Abstract
After an initial period of feminist theorizing concerned with understanding patriarchy as a structure of male domination, many thinkers turned away from theorizing domination as such and focused instead on women's (constructed) subjectivity, identity, and agency. While this has fostered important insights into the formation of women's preferences, desires, and choices, this focus on subjectivity and subject formation has largely overshadowed deeper understandings of patriarchy as a structure of male domination while producing elisions between agency and freedom. In this article, I move to show how domination as a structural concept can help us to reclaim the idea of ‘patriarchy’ as a source of women's systematic oppression while freedom as non-domination, derived from early republican conceptualizations of freedom, can help us to disambiguate freedom from agency by taking as central the relative positions of actors within social and political structures. Structural freedom as non-domination is thus useful for feminist thinkers in that it gives us critical purchase on the dynamics inherent in unequal social and political relationships and can be linked clearly to the institutions and ideologies that shape and justify interactions between more powerful and less powerful groups. Further, from this point of view intersecting structures of domination can be analysed rather than intersecting identity categories, allowing us to take intersectionality into account and avoiding the need to ground feminist action on a unitary ‘category woman’. Finally, this analysis points toward the radical democratic connexion between freedom and participation in the creation of the material and symbolic structures that frame our collective lives.
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Notes
It should be noted that this statement was written by a collective for an expressly political purpose; I include it here not in order to compare its underlying theoretical premises with expressly theoretical arguments written by single authors, but instead to capture the spirit of a general argument being made at this time.
I do not mean to suggest that women's subject formation and patriarchy as a structure of domination are unrelated; indeed they are interconnected in complex ways. However, these connections have not always been made clear.
‘Resistance’ is a particularly seductive yet limited way to understand freedom. Since it induces the feeling that one is ‘doing something’ but is always exercised in reaction to whatever already exists, it seldom takes the form of collective action or deep structural change.
Here, it is appropriate to use gender-specific language, since in classical Rome only men were eligible for the freedom associated with property-holding and citizenship.
As Nancy Hirschmann points out, however, some force is necessary if domination is to maintain itself; women are regularly beaten and raped, for example, so the idea that women could be ‘dominated’ by men without ‘interference’ does not hold (Hirschmann, 2003: 27).
It should also be noted that heteronormativity is not gender-neutral; women and men experience it in very different ways and with different consequences.
This is not to suggest that one's ‘position’ within gender as a structure is unrelated to one's experience of gender at the level of identity, subjectivity, or experience.
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks R. Amy Elman, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors of Feminist Review for their helpful comments and suggestions.
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Einspahr, J. structural domination and structural freedom: a feminist perspective. Fem Rev 94, 1–19 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2009.40
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2009.40