criticisms to the mainstream theories

These are my notes to help me learn about bell hooks feminist theory.

On the hegemonic movements.

We will discuss first the liberal and the radical movement.

The radical movement is known to criticize how gender artificially created the class of men and the class of women. Often times, radical activists base their analysis on the opposition of men and women. For example, the creation of the female class, created a class of people who will work for free and ensure the reproduction of society.

Here we call liberal movements, the ones who advocates for equal opportunity, and they support the idea that with meritocracy we can achieve a fair society. Liberal movements want to achieve equality.

Criticizing the classification.

When radical feminists oppose men, they work with two groups, males and females. This excludes any non binary person, and also has historically excluded trans people from the movement, an article on understanding trans exclusion in feminism is to come.

But by creating the two categories, the analysis sees men as only the hegemonic masculinities. At the same time, these lenses are limiting, since not all women are equal. And the same is valid for men. In The Will to change, bell hooks talks about the work on Masculinities.

When liberal feminists seek for equality, they are white women seeking equality to their male counterpart, they aren't seeking to have the same conditions as black men, because they know that they will have more privilege being equal to the white men.

This makes very hard for these two movements to understand and cooperate with black communities.

On the personal.

The personal is political, is a maxim repeated by the liberal feminists. The weakness in this approach is that it is very hard to constitute a social movement based only in individualities, because people will tend to believe that they can solve their problems in an individual level.