Few questions have haunted feminist theory and the feminist movement as persistently as the deceptively simple one: What is a woman? Some have tried to answer it directly. Others have argued that the question itself is a form of exclusion, a demand for definition that inevitably leaves someone out. Still others have rejected the question altogether, insisting that feminism should not begin from the search for a universal essence.
Different answers have reflected different political moments. In the 1970s, Marxist-influenced feminists approached the question in structural terms, asking what role women as a group play in maintaining the existing social order. In the 1980s, psychoanalytic and poststructuralist approaches shifted the focus to subjectivity: what it means to live as a woman, how femininity shapes one’s relation to the body, to language, to sexuality, and to others. In these accounts, the feminine subject was never stable but fractured and historically produced.
In recent decades, the debate has increasingly taken the form of a dispute over identity. The question is no longer only what a woman is, but who counts as one, and how the category intersects with race, class, sexuality, disability, and nationality. This shift is often associated with intersectional feminism, though intersectionality itself is broader than the identity-centered version that dominates public debate. Within this framework, there is no single answer to the question of what a woman is. Women’s lives are shaped by multiple structures of power that cannot be separated from one another.
This emphasis on difference is often presented as a break with earlier feminism. But the idea that women’s oppression is shaped by class and race did not begin with intersectionality. Black feminists made this argument long before the term existed, and Marxist feminists criticized liberal feminism for isolating the “woman question” from the class question decades earlier. As the Swedish…
Auteur: Evelina Johansson Wilén
