## 1. Defining power



In social and political theory, power is often regarded as an
essentially contested concept (see Lukes 1974 and 2005, and Connolly
1983). Although this claim is itself contested (see Haugaard 2010 and
2020, 4-10; Morriss 2002, 199-206 and Wartenberg 1990,
12-17), there is no doubt that the literature on power is marked
by deep, widespread, and seemingly intractable disagreements over how
the term should be understood.



One such disagreement pits those who define power as getting someone
else to do what you want them to do, that is, as an exercise of
power-over others, against those who define it as an ability or a
capacity to act, that is, as a power-to do something. The classic
formulation of the former definition is offered by Max Weber, who
defines power as "the probability that one actor within a social
relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite
resistance..." (1978, 53). Similarly, Robert Dahl offers
what he calls an "intuitive idea of power" according to
which "A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do
something that B would not otherwise do" (1957, 202-03).
Dahl's discussion of power sparked a vigorous debate that
continued until the mid-1970s, but even his sharpest critics seemed to
concede his definition of power as an exercise of power-over others
(see Bachrach and Baratz 1962 and Lukes 1974). As Steven Lukes notes,
Dahl's one-dimensional view of power, Bachrach and
Baratz's two-dimensional view, and his own three-dimensional
view are all variations of "the same underlying conception of
power, according to which A exercises power over B when A affects B in
a manner contrary to B's interests" (1974, 30). Similarly,
but from a very different theoretical background, Michel
Foucault's highly influential analysis implicitly presupposes
that power is a kind of power-over; and he puts it, "if we speak
of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we
suppose that certain persons exercise power over others" (1983,
217). Notice that there are two salient features of this definition of
power: power is understood in terms of power-over relations, and it is
defined in terms of its actual exercise.



Classic articulations of power understood as power-to have been
offered by Thomas Hobbes - power is a person's
"present means...to obtain some future apparent Good"
(Hobbes 1985 (1641), 150) - and Hannah Arendt - power is
"the human ability not just to act but to act in concert"
(1970, 44). Arguing in favor of this way of conceptualizing power,
Hanna Pitkin notes that the word "power" is related
etymologically to the French *pouvoir* and the Latin
*potere*, both of which mean to be able. "That
suggests," she writes, "that power is a something -
anything - which makes or renders somebody able to do, capable
of doing something. Power is capacity, potential, ability, or
wherewithal" (1972, 276). Similarly, Peter Morriss (2002) and
Lukes (2005) define power as a dispositional concept, meaning, as
Lukes puts it, that power "is a potentiality, not an actuality
- indeed a potentiality that may never be actualized"
(2005, 69). (Note that this statement amounts to a significant
revision of Lukes's earlier analysis of power, in which he
argued against defining power as power-to on the grounds that such a
definition obscures "the conflictual aspect of power - the
fact that it is exercised over people" and thus fails to address
what we care about most when we decide to study power (1974, 31). For
helpful discussion of whether Lukes's embrace of the
dispositional conception of power is compatible with his other
theoretical commitments, see Haugaard (2010)). Some of the theorists
who analyze power as power-to leave power-over entirely out of their
analysis. For example, Arendt distinguishes power sharply from
authority, strength, force, and violence, and offers a normative
account in which power is understood as an end in itself (1970). As
Jurgen Habermas has argued, this has the effect of screening any
and all strategic understandings of power (where power is understood
in the Weberian sense as imposing one's will on another) out of
her analysis (Habermas 1994). (Although Arendt defines power as a
capacity, she also maintains that "power springs up between men
when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse"
(1958, 200); hence, it is not clear whether she fully accepts a
dispositional view of power). Others suggest that both aspects of
power are important, but then focus their attention on either
power-over (e.g., Connolly 1993) or power-to (e.g., Morriss 2002).
Still others define power-over as a particular type of capacity,
namely, the capacity to impose one's will on others; on this
view, power-over is a derivative form of power-to (Allen 1999, Lukes
2005). However, others have argued power-over and power-to refer to
fundamentally different concepts and that it is a mistake to try to
develop an account of power that integrates them (Pitkin 1972,
Wartenberg 1990).



Another way of carving up the power literature is to distinguish
between action-theoretical conceptions - that is, those that
define power in terms of either the actions or the dispositional
abilities of individual actors - and broader systemic or
constitutive conceptions - that is, those that view power as
systematically structuring possibilities for action, or, more
strongly, as constitutive of social actors and the social world in
which they act. On this way of distinguishing various conceptions of
power, Hobbes and Weber are on the same side, since both of them
understand power in primarily instrumentalist, individualist, and
action-theoretical terms (Saar 2010, 10). The systemic conception, by
contrast, views power as "the ways in which given social systems
confer differentials of dispositional power on agents, thus
structuring their possibilities for action" (Haugaard 2010, 425;
see Clegg 1989). The systemic conception thus highlights the ways in
which broad historical, political, economic, cultural, and social
forces enable some individuals to exercise power over others, or
inculcate certain abilities and dispositions in some actors but not in
others. Saar argues, however, that the systemic conception of power
should be understood not as an alternative to the action-theoretical
conception of power, but rather as a more complex and sophisticated
variant of that model. For, as he says, its "basic scenario
remains individualistic at the methodological level: power operates on
individuals as individuals, in the form of a 'bringing to
action' or external determination" (Saar 2010, 14).



The constitutive conception of power pushes the insight of the
systemic conception further by focusing on the constitutive
relationships between power, individuals, and the social worlds they
inhabit. The roots of this constitutive conception can be traced back
to Spinoza (2002a and 2002b; Saar 2013), but variants of this view are
also found in the work of more contemporary theorists such as Arendt
and Foucault. Here it is important to note that Foucault's work
on power contains both action-theoretical and constitutive strands.
The former strand is evident in his claim, cited above, that "if
we speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only
insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power over
others" (Foucault 1983, 217), whereas the latter strand is
evident in his definition of power as "the multiplicity of force
relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which
constitute their own organization; as the processes which, through
ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or
reverses them;...thus forming a chain or system" (Foucault
1979, 92).



What accounts for the highly contested nature of the concept of power?
One explanation is that how we conceptualize power is shaped by the
political and theoretical interests that we bring to our study of it
(Lukes 1986, Said 1986). For example, democratic theorists are
interested in different things when they study power than are social
movement theorists or critical race theorists or postcolonial
theorists, and so on. Thus, a specific conceptualization of power
could be more or less useful depending on the specific disciplinary or
theoretical context in which it is deployed, where usefulness is
evaluated in terms of how well it "accomplishes the task the
theorists set for themselves" (Haugaard 2010, 426). On this
view, if we suppose that feminists who are interested in power are
interested in understanding and critiquing gender-based relations of
domination and subordination as these intersect with other axes of
oppression and thinking about how such relations can be transformed
through individual and collective resistance, then we would conclude
that specific conceptions of power should be evaluated in terms of how
well they enable feminists to fulfill those aims.



Lukes suggests another, more radical, explanation for the essentially
contested nature of the concept of power: our conceptions of power
are, according to him, themselves shaped by power relations. As he
puts it, "how we think about power may serve to reproduce and
reinforce power structures and relations, or alternatively it may
challenge and subvert them. It may contribute to their continued
functioning, or it may unmask their principles of operation, whose
effectiveness is increased by their being hidden from view. To the
extent that this is so, conceptual and methodological questions are
inescapably political and so what 'power' means is
'essentially contested'..." (Lukes 2005, 63).
The thought that conceptions of power are themselves shaped by power
relations is behind the claim, made by many feminists, that the
influential conception of power as power-over is itself a product of
patriarchal domination (for further discussion, see section 4
below).


## 2. Power as Resource: Liberal Feminist Approaches



Those who conceptualize power as a resource understand it as a
positive social good that is currently unequally distributed. For
feminists who understand power in this way, the goal is to
redistribute this resource so that women will have power equal to men.
Implicit in this view is the assumption that power is, as Iris Marion
Young puts it, "a kind of stuff that can be possessed by
individuals in greater or lesser amounts" (Young 1990, 31).



The conception of power as a resource is arguably implicit in the work
of some liberal feminists (Mill 1970, Okin 1989). For example, in
*Justice, Gender, and the Family*, Susan Moller Okin argues
that the modern gender-structured family unjustly distributes the
benefits and burdens of familial life amongst husbands and wives. Okin
includes power on her list of the benefits, which she calls
"critical social goods." As she puts it, "when we
look seriously at the distribution between husbands and wives of such
critical social goods as work (paid and unpaid), power, prestige,
self-esteem, opportunities for self-development, and both physical and
economic security, we find socially constructed inequalities between
them, right down the list" (Okin, 1989, 136). Here, Okin seems
to presuppose that power is a resource that is unequally and unjustly
distributed between men and women; hence, one of the goals of feminism
would be to redistribute this resource in more equitable ways.



