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Does discourse theory explain the development of the

feminist movement?


Todays world has brought us to a point where our identities are
characterized as multifaceted. At any point in our interactions, any one of
these identities may become relevant, and influence what other think or say
about us. Consequently, our gender and sexuality might, sometimes, be
brought to focus attention, through the use of explicitly gendered or marked
terms.
Nowadays world is an exciting environment for the feminists and
gender talk. Since the mid-1970s, there could be seen a rapid growth in the
number and rage of approaches that have set about exploring the relationship
between gender and language. In part, this growth can be perceived as a
consequence of the increase in importance of the discourse in the social and
human sciences, in which language is seen not only as a neutral means of
expression, but as something that is central to the construction and
reproduction of gendered selves, social structures and relations.
It is thought, by few feminists, that discourse is often gendered, and
that it forms one of the primary means through which patriarchy and
oppressive norms and social practices are instantiated and reproduced.
Moreover, they are increasingly aware of the fundamentally political nature of
discourse, because when discourse it used for mainly communication there
exist a tendency to naturalize and perpetuate oppressive understandings of
gender and gender and role behavior, largely being presented as timeless,
rational and natural. Therefore, these understandings become deeply
ingrained in our commonsense views about the world, and become regarded
as normative and expectable. Nonetheless, there is a growing awareness that
the politics of discourse is not one-dimensional. Discourse can be used to

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expose and denaturalize commonsense understandings of gender and to
challenge ideas which create and sustain sexist and heterosexist social
practices.
This paper analyzes the relationship between the feminist movement
and discourse theory based on the five main points of discourse theory,
starting from the question Does discourse theory explain the development of the
feminist movement? Firstly, the paper deals with the feminist movement per se,
based on historical grounds taking into consideration how the movement was
brought to existence and how it developed; secondly it will analyze the
movement from a discourse perspective, and thirdly it will provide a
conclusion in accordance with the question already mentioned.
In Early Modern England feminist activity took a different form from
the feminist movement of the twentieth century. Indeed, the issue of whether
or not the efforts made by women for better treatment at the hands of men in
this period can really be called feminism at all is still being debated.
However, looking backwards into the history of womens struggle against
oppression, we are able to identify instances of resistance which we can
legitimately identify as feminist in nature.
For a clear definition of feminism there have to be a clear understanding
of the term patriarchy. According to Chris Weedon, the term patriarchal
refers to power relations in which womens interests are subordinated to the interests
of men. These power relations take on many forms, from the sexual division of labor
and the social organization of procreation to the internalized norms of femininity by
which we live. Patriarchal power rests on social meaning given to biological sexual
difference.
1

Even though the definition may appear to cover a great deal of ground,
it is plausible only if applied to the twentieth century. However, the period
15501700 saw no legislated improvement in the position of women. At the

1
Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory, Blackwell Publishers, 1987,
p.2.

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end of the period, women did not have any formal rights in local or national
government, including the right to vote. Although conditions for the education
of women largely improved from 15501700, women were barred from
receiving a university education and the concomitant benefits. Moreover the
vast majority of the population, male and female, had no voting rights, and but
little access to education and legal representation. It is certainly not true to say
that all men were more empowered than all women. Yet, whilst the aristocratic
lady might enjoy more socio-economic power than a male apprentice, she
enjoyed less than a man of equivalent rank, just as the male apprentice enjoyed
more power than a woman of a similar social standing. Women had no
recourse to law for equality of pay and conditions, and married women had no
legal independence from their husbands. This latter condition was exacerbated
by the fact that it was very difficult for women to achieve economic
independence, and so marriage was one of the few ways in which women
could secure their future. Unless exceptional circumstances prevailed, upon
marriage, all property that belonged to the wife, and all property that she
subsequently received, automatically became her husbands. Childbearing
was a major part of the wifes role, be it to provide male heirs to her husbands
lands and titles or to provide a source of labour. However, women had no
rights over their children; the bringing up, education and disposal in marriage
were entirely the preserve of the father. In the eyes of the law, they belonged to
their fathers, and where parents fell out or separated.
Early thinking about the difference between women and men was
based on essentialist ideas about gender which maintained that women's and
men's differences are a result of biology. The belief that biology is destiny
suggests that, in comparable situations, men exhibit "masculine" psychological
traits such as aggressiveness, rationality and assertiveness, whereas women
will exhibit "feminine" traits such as gentleness, intuitiveness and sensitivity.
These differences, it was believed, translated into particular patterns of
thought, feeling and behaviour specific to each gender.

