Mazra wrote:
I don't know, I think this is all getting a bit out of hand. Also, feminism is divided into two very distinct causes here:
1. Liberal feminists fight for equal rights, but recognize the difference between sexes.
2. Radical feminists believe society (the patriarchy) is intentionally oppressing women, and a revolution is needed to change it.
What I'm seeing here, on Facebook, and in this GamerGate case, it appears more radical than liberal. I think that's a shame, because it derails the discussion from the important stuff to patriarchy conspiracy theories.
The different schools of feminism are different theories about what is required in order for women to be free and what is the cause of their subjugation in the first place.
Radical feminists are often apart from other schools in that they believe that gender is the fundamental system of all oppressions under patriarchy.
ALL feminists would agree that gender is being used as a mechanism of oppression - we train our girls to be submissive from birth, and we don't encourage them to excel in culturally-valued roles like we do with boys - but other schools of feminism focus on equalizing gender, rather than destroying it.
Liberal feminists hold that society has a belief that women are physically and intellectually inferior to men, and that has led to the systemic issues women face.
Cultural feminism holds that society has an untrue belief that the disparity between the sexes is biological, not culturally reinforced (for example, the really long-held belief in Western culture that women can't excel in academics). They argue that essential all relevant beliefs about female capability are the result of cultural influence, not biology.
Socialist feminism holds that, as men control the VAST majority of capital, women cannot attain equality under capitalism, particularly not free market capitalism.
Intersectionalist feminism is essentially a meta theory that you'd layer on top of another layer of feminism. Intersectionality doesn't have any belief about what causes patriarchy, but it holds that the specific oppression a person faces is the result of ALL the different, unique lines of oppression that they face. Which is pretty obvious - rich black guys, poor white women, middle class trans, upper class white gay, etc. all have very different experiences of oppression.
Generally speaking, socialist vs. cultural vs. liberal doesn't really matter, functionally. Perspectives on individual issues don't often differ greatly between them outside of market-based issues (where socialist feminists may disagree with cultural/liberal feminists on a case-by-case basis).
Radical feminists, believing that equality can't be established while we reinforce the gender system, are often apart. They're also the school that tends to be the most aggressive as a result of being apart from the rest, and being the school that most directly blames MEN (rather than blaming the mechanisms men have established and fail to recognize).