The Radical Feminist Account of Domination

Abstract

It has been said that the radical feminist emphasis on women's oppression is unable to account for other forms of oppression such as those of race and class. I argue that the radical feminist emphasis, the placing of male domination at the centre of the analysis, is a more theoretically adequate account of oppression in general than the additive approach of socialist or postmodernist feminism. These latter accounts merely place different forms of oppression side by side while failing to draw out the distinctions between them. The emphasis of radical feminism, on the other hand, by attributing oppression to the construction of masculinity, exposes the male supremacist interests involved in all hierarchical and invidious distinctions between categories of human beings.