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The feminism engendered under such circumstances was inevitably
one which had to change attitudes before it sought to change conditions. Most
feminist writers of the period sought to challenge the prevailing idea that
women were an inferior branch of the human race, tainted by Eves
transgression in the Garden of Eden with fewer capabilities than men for
moral behavior and rational thought. Moreover, even though the term
feminism came into English usage around 1890s, it is traced much further
back. For instance, as early as the 4
th
Century BC, Aristotle declared that
women were women by virtue of a certain lack of qualities.
The period 1550-1700 presented women with grounds upon which to
challenge the inevitability of patriarchal authority. long and successful reign
of Elizabeth I (15581603) and the cultural influences of powerful women such
as Anna of Denmark (queen to James VI and I), the Countess of Bedford, the
Countess of Pembroke and Henrietta Maria (queen to Charles I) demonstrated
that, given the right opportunities, women could flourish in politics and the
arts.
Later on, the Civil War and Interregnum (164260), and the Glorious
Revolution (1688) showed that the supreme patriarchal power of the King
could be successfully contested by his male and female subjects. After the
Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the rise of the professional woman in the arts
as performer, dramatist and poet gave both an effective channel to express
feminist ideas and a practical vehicle for giving the lie to notions of womens
inferiority.
Contemporary feminist have contributed to complex and nuanced
understandings of power relations and gender at work within particular social
orders. Two important insights for a feminist have been the recognition of (1)
the difference and diversity among women (and men), which has called for
undertaking historically and culturally contingent analyses of gender and
sexism; and (2) the pervasiveness of subtle, discursive workings of modern
power in many societies today. By studying gender and discourse, and by

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exploring how dominant or prejudicial ideas about gender are created or
resisted in discourse, knowledge can be acquired and used to inform social
change for the better.
For many contemporary feminist theorists, the concept of woman is a
problematic one, primarily concerning its significance because it is the central
concept for feminist theory, yet it is impossible to be precisely formulated. In
an attempt to speak for women, feminism presupposes that it has knowledge
of what women truly are. However, that isnt not entirely true as the dilemma
feminist theorists are facing is that our very self-definition is grounded in a
concept that we must deconstruct and de-essentialize in all of its aspects. Man
has said that woman can be defined, delineated, captured understood,
explained, and diagnosed- to a level of determination never accorded to main
himself, who is conceived as a rational animal with free will. Where mans
behavior is undetermined, free to construct its own future along the course of
its rational choice, womans nature has over-determined her behavior, the
limits of her intellectual endeavors, and the inevitabilities of her emotional
journey through life. Despite the variety of ways in which men, over time, has
constructed female essential characteristics, she was always depicted as the
Object, a conglomeration of attributes to be predicted and controlled along
with other natural phenomena. The place of the free willed subject who can
transcend natures mandates is reserved exclusively for men.
2

Due to that perspective two major situations have been articulated by
the feminists. First response is based on the claim that feminists have the
exclusive right to describe and evaluate women, and the second one rejects the
possibility of defining woman as such at all. The first response depicts the
problem of male supremacist culture which is the problem of a process in
which women are defined by men, mainly by a group who has contrasting
points of view and set of interests from women. The second response is about
deconstructing all concept of women and argue that both feminist and

