Feminism, Defeated

Feminism has been defeated.

Once a politics, feminism is now a philosophy, an epistemology, a method. Once for women, it is now for everyone. Once in pursuit of liberation, it now seeks only inclusion.

In Feminism, Defeated, Kate Phelan traces the depoliticization and ultimately, the defeat of feminism. She recovers the second-wave view of men and women as sex-classes, enemies, political kinds, a view more radical than the contemporary view of men and women as social constructs. She also describes how poststructuralism displaced this view and replaced it with another. In this view, the sex/gender binary constructs men and women, and excludes the gender nonconforming.

As this view replaced the second-wave one, the injustice of men’s oppression of women was replaced by that of exclusion, and the goal of women’s liberation was replaced by that of inclusion. Thus did feminism become the trans-inclusionary movement as which we now know it, and Phelan shows that this shift was not the progression of feminism; it was the betrayal of it. In this highly original and persuasive study, she argues that the recent emergence of a new gender-critical feminism presents a moment of opportunity to reclaim feminism’s political project.

Kate Phelan is a lecturer in the School of Global, Urban, and Social Studies at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. A feminist philosopher, she is the author of Feminism, Defeated.