What is a feminist perspective

Feminism is a methodological principle that refers to viewing and analyzing issues through a gender lens.

In fact, feminism is not a separate discipline in the traditional sense, but rather an academic perspective. It exists both within existing disciplines and outside of them. As an academic perspective, feminism has these characteristics: 1, it is fluid, not fixed. It is like a stream of thought constantly flowing, constantly changing, quietly roaming through various fields, nurturing new life and bringing vitality and vigor wherever it goes.2. It is historical. The goal of feminism is not to open up a women's line, but to liberate women; it has a process of emergence, development and extinction. The day of women's emancipation is also the day of feminism's demise. Its historicity is also manifested in the fact that it has a different historical mission in each era and each society. 3. It is pluralistic. A single feminism cannot explain the diversity of women of different races, nationalities, social classes and time.4. It is cosmopolitan and national. Feminism is cosmopolitan, aiming to liberate women from all forms of oppression and to promote solidarity among women of all nations. Feminism is also national, aiming to develop itself in relation to the cultural and social background of each country.5. It is both an abstract ideology and a concrete political program and political strategy.

As an academic perspective, feminism uses gender as a lens to look through and analyze the history and current situation, theory and practice of various disciplines, and in this perspective, carries and refreshes various fields through criticism and construction. In the concept of feminism, the meanings of sex (Sex) and gender (Gender) are different, with the former referring to the fact that every human being is biologically born male or female, while the latter refers to the values and meanings that society assigns to both sexes. In the feminist view, the construction of gender is not determined by biology because biology itself is mediated by society. Gender is a socio-historical, economic, political and cultural category. The gender system is not a contingent phenomenon, but the way in which social reality is organized, marked, and experienced. First, gender is a socio-historical category, a dynamic and developing concept, and people in different historical eras have different understandings of gender; second, gender is an economic category, and the understanding of gender in each era is closely linked to the socio-economic structure of that era, and the kind of gender roles played by men and women are ultimately determined by their position in a certain socio-economic structure; third, gender is also a political category, and it is itself a socially-mediated phenomenon, and it is the way in which social reality is organized, marked and experienced. Again, gender is a political category, which itself includes power relations and is the product and epitome of power relations in a certain society. In addition, gender is also a cultural category. It is shaped and expressed in different ways in different times and in different societies and cultural contexts. The distinction between sex and gender helps one to see that sexism in all disciplines is in fact socially and culturally constructed, and that it simply repeats a confusion of fact and value, of is and ought: from the fact that a woman is born a woman, the inference is that she is inferior, inferior, and deserving of enslavement.

Thus, when feminism enters the realm of academia, its first task is to subvert the "patriarchal" structures of the disciplines. The term "patriarchy," originally derived from sociology, implies a social structure in which the father is the head of the household. This social structure permeates every aspect of human social life in all its manifestations. In criticizing patriarchy, feminism also deconstructs the conceptual framework on which the theory of patriarchy is built. K.J. Warren, an American feminist philosopher, saw that in Western culture there has always been a dichotomy of culture/nature, male/female, rationality/emotion, and public/private spheres. The domination of women by men and of nature by human beings is rooted in the conceptual framework of "patriarchy". This conceptual framework is characterized by three important features: 1) the hierarchical thinking of value, which holds that values at the top of the hierarchy are superior to those at the bottom; 2) the dichotomy of value, which divides things into opposing and exclusive sides, so that one side of the hierarchy has a higher value than the other; and 3) the logic of domination, which states that, for any X and Y, X's domination of Y is justified if X's value is higher than Y. Deconstructionism attempts to break down this dichotomy and hierarchical order of values in traditional philosophy. Derrida, the deconstructionist philosopher, emphasizes that the dichotomous items are interdependent, that no one of them can exist independently of the other, and that the two items only derive their meanings in relative relation and from the chain of canonical references to which they are subordinate. No member of the linguistic chain can gain priority, and what has actual meaning is merely a game of substitution. This suggests that deconstructionism examines the relationship between binary opposites in terms of their correspondence, arguing that if there is no counterpart, there is no other party, and neither party has priority. Moreover, such oppositions and correspondences are linguistic, i.e., they are artificial oppositions and correspondences. This in a sense denies the tradition of male superiority and sees such traditions as merely a language game, neither a natural or essential thing nor a truth or being. The aim of deconstructionism is not actually to invert the binary oppositional term, but to question the notion of opposition and the notion of identity on which the opposition depends, and so to weaken the foundations of identity, truth and being.