2
Genevive Lloyd, The Man of Reason, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, p. 86

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misogynist attempts to define women are politically reactionary and
ontologically mistaken.
Discourse theory is, at its core, a theory of politics: of the hegemonic
formation of social relations of discourses that necessarily involve
hierarchies of power and relations of inclusion and exclusion. As such,
discourse is, in essence, political. And since discursive articulations and
contestations rely on forms of mediation, ranging from body language to mass
media representations, discourse theory can be thought of as fundamentally
about media politics.
Discourse theory has 5 main points, introduced by Laclau and Mouffle,
having as staple keywords terms like discourse, articulation and
hegemony. These points are critical in discourse theory, but they might, as
well, explain the emergence of a movement such as feminism.
The first argument is characterized by the anti-essentialist ontology of
discourse theory, where there is a strong belief that there is no such thing as
pre-given essence, pre-determinate, that could be placed in the centre.
Therefore, there is no such thing as an essence that stabilizes the identities
fixing the entire system for good.
Most feminist argue that being a feminist needs a certain bottom line,
an essentialist base from which to ground their politics, and some foundational
criteria from which to judge the validity and political adequacy of the feminist
claims. For instance, traditionally, feminism needed to have a fix object
patriarchy- that was intrinsically negative, measurable and linked up with
identity to work with, and against which we can collectively mobilize. There is
no room for an always indexical element to identity, as one would never be
able to pin it down and capture it for long enough to make claims about the
workings of social power. To some extent, then, selective reification of the
object of our critique is unavoidable
The second argument of discourse theory deals with struggles,
picturing how discourses are constructed through hegemonic struggles that

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wish to establish an intellectual and political leadership that being possible
only through the installment of certain articulation based on meaning and
identities. The aim is to be hegemonic since there are struggles among different
representations of reality, which are the result of the differences between what
we are, and what we believe in. Discourses are not simple speeches, not only
products of the one who pronounces them; they have the ability to pronounce
the identity of the one that produces them. Therefore, discourses can be
perceived as creators of the actors identities.
The world, perceived as the macro-social structural context, and the
mind, depicted as the cognitive-psychological context, can be retheorized as
discursive topic, not resource. Individuals draw on descriptions which invoke
mental process, thought and feelings, in order to produce and reproduce in
gender talk, and naturalize or challenge specific understandings of gender.
Sometimes, this ideas main core is taken to a new level and its meaning
concludes to nothingness, largely there is nothing beyond discourses text, and
so it encourages a wholesale collapse into discourse idealism, the position
that there is nothing but discourse.
However, as we could see in the history of feminism, the second
argument of the discourse theory applies in the development of the feminist
movement. Drawing on a line for attention, the feminists have gone through
tremendous struggle for the achievement of the rights they have today. The
movement per se is characterized by the females perpetual struggle to
recognition, the right to own identity beyond that recognized only as an Object
to men. Moreover, feminist discourses developed as the necessity for
pronunciation of womens identity beyond that of housewives with emphasis
on childbearing, so that it settles an equality point between men and women,
taking away the patriarchal order.
The third point of discourse theory has as core the idea of antagonism.
All processes of articulation, meaning and identity are strongly linked to the
construction of antagonisms- social or otherwise. These antagonisms are

