Abstract
Feminism provides a worldview with innovative possibilities for scholarship and activism on behalf of families and intimate relationships. As a flexible framework capable of engaging with contentious theoretical ideas and the urgency of social change, feminism offers a simultaneous way to express an epistemology (knowledge), a methodology (the production of knowledge), an ontology (one’s subjective way of being in the world), and a praxis (the translation of knowledge into actions that produce beneficial social change). Feminist family science, in particular, advances critical, intersectional, and queer approaches to examine the uses and abuses of power and the multiple axes upon which individuals and families are privileged, marginalized, and oppressed in diverse social contexts. In this paper, I embrace feminism as a personal, professional (academic), and political project and use stories from my own life to illuminate broader social-historical structures, processes, and contexts associated with gender, race, class, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, nationality, and other systems of social stratification. I provide a brief history and reflections on contemporary feminist theory and activism, particularly from the perspective of my disciplinary affiliation of feminist family science. I address feminism as an intersectional perspective through three themes: (a) theory: defining a critical feminist approach, (b) method: critical feminist autoethnographic research, and (c) praxis: transforming feminist theory into action. I conclude with takeaway messages for incorporating reflexivity and critical consciousness raising to provoke thought and action in the areas of personal, professional, and political change.
Keywords
Feminist theorizing is embedded in a critical and contentious practice that reflects a shared politics of engagement to decenter patriarchy, capitalism, colonization, racism, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and other systems of oppression and inequality on behalf of social change (Collins, 2019; Ferguson, 2017; Few-Demo & Allen, 2020; Oswald et al., 2009). As a critical, intersectional theory, feminism is a relational, collectivist, and integrative endeavor that is embedded in the standpoint, “I am because we are” (Lewis, 2009, p. 309). My goal in this paper is to confront and interpret the contradictions, tensions, and (im)possibilities inherent in the politics, identity, and practice of being guided by a feminist perspective, variously defined, in the study of families and intimate relationships. Thus, I take seriously the adage that the personal and the professional are political, and I utilize feminist consciousness raising in order to describe feminism as an intersectional perspective through an analysis of three themes: (a) theory: defining a critical feminist approach, (b) method: critical feminist autoethnographic research, and (c) praxis: transforming feminist theory into action.
By “feminist perspective,” I mean the intertwined strategies of theorizing, studying, practicing, and living the results of feminist theorizing and research on behalf of social justice. Feminist