Although she doesn't discuss Okin's work explicitly, Young
offers a compelling critique of this view, which she calls the
distributive model of power. First, Young maintains that it is wrong
to think of power as a kind of stuff that can be possessed; on her
view, power is a relation, not a thing that can be distributed or
redistributed. Second, she claims that the distributive model tends to
presuppose a dyadic, atomistic understanding of power; as a result, it
fails to illuminate the broader social, institutional and structural
contexts that shape individual relations of power. According to Young,
this makes the distributive model unhelpful for understanding the
structural features of domination. Third, the distributive model
conceives of power statically, as a pattern of distribution, whereas
Young, following Foucault (1980), claims that power exists only in
action, and thus must be understood dynamically, as existing in
ongoing processes or interactions. Finally, Young argues that the
distributive model of power tends to view domination as the
concentration of power in the hands of a few. According to Young,
although this model might be appropriate for some forms of domination,
it is not appropriate for the forms that domination takes in
contemporary industrial societies such as the United States (Young
1990a, 31-33). On her view, in contemporary industrial
societies, power is "widely dispersed and diffused" and
yet it is nonetheless true that "social relations are tightly
defined by domination and oppression" (Young 1990a,
32-33).


## 3. Power as Domination



Young's critique of the distributive model points toward an
alternative way of conceptualizing power, one that understands power
not as a resource or critical social good, but instead views it as a
relation of domination. Although feminists have often used a variety
of terms to refer to this kind of relation - including
"oppression," "patriarchy,"
"subjection," and so forth -the common thread in
these analyses is an understanding of power as an unjust or
illegitimate power-over relation. In the remainder of this entry, I
use the term "domination" simply to refer to unjust or
oppressive power-over relations. In this section, I discuss the
specific ways in which feminists with different political and
philosophical commitments - influenced by phenomenology, radical
feminism, Marxist socialism, intersectionality theory,
post-structuralism, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and analytic
philosophy - have conceptualized domination.


### 3.1 Phenomenological Feminist Approaches



The *locus classicus* of feminist phenomenological approaches
to theorizing male domination is Simone de Beauvoir's *The
Second Sex*. Beauvoir's text provides a brilliant analysis
of the situation of women: the social, cultural, historical, and
economic conditions that define their existence. Her diagnosis of
women's situation relies on the distinction between being
for-itself - self-conscious subjectivity that is capable of
freedom and transcendence - and being in-itself - the
un-self-conscious things that are incapable of freedom and mired in
immanence. Beauvoir argues that whereas men have assumed the status of
the transcendent subject, women have been relegated to the status of
the immanent Other. As she puts it in a famous passage from the
Introduction to *The Second Sex*: "She is defined and
differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her;
she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He
is the Subject, he is the Absolute - she is the Other"
(Beauvoir, xxii). This distinction - between man as Subject and
woman as Other - is the key to Beauvoir's understanding of
domination or oppression. She writes, "every time transcendence
falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation of
existence into the 'en-soi' - the brutish life of
subjection to given conditions - and liberty into constraint and
contingence. This downfall represents a moral fault if the subject
consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and
oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil" (Beauvoir,
xxxv). Although Beauvoir suggests that women are partly responsible
for submitting to the status of the Other in order to avoid the
anguish of authentic existence (hence, they are in bad faith) (see
Beauvoir xxvii), she maintains that women are oppressed because they
are compelled to assume the status of the Other, doomed to immanence
(xxxv). Women's situation is thus marked by a basic tension
between transcendence and immanence; as self-conscious human beings,
they are capable of transcendence, but they are compelled into
immanence by cultural and social conditions that deny them that
transcendence (see Beauvoir, chapter 21).



Some feminists have criticized Beauvoir's conception of oppression for
its reliance on a problematic analogy between race and gender (see,
for example, her claim that "there are deep similarities between
the situation of woman and that of the Negro," (Beauvoir,
xxix)). Beauvoir's frequent use of such analogies, critics contend,
erases the experience of Black women by implicitly coding all women as
white and all Blacks as male (Gines (Belle) 2010 and 2017, Collins
2019, 194-198, and Simons 2002). As Kathryn T. Gines (now Kathryn
Sophia Belle) argues further, Beauvoir's analysis deploys
"comparative and competing frameworks of oppression"
(Gines (Belle) 2014a). At times, Beauvoir treats not just sexism and
racism but also antisemitism, colonialism, and class oppression
comparatively, arguing that they rest of similar dynamics of Othering.
Her comparative analysis of race and gender is most problematic in her
frequent analogy between the situation of women and that of the slave.
As Belle argues, this analogy not only obscures the experiences of
Black female slaves, it also leads Beauvior to "engage in an
appropriation of Black suffering in the form of slavery to advance her
philosophical discussion of woman's situation" (265). At other
times, Beauvoir treats racism, sexism, antisemitism, colonialism, and
class oppression as competing frameworks and argues that gender
subordination is the most significant and constitutive form of
oppression. Both moves are problematic, according to Belle, the former
for its erasure of the oppression of Black women and the latter for
its privileging of gender oppression over other forms of
oppression.



Feminist phenomenologists have engaged critically with Beauvoir's work
while extending her insights into power. For example, Young argues
that Beauvoir pays relatively little attention to the role that female
embodiment plays in women's oppression (Young 1990b,
142-3). Although Beauvoir does discuss women's bodies in
relation to their status as immanent Other, she tends to focus on
women's physiology and how physiological features such as
menstruation and pregnancy tie women more closely to nature, thus, to
immanence. In her essay, "Throwing Like a Girl," Young
draws on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological analysis of
the lived body to analyze "the situatedness of the woman's
actual bodily movement and orientation to its surroundings and its
world" (Young 1990b, 143). She notes that girls and women often
fail to use fully the spatial potential of their bodies (for example,
they throw "like girls"), they try not to take up too much
space, and they tend to approach physical activity tentatively and
uncertainly (Young 1990b, 145-147). Young argues that feminine
bodily comportment, movement, and spatial orientation exhibit the same
tension between transcendence and immanence that Beauvoir diagnoses in
*The Second Sex*. "At the root of those
modalities," Young writes, "is the fact that the woman
lives her body as object as well as subject. The source of this is
that patriarchal society defines woman as object, as a mere body, and
that in sexist society women are in fact frequently regarded by others
as objects and mere bodies" (Young 1990b, 155). And yet women
are also subjects, and, thus, cannot think of themselves as mere
bodily objects. As a result, woman "cannot be in unity with
herself" (Young 1990b, 155). Young explores the tension between
transcendence and immanence and the lack of unity characteristic of
feminine subjectivity in more detail in several other essays that
explore pregnant embodiment, women's experience with their
clothes, and breasted experience (See Young 1990b, chapters
9-11).



Much important work in feminist phenomenology follows Young in drawing
inspiration from Merleau-Ponty's analyses of embodiment and
intercorporeality (see Heinamaa 2003, Weiss 1999); like Young, these
authors use a Merleau-Pontyian approach to phenomenology to explore
the fundamental modalities of female embodiment or feminine bodily
comportment. Feminists have also mined the work of Edmund Husserl, the
founder of phenomenology, for useful resources for feminist
phenomenology (Al-Saji 2010 and Oksala 2016).



More generally, Oksala defends the importance of feminist
phenomenology as an exploration of gendered experience against
poststructuralist critics who find such a project hopelessly
essentialist. While Oksala acknowledges that essentialism is a danger
found in some work in feminist phenomenology - for example, she
is critical of Sonia Kruks (2001) for "considering 'female
experience' as an irreducible given grounded in a female
body" (Oksala 2016, 72) - she also insists that a
phenomenological analysis of experience is crucial for feminism. As
she puts it, "it is my contention that feminist theory must
'retrieve experience', but this cannot mean returning to a
pre discursive female experience grounded in the commonalities of
women's embodiment" (40). On her view, experience is
always constructed in such a way that it "reflects oppressive
discourses and power relations" (43); and yet, experience and
thought or discourse are not co-extensive. This means that there is
always a gap between our personal experience and the linguistic
representations that we employ to make sense of that experience, and
it is this gap that provides the space for contestation and critique.
Thus, Oksala concludes, "experiences can contest discourses even
if, or precisely because, they are conceptual through and
through" (50). For Oksala, experience plays a crucial role in
reinforcing and reproducing oppressive power relations, but radical
reflection on our experience opens up a space for individual and
collective resistance to and transformation of those power
relations.



The concept of experience is also central to Mariana Ortega's analysis
of Latina feminist phenomenology (Ortega 2016). Ortega reads the
prominent Latina feminists Gloria Anzaldua and Maria
Lugones as phenomenologists "whose writings are deeply informed
by their lived experience, specifically by their experience of
marginalization and oppression as well as their experience of
resistance" (7). By highlighting the experience of marginalized
and oppressed selves who live their lives at the borderlands or in a
state of in-betweenness, Latina feminist phenomenology, as Ortega
reads it, offers an important corrective to and expansion of the
critique of modern subjectivity in the European phenomenological
tradition.