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binary, based on the exclusion of the threatening other. At discourse level, the
threatening others is represented by a different discourse that can be embodied
by a different group, largely a rival group. Looking at the threatening others
from a feminist perspectives we can perceive different levels of threats, from
lower ones, such as sexist and misogynistic language, to broader ones, like the
power relations Chris Weedon spoke about the patriarchal power which has
social pillars embodied, for instance by the sexual division of labor and the
social organization of procreation.
The feminist movement and feminist scholarship are frequently seen
as divided between the advocates of equality on the one side and the
advocates of sexual difference on the other. Some are demanding equality in
the sense of the identical treatment of women and men, and others demand
that the distinctive characteristics and activities of women should be given
special considerations, and it appears that women are forced to choose
between the two. Either way, the antagonism is clearly another group of
individuals, different from gender point of view, and to which womens
interests are perceived to have been subordinated for too long.
The fourth point of discourse theory emphasizes dislocation, bringing
to existence the idea that a discourse becomes dislocated when it confronts to
unexplained events. Most existing discourses are flexible, but limited, being
ultimately in conformity with events that could stabilize them. The aim of
these discourses is to become elastic enough to gain the ability to stretch so
that they will comprise the changes in society and integrate them.
This fourth point does apply to feminist movement, as, in the
beginning, the demands were in accordance with the period of time they took
place in, continuously changing with the time to fit the actual context. It
started with womens excruciating struggle for citizenship, and especially for
suffrage, beginning that was not a simply campaign for equality, for the rights
of men and citizens to be extended to them as well. From at least 1792, when
Mary Wollstonecrafts A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published,

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women have demanded both equal civil and political rights, and that their
difference from men should be acknowledged in their citizenship. Later on,
feminist discourse included the inclusion of women into the political order,
which is seen as an incredibly sensitive and complex matter. It is assumed that
the problem of womens citizenship is one of exclusion; therefore a major
reason for the complexity of womens political status is that it has never been a
matter of mere exclusion.
Womens political standing rests on a major paradox; they have been excluded
and included on the basis of the very same capacities and attributes. Feminist
theorists have shown how political constructions of what it means to be a man
or a woman are central to conceptions of the well-ordered polity.
Moreover, the aim of feminism is not only to show up the complex,
subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, ways in which frequently taken-for-
granted gendered assumptions and hegemonic power relations are
discursively produced, sustained, negotiated, and challenged in different
contexts and communities, but also to address solutions adaptable to the
ongoing changes that take place in the world. Such an interest is not merely an
academic de-construction of texts and talk for its own sake, but comes from an
acknowledgement that the issues dealt with (in view of effecting social change)
have material and phenomenological consequences for groups of women and
men in specic communities.
The fifth and the last main point of discourse theory mainly concern the
split subject. This notion of split subject refers to the effects of the signifier on
the subject. In terms of discourse theory, the individual has neither full
structural identity nor an identity outside the structure. This brings us to the
conclusion that the individual is always in the search of a final identity, never
being fully complete. This point, is also applicable in what concerns the
feminist movement, as shown before with the fourth main point, feminist not
only will they try to adapt their studies and ideas to the continuous changes
that the world implies, but they were and will always be in a perpetual search

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for a complete identity. Feminist not only try to find a point of equality
between genders, but given the worlds curse to be forever changing, so do the
feminist try to adapt to the new ways of living and to the high standards
imposed by such a concept of equality between man and women.
In conclusion, regarding the question which gives the title of this essay
Does discourse theory explain the development of feminist movement? the answer
would be yes. At a certain level, discourse theory and the five main points
introduced by Laclau and Mouffle give a certain insight in what concerns the
way in which the feminist movement has taken life, and developed in time.
Due to their need of emancipation and the feminist recovery of women for
history has been a far-reaching, complex, and contradictory project. It is beset
by aversion of the 'sameness versus difference' conundrum that feminists have
long faced as they argued for equality with men. Feminist historians have
made the identity of 'women' coherent and singular at the same time that they
have provided empirical evidence for irreducible differences among women.
The feminist approach simultaneously establishes women as historical
subjects operating in time and makes the idea of 'women' singular and
timeless: those women in the past (or in other cultures) whose actions set
precedents for our own are taken in some fundamental way to be just like us.
This has been brought to existence due to their need to have an identity, which
develops in time with the social changes. Issues such as gender and sexuality
has brought women to see men as opposition, as a threatening other which
has to be either excluded, either brought to on the same side. The issue of
sexuality has posed formidable questions of difference as well, leading to
serious fractures in feminist solidarity and to the appearance of 'radical'
feminisma term used to refer to those who deem heterosexuality the source of
women's oppression.




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