BEASLEY

CHAPTER 4

GENDER DIFFERENCE FEMINISM: WOMEN-CENTRED IDENTITY

POLITICS TO SEXUAL DIFFERENCE RICH TO GROSZ
* CHALLENGING THE UNIVERSAL HUMAN: SUPPORTING (SINGULAR) DIFFERENCE
Gender Difference feminism developed from the 1980s onwards. The framework is somewhat
more sympathetic to Marxism (the other major Modernist view).
Gender Difference feminists challenged Marxisms universal (Modernist).
While Marxism is concerned with overthrowing the mainstream politics of Liberal thinking,
Gender Difference feminist suggested that Liberalism and Marxism shared more that either was
prepared to grant.
Gender Difference feminists argue that there is no singular universal human nature that can
form the basis of equality. They assert that equality feminists in pursuing a notion of woman
becoming equal to men. Gender Difference feminist argue that, in the strongly Modernist notion
of a universal human nature proposed by Liberalism and Marxism, equality = sameness. What
seems impartial or gender neutral is actually male-defined.
The Gender Difference feminists argue that the goal of universal equality counters
discrimination at the cost of presuming that women would be better off being like man, by
contrast Gender Difference feminists give value to womans group identity as women.
Equality and difference feminisms are associated with Liberal and Radical feminisms.
GENDER DIFFERENCE FEMINISMS: MODERNIST WOMEN-CENTRED TO POSTMODERN
GENDER/SEXYUAL DIFFERENCE APPROACHES
MODERNIST

POSTMODERN

1.- Category Identity politics termed

Woman-centred

2.- Gender/Sexual Difference approaches

a) Womens difference from men

a) The use of woman as symbolising

otherness or difference from the norm
-woman as a social symbol of what escape
the norm.

b) Womens commonality with each other,

shared experience of womanhood

b) Actual women share only a symbolic

location as the socially marginal.

c) The positive content of marginal identities,

e.g. woman

c) No particular content for identity of actual

women is presumed

d) Woman-centred model

d) Affirmation of the feminine and the female body as symbolising that which doesnt
fit the (masculine) universal standard.

e) Includes Radical (Rich), Socialist (Hartsock)

and Freudian psychoanalytic (Chodorow)
feminisms

e) Includes Postmodern-influenced version

of psychoanalytic feminism, e.g. Freudian (Flax) and Lacanian (Grosz)

* MODERNIST WOMEN-CENTRED FEMINISM: BROAD FEATURES:

The variant of Gender Difference feminism that may be described as on the Modernist side of
the continuum is the women-centred feminism = predominant version of Western feminist in
the 1980s.
Women-centred feminism arises out of some strands of Radical and Socialist feminisms. In
women-centred feminism the focus is on womens difference from men. Oppressions based
upon sex/gender distinction on women, occupying a lower social status. Women-centred
Radical and Socialist feminists see patriarchy as the first form of social hierarchy. Their political

project is to undo the impact of patriarchy in typically Modernist terms to throw off androcentric
power.
In attending to womens difference form men there is a concomitant concern here with womens
commonality as a group, rather that with Human commonality.
Modernist variant of Gender Difference feminism is often labelled category or Identity
politics feminism because it claims to speak from and about the identity category of women. As
a variant of gynocentric theory, this women-centred approach perceives the world through the
lens of a division between male and female.
* WOMEN-CENTRED GENDER DIFFERENCE WRITINGS:
The overall spirit of Modernist women-centred thinking has been to acknowledge and give
credence to womans ways of knowing, being and valuing. Writers like Radical feminist Mary
Daly insist that women are intrinsically different from men and identify women with the creative
and life-affirming. By contrast, standpoint theorists like Nancy Hartsock, a Socialist feminist,
says that women are not intrinsically different from men, because they are not powerful and
develop different on social life.
Emancipatory feminism: strategy of inclusion or assimilation into existing society,Gender
Difference feminism = strategy or reversal, a reassessment of the socially marginal (Ferguson,
a turning towards women and the feminine). Adrien Rich in Compulsory heterosexuality and
lesbian existence doubts about connections between lesbians and gay men on the basis that
any coverall homosexual labels crases womens specificity. She sees lesbians as having more
in common with other women than with men. Rich outlines what she called a lesbian
continuum which suggest that the experience of heterosexual women and lesbians are not as
distinct as heterosexist and patriarchal society presumes. You can see in Richs work the usual
focus of women-centred approaches upon what is common to women, what it shared between
women, and how this is different from men.
During the 1980s the woman-identified associated with demands for lesbian separatism
and for feminists to separate from men. Women-centred thinking became identified with striving
for an authentic identity, a pure womanhood.
Andrea Dworkins linkage of heterosexual with what she perceived as patriarchys rape
culture, and pornography with the marketing strategy of this culture, appeared to offer an
account of a women-centred perspective. Dworkins analysis constructs men and women as
unitary and distinct categories. Dworkins account of heterosex may also be viewed as related to
Social Constructionism, an approach that rejects notions of identity difference. Dworkins
ambiguous location between Gender Difference and Social Constructionist, show the limits of
terminologies like women-centred and Different feminism.
* PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DIFFERENCE FEMINISM:
Modernist women-centred writers employing psychoanalysis support the women-centred
notion that women have a different self/identity. Women-centred psychoanalytic feminist see
subordination as a source of insights.
Psychoanalysis = Sigmund Freud. Freuds work argued that sexed and sexual identities are
not the result of social imitation or modelling. Freuds view was that gender difference was the
basis of the construction of identity itself. Psychoanalysis argues that gender (sexual) difference
is what makes the self and underpins social life.
Gender Difference feminists stress the role of the Mother in the development of the self,
Freud highlighted the Father. All psychoanalytic feminists suggest that Freuds analysis can be
employed to support a positive re-valuation of women/femininity, despite its male focus.
* FREUDS WORK AND ITS USES FOR FEMINISM:
Psychoanalysis has also been adopted buy feminists because of the development of the self.
Freud is interested in how we become human, in how we develop a self. Freuds work questions
gendered and sexual identities/roles. Children become the key to understanding personality,
social relationships and social organisation itself. Freud focuses on how the self is constructed.
Freud does not accept that we are fixed creatures.
* FREUDS ACCOUNT OF THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE SELF AND HENCE SOCIAL
ORGANISATION:
The period from birth in which children experience pleasure in an amorphous way, Freud called
the pre-Oedipal period= relation to the Mother, a symbiotic period.

