How has feminist philosophy contested and revised existing accounts of justice?

Answer

Introduction

The concept feminism emerged from women’s increasing realization of the fact that their former victories had not realized the desired success in establishing equality between the male and female sexes. According to Alcoff and Kittay (2007) and Meyer (2017), feminist viewpoints who distrust the law share three crucial premises. First are conventional legal doctrines, which were developed by men within a society that was men dominated, have a crucial male bias even if they are apparently gender-neutral. Second, women’s reasons are so dissimilar from men’s lives that any theory that is developed by men does not fit women’s reality. Last, the formulation of feminist concept requires that women develop a theory from their individual perspective and experience. Feminism has been regarded as a political movement and intellectual commitment that seeks for justice for females as well as the end of sexism in all kinds. Motivated and informed by the pursuit for social justice, feminist inquiries have provided a wide variety of viewpoints regarding economic, political, and social phenomena (Bell, 2000; Dohmen, 2017). Globally, feminists have continued to identify law as a tool of male supremacy, making critiques of law as a crucial component of feminist movement by eradicating the most barefaced examples of lawful/ legal sexism (Robeyns, 2017). It is against this backdrop that this essay, using various strands of feminist political viewpoints, aims at answering the question: How has feminist philosophy contested and revised existing accounts of justice? The next section of this essay will be on literature review. Under the literature review section, an exploration of various literatures regarding how feminist philosophy has contested and revised existing accounts of justice will be done. A review of the literatures’ research designs, data collection methods and procedures, data analyses, and findings will be done. The objective of this section will be to determine how feminist philosophy has contested and revised existing accounts of justice. This section anticipates finding that gender reform feminisms have encountered contradictions in their views and practical solutions. For instance, liberalism feminism contends that men and women are essentially alike, and thus women ought to be equally represented in public spheres that are often dominated by men. However, the question that is likely to come out is what difference does it make if a man or woman does a certain job?

Literature Review

A lot has been written regarding feminist political viewpoint. The work The Blackwell guide to feminist philosophy (2007) by Hirschmann focused on two facets that are unique to feminist political viewpoint: feminist approaches to political concepts, such as equality, justice, obligation, and freedom; and theoretical approaches to practical political concerns of particular importance to women, like welfare reform, abortion, domestic violence, sexual assault, and pornography. According to Hirschmann (2007), Alison Jaggar in her Feminist Politics and Human Nature work postulated a typology of feminist political philosophers of liberal, Marxist, radical, and socialist (Butler, 2007). According to Jaggar’s work, liberal feminism esteemed the primacy of individual women as well as their individual abilities to compete with their male counterparts, which necessitated the elimination of the various social barriers that were initially placed in women’s ways towards achievements. However Jaggar argued that elimination of social barriers would only shore up the very free-capitalist system that functioned by subordinating women, and thus women’s equality in such a system that would never free women (Butler, 2007).

The Marxist feminists, on the other hand, have argued for the ending of capitalism. Marxist feminists argue that the oppression of women can be ended only if capitalism is completely eliminated. However, contemporary feminists like Nancy Harsock has lately claimed that capitalism cannot wholly be destroyed till women are freed, implying that while Marxists argued that capitalism was the basis for patriarchy, others argued that patriarchy was the foundation for capitalism (Butler, 2007).

In the chapter “Trans Women and the Meaning of 'Woman’” in  Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings (2012), Talia Mae Bettcher posits that two dominant models that have been developed about trans-sexuality, the ‘Transgender Model’ and the ‘Wrong Body Model,’ are misleading. She proceeds to provide a third model, a multiple-meaning viewpoint, which permits trans-individuals wishing to fit into the ‘woman and ‘man’ binaries to do so minus being pathologized (Bettcher, 2012). In the work, Bettcher posits that as opposed to starting with the dominant or mainstream meanings of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ gender terms, there is a need to equally take into account their meanings along with their usage within trans-communities (Bettcher, 2012). For this reason, Bettcher points out that expressions like ‘trans-woman do not merely imply a controversial instance of ‘woman’ and that being a trans-woman  is not a unique type of a woman, but a woman, period.

This study is important since the approach given to trans-man or trans-woman enables trans-people to stop accommodating themselves to the popular or dominant usages of gender terms. Thus, they expose, simultaneously, the political hegemony of the manner in which these binaries are perceived and understood.

In another text, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler, a deeper exposition was given regarding feminist political philosophy. According to the text, the liberal feminism theoretically claims that differences in gender are not based upon biology, and as such that men and women are not all that dissimilar, their shared humanity overrides their proactive differentiation. Butler argues that since men and women are not different, they ought to be treated in the same manner under the law. Butler argues that women and men ought to have same rights and work and educational opportunities, as supported by Stoljar (2018) and Mari (2016). The liberalist feminists’ activist concentration has been gender discrimination, like gendered job marketplaces and inequitable wage scales, along with getting women into positions of influence and authority in the government, professions, and cultural institutions (Butler, 2007). As such, the liberal activists took crucial weapons of civil rights movements, like affirmative action, anti-discrimination, and legislation, and employed them in fighting gender inequality, particularly in job marketplaces.

According to the work by Butler, Marx’s assessment of capitalism’s social structure was supposed to be applicable to people of any kind of social characteristics. If one owned a means of production, the one was a member of the capitalist class, and if one sold their labour for a wage then they were members of the proletariat. That would, according to Butler, be true of women as well (Butler, 2007). However, till 19^th century, married women within capitalist nations/economies were not permitted to own a property in their individual names. Additionally, profits accrued from their businesses belonged to their husbands. Notwithstanding the fact that Marx acknowledged that employees and capitalists had wives who did work in the home as well as took care of children, he did not have a place for housewives in his assessment of capitalism (Butler, 2007). Thus, Butler argues that Marxist and socialist feminisms criticized the family as the spring of women’s exploitation and oppression.

The text by Butler is important because it shows how gender inequality is treated under law in some countries by mothers being given paid leaves before and after they deliver their babies and that provides affordable childcare. Some countries also give paid leaves to fathers that they may have adequate childcare. In addition, the social feminism, according to the text, considers comparable worth between men and women as the solution to feminist political philosophy. The study is also important since it shows that the principal contribution of liberal feminism is exposing how contemporary society discriminates against women.