For other influential feminist-phenomenological analyses of domination
see Bartky 1990, 2002, Bordo 1993, and Kruks 2001. For helpful
overviews of feminist phenomenology, see Fisher and Embree 2000, and
Heinamaa and Rodemeyer 2010. For a highly influential articulation of
queer phenomenology, drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger,
Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon, see Ahmed (2006). For a compelling
phenomenological analysis of transgender experience, see Salamon
(2010).


### 3.2 Radical Feminist Approaches



Unlike liberal feminists, who view power as a positive social resource
that ought to be fairly distributed, and feminist phenomenologists,
who understand domination in terms of a tension between transcendence
and immanence, radical feminists tend to understand power in terms of
dyadic relations of dominance/subordination, often understood on
analogy with the relationship between master and slave.



For example, in the work of legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon,
domination is closely bound up with her understanding of gender
difference. According to MacKinnon, gender difference is simply the
reified effect of domination. As she puts it, "difference is the
velvet glove on the iron fist of domination. The problem is not that
differences are not valued; the problem is that they are defined by
power" (MacKinnon 1989, 219). If gender difference is itself a
function of domination, then the implication is that men are powerful
and women are powerless by definition. As MacKinnon puts it,
"women/men is a distinction not just of difference, but of power
and powerlessness....Power/powerlessness is the sex
difference" (MacKinnon 1987, 123). (In this passage, MacKinnon
glosses over the distinction, articulated by many second-wave
feminists, between sex - the biologically rooted traits that
make one male or female, traits that are often presumed to be natural
and immutable - and gender - the socially and culturally
rooted, hence contingent and mutable, traits, characteristics,
dispositions, and practices that make one a woman or a man. This
passage suggests that MacKinnon, like Judith Butler (1990) and other
critics of the sex/gender distinction, thinks that sex difference, no
less than gender difference, is socially constructed and shaped by
relations of power.) If men are powerful and women powerless as such,
then male domination is, on this view, pervasive. Indeed, MacKinnon
claims that it is a basic "fact of male supremacy" that
"no woman escapes the meaning of being a woman within a gendered
social system, and sex inequality is not only pervasive but may be
universal (in the sense of never having not been in some form"
(MacKinnon 1989, 104-05). For MacKinnon, heterosexual
intercourse is the paradigm of male domination; as she puts it,
"the social relation between the sexes is organized so that men
may dominate and women must submit and this relation is sexual -
in fact, is sex" (MacKinnon 1987, 3). As a result, she tends to
presuppose a dyadic conception of domination, according to which
individual women are subject to the will of individual men. If male
domination is pervasive and women are powerless by definition, then it
follows that female power is "a contradiction in terms, socially
speaking" (MacKinnon 1987, 53). The claim that female power is a
contradiction in terms has led many feminists to criticize MacKinnon
on the grounds that she denies women's political agency and
presents them as helpless victims (for exemplary versions of this
criticism, see Brown 1995 and Butler 1997a).



Marilyn Frye likewise offers a radical feminist analysis of power that
seems to presuppose a dyadic model of domination. Frye identifies
several faces of power, one of the most important of which is access.
As Frye puts it, "total power is unconditional access; total
powerlessness is being unconditionally accessible. The creation and
manipulation of power is constituted of the manipulation and control
of access" (Frye 1983, 103). If access is one of the most
important faces of power, then feminist separatism, insofar as it is a
way of denying access to women's bodies, emotional support,
domestic labor, and so forth, represents a profound challenge to male
power. For this reason, Frye maintains that all feminism that is worth
the name entails some form of separatism. She also suggests that this
is the real reason that men get so upset by acts of separatism:
"if you are doing something that is so strictly forbidden by the
patriarchs, you must be doing something right" (Frye 1983, 98).
Frye frequently compares male domination to a master/slave
relationship (see, for example, 1983, 103-105), and she defines
oppression as "a system of interrelated barriers and forces
which reduce, immobilize, and mold people who belong to a certain
group, and effect their subordination to another group (individually
to individuals of the other group, and as a group, to that
group)" (Frye 1983, 33). In addition to access, Frye discusses
definition as another, related, face of power. Frye claims that
"the powerful normally determine what is said and sayable"
(105). For example, "when the Secretary of Defense calls
something a peace negotiation...then whatever it is that he
called a peace negotiation is an instance of negotiating peace"
(105). Under conditions of subordination, women typically do not have
the power to define the terms of their situation, but by controlling
access, Frye argues, they can begin to assert control over their own
self-definition. Both of these - controlling access and
definition - are ways of taking power. Although she does not go
so far as MacKinnon does in claiming that female power is a
contradiction in terms, Frye does claim that "if there is one
thing women are queasy about it is actually taking power" (Frye
1983, 107).



A similar dyadic conception of male domination can arguably be found
in Carole Pateman's *The Sexual Contract* (1988)
(although Pateman's work is heavily influenced by socialist feminism,
her account of power is closer to radical feminism). Like MacKinnon,
Pateman claims that gender difference is constituted by domination; as
she puts it, "the patriarchal construction of the difference
between masculinity and femininity is the political difference between
freedom and subjection" (Pateman 1988, 207). She also claims
that male domination is pervasive, and she explicitly appeals to a
master/subject model to understand it; as she puts it, "in
modern civil society all men are deemed good enough to be
women's masters" (Pateman 1988, 219). In Pateman's
view, the social contract that initiates civil society and provides
for the legitimate exercise of political rights is also a sexual
contract that establishes what she calls "the law of male
sex-right," securing male sexual access to and dominance over
women (1988, 182). As Nancy Fraser has argued, on Pateman's
view, the sexual contract "institutes a series of male/female
master/subject dyads" (Fraser 1993, 173). Fraser is highly
critical of Pateman's analysis, which she terms the
"master/subject model," a model that presents
women's subordination "first and foremost as the condition
of being subject to the direct command of an individual man"
(1993, 173). The problem with this dyadic account of women's
subordination, according to Fraser, is that "gender inequality
is today being transformed by a shift from dyadic relations of mastery
and subjection to more impersonal structural mechanisms that are lived
through more fluid cultural forms" (1993, 180). Fraser suggests
that, in order to understand women's subordination in
contemporary Western societies, feminists will have to move beyond the
master/subject model to analyze how women's subordination is
secured through cultural norms, social practices, and other impersonal
structural mechanisms. (For Pateman's response to Fraser's
criticism, see Pateman and Mills (2007, 205-06)).



Although feminists such as Fraser, Judith Butler, and Wendy Brown have
been highly critical of the radical feminist account of domination,
analytic feminists have found this account more productive. For
example, Rae Langton (2009) has used speech act theory to defend
MacKinnon's claims that pornography both causes and constitutes
women's subordination. More generally, Langton (2009) and Sally
Haslanger (2012) have drawn on MacKinnon's work to develop an account
of sexual objectification and to explore the ways that objectification
is often obscured by claims to objectivity (for further discussion of
Haslanger's work, see section 3.7 below).


### 3.3 Socialist Feminist Approaches



According to the traditional Marxist account of power, domination is
understood on the model of class exploitation; domination results from
the capitalist appropriation of the surplus value that is produced by
the workers. As many second wave feminist critics of Marx have pointed
out, however, Marx's categories are gender-blind (see, for
example, Firestone 1970, Hartmann 1980, Hartsock 1983, Rubin 1976).
Marx ignores the ways in which class exploitation and gender
subordination are intertwined; because he focuses solely on economic
production, Marx overlooks women's reproductive labor in the
home and the exploitation of this labor in capitalist modes of
production. As a result of this gender-blindness, second wave Marxist
or socialist feminists argued that Marx's analysis of class
domination must be supplemented with a radical feminist critique of
patriarchy in order to yield a satisfactory account of women's
oppression; the resulting theory is referred to as dual systems theory
(see, for example, Eisenstein 1979, Hartmann 1980). As Young describes
it, "dual systems theory says that women's oppression
arises from two distinct and relatively autonomous systems. The system
of male domination, most often called 'patriarchy',
produces the specific gender oppression of women; the system of the
mode of production and class relations produces the class oppression
and work alienation of most women" (Young 1990b, 21). Although
Young agrees with the aim of theorizing class and gender domination in
a single theory, she is critical of dual systems theory on the grounds
that "it allows Marxism to retain in basically unchanged form
its theory of economic and social relations, on to which it merely
grafts a theory of gender relations" (Young 1990b, 24). Young
calls instead for a more unified theory, a truly feminist historical
materialism that would offer a critique of the social totality.