Freud calls the second period in childrens lives, the Oedipal period = marked by a movement
away from the Mother.
For Freud, mother and father figures work as broad psychosocial symbols in the childs world.
The father is described as the third term who steps in between Mother and Child.
All children must in some way lose the mother for the rewards of selfhood. This sets the scene
for ongoing social devaluation of women and the association of men with status and authority.
Boys tends to the father and girls to through a similar process but it is not the same, their selflessness of union with mother is less clear-cut.
Both boys and girls align with father but in the case of boys this is attained through identification,
while for girls alignment is established through desire.
The crucial point of Freuds analysis is that to become a self requires the adoption of a
gendered positioning.
* FEMINIST REWORKINGS OF FREUD: BASIC CRITICISM
Most feminists are critical of aspects of Freuds work. Freud demonstrate a pshycho-social basis
for gender identities and hierarchy which is undermined by equating gender with anatomy.
Jacques Lacan is a contemporary interpreter of Freuds approach. His work is important in
Postmodern feminist psychoanalytic accounts because he replaces Freuds biological stance
with a cultural perspective.
Feminists criticise Freud because he is accepting and prescribing male dominance as the basis
of all human culture and human selfhood. Penis of male-centredness = phallocentrism.
This story is literally penis-centred (the color purple). The libido is identified as male.
* WOMAN-CENTRED (MODERNIST) PSYCHOANALYTIC FEMINIST: NANCY CHODOROW:
Nancy Chodorow, a modernist women-centred writers, points out that although Freud presents
all children as initially polymorphously sexual, they are not (Why the penis focus of attention?
Why mothers breast is not a symbol in the development of the child?). She rejects Freuds
account of femininity as entailing a weaker sense of self. Chodorow asserts that Freud
underestimate the pre-Oedipal period and overestimate the Oedipal.
Chodorow, like Freud, argues that girls retain a longer connection in the pre-Oedipal period to
mother than boys. They continue to desire mother, to be mother. This reproduction of mothering
behaviour continues to generate womens unequal responsibility for parenting. Chodorow
recommends that mens greater involvement in parenting would disrupt this chain of effects.
Chodorows views suggest that women can offer a model for reforming neo-liberal individualism
and masculinity.
* DEBATES ABOUT MODERNIST GENDER DIFFERENCE FEMINISM:
Rich and Chodorow provide two different examples of Modernist Gender Difference feminism.
They focus on the significance of gender identities as the key to understanding patriarchal
society. Modernist Gender Difference (women-centred) gained major influence in feminism in
the 1980s and accepted Western societics.
There are many criticism of women-centred Gender Difference feminism because it is viewed as
back to conservative popularist ideas about the nature of men and women. The criticisms of this
kind of Feminism tend to arise in relation to four major issues:
1) Describing a universalised content for womanhood. Critics suggest that the Difference
framework reinforces socially inscribed gender categories. Gender Difference thinking is
seen as conforming societys binary categories with being a woman or a man.
2) A fixed content to an identity/self associated with being a woman or a man. Social
Constructionist and Postmodernist critics note that manhood are not the same in every
culture. The sex wars in feminism during the 1980s and 1990s. Sex radical like Pat
Califia noted that some women were nurturing, while others were inflicting pain in S/M
(sadomasochistic) sex.
3) Social Constructionists argued that focusing on difference (on what men and women
might be like) diverts from the critical issue of domination. Difference is not the cause
of social discrimination but rather arises from it.
4) Commentators attending to Differences argue that the attempt to construct a
monolithic group, women focuses on gendered power and ignores differences such
as race and class.

CONCLUSION:
The criticisms of Gender Difference feminism revolve around a rejection of Identity politics
associated with Modernist women-centred accounts. The first three of the criticism above,
contributed to the development of a Postmodern Gender/Sexual Difference approach, which
reflected the broad move in gender/sexuality theory during 1990s away from a stress on
identity categories. The last of the criticism above, regarding the construction of a monolithic
category woman continued to be an issue for the Postmodern variant.