Title: Gender, Conflict and Conflict Resolution
Headings: Gender, Conflict and Conflict Resolution
Gender, Conflict and Conflict Resolution
Biography

Content: By focusing on language, symbols, alternative discourses, and meaning, post-modern feminism studies how social power is exercised and how social relations of gender, class and race can be transformed. This doesn't rule out the specificity of women's experiences, and their differences from men, since under patriarchy women have differential access to the discursive field. At the societal level, patriarchy is characterized by historic discrimination and injustice reproduced in institutions and ideologies. Assumptions about male superiority pervade our thought processes. The life experiences on which the claims of the dominant ideologies have been founded have been the experiences of men, not women. Patriarchy, like other dictatorships, controls reality. Women and men are socialized within rigid gender expectations. Institutions such as the church, the family, and the law reproduce these biases in norms, rules and laws. Women have historically been subjugated politically, economically and culturally. This institutional system of oppression and injustice directly creates disputes, sustains and escalates other conflicts and invades all other human interactions.