The Feminism of Uncertainty: A Gender Diary
Ann Snitow is Associate Professor of Literature and Gender Studies at Lang College, The New School, in New York City. A longtime activist, Snitow has cofounded The Network of East-West Women, No More Nice Girls, and New York Radical Feminists. She has written for The Village Voice, The Nation, The Women’s Review of Books, Dissent, and many other publications, and is coeditor of Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality and The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation.
Continuing a Gender Diary
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Published:August 2015
This piece, which has become a classic text in feminist theory, attempts to tease out a number of possible understandings of a central contradiction in contemporary feminist thinking. This recurring feminist divide goes under a variety of names: equality versus difference, minimizers versus maximizers, radical feminists versus cultural feminists, social constructionists versus essentialists, feminists versus motherists, etc. Such tensions in feminism between emphasizing or de-emphasizing the identity “woman” are not considered here as universal or timeless, but, it is argued, such fundamental disagreements are common because they express some of the irresolvable dilemmas of feminist thought and action in our...
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