Concepts, Theories and Debates in Women's and Gender Studies
This domain tests the conceptual vocabulary and theoretical lineages that underpin the rest of the syllabus. Expect questions that ask you to distinguish perspectives, attribute slogans and texts, and identify which debate a statement belongs to.
Core distinctions
- Sex and gender: sex is conventionally used for biological classification; gender for socially produced roles and identities. The distinction is analytic, not a claim that biology is irrelevant.
- Patriarchy: a system of male dominance operating across households, markets, law and culture, not merely individual prejudice.
- Waves and lineages: liberal feminism stresses equal rights in the public sphere (Wollstonecraft); radical feminism locates patriarchy in intimate and sexual relations; socialist/Marxist feminism links women's subordination to unpaid reproductive labour; Black feminism (Collins, hooks) and postcolonial feminism (Mohanty, Spivak) challenge universalising claims; queer theory (Butler) treats gender as performative.
- Key debates: essentialism versus social construction; equality versus difference; redistribution versus recognition; intersectionality versus single-axis analysis.
Worked example
A statement says: 'The personal is political.' Which tradition does it best illustrate, and why? The slogan is associated with radical feminism and second-wave consciousness-raising (Hanisch, 1969). Reasoning: it treats household and sexual arrangements as power relations requiring political analysis, not private matters. It is not a liberal claim about formal equality, nor a postmodern claim about discourse alone.
Traps that cost marks
- Treating 'sex' and 'gender' as interchangeable.
- Presenting the wave metaphor as global and chronological rather than Anglo-American and contested.
- Attributing intersectionality to Butler; it is associated with Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989).
- Reducing feminism to a single perspective.