In a later essay, Young offers a more systematic analysis of
oppression, an analysis that is grounded in her earlier call for a
comprehensive socialist feminism. Young identifies five faces of
oppression: economic exploitation, socio-economic marginalization,
lack of power or autonomy over one's work, cultural imperialism,
and systematic violence (Young 1992, 183-193). The first three
faces of oppression in this list expand on the Marxist account of
economic exploitation, and the last two go beyond that account,
bringing out other aspects of oppression that are not well explained
in economic terms. According to Young, being subject to any one of
these forms of power is sufficient to call a group oppressed, but most
oppressed groups in the United States experience more than one of
these forms of power, and some experience all five (Young 1992, 194).
She also claims that this list is comprehensive, both in the sense
that "covers all the groups said by new left social movements to
be oppressed" and that it "covers all the ways they are
oppressed" (Young 1992, 181; for critical discussion, see Allen
2008b).



Nancy Hartsock offers a different vision of feminist historical
materialism in her book *Money, Sex, and Power*: *Toward a
Feminist Historical Materialism* (1983). In this book, Hartsock is
concerned with "(1) how relations of domination along lines of
gender are constructed and maintained and (2) whether social
understandings of domination itself have been distorted by men's
domination of women" (Hartsock 1983, 1). Following Marx's
conception of ideology, Hartsock maintains that the prevailing ideas
and theories of a time period are rooted in the material, economic
relations of that society. This applies, in her view, to theories of
power as well. Thus, she criticizes theories of power in mainstream
political science for presupposing a market model of economic
relations - a model that understands the economy primarily in
terms of exchange, which is how it appears from the perspective of the
ruling class rather than in terms of production, which is how it
appears from the perspective of the worker. She also argues that power
and domination have consistently been associated with masculinity.
Because power has been understood from the position of the socially
dominant - the ruling class and men - the feminist task,
according to Hartsock, is to reconceptualize power from a specifically
feminist standpoint, one that is rooted in women's life
experience, specifically, their role in reproduction. Conceptualizing
power from this standpoint can, according to Hartsock, "point
beyond understandings of power as power over others" (Hartsock
1983, 12). (We'll come back to this point in section 4).



Socialist feminism fell largely out of fashion during the latter part
of the 20th century, fueled in part by the rise of poststructuralism,
the prominence of identity and recognition based politics, and the
emergence of a neoliberal consensus (for a trenchant critique of these
developments, see Fraser 1996 and 2013). However, in the wake of the
global financial crisis of 2008, socialist feminism, now often
referred to as Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), has made a comeback.
SRT has a long history, with important early contributions by Silvia
Federici (1975) and Maria Mies (1986) and connections to the Italian
wages for housework campaign that began in the 1970s; for more recent
discussions, see Tithi Bhattacharya (2017), Federici (2014 and 2019),
and Alessandra Mezzadri (2019). SRT is a Marxist feminist project that
orients itself to a question that remains implicit in Marx's theory of
value: how is labor power, which is the source of value and thus of
exploitation in Marx's account, itself produced, reproduced, and
maintained? SRT maintains that labor power is produced and reproduced
outside of the official economy, largely through women's unpaid labor
within the family or domestic sphere. For social reproduction
theorists, the production of goods and services is thus possible only
on the basis of (largely) unpaid social reproduction, which includes
childbirth, domestic work, caring for children, the elderly and others
who cannot work for wages, and so on. For Federici, this represents an
ongoing process of expropriation akin to Marx's notion of primitive
accumulation (Federici 2014). Social reproduction theorists understand
production and reproduction as parts of an integrated system; indeed,
they view the distinction between the two as ultimately misleading
inasmuch as it obscures the ways in which social reproduction is
itself productive of value (Mezzadri 2019). For a related attempt to
understand capitalism as a social totality whose relations of
production are made possible by the expropriation of socially
reproductive labor, environmental resources, and the labor of
dispossessed and colonized peoples, see Fraser in Fraser and Jaeggi
(2018).


### 3.4 Intersectional Approaches



Theories of intersectionality highlight the complex, interconnected,
and cross-cutting relationships between diverse modes of domination,
including (but not limited to) sexism, racism, class oppression, and
heterosexism. The project of intersectional feminism grew out of Black
feminism, which, as scholars have recently noted, has a long tradition
of examining the interconnections between racism and sexism,
stretching back to the writing and activism of late 19th and early
20th century black feminists such as Maria W. Stewart, Ida. B. Wells,
Anna Julia Cooper, and Sojourner Truth (see Gines 2014b and Cooper
2016). Because these thinkers and activists did not use the term
intersectionality, Gines (now Belle) characterizes their work as
proto-intersectional, which she defines as follows: "identifying
and combating racism and sexism - through activist organizing and
campaigning - not only as separate categories impacting identity and
oppression, but also as systems of oppression that work together and
mutually reinforce one another, presenting unique problems for black
women who experience both, simultaneously and differently than white
women and/or black men" (Gines 2014b, 14). Other important
antecedents to contemporary intersectionality theory include the
Combahee River Collective's notion of "interlocking
systems of oppression" (CRC 1977), Deborah King's analysis
of multiple jeopardy and multiple consciousness (King 1988), and the
work from the 1980s of Black feminists such as Audre Lorde (1984),
Angela Davis (1984), and bell hooks (1981). As Mariana Ortega has
argued (2016), there are also important conceptions of
intersectionality developed in Latina feminism, particularly in
Anzaldua's account of the borderlands and mestiza consciusness
(Anzaldua 1987) and Lugones's account of the intermeshedness of
race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, and class (Lugones 2003).



In other words, the concept of intersectionality has a long history
and a complex genealogy (for discussions, see Cooper 2016, Collins
2011 and 2019, 123-126, and Nash 2019). Still, it is widely
acknowledged that the contemporary discussion and use of the term
intersectionality was sparked by the work of legal theorist Kimberle
Crenshaw (Crenshaw 1991a and 1991b), specifically, by her critique of
single-axis frameworks for understanding domination in the context of
legal discrimination. A single-axis framework treats race and gender
as mutually exclusive categories of experience. In so doing, such a
framework implicitly privileges the perspective of the most privileged
members of oppressed groups - sex or class-privileged Blacks in
race discrimination cases; race or class-privileged women in sex
discrimination cases. Thus, a single-axis framework distorts the
experiences of Black women, who are simultaneously subject to multiple
and intersecting forms of subordination. As Crenshaw explains,
"the intersection of racism and sexism factors into Black
women's lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking
at the race or gender dimensions of those experiences
separately" (Crenshaw 1991b, 1244).



In the thirty years since the publication of Crenshaw's essays
on intersectionality, this framework has become extraordinarily
influential in women's, gender, and sexuality studies. Indeed,
it has been called "the most important contribution that
women's studies, in conjunction with other fields, has made so
far" (McCall 2005, 1771). However, feminist philosophers have
noted that this influence has yet to be felt within the mainstream of
the discipline of philosophy, where "intersectionality is
largely ignored as a philosophical theme or framework" (Goswami,
O'Donovan and Yount 2014, 6). Moreover, intersectionality is not
without its feminist critics.



Some sympathetic critics of intersectionality have suggested that the
concept is limited in that it focuses primarily on the
action-theoretical level. A full analysis of the intertwining of
racial, gender, and class-based subordination also requires, on this
view, a systemic or macro-level concept that corresponds to the
concept of intersectionality. Echoing the Combahee River Collective
(CRC 1977), Patricia Hill Collins proposes the term
"interlocking systems of oppression" to fulfill this role.
As she explains, "the notion of interlocking oppressions refers
to the macro-level connections linking systems of oppression such as
race, class, and gender. This is the model describing the social
structures that create social positions. Second, the notion of
intersectionality describes micro-level processes - namely, how
each individual and group occupies a social position within
interlocking structures of oppression described by the metaphor of
intersectionality. Together they shape oppression" (Collins
*et al*. 2002, 82).



Others have worried that discussions of intersectionality tend to
focus too much on relations and sites of oppression and subordination,
without also taking into account relations of privilege and dominance.
As Jennifer Nash has argued, this has led to "the question of
whether *all* identities are intersectional or whether only
multiply marginalized subjects have an intersectional identity"
(Nash 2008, 9). Although some feminist scholars claim that
intersectionality encompasses all subject positions, not just those
that are marginalized or oppressed, Nash notes that "the
overwhelming majority of intersectional scholarship has centred on the
particular positions of multiply marginalized subjects" (Nash
2008, 9-10). The over-emphasis on oppression in theories of
intersectionality leads theorists "to ignore the intimate
connections between privilege and oppression," for example, by
"ignor[ing] the ways in which subjects might be both victimized
by patriarchy and privileged by race" (Nash 2008, 12). In
response to this concern, philosophers such as Ann Garry have offered
a broader, more inclusive conception of intersectionality that
emphasizes both oppression and privilege (see Garry 2011).



