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Volume :18 Issue : 71 2000
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Feminism: Its Thoughts and Approaches (in Arabic)
Auther : Norah F. Al-Mosaed
The aim of this paper is to highlight and explore the approaches and schools of feminist thought. Despite conservative attitudes by many to its theories and principles, feminism is capable of presenting a vision and an in-depth analysis of some social issues, particularly those related to women.
Feminism is being subject to constant re-shaping and re-molding. Therefore, it has surpassed other intellectual schools in that sense, and will remain so for a long time to come. Feminists embarked on a mission to locate the method by which women are freed from social, cultural, political, economical, and legal restraints, which offered them rights and opportunities far less than those offered to men.
Feminism, like many philosophical theories, contains a diversity of concepts, therefore it is difficult to fully comprehend and cover its entirety. Nevertheless, feminists can locate their thoughts within the Liberal, Marxist, Radical, Socialist, Psychoanalyst, existentialist, and Post-Modernist Schools.
This paper argues that, despite the major differences between these schools, they bring to the fore the women’s issue, through various interpretations and analysis of their status within their communities, in accordance with the thought and methodology of each school. The paper investigates whether that analysis associates the issue of women’s oppression with the social environment and up-bringing, or patriarchal system, or the production and work system, or the Oedipal and pre-Oedipal complex, or finally with the woman as “other”.
The paper also explores some non-western feminism (viz. Third World feminism and feminism in the Arab World). Although these feminists may agree with Western feminists on the broader concepts, they differ in the realization that these concepts alone are not enough to interpret and analyze women’s condition in the third world societies. Despite the fact that imperialism and colonialism is a focal part of third world feminists argument, feminists in the Arab World depart from the inherited culture and the system of values in their argument to define their identity and uniqueness.