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Feminist Perspectives on Power
First published Wed Oct 19, 2005; substantive revision Thu Oct 28, 2021
Although any general definition of feminism would no doubt be controversial, it seems
undeniable that much work in feminist theory is devoted to the tasks of critiquing gender
subordination, analyzing its intersections with other forms of subordination such as racism,
heterosexism, and class oppression, and envisioning prospects for individual and collective
resistance and emancipation. Insofar as the concept of power is central to each of these
theoretical tasks, power is clearly a central concept for feminist theory as well. And yet,
curiously, it is one that is not often explicitly thematized in feminist work (exceptions
include Allen 1998, 1999, Caputi 2013, Hartsock 1983 and 1996, Yeatmann 1997, and
Young 1992). Indeed, Wendy Brown contends that “Power is one of those things we cannot
approach head-on or in isolation from other subjects if we are to speak about it intelligently”
(Brown 1988, 207). This poses a unique challenge for assessing feminist perspectives on
power, as those perspectives must first be reconstructed from discussions of other topics.
Nevertheless, it is possible to identify three main ways in which feminists have
conceptualized power: as a resource to be (re)distributed, as domination, and as
empowerment. After a brief discussion of the power debates in social and political theory,
this entry will survey each of these feminist conceptions.
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1. Defining power
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2. Power as Resource: Liberal Feminist Approaches
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3. Power as Domination
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3.1 Phenomenological Feminist Approaches
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3.2 Radical Feminist Approaches
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3.3 Socialist Feminist Approaches
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3.4 Intersectional Approaches
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3.5 Poststructuralist Feminist Approaches
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3.6 Postcolonial and Decolonial Feminist Approaches
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3.7 Analytic Feminist Approaches
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4. Power as Empowerment
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5. Concluding thoughts
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Bibliography
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Academic Tools
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Other Internet Resources
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Related Entries
1. Defining power
In social and political theory, power is often regarded as an essentially contested concept (see
Lukes 1974 and 2005, and Connolly 1983). Although this claim is itself contested (see
Haugaard 2010 and 2020, 4–10; Morriss 2002, 199–206 and Wartenberg 1990, 12–17), there
is no doubt that the literature on power is marked by deep, widespread, and seemingly
intractable disagreements over how the term should be understood.
One such disagreement pits those who define power as getting someone else to do what you
want them to do, that is, as an exercise of power-over others, against those who define it as
an ability or a capacity to act, that is, as a power-to do something. The classic formulation of
the former definition is offered by Max Weber, who defines power as “the probability that
one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite
resistance…” (1978, 53). Similarly, Robert Dahl offers what he calls an “intuitive idea of
power” according to which “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do
something that B would not otherwise do” (1957, 202–03). Dahl’s discussion of power
sparked a vigorous debate that continued until the mid-1970s, but even his sharpest critics
seemed to concede his definition of power as an exercise of power-over others (see Bachrach
and Baratz 1962 and Lukes 1974). As Steven Lukes notes, Dahl’s one-dimensional view of
power, Bachrach and Baratz’s two-dimensional view, and his own three-dimensional view
are all variations of “the same underlying conception of power, according to which A
exercises power over B when A affects B in a manner contrary to B’s interests” (1974, 30).
Similarly, but from a very different theoretical background, Michel Foucault’s highly
influential analysis implicitly presupposes that power is a kind of power-over; and he puts it,
“if we speak of the structures or the mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose
that certain persons exercise power over others” (1983, 217). Notice that there are two salient
features of this definition of power: power is understood in terms of power-over relations,
and it is defined in terms of its actual exercise.