Rather than supplementing the notion of intersectionality with a
macro-level concept of interlocking systems of oppression or
broadening it to include relations of oppression and privilege, Naomi
Zack argues that feminists should move beyond it. Zack maintains that
intersectionality undermines its own goal of making feminism more
inclusive. It does this, on Zack's view, by dividing women into
smaller and smaller groups, formed by specific intersections of race,
class, gender, sexuality, and so forth. As Zack puts it, "as a
theory of women's identity, intersectionality is not inclusive
insofar as members of specific intersections of race and class create
*only* their own feminisms" (Zack 2005, 2). Because it
tends toward "the reification of intersections as
incommensurable identities," Zack maintains that
"intersectionality has not borne impressive political
fruit" (Zack 2005, 18).



From a very different perspective, queer theorists such as Lynne
Huffer and Jasbir Puar have also criticized intersectionality as a
theory of identity. Unlike Zack, however, their concern is not with
the proliferation of incommensurable identities but rather with the
ways in which the notion of intersectionality remains, as Puar says,
"primarily trapped within the logic of identity" (Puar
2012, 60). As Huffer puts the point: "the institutionalization
of intersectionality as the *only* approach to gender and
sexuality that takes difference seriously masks
intersectionality's investment in a subject-making form of
power-knowledge that runs the risk of perpetuating precisely the
problems intersectionality had hoped to alleviate" (Huffer 2013,
18). Puar argues further that the primary concepts of
intersectionality, including gender, race, class, and sexuality, are
themselves the product of Eurocentric, modernist, and colonial
discourses and practices and, as such, are problematic from the point
of view of postcolonial and transnational feminism (Puar 2012).



Finally, Anna Carastathis has argued that the problem with
intersectionality theory lies in its very success (Carastathis 2013
and 2014). Intersectionality has been, on her view, too easily
appropriated by white-dominated feminist theory, cut off from its
roots in Black and women of color feminism, and incorporated into a
self-congratulatory progressivist narrative according to which
"intersectionality is celebrated as a methodological triumph
over 'previous' essentialist and exclusionary approaches
to theorizing identity and power relations" (Carastathis 2014,
59; for related critiques, see Nash 2008 and 2019 and Puar 2012).
Carastathis cites Kimberle Crenshaw's lament that
intersectionality's reach is wide but not very deep, and
suggests that this may be the result of aversive racism - that
is, a desire to assert or establish racial innocence, but without
really coming to terms with their own internalized racism - on
the part of white feminists (Carastathis, 2014, 68-69).



In response to these sorts of criticisms of intersectionality, some
scholars have attempted to reformulate the concept by understanding it
as a family resemblance concept (Garry 2011) or by highlighting its
provisionality (Carastathis, 2014). Others have argued for an
expansion of the intersectional framework to better account for the
experiences of diasporic subjects (Sheth 2014) or for a rethinking of
this framework in relation to a Deleuzian notion of assemblage (Puar
2007 and 2012). Collins (2019) has proposed the development of
intersectionality as a critical social theory through a reflection on
its genealogy, epistemology, and methodology.


### 3.5 Poststructuralist Feminist Approaches



Most of the work on power done by post-structuralist feminists has
been inspired by Foucault. In his middle period works (Foucault 1977,
1978, and 1980), Foucault analyzes modern power as a mobile and
constantly shifting set of force relations that emerge from every
social interaction and thus pervade the social body. As he puts it,
"power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but
because it comes from everywhere" (1978, 93). Foucault endeavors
to offer a "micro-physics" of modern power (1977, 26), an
analysis that focuses not on the concentration of power in the hands
of the sovereign or the state, but instead on how power flows through
the capillaries of the social body. Foucault criticizes previous
analyses of power (primarily Marxist and Freudian) for assuming that
power is fundamentally repressive, a belief that he terms the
"repressive hypothesis" (1978, 17-49). Although
Foucault does not deny that power sometimes functions repressively
(see 1978, 12), he maintains that it is primarily productive; as he
puts it, "power produces; it produces reality; it produces
domains of objects and rituals of truth" (1977, 194). It also,
according to Foucault, produces subjects. As he puts it, "the
individual is not the vis-a-vis of power; it is, I believe, one
of its prime effects" (1980, 98). According to Foucault, modern
power subjects individuals, in both senses of the term; it
simultaneously creates them as subjects by subjecting them to power.
As we will see in a moment, Foucault's account of subjection and
his account of power more generally have been extremely fruitful, but
also quite controversial, for feminists interested in analyzing
domination.



It should come as no surprise that so many feminists have drawn on
Foucault's analysis of power. Foucault's analysis of power
has arguably been the most influential discussion of the topic over
the last forty years; even those theorists of power who are highly
critical of Foucault's work acknowledge this influence (Lukes
2005 and, in a somewhat backhanded way, Morriss 2002). Moreover,
Foucault's focus on the local and capillary nature of modern
power clearly resonates with feminist efforts to redefine the scope
and bounds of the political, efforts that are summed up by the slogan
"the personal is political." At this point, the feminist
work that has been inspired by Foucault's analysis of power is
so extensive and varied that it defies summarization (see, for
example, Allen 1999 and 2008a, Bartky 1990, Bordo 2003, Butler 1990,
1993, 1997, Diamond and Quinby (eds) 1988, Fraser 1989, Hekman (ed)
1996, Heyes 2007, McLaren 2002, McNay 1992, McWhorter 1999, Sawicki
1990, and Young 1990). I will concentrate on highlighting a few
central issues from this rich and diverse body of scholarship.



Several of the most prominent Foucaultian-feminist analyses of power
draw on his account of disciplinary power in order to critically
analyze normative femininity. In *Discipline and Punish*,
Foucault analyzes the disciplinary practices that were developed in
prisons, schools, and factories in the 18th century - including
minute regulations of bodily movements, obsessively detailed time
schedules, and surveillance techniques - and how these practices
shape the bodies of prisoners, students and workers into docile bodies
(1977, 135-169). In a highly influential essay, Sandra Bartky
criticizes Foucault for failing to notice that disciplinary practices
are gendered and that, through such gendered discipline, women's
bodies are rendered more docile than the bodies of men (1990, 65).
Drawing on and extending Foucault's account of disciplinary
power, Bartky analyzes the disciplinary practices that engender
specifically feminine docile bodies - including dieting
practices, limitations on gestures and mobility, and bodily
ornamentation. She also expands Foucault's analysis of the
Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham's design for the ideal prison, a
building whose spatial arrangement was designed to compel the inmate
to surveil himself, thus becoming, as Foucault famously put it,
"the principle of his own subjection" (1977, 203). With
respect to gendered disciplinary practices such as dieting,
restricting one's movement so as to avoid taking up too much
space, and keeping one's body properly hairless, attired,
ornamented and made up, Bartky observes "it is women themselves
who practice this discipline on and against their own
bodies....The woman who checks her make-up half a dozen times a
day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara run, who worries
that the wind or rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to
see if her stocking have bagged at the ankle, or who, feeling fat,
monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate
in the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to
relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of
obedience to patriarchy" (1990, 80).



As Susan Bordo points out, this model of self-surveillance does not
adequately illuminate all forms of female subordination - all
too often women are actually compelled into submission by means of
physical force, economic coercion, or emotional manipulation.
Nevertheless, Bordo agrees with Bartky that "when it comes to
the politics of appearance, such ideas are apt and illuminating"
(1993, 27). Bordo explains that, in her own work, Foucault's
analysis of disciplinary power has been "extremely helpful both
to my analysis of the contemporary disciplines of diet and exercise
and to my understanding of eating disorders as arising out of and
reproducing normative feminine practices of our culture, practices
which train the female body in docility and obedience to cultural
demands while at the same time being experienced in terms of power and
control" (ibid). Bordo also highlights and makes use of
Foucault's understanding of power relations as inherently
unstable, as always accompanied by, even generating, resistance (see
Foucault 1983). "So, for example, the woman who goes into a
rigorous weight-training program in order to achieve the currently
stylish look may discover that her new muscles give her the
self-confidence that enables her to assert herself more forcefully at
work" (1993, 28).



