3.3 Archetypes and Stereotypes 3.4 The Evolution of Feminism 3.5 Feminist Perspectives on Power
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Feminists continue to create critical consciousness around the female world and to reshape academic disciplines to include women’s voices while continuing to press for the right of women to participate equally in a male dominated world (Jamieson 1995;
Ledwith 2009; Lee 2010). As South Africa moves towards developing spaces and institutions which are free from racial and gender discrimination, there is a need to understand the way in which those who were previously denied access to positions of power are able to participate, challenge and influence the mainstream models of thought and behaviour if they are to realise their potential and actively engage with organisational transformation. As the dominant social structure in our capitalist business institutions, patriarchy has constructed a reality which has been accepted and integrated as the prevailing ‘common sense’ view of the world (Kenway 2001). As a cultural discourse, patriarchy, according to Dickerson (2013: 102) is “the grand narrative that influences us all, often invisibly and creates conditions for people to respond outside what might be their preferences for performing relationships.” This makes it difficult to confront patriarchy in any direct sense and highlights the way in which women and men give consent to patriarchy’s dominance without necessarily being aware of it.
Patriarchy intersects multiple sites within a culture (Dickerson 2013) and is supported by a number of other dominant cultural discourses, such as capitalism. Fisher and Ponniah (2003) believe that corporate capitalism is the most powerful system of the west which dominates the world and invades cultures with structures of oppression.
Globalisation is “not simply economic domination of the world but also the imposition of monolithic thought that consolidates vertical forms of difference and prohibits the public from imagining diversity in egalitarian, horizontal terms” (Fisher & Ponniah, 2003: 10). In her article on “The Elusive Nature of Power”, Ledwith (2009) highlights the complexity and interrelatedness of multiple oppression and concludes that the challenge to traditional knowledge systems is emerging from feminist theorists who are seeking alternative meanings in an uncertain world. She points to eco-feminism as an example of an alternative worldview which reflects women’s “concerns for preserving harmonious life on earth over time and space” (Ledwith 2009: 692). The emphasis in this discourse is on harmony, co-operation and interconnectedness, providing an
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alternative to the competitive hierarchical structures of capitalism and patriarchy (Eisenstein 2010; Ledwith 2009; Mama 2011).
While recognising the need to interrogate dominant discourses and associated practices and create the spaces for alternatives, several feminist authors caution dichotomous thinking in relation to patriarchy, as well as ‘speaking for’ women as a generalised category (Ledwith 2009; Lee 2010). Just as it has been argued in the previous chapter that power is a social construct which is the reason for understanding its construction from multiple perspectives, so too are sex and gender socially constructed (Mahalik, Good & Englar-Carlson 2003). Feminist authors point out that patriarchy can be abusive towards men as well as women and typically denies them the opportunity for reaching out in dialogue with other men as part of the practice of being masculine (hooks 2004; Lee 2010). Dickerson (2013) is careful to point out that feminist studies which critique patriarchy are not a criticism of either men or women, but rather about bringing to the fore a more preferred way of being outside of patriarchal effects on both genders.
However, feminist theory should not downplay the insidious nature of patriarchal oppression (Kenway 2001; Ledwith 2009). It is the hegemonic effect of a patriarchal culture in which masculinity and femininity become a way of thinking that makes privilege and oppression seem acceptable and commonplace to the extent that it is either hardly noticeable, worthy of analysis, let alone challenge (Johnson 2005). Harvey (2010) comments that it is the small, every day actions, in the case of nonviolent oppression, that create systemic patterns of exclusion and subordination which have a cumulative impact on the psychological well-being of the victim of oppression, as well as their life-path and opportunities for fulfilment. For the non-oppressed, the perceived triviality of these individual acts limits the victim’s ability to address it and the perpetrator’s ability to take claims about the oppression seriously (Lee 2010).
Understanding that through this process women consent to patriarchal domination, Ledwith (2009: 687) positions feminist consciousness as the “beginning of questioning the nature of that consent in relation to patriarchy”.
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Particularly significant to this study therefore is the effect of the patriarchal discourse in preventing women from easily engaging with power as a construct (Freeman, Bourque
& Shelton 2001; Henry 1994; Lee 2010; Miller 1982). According to Lee (2010) women and men are socialized into gender-specific language patterns which are taught in youth and remain into adulthood. Gender is not just reflected in language but the concept of gender is itself constituted by the language used to refer to it. Under patriarchy, gender is defined with masculine and feminine imagery portraying male and female as two opposite sorts of human beings (Johnson 2005). Freeman et al. (2001) believe that the tradition of power as a male preserve has obscured our understanding of women and power, attributing behavioural difference in men and women to gender rather than difference in access to power. Psychological studies that have attempted to disentangle the effects of gender and power by focussing on behavioural dimensions have found that gender differences tend to disappear (Freeman et al. 2001). Although behavioural differences may not necessarily be apparent in these studies, the question remains whether women’s discourse enables them to bring to the fore an approach which may redefine the way power has been constructed within a patriarchal context. In research conducted by Miller (1982), the findings revealed that power is often viewed as a ‘dirty word’ by women, concluding that the very term power may have been distorted in the hands of people who needed to maintain dominance and for this reason it has acquired overtones of tyranny. Ramazanogulu’s (1989) claim that there is a gap in feminist work dealing directly with women’s experience of power still applies today (Mama 2011).