Classic articulations of power understood as power-to have been offered by Thomas Hobbes
– power is a person’s “present means…to obtain some future apparent Good” (Hobbes 1985
(1641), 150) – and Hannah Arendt – power is “the human ability not just to act but to act in
concert” (1970, 44). Arguing in favor of this way of conceptualizing power, Hanna Pitkin
notes that the word “power” is related etymologically to the French pouvoir and the
Latin potere, both of which mean to be able. “That suggests,” she writes, “that power is a
something – anything – which makes or renders somebody able to do, capable of doing
something. Power is capacity, potential, ability, or wherewithal” (1972, 276). Similarly, Peter
Morriss (2002) and Lukes (2005) define power as a dispositional concept, meaning, as Lukes
puts it, that power “is a potentiality, not an actuality – indeed a potentiality that may never be
actualized” (2005, 69). (Note that this statement amounts to a significant revision of Lukes’s
earlier analysis of power, in which he argued against defining power as power-to on the
grounds that such a definition obscures “the conflictual aspect of power – the fact that it is
exercised over people” and thus fails to address what we care about most when we decide to
study power (1974, 31). For helpful discussion of whether Lukes’s embrace of the
dispositional conception of power is compatible with his other theoretical commitments, see
Haugaard (2010)). Some of the theorists who analyze power as power-to leave power-over
entirely out of their analysis. For example, Arendt distinguishes power sharply from
authority, strength, force, and violence, and offers a normative account in which power is
understood as an end in itself (1970). As Jürgen Habermas has argued, this has the effect of
screening any and all strategic understandings of power (where power is understood in the
Weberian sense as imposing one’s will on another) out of her analysis (Habermas 1994).
(Although Arendt defines power as a capacity, she also maintains that “power springs up
between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse” (1958, 200);
hence, it is not clear whether she fully accepts a dispositional view of power). Others suggest
that both aspects of power are important, but then focus their attention on either power-over
(e.g., Connolly 1993) or power-to (e.g., Morriss 2002). Still others define power-over as a
particular type of capacity, namely, the capacity to impose one’s will on others; on this view,
power-over is a derivative form of power-to (Allen 1999, Lukes 2005). However, others have
argued power-over and power-to refer to fundamentally different concepts and that it is a
mistake to try to develop an account of power that integrates them (Pitkin 1972, Wartenberg
1990).
Another way of carving up the power literature is to distinguish between action-theoretical
conceptions – that is, those that define power in terms of either the actions or the
dispositional abilities of individual actors – and broader systemic or constitutive conceptions
– that is, those that view power as systematically structuring possibilities for action, or, more
strongly, as constitutive of social actors and the social world in which they act. On this way
of distinguishing various conceptions of power, Hobbes and Weber are on the same side,
since both of them understand power in primarily instrumentalist, individualist, and actiontheoretical terms (Saar 2010, 10). The systemic conception, by contrast, views power as “the
ways in which given social systems confer differentials of dispositional power on agents,
thus structuring their possibilities for action” (Haugaard 2010, 425; see Clegg 1989). The
systemic conception thus highlights the ways in which broad historical, political, economic,
cultural, and social forces enable some individuals to exercise power over others, or inculcate
certain abilities and dispositions in some actors but not in others. Saar argues, however, that
the systemic conception of power should be understood not as an alternative to the actiontheoretical conception of power, but rather as a more complex and sophisticated variant of
that model. For, as he says, its “basic scenario remains individualistic at the methodological
level: power operates on individuals as individuals, in the form of a ‘bringing to action’ or
external determination” (Saar 2010, 14).
The constitutive conception of power pushes the insight of the systemic conception further
by focusing on the constitutive relationships between power, individuals, and the social
worlds they inhabit. The roots of this constitutive conception can be traced back to Spinoza
(2002a and 2002b; Saar 2013), but variants of this view are also found in the work of more
contemporary theorists such as Arendt and Foucault. Here it is important to note that
Foucault’s work on power contains both action-theoretical and constitutive strands. The
former strand is evident in his claim, cited above, that “if we speak of the structures or the
mechanisms of power, it is only insofar as we suppose that certain persons exercise power
over others” (Foucault 1983, 217), whereas the latter strand is evident in his definition of
power as “the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate
and which constitute their own organization; as the processes which, through ceaseless
struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them;…thus forming a
chain or system” (Foucault 1979, 92).
What accounts for the highly contested nature of the concept of power? One explanation is
that how we conceptualize power is shaped by the political and theoretical interests that we
bring to our study of it (Lukes 1986, Said 1986). For example, democratic theorists are
interested in different things when they study power than are social movement theorists or
critical race theorists or postcolonial theorists, and so on. Thus, a specific conceptualization
of power could be more or less useful depending on the specific disciplinary or theoretical
context in which it is deployed, where usefulness is evaluated in terms of how well it
“accomplishes the task the theorists set for themselves” (Haugaard 2010, 426). On this view,
if we suppose that feminists who are interested in power are interested in understanding and
critiquing gender-based relations of domination and subordination as these intersect with
other axes of oppression and thinking about how such relations can be transformed through
individual and collective resistance, then we would conclude that specific conceptions of
power should be evaluated in terms of how well they enable feminists to fulfill those aims.