Whereas Bartky and Bordo focus on Foucault's account of
disciplinary power, Judith Butler draws primarily on his analysis of
subjection. For example, in her early and massively influential book,
*Gender Trouble* (1990), Butler notes that "Foucault
points out that juridical systems of power produce the subjects they
subsequently come to represent. Juridical notions of power appear to
regulate political life in purely negative terms.....But the
subjects regulated by such structures are, by virtue of being
subjected to them, formed, defined, and reproduced in accordance with
the requirements of those structures" (1990, 2). The implication
of this for feminists is, according to Butler, that "feminist
critique ought also to understand how the category of
'women', the subject of feminism, is produced and
restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation
is sought" (1990, 2). This Foucaultian insight into the nature
of subjection - into the ways in which becoming a subject means
at the same time being subjected to power relations - thus forms
the basis for Butler's trenchant critique of the category of
women, and for her call for a subversive performance of the gender
norms that govern the production of gender identity. In *Bodies
that Matter* (1993), Butler extends this analysis to consider the
impact of subjection on the bodily materiality of the subject. As she
puts is, "power operates for Foucault in the constitution of the
very materiality of the subject, in the principle which simultaneously
forms and regulates the 'subject' of subjectivation"
(1993, 34). Thus, for Butler, power understood as subjection is
implicated in the process of determining which bodies come to matter,
whose lives are livable and whose deaths grievable. In *The Psychic
Life of Power* (1997b), Butler expands further on the Foucaultian
notion of subjection, bringing it into dialogue with a Freudian
account of the psyche. In the introduction to that text, Butler notes
that subjection is a paradoxical form of power. It has an element of
domination and subordination, to be sure, but, she writes, "if,
following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as
well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the
trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but
also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what
we harbor and preserve in the beings that we are" (1997b, 2).
Although Butler credits Foucault with recognizing the fundamentally
ambivalent character of subjection, she also argues that he does not
offer an account of the specific mechanisms by which the subjected
subject is formed. For this, Butler maintains, we need an analysis of
the psychic form that power takes, for only such an analysis can
illuminate the passionate attachment to power that is characteristic
of subjection.



Although many feminists have found Foucault's analysis of power
extremely fruitful and productive, Foucault has also had his share of
feminist critics. In a very influential early assessment, Nancy Fraser
argues that, although Foucault's work offers some interesting
empirical insights into the functioning of modern power, it is
"normatively confused" (Fraser 1989, 31). In his writings
on power, Foucault seems to eschew normative categories, preferring
instead to describe the way that power functions in local practices
and to argue for the appropriate methodology for studying power. He
even seems to suggest that such normative notions as autonomy,
legitimacy, sovereignty, and so forth, are themselves effects of
modern power (this point has been contested recently in the literature
on Foucault; see Allen 2008a and Oksala 2005). Fraser claims that this
attempt to remain normatively neutral or even critical of normativity
is incompatible with the politically engaged character of
Foucault's writings. Thus, for example, although Foucault claims
that power is always accompanied by resistance, Fraser argues that he
cannot explain why domination ought to be resisted. As she puts it,
"only with the introduction of normative notions of some kind
could Foucault begin to answer such questions. Only with the
introduction of normative notions could he begin to tell us what is
wrong with the modern power/knowledge regime and why we ought to
oppose it" (1989, 29). Other feminists have criticized the
Foucaultian claim that the subject is an effect of power. According to
feminists such as Linda Martin Alcoff and Seyla Benhabib, such
a claim implies a denial of agency that is incompatible with the
demands of feminism as an emancipatory social movement (Alcoff 1990,
Benhabib 1992, and Benhabib et al. 1995; for a reply to this line of
criticism, see Allen 2008a chs. 2 and 3). Finally, Nancy Hartsock
(1990 and 1996) calls into question the usefulness of Foucault's
work as an analytical tool. Hartsock makes two related arguments
against Foucault. First, she argues that his analysis of power is not
a theory for women because it does not examine power from the
epistemological point of view of the subordinated; in her view,
Foucault analyzes power from the perspective of the colonizer, rather
than the colonized (1990). Second, Foucault's analysis of power
fails to adequately theorize structural relations of inequality and
domination that undergird women's subordination; this is related
to the first argument because "domination, viewed from above, is
more likely to look like equality"(1996, 39; for a response to
this critique, see Allen 1996 and 1999).



Despite these and other trenchant feminist critiques of Foucault (see,
for example, Hekman, ed. 1996 and Ramazanoglu, ed. 1993), his analysis
of power continues to be an extremely useful resource for feminist
conceptions of domination. For recent important feminist work that
draws on Foucault's genealogical method to offer an
intersectional analysis of racism and gender or sexual oppression see
Feder (2007) and McWhorter (2009).


### 3.6 Postcolonial and Decolonial Feminist Approaches



Postcolonial and decolonial theory offer overlapping critiques of
historical and contemporary practices and discourses of imperial and
colonial domination. Yet they also have distinct lineages, theoretical
commitments, and implications (for helpful discussion, see Bhambra
2014 and Ramamurthy and Tambe 2017). Postcolonial theory rose to
prominence in the late 20th century, in association with the
groundbreaking work of Edward Said (1979) and the Subaltern Studies
Collective, and has been most influential in literary and cultural
studies. Taking as its primary point of reference the northern
European colonization of Southeast Asia and focusing primarily on the
discursive and cultural effects of colonialism, postcolonial theory is
deeply (though not uncritically) influenced by poststruturalism,
particularly the work of Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Decolonial
theory emerged somewhat later, in the early 2000s, in association with
the Latin American and Carribean scholars in the Modernity/Coloniality
group. Its primary point of reference is the colonization of the
Americas that began in 1492. Heavily influenced by Latin American
Marxism, world systems theory, and indigenous political struggles,
decolonial theory focuses on the connections between capitalism,
colonialism, and racial hierarchies. Although these two approaches are
not mutually exclusive, decolonial theory is often viewed as the more
radical of the two, due to its broader historical range and its calls
for epistemic decolonization and delinking from capitalist
modernity/coloniality (Ruiz 2021).



Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988) is
widely viewed as the watershed text in postcolonial feminism. Spivak's
essay opens with a critical discussion of an exchange betweeen
Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, in which they reject the idea of speaking
for the oppressed, insisting instead that the oppressed should speak
for themselves. The first part of her essay is devoted to a critique
of this claim and of the myriad ways in which Foucault and Deleuze
ignore the epistemic violence of imperialism. It is Foucault and
Deleuze's insistence that the oppressed "can speak and
know their conditions" that leads Spivak to formulate her famous
question, "can the subaltern speak?" (78). If, as Spivak
goes on to suggest, the subaltern can *not* speak, then the
"subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow" (83).
Drawing on the example of the British banning the practice of sati in
colonial India, Spivak suggests that the subaltern cannot speak
because she is caught between imperialist discourse and patriarchal
traditionalism, neither of which enables her to voice her experience:
"Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and
object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a
pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the
displaced figuration of the 'third world woman' caught
between tradition and modernization" (102). In other words,
there is no space from which the subaltern as female can speak and no
way she can be heard or read.



Another emblematic text in postcolonial feminism is Chandra Talpade
Mohanty's "Under Western Eyes" (1988). Mohanty's essay is
framed as a critique of Western feminist analyses of "Third
World Women" for their reductive and overly simplistic
understandings of power and oppression. In such discourses, as Mohanty
explains, "power is automatically defined in binary terms:
people who have it (read: men) and people who do not (read: women).
Men exploit, women are exploited. Such simplistic formulations are
historically reductive; they are also ineffectual in designing
strategies to combat oppressions" (73). By contrast, Mohanty
calls for an intersectional understanding of power that refuses to
homogenize or falsely universalize women's experience:
"the...homogenization of class, race, religion, and daily
material practices of women in the Third World can create a false
sense of the commonality of oppressions, interests, and struggles
between and among women globally. Beyond sisterhood there are still
racism, colonialism, and imperialism" (77). Furthermore, by
representing "Third World Women" as mere passive objects
or victims of oppression, Western feminists implicitly position
themselves as active subjects of resistance and revolutionary agents
- which Mohanty calls "the colonialist move"
(79).



Much of the agenda for decolonial feminism was set by Lugones in a
pair of essays published in *Hypatia* (2007 and 2010). Building
on the work of Anibal Quijano (2000), who argued that racialization is
rooted in the structure of colonial capitalism, Lugones contends that
gender itself is "a colonial concept and mode of organization of
relations of production, property relations, of cosmologies and ways
of knowing" (2007, 186). Seeing gender as a colonial concept
enables feminists to break out of the ahistorical framework of
patriarchy. As she explains: "To understand the relation of the
birth of the colonial/modern gender system to the birth of global
colonial capitalism-with the centrality of the coloniality of
power to that system of global power-is to understand our
present organization of life anew" (2007, 187). Lugones's
decolonial feminist framework combines the insights of
intersectionality theory with Quijano's understanding of the
coloniality of power (2007, 187-88). This brings into focus what
Lugones calls the "modern/colonial gender system" (2007,
189), a system that is characterized by strict sexual dimorphism and
presumed correspondence between biological sex and gender. In the
later essay, Lugones simplifies her formulation somewhat: "I
call the analysis of racialized, capitalist, gender oppression
"the coloniality of gender." I call the possibility of
overcoming the coloniality of gender "decolonial
feminism"" (2010, 747).


### 3.7 Analytic Feminist Approaches



Although most of the approaches to dominaiton discussed above have
been informed by the Continental philosophical tradition, analytic
feminists have made important contributions to the feminist literature
on domination as well. For example, Ann Cudd (2006) draws on the
framework of rational choice theory to analyze oppression (for related
work on rational choice theory and power, see Dowding 2001 and 2009;
for critical discussion, see Allen 2008c).



