Feminist sociology is a conflict theory and theoretical perspective which observes gender in its relation to power, both at the level of face-to-face interaction and reflexivity within a social structure at large. Focuses include sexual orientation, race, economic status, and nationality.
At the core of feminist sociology is the idea of the systematic oppression of women and the historical dominance of men within most societies: 'patriarchy'. Feminist thought has a rich history, however, which may be categorized into three 'waves'. The current, 'third wave', emphasizes the concepts of globalization, postcolonialism, post-structuralism and postmodernism. Contemporary feminist thought has frequently tended to do-away with all generalizations regarding sex and gender, closely linked with antihumanism, posthumanism, queer theory and the work of Michel Foucault.
Read more about Feminist Sociology: Heterosexism, Feminism and Race, Feminist Critiques of Multiculturalism
Famous quotes containing the words feminist and/or sociology:
“The liberal wing of the feminist movement may have improved the lives of its middle- and upper-class constituency—indeed, 1992 was the Year of the White Middle Class Woman—but since the leadership of this faction of the feminist movement has singled out black men as the meta-enemy of women, these women represent one of the most serious threats to black male well-being since the Klan.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)