power: patriarchy is hegemonic, and so is white supremacy.
When feminism doesn't recognize the contributions of women of color, and when it assumes that Western women ought to speak for all the disenfranchised women worldwide, we've got some problems on our hands.
The Sex Wars
Ah, the Sex Wars. These were actually a lot less fun than they sound. And they sure didn't take place in a galaxy far, far away.
Remember when we defined Adrienne Rich's term compulsory heterosexuality? Rich came up with the phrase at a time when feminist politics in North America and the UK were being rocked by majorly divisive issues like sexual preference, pornography, kink, butch/femme relationships, fetishes, sexual entertainment, sex work, and so on. Whew!
Although it's a bit simplistic to reduce these debates to two clear-cut sides, it's useful to think of the major players as dividing into roughly two teams: the "anti-pornography" feminists, and the "pro-sex" feminists.
Basically, the fights broke down like this. Many feminists looked around and saw connections in the kinds of oppression women face in patriarchal cultures. Products like pornography, sexual entertainment, and sex work—products that are for sale—were seen as being essentially exploitative. And, by the same token, intimate relationships between women and men were seen as being exploitative in the same ways.
As the anti-pornographers saw it, the sex industry wasn't just teaching men to be turned on by degrading women, it was also teaching women to get turned on by being degraded. Adrienne Rich is a pretty good example of this category, and her article called "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1980) makes a pretty slamming argument about how the way sex is portrayed and understood in society doesn't just make things tough for lesbians—it creates a culture where women are used to being treated in a bad way and liking it. Hence the queasiness around sex.
For their part, pro-sexers like Gayle Rubin—who wrote her own doozy of an essay titled "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality" (1984)—argued that it was dangerous for feminists to say sex was something inherently bad. Doing that was basically equivalent to getting into bed (so to speak) with right-wing politicians who'd like nothing better than the freedom to police citizens' sexualities.
This brand of feminist argued that not every form of pornography, sexual entertainment, or sex work could be painted with the same brush, and that just because a woman liked getting tied up in the bedroom, that didn't make her oppressed.
So where does sex belong today? Well, most feminists might say, probably in the bedroom. Or the kitchen, if you're into that. Some would say you can take it to the street or use a handcuff. The issue of whether heterosexual sex is inherently oppressive, though, is a bit passé—more important to today's debates are issues like consent, comfort between partners, and how sex is represented in a way that doesn't make anyone look like they're naturally the inferior participant.
Against Postmodernism and Poststructuralism
While feminist scholars were making huge headway into university curricula, other theoretical trends were sweeping the nation, too, even if they didn't use a Miss America pageant to do it. Movements like deconstruction and poststructuralism were often thought of as being part and parcel of "postmodern" theory, and together they raised a lot of questions about the nature of personal identity and agency.
Early in her career, gender theorist extraordinaire Judith Butler became famous for putting deconstructive and poststructuralist methods to feminist use—for example, by questioning the binary concepts that made up the idea of "man vs. woman" in the first place. But not everyone agreed that feminism and postmodernism should mix.
In 1990, a symposium in Philadelphia brought Butler together with a fellow feminist scholar, Seyla Benhabib, who argued that the relationship between feminism and postmodern theory couldn't be anything more than an "uneasy alliance."
Benhabib was particularly concerned about postmodern celebrations of the "death" of man: in other words, the view that our personal identities are so deeply shaped by language and society that they're barely "ours" at all. Whereas Butler argued that postmodern theory is necessary for anti-essentialist thinking, Benhabib said that postmodern theorists risk doing away with "accountability," self-reflection, and individual agency. In other words, they risk making activist politics impossible.
Similar critiques of postmodern theory were made by the Caribbean-American scholar Barbara Christian, who argued that movements like deconstruction, poststructuralism, and French feminism were so full of jargon that only readers with highly specialized training would be able to understand them at all. In her 1988 essay "The Race for Theory, Christian argued that the labyrinthine, heady language of postmodernism would only benefit the same academic élite that had been in power for decades.
Although bell hooks later contradicted Christian's point by arguing that postmodern theory could be useful for African-American politics, Christian's warnings, like Benhabib's, are well worth keeping in mind.
Sure, their names aren't as trendy in the feminist canon as Butler or hooks, but hey, if we've learned anything from feminist theory, it's that things like "trendy" and "the canon" ought to be treated like they're a ticking bomb.