Cudd defines oppression in terms of four conditions: 1) the group
condition, which states that individuals are subjected to unjust
treatment because of their membership (or ascribed membership) in
certain social groups (Cudd 2006, 21); 2) the harm condition, which
stipulates that individuals are systematically and unfairly harmed as
a result of such membership (Cudd 2006, 21); 3) the coercion
condition, which specifies that the harms that those individuals
suffer are brought about through unjustified coercion (Cudd 2006, 22);
and 4) the privilege condition, which states that such coercive,
group-based harms count as oppression only when there exist other
social groups who derive a reciprocal privilege or benefit from that
unjust harm (Cudd 2006, 22-23). Cudd then defines oppression as
"an objective social phenomenon" characterized by these
four conditions (Cudd 2006, 23).



As Cudd sees it, the most difficult and interesting question that an
analysis of oppression must confront is the "endurance question:
how does oppression endure over time in spite of humans' rough
natural equality?" (Cudd 2006, 25). Any satisfactory answer to
this question must draw on a combination of empirical,
social-scientific research and normative philosophical theorizing,
inasmuch as a theory of oppression is an explanatory theory of a
normative concept (Cudd 2006, 26). (That oppression is a normative
- rather than a purely descriptive - concept is evident
from the fact that it is defined as an unjust or unfair set of power
relations). Cudd argues that social-theoretical frameworks such as
functionalism, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary psychology are
inadequate for theorizing oppression (Cudd 2006, 39-45).
Structural rational choice theory, in her view, best meets reasonable
criteria of explanatory adequacy and therefore provides the best
social-theoretical framework for analyzing oppression. By appealing to
a  *structural*  theory of rational choice, Cudd's
analysis of oppression avoids relying on assumptions about the
psychology of individual agents. Rather, as Cudd puts it, "the
structural theory of rational choice assesses the objective social
rewards and penalties that are consequent on" the interactions
and social status of specific group members and "uses these
assessments to impute preferences and beliefs to individuals based
purely on their social group memberships" (Cudd 2006, 45). But,
as a structural theory of *rational choice*, the framework
assumes "that agents behave rationally in the sense that they
choose actions that maximize their (induced) expected utilities"
(Cudd 2006, 46). In other words, structural rational choice theory
models human actions as "(basically instrumentally rational)
individual choice constrained within socially structured
payoffs" (Cudd 2006, 37). When utilized to analyze oppression,
structural rational choice theory suggests that the key to answering
the endurance question lies in the fact that "the oppressed are
co-opted through their own short-run rational choices to reinforce the
long-run oppression of their social group" (Cudd 2006,
21-22).



Sally Haslanger's work on gender and racial oppression, like
Cudd's, is heavily informed by the tools of analytic philosophy,
though Haslanger also situates her work within the tradition of
Critical Theory (see Haslanger 2012, 22-30). Haslanger distinguishes
between two kinds of cases of oppression: agent oppression, in which
"a person or persons (the oppressor(s)) inflicts harm upon
another (the oppressed) wrongfully or unjustly" (314) and
structural oppression, in which "the oppression is not an
individual wrong but a social/political wrong; that is, it is a
problem lying in our collective arrangements, an injustice in our
practices or institutions" (314). Having made this distinction,
Haslanger then argues for a mixed analysis of oppression that does not
attempt to reduce agent oppression to structural oppression or vice
versa. The danger of reducing structural oppression to agent
oppression - what Haslanger calls the individualistic approach to
oppression - is that doing so fails to acknowledge that
"sometimes structures themselves, not individuals are the
problem" (320). The danger of reducing agent oppression to
structural oppression - what Haslanger calls the institutionalist
approach - is that such an approach "fails to distinguish those
who abuse their power to do wrong and those who are privileged but do
not exploit their power" (320). Haslanger's mixed
approach, by contrast, is "attentive simultaneously [and, we
might add, non-reductively] to both agents and structures"
(11).



Haslanger also connects her account of structural domination and
oppression to her analysis of gender. Haslanger offers what she calls
a "focal analysis" of gender, according to which the core
of gender is "the pattern of social relations that constitute
the social classes of men as dominant and women as subordinate"
(228). Other things - such as norms, identities, symbols, etc - are
then gendered in relation to those social relations. On her analysis,
gender categories are defined in terms of how one is socially
positioned with respect to a broad complex of oppressive relations
between groups that are distinguished from one another by means of
sexual difference (see 229-230). As Haslanger explains, the
"background idea" informing this account of gender is
"that women are *oppressed*, and that they are oppressed
*as women*" (231).



By claiming that women are oppressed as women, Haslanger reiterates an
earlier claim made by radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon
(see, for example, MacKinnon 1987, 56-57). Indeed, Haslanger's
analysis is heavily indebted to MacKinnon's work (see Haslanger
2012, 35-82), though she does not endorse MacKinnon's strong
claims about the link between objectivity and masculinity, nor does
she adopt a dyadic (or, to use Haslanger's terminology,
reductively agent focused) understanding of oppression. But, like
MacKinnon, Haslanger believes that "gender categories are
defined relationally - one is a woman (or a man) by virtue of
one's position in a system of social relations" (58). This
means that "one's gender is an extrinsic property,
and...it is not necessary that we each have the gender we now have, or
that we have any gender at all" (58). Since the social relations
in terms of which gender categories are defined are relations of
hierarchical domination and structural oppression, "gender is,
by definition, hierarchical: Those who function socially as men have
power over those who function socially as women" (61). As
Haslanger admits, referencing the sex/gender distinction, this does
not mean that all males have power over all females - but it does
mean that females who are not subordinated by males are not, strictly
speaking, women, and vice versa. Moreover, as Haslanger notes,
"MacKinnon's account of gender, like others that define
gender hierarchically, has the consequence that feminism aims to
undermine the very distinction it depends upon. If feminism is
successful, there will no longer be a gender distinction as
such" because the complex of social relations of domination and
structural oppression that give gender its meaning will no longer
exist (62). While endorsing MacKinnon's radical conclusion with
respect to the currently existing gender categories of
'man' and 'woman', Haslanger's own
account offers a somewhat more nuanced view that allows for the future
possibility of a kind of gender difference that would not be predicted
on gender dominance: "gender can be fruitfully understood as a
higher order genus that includes not only the hierarchical social
positions of man and woman, but potentially other non-hierarchical
social positions defined in part by reference to reproductive
function. I believe gender *as we know it* takes hierarchical
forms as men and women; but the theoretical move of treating men and
women as only two kinds of gender provides resources for thinking
about other (actual) genders, and the political possibility of
constructing non-hierarchical genders" (235)


## 4. Power as Empowerment



Up to this point, this entry has focused on power understood in terms
of an oppressive or unjust power-over relationship. I have used the
term "domination" to refer to such relationships, though
some of the theorists discussed above prefer the terms
"oppression" or "subjection," and others refer
to this phenomenon simply as "power." However, a
significant strand of feminist theorizing of power starts with the
contention that the conception of power as power-over, domination, or
control is implicitly masculinist. In order to avoid such masculinist
connotations, many feminists from a variety of theoretical backgrounds
have argued for a reconceptualization of power as a capacity or
ability, specifically, the capacity to empower or transform oneself
and others. Thus, these feminists have tended to understood power not
as power-over but as power-to. Wartenberg (1990) argues that this
feminist understanding of power, which he calls transformative power,
is actually a type of power-over, albeit one that is distinct from
domination because it aims at empowering those over whom it is
exercised. However, most of the feminists who embrace this
transformative or empowerment-based conception of power explicitly
define it as an ability or capacity and present it as an alternative
to putatively masculine notions of power-over. Thus, in what follows,
I will follow their usage rather than Wartenberg's.



For example, Jean Baker Miller claims that "women's
examination of power...can bring new understanding to the whole
concept of power" (Miller 1992, 241). Miller rejects the
definition of power as domination; instead, she defines it as
"the capacity to produce a change - that is, to move
anything from point A or state A to point B or state B" (Miller
1992, 241). Miller suggests that power understood as domination is
particularly masculine; from women's perspective, power is
understood differently: "there is enormous validity in
women's not wanting to use power as it is presently conceived
and used. Rather, women may want to be powerful in ways that
simultaneously enhance, rather than diminish, the power of
others" (Miller 1992, 247-248).



Similarly, Virginia Held argues against the masculinist conception of
power as "the power to cause others to submit to one's
will, the power that led men to seek hierarchical control
and...contractual constraints" (Held 1993, 136). Held views
women's unique experiences as mothers and caregivers as the
basis for new insights into power; as she puts it, "the capacity
to give birth and to nurture and empower could be the basis for new
and more humanly promising conceptions than the ones that now prevail
of power, empowerment, and growth" (Held 1993, 137). According
to Held, "the power of a mothering person to empower others, to
foster transformative growth, is a different sort of power from that
of a stronger sword or a dominant will" (Held 1993, 209). On
Held's view, a feminist analysis of society and politics leads
to an understanding of power as the capacity to transform and empower
oneself and others.