Lukes suggests another, more radical, explanation for the essentially contested nature of the
concept of power: our conceptions of power are, according to him, themselves shaped by
power relations. As he puts it, “how we think about power may serve to reproduce and
reinforce power structures and relations, or alternatively it may challenge and subvert them.
It may contribute to their continued functioning, or it may unmask their principles of
operation, whose effectiveness is increased by their being hidden from view. To the extent
that this is so, conceptual and methodological questions are inescapably political and so what
‘power’ means is ‘essentially contested’…” (Lukes 2005, 63). The thought that conceptions
of power are themselves shaped by power relations is behind the claim, made by many
feminists, that the influential conception of power as power-over is itself a product of
patriarchal domination (for further discussion, see section 4 below).
2. Power as Resource: Liberal Feminist
Approaches
Those who conceptualize power as a resource understand it as a positive social good that is
currently unequally distributed. For feminists who understand power in this way, the goal is
to redistribute this resource so that women will have power equal to men. Implicit in this
view is the assumption that power is, as Iris Marion Young puts it, “a kind of stuff that can
be possessed by individuals in greater or lesser amounts” (Young 1990, 31).
The conception of power as a resource is arguably implicit in the work of some liberal
feminists (Mill 1970, Okin 1989). For example, in Justice, Gender, and the Family, Susan
Moller Okin argues that the modern gender-structured family unjustly distributes the benefits
and burdens of familial life amongst husbands and wives. Okin includes power on her list of
the benefits, which she calls “critical social goods.” As she puts it, “when we look seriously
at the distribution between husbands and wives of such critical social goods as work (paid
and unpaid), power, prestige, self-esteem, opportunities for self-development, and both
physical and economic security, we find socially constructed inequalities between them, right
down the list” (Okin, 1989, 136). Here, Okin seems to presuppose that power is a resource
that is unequally and unjustly distributed between men and women; hence, one of the goals
of feminism would be to redistribute this resource in more equitable ways.
Although she doesn’t discuss Okin’s work explicitly, Young offers a compelling critique of
this view, which she calls the distributive model of power. First, Young maintains that it is
wrong to think of power as a kind of stuff that can be possessed; on her view, power is a
relation, not a thing that can be distributed or redistributed. Second, she claims that the
distributive model tends to presuppose a dyadic, atomistic understanding of power; as a
result, it fails to illuminate the broader social, institutional and structural contexts that shape
individual relations of power. According to Young, this makes the distributive model
unhelpful for understanding the structural features of domination. Third, the distributive
model conceives of power statically, as a pattern of distribution, whereas Young, following
Foucault (1980), claims that power exists only in action, and thus must be understood
dynamically, as existing in ongoing processes or interactions. Finally, Young argues that the
distributive model of power tends to view domination as the concentration of power in the
hands of a few. According to Young, although this model might be appropriate for some
forms of domination, it is not appropriate for the forms that domination takes in
contemporary industrial societies such as the United States (Young 1990a, 31–33). On her
view, in contemporary industrial societies, power is “widely dispersed and diffused” and yet
it is nonetheless true that “social relations are tightly defined by domination and oppression”
(Young 1990a, 32–33).
3. Power as Domination
Young’s critique of the distributive model points toward an alternative way of
conceptualizing power, one that understands power not as a resource or critical social good,
but instead views it as a relation of domination. Although feminists have often used a variety
of terms to refer to this kind of relation – including “oppression,” “patriarchy,” “subjection,”
and so forth –the common thread in these analyses is an understanding of power as an unjust
or illegitimate power-over relation. In the remainder of this entry, I use the term
“domination” simply to refer to unjust or oppressive power-over relations. In this section, I
discuss the specific ways in which feminists with different political and philosophical
commitments – influenced by phenomenology, radical feminism, Marxist socialism,
intersectionality theory, post-structuralism, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and analytic
philosophy – have conceptualized domination.
