Liberation or oppression? radical feminism and in vitro fertilisation.

Post-Liberation Feminism and Practices of Freedom

Most feminist theorists over the last forty years have held that a basic tenet of feminism is that women as a group are oppressed. The concept of oppression has never had a very broad meaning in liberal discourse, however, and with the rise of neo-liberalism since 1980 it has even less currency in public debate. This article argues that, while we may still believe women are oppressed, for pragm...

Masculine Domination, Radical Feminism and Change

Feminists are starting to look to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, in the hope that it might provide a useful framework for conceptualizing the tension between structure and agency in questions of gender. This article argues that Bourdieu’s analysis of gender can indeed be useful to feminists, but that the options Bourdieu offers for change are problematic. The article suggests that Bourdieu’s anal...

The Role of Power in Wellness, Oppression, and Liberation: the Promise of Psychopolitical Validity

The power to promote wellness, resist oppression, and foster liberation is grounded in psychological and political dynamics. Hitherto, these two sources of power have been treated in isolation, both for descriptive and prescriptive purposes. As a result, we lack an integrative theory that explains the role of power in promoting human welfare and preventing suffering, and we lack a framework for...

Gyn/Ecology: the metaethics of radical feminism

idea of the imagination influencing the shape of the developing foetus was in existence before and after Van Helmont. In the eighteenth century the image-making faculty was transferred to the brain. The nineteenth-century conception that only what is in the outside world is real was replaced during the twentieth century by the thought that what goes on in people's minds can have just as much re...

In vitro fertilisation and moral equivalence.