This conception of power as transformative and empowering is also a
prominent theme in lesbian feminism and ecofeminism. For example,
Sarah Lucia Hoagland is critical of the masculine conception of power
with its focus on "state authority, police and armed forces,
control of economic resources, control of technology, and hierarchy
and chain of command" (Hoagland 1988, 114). Instead, Hoagland
defines power as "power-from-within" which she understands
as "the power of ability, of choice and engagement. It is
creative; and hence it is an affecting and transforming power but not
a controlling power" (Hoagland 1988, 118). Similarly, Starhawk
claims that she is "on the side of the power that emerges from
within, that is inherent in us as the power to grow is inherent in the
seed" (Starhawk 1987, 8). For both Hoagland and Starhawk,
power-from-within is a positive, life-affirming, and empowering force
that stands in stark contrast to power understood as domination,
control or imposing one's will on another.



A similar understanding of power can also be found in the work of the
prominent French feminists Luce Irigaray and Helene
Cixous. Irigaray, for example, urges feminists to question the
definition of power in phallocratic cultures, for if feminists
"aim simply for a change in the distribution of power, leaving
intact the power structure itself, then they are resubjecting
themselves, deliberately or not, to a phallocratic order"
(Irigaray 1985, 81), that is, to a discursive and cultural order that
privileges the masculine, represented by the phallus. If we wish to
subvert the phallocratic order, according to Irigaray, we will have to
reject "a definition of power of the masculine type"
(Irigaray 1985, 81). Some feminists interpret Irigaray's work on
sexual difference as suggesting an alternative conception of power as
transformative, a conception that is grounded in a specifically
feminine economy (see Irigaray 1981 and Kuykendall 1983). Similarly,
Cixous claims that "les pouvoirs de la femme" do not
consist in mastering or exercising power over others, but instead are
a form of "power over oneself" (Cixous 1977,
483-84).



Along similar lines, Nancy Hartsock refers to the understanding of
power "as energy and competence rather than dominance" as
"the feminist theory of power" (Hartsock 1983, 224).
Hartsock argues that precursors of this theory can be found in the
work of some women who did not consider themselves to be feminists
- most notably, Hannah Arendt, whose rejection of the
command-obedience model of power and definition of 'power'
as "the human ability not just to act but to act in
concert" overlaps significantly with the feminist conception of
power as empowerment (1970, 44). Arendt's definition of
'power' brings out another aspect of the definition of
'power' as empowerment because of her focus on community
or collective empowerment (on the relationship between power and
community, see Hartsock 1983, 1996). This aspect of empowerment is
evident in Mary Parker Follett's distinction between power-over
and power-with; for Follett, power-with is a collective ability that
is a function of relationships of reciprocity between members of a
group (Follett 1942). Hartsock finds it significant that the theme of
power as capacity or empowerment has been so prominent in the work of
women who have written about power. In her view, this points in the
direction of a feminist standpoint that "should allow us to
understand why the masculine community constructed...power, as
domination, repression, and death, and why women's accounts of
power differ in specific and systematic ways from those put forward by
men....such a standpoint might allow us to put forward an
understanding of power that points in more liberatory
directions" (Hartsock 1983, 226).



The notion of empowerment has also been taken up widely by advocates
of so-called "power feminism." A reaction against a
perceived over-emphasis on women's victimization and oppression
in feminism of the 1980s, power feminism emerged in the 1990s in the
writings of feminists such as Camille Paglia, Katie Roiphe, Christina
Hoff Sommers, and Naomi Wolf. Although this movement has had more
influence in mainstream media and culture than in academia -
indeed, in many ways it can be read as a critique of academic feminism
- it has also sparked scholarly debate. As Mary Caputi argues in
her book *Feminism and Power: The Need for Critical Theory*
(2013), power feminists reject not only the excessive focus on
women's victimization but also the claim, made by earlier
empowerment theorists, that women are "sensitive creatures given
more to a caring, interconnected web of human relationships than to
the rugged individualism espoused by men" (Caputi 2013, 4). In
contrast, power feminists endorse a more individualistic,
self-assertive, even aggressive conception of empowerment, one that
tends to define empowerment in terms of individual choice with little
concern for the contexts within which choices are made or the options
from which women are able to choose. Caputi argues that power feminism
relies on and mimetically reproduces a problematically masculinist
conception of power, one "enthralled by the display of
'power over' rather than 'power
with'..." (Caputi 2013, xv). As she puts it:
"feminism must query the uncritical endorsement of an
empowerment aligned with a masculinist will to power, and disown the
tough, sassy, self-assured *but unthinking*
'feminist'" (Caputi 2013, 17). Because of its
tendency to mimic an individualistic, sovereign, and masculinist
conception of power over, power feminism, according to Caputi,
"does little, if anything, to rethink our conception of
power" (Caputi 2013, 89). In order to prompt such a rethinking,
Caputi turns to the resources of the early Frankfurt School of
critical theory and to the work of Jacques Derrida.



Serene Khader's *Adaptive Preferences and Women's
Empowerment* offers another rethinking of empowerment in feminist
theory. Focusing on empowerment in the context of international
development practice, Khader develops a deliberative perfectionist
account of adaptive preferences. Rather than defining adaptive
preferences in terms of autonomy deficits, Khader defines them as
preferences "inconsistent with basic flourishing...that are
formed under conditions nonconductive to basic flourishing and...that
we believe people might be persuaded to transform upon normative
scrutiny of their preferences and exposure to conditions more
conducive to flourishing" (Khader 2011, 42). The perfectionism
in her account leads her to emphasize the distinction between merely
adaptive preferences - those formed through adaptation to existing
social conditions - and what she calls "inappropriately
adaptive preferences" (IAPs) - preferences that are
adaptive to bad or oppressive social conditions and that are harmful
to those who adopt them (52-53). She also insists that IAPs are most
often selective rather than global self-entitlement deficits (109),
which means that they impact individuals' sense of their own
worth or entitlement to certain goods not globally but rather in
particular domains and contexts and in relation to certain specific
individuals or groups. This allows her to acknowledge the
psychological effects of oppression working through the mechanism of
IAPs without denying the possibility of agency on the part of the
oppressed.



Khader draws on her deliberative perfectionist account of IAPs to
diagnose and move beyond certain controversies over the notion of
empowerment that have emerged in feminist development practice and
theorizing. As the concept of women's empowerment has become
central to international development practice, feminists have raised
concerns about the ideological effects of this shift. While
acknowledging that the language of empowerment in development practice
can have ideological effects, Khader addresses these concerns by
providing a clearer conception of empowerment than the one implicit in
the development literature and emphasizing what she understands as the
normative core of this concept, its relation to human flourishing. She
defines empowerment as the "*process of overcoming one or
many IAPs through processes that enhance some element of a
person's concept of self-entitlement and increase her capacity
to pursue her own flourishing*" (Khader 2011, 176). This
definition of empowerment enables her to rethink certain dilemmas of
empowerment that have emerged in development theory and practices. For
example, many development practitioners define empowerment in terms of
choice, and then struggle to make sense of apparently
self-subordinating choices. If choice equals empowerment, then does
this mean that the choice to subordinate or disempower oneself is an
instance of empowerment? Khader's finely grained analysis
provides an elegant way out of this dilemma by emphasizing the
conditions under which choices are made and the tradeoffs among
different domains or aspects of flourishing that these conditions may
necessitate. Discussing a case of young women in Tanzania who chose to
undergo clitoridectomy *after* receiving education about the
practice aimed at empowering them, Khader writes: "Are the young
women who choose clitoridectomy disempowered because they have few
options for unambiguously pursuing their flourishing or are they
empowered because they have exercised agential capacities by making a
choice? My analysis of IAP allows us to say both" (187). For
Khader, empowerment is a messy, complex, and incremental concept. Her
analysis of empowerment enables us to see that
"self-subordinating choices can have selective empowering
effects under disempowering conditions" (189). But the normative
core of her account, its deliberative perfectionism, insists that
"a situation where one cannot seek one's basic flourishing
across multiple domains is a tragic one" (189).


## 5. Concluding thoughts



The concept of power is central to a wide variety of debates in
feminist philosophy. Indeed, the very centrality of this concept to
feminist theorizing creates difficulties in writing an entry such as
this one: since the concept of power is operative on one way or
another in almost all work in feminist theory, it is extremely
difficult to place limits on the relevant sources. Throughout, I have
emphasized those texts and debates in which the concept of power is a
central theme, even if sometimes an implicit one. I have also
prioritized those authors and texts that have been most influential
within feminist philosophy, as opposed to the wider terrain of
feminist theory or gender studies, though I acknowledge that this
distinction is difficult to maintain and perhaps not always terribly
useful. Debatable as such framing choices may be, they do offer some
much needed help in delimiting the range of relevant sources and
providing focus and structure to the discussion.