3.1 Phenomenological Feminist Approaches
The locus classicus of feminist phenomenological approaches to theorizing male domination
is Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Beauvoir’s text provides a brilliant analysis of the
situation of women: the social, cultural, historical, and economic conditions that define their
existence. Her diagnosis of women’s situation relies on the distinction between being foritself – self-conscious subjectivity that is capable of freedom and transcendence – and being
in-itself – the un-self-conscious things that are incapable of freedom and mired in
immanence. Beauvoir argues that whereas men have assumed the status of the transcendent
subject, women have been relegated to the status of the immanent Other. As she puts it in a
famous passage from the Introduction to The Second Sex: “She is defined and differentiated
with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as
opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other” (Beauvoir,
xxii). This distinction – between man as Subject and woman as Other – is the key to
Beauvoir’s understanding of domination or oppression. She writes, “every time
transcendence falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation of existence into
the ‘en-soi’ – the brutish life of subjection to given conditions – and liberty into constraint
and contingence. This downfall represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is
inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil”
(Beauvoir, xxxv). Although Beauvoir suggests that women are partly responsible for
submitting to the status of the Other in order to avoid the anguish of authentic existence
(hence, they are in bad faith) (see Beauvoir xxvii), she maintains that women are oppressed
because they are compelled to assume the status of the Other, doomed to immanence (xxxv).
Women’s situation is thus marked by a basic tension between transcendence and immanence;
as self-conscious human beings, they are capable of transcendence, but they are compelled
into immanence by cultural and social conditions that deny them that transcendence (see
Beauvoir, chapter 21).
Some feminists have criticized Beauvoir’s conception of oppression for its reliance on a
problematic analogy between race and gender (see, for example, her claim that “there are
deep similarities between the situation of woman and that of the Negro,” (Beauvoir, xxix)).
Beauvoir’s frequent use of such analogies, critics contend, erases the experience of Black
women by implicitly coding all women as white and all Blacks as male (Gines (Belle) 2010
and 2017, Collins 2019, 194–198, and Simons 2002). As Kathryn T. Gines (now Kathryn
Sophia Belle) argues further, Beauvoir’s analysis deploys “comparative and competing
frameworks of oppression” (Gines (Belle) 2014a). At times, Beauvoir treats not just sexism
and racism but also antisemitism, colonialism, and class oppression comparatively, arguing
that they rest of similar dynamics of Othering. Her comparative analysis of race and gender
is most problematic in her frequent analogy between the situation of women and that of the
slave. As Belle argues, this analogy not only obscures the experiences of Black female
slaves, it also leads Beauvior to “engage in an appropriation of Black suffering in the form of
slavery to advance her philosophical discussion of woman’s situation” (265). At other times,
Beauvoir treats racism, sexism, antisemitism, colonialism, and class oppression as competing
frameworks and argues that gender subordination is the most significant and constitutive
form of oppression. Both moves are problematic, according to Belle, the former for its
erasure of the oppression of Black women and the latter for its privileging of gender
oppression over other forms of oppression.
Feminist phenomenologists have engaged critically with Beauvoir’s work while extending
her insights into power. For example, Young argues that Beauvoir pays relatively little
attention to the role that female embodiment plays in women’s oppression (Young 1990b,
142–3). Although Beauvoir does discuss women’s bodies in relation to their status as
immanent Other, she tends to focus on women’s physiology and how physiological features
such as menstruation and pregnancy tie women more closely to nature, thus, to immanence.
In her essay, “Throwing Like a Girl,” Young draws on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenological analysis of the lived body to analyze “the situatedness of the woman’s
actual bodily movement and orientation to its surroundings and its world” (Young 1990b,
143). She notes that girls and women often fail to use fully the spatial potential of their
bodies (for example, they throw “like girls”), they try not to take up too much space, and
they tend to approach physical activity tentatively and uncertainly (Young 1990b, 145–147).
Young argues that feminine bodily comportment, movement, and spatial orientation exhibit
the same tension between transcendence and immanence that Beauvoir diagnoses in The
Second Sex. “At the root of those modalities,” Young writes, “is the fact that the woman lives
her body as object as well as subject. The source of this is that patriarchal society defines
woman as object, as a mere body, and that in sexist society women are in fact frequently
regarded by others as objects and mere bodies” (Young 1990b, 155). And yet women are
also subjects, and, thus, cannot think of themselves as mere bodily objects. As a result,
woman “cannot be in unity with herself” (Young 1990b, 155). Young explores the tension
between transcendence and immanence and the lack of unity characteristic of feminine
subjectivity in more detail in several other essays that explore pregnant embodiment,
women’s experience with their clothes, and breasted experience (See Young 1990b, chapters
9–11).
Much important work in feminist phenomenology follows Young in drawing inspiration
from Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of embodiment and intercorporeality (see Heinamaa 2003,
Weiss 1999); like Young, these authors use a Merleau-Pontyian approach to phenomenology
to explore the fundamental modalities of female embodiment or feminine bodily
comportment. Feminists have also mined the work of Edmund Husserl, the founder of
phenomenology, for useful resources for feminist phenomenology (Al-Saji 2010 and Oksala
2016).
More generally, Oksala defends the importance of feminist phenomenology as an exploration
of gendered experience against poststructuralist critics who find such a project hopelessly
essentialist. While Oksala acknowledges that essentialism is a danger found in some work in
feminist phenomenology – for example, she is critical of Sonia Kruks (2001) for
“considering ‘female experience’ as an irreducible given grounded in a female body” (Oksala
2016, 72) – she also insists that a phenomenological analysis of experience is crucial for
feminism. As she puts it, “it is my contention that feminist theory must ‘retrieve experience’,
but this cannot mean returning to a pre discursive female experience grounded in the
commonalities of women’s embodiment” (40). On her view, experience is always
constructed in such a way that it “reflects oppressive discourses and power relations” (43);
and yet, experience and thought or discourse are not co-extensive. This means that there is
always a gap between our personal experience and the linguistic representations that we
employ to make sense of that experience, and it is this gap that provides the space for
contestation and critique. Thus, Oksala concludes, “experiences can contest discourses even
if, or precisely because, they are conceptual through and through” (50). For Oksala,
experience plays a crucial role in reinforcing and reproducing oppressive power relations, but
radical reflection on our experience opens up a space for individual and collective resistance
to and transformation of those power relations.
The concept of experience is also central to Mariana Ortega’s analysis of Latina feminist
phenomenology (Ortega 2016). Ortega reads the prominent Latina feminists Gloria Anzaldúa
and María Lugones as phenomenologists “whose writings are deeply informed by their lived
experience, specifically by their experience of marginalization and oppression as well as
their experience of resistance” (7). By highlighting the experience of marginalized and
oppressed selves who live their lives at the borderlands or in a state of in-betweenness,
Latina feminist phenomenology, as Ortega reads it, offers an important corrective to and
expansion of the critique of modern subjectivity in the European phenomenological tradition.
For other influential feminist-phenomenological analyses of domination see Bartky 1990,
2002, Bordo 1993, and Kruks 2001. For helpful overviews of feminist phenomenology, see
Fisher and Embree 2000, and Heinamaa and Rodemeyer 2010. For a highly influential
articulation of queer phenomenology, drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, MerleauPonty, and Fanon, see Ahmed (2006). For a compelling phenomenological analysis of
transgender experience, see Salamon (2010).
3.2 Radical Feminist Approaches
Unlike liberal feminists, who view power as a positive social resource that ought to be fairly
distributed, and feminist phenomenologists, who understand domination in terms of a tension
between transcendence and immanence, radical feminists tend to understand power in terms
of dyadic relations of dominance/subordination, often understood on analogy with the
relationship between master and slave.
For example, in the work of legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon, domination is closely
bound up with her understanding of gender difference. According to MacKinnon, gender
difference is simply the reified effect of domination. As she puts it, “difference is the velvet
glove on the iron fist of domination. The problem is not that differences are not valued; the
problem is that they are defined by power” (MacKinnon 1989, 219). If gender difference is
itself a function of domination, then the implication is that men are powerful and women are
powerless by definition. As MacKinnon puts it, “women/men is a distinction not just of
difference, but of power and powerlessness….Power/powerlessness is the sex difference”
(MacKinnon 1987, 123). (In this passage, MacKinnon glosses over the distinction,
articulated by many second-wave feminists, between sex – the biologically rooted traits that
make one male or female, traits that are often presumed to be natural and immutable – and
gender – the socially and culturally rooted, hence contingent and mutable, traits,
characteristics, dispositions, and practices that make one a woman or a man. This passage
suggests that MacKinnon, like Judith Butler (1990) and other critics of the sex/gender
distinction, thinks that sex difference, no less than gender difference, is socially constructed
and shaped by relations of power.) If men are powerful and women powerless as such, then
male domination is, on this view, pervasive. Indeed, MacKinnon claims that it is a basic “fact
of male supremacy” that “no woman escapes the meaning of being a woman within a
gendered social system, and sex inequality is not only pervasive but may be universal (in the
sense of never having not been in some form” (MacKinnon 1989, 104–05). For MacKinnon,
heterosexual intercourse is the paradigm of male domination; as she puts it, “the social
relation between the sexes is organized so that men may dominate and women must submit
and this relation is sexual – in fact, is sex” (MacKinnon 1987, 3). As a result, she tends to
presuppose a dyadic conception of domination, according to which individual women are
subject to the will of individual men. If male domination is pervasive and women are
powerless by definition, then it follows that female power is “a contradiction in terms,
socially speaking” (MacKinnon 1987, 53). The claim that female power is a contradiction in
terms has led many feminists to criticize MacKinnon on the grounds that she denies women’s
political agency and presents them as helpless victims (for exemplary versions of this
criticism, see Brown 1995 and Butler 1997a).
Marilyn Frye likewise offers a radical feminist analysis of power that seems to presuppose a
dyadic model of domination. Frye identifies several faces of power, one of the most
important of which is access. As Frye puts it, “total power is unconditional access; total
powerlessness is being unconditionally accessible. The creation and manipulation of power is
constituted of the manipulation and control of access” (Frye 1983, 103). If access is one of
the most important faces of power, then feminist separatism, insofar as it is a way of denying
access to women’s bodies, emotional support, domestic labor, and so forth, represents a
profound challenge to male power. For this reason, Frye maintains that all feminism that is
worth the name entails some form of separatism. She also suggests that this is the real reason
that men get so upset by acts of separatism: “if you are doing something that is so strictly
forbidden by the patriarchs, you must be doing something right” (Frye 1983, 98). Frye
frequently compares male domination to a master/slave relationship (see, for example, 1983,
103–105), and she defines oppression as “a system of interrelated barriers and forces which
reduce, immobilize, and mold people who belong to a certain group, and effect their
subordination to another group (individually to individuals of the other group, and as a
group, to that group)” (Frye 1983, 33). In addition to access, Frye discusses definition as
another, related, face of power. Frye claims that “the powerful normally determine what is
said and sayable” (105). For example, “when the Secretary of Defense calls something a
peace negotiation…then whatever it is that he called a peace negotiation is an instance of
negotiating peace” (105). Under conditions of subordination, women typically do not have
the power to define the terms of their situation, but by controlling access, Frye argues, they
can begin to assert control over their own self-definition. Both of these – controlling access
and definition – are ways of taking power. Although she does not go so far as MacKinnon
does in claiming that female power is a contradiction in terms, Frye does claim that “if there
is one thing women are queasy about it is actually taking power” (Frye 1983, 107).
A similar dyadic conception of male domination can arguably be found in Carole
Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1988) (although Pateman’s work is heavily influenced by
socialist feminism, her account of power is closer to radical feminism). Like MacKinnon,
Pateman claims that gender difference is constituted by domination; as she puts it, “the
patriarchal construction of the difference between masculinity and femininity is the political
difference between freedom and subjection” (Pateman 1988, 207). She also claims that male
domination is pervasive, and she explicitly appeals to a master/subject model to understand
it; as she puts it, “in modern civil society all men are deemed good enough to be women’s
masters” (Pateman 1988, 219). In Pateman’s view, the social contract that initiates civil
society and provides for the legitimate exercise of political rights is also a sexual contract
that establishes what she calls “the law of male sex-right,” securing male sexual access to
and dominance over women (1988, 182). As Nancy Fraser has argued, on Pateman’s view,
the sexual contract “institutes a series of male/female master/subject dyads” (Fraser 1993,
173). Fraser is highly critical of Pateman’s analysis, which she terms the “master/subject
model,” a model that presents women’s subordination “first and foremost as the condition of
being subject to the direct command of an individual man” (1993, 173). The problem with
this dyadic account of women’s subordination, according to Fraser, is that “gender inequality
is today being transformed by a shift from dyadic relations of mastery and subjection to more
impersonal structural mechanisms that are lived through more fluid cultural forms” (1993,
180). Fraser suggests that, in order to understand women’s subordination in contemporary
Western societies, feminists will have to move beyond the master/subject model to analyze
how women’s subordination is secured through cultural norms, social practices, and other
impersonal structural mechanisms. (For Pateman’s response to Fraser’s criticism, see
Pateman and Mills (2007, 205–06)).
Although feminists such as Fraser, Judith Butler, and Wendy Brown have been highly
critical of the radical feminist account of domination, analytic feminists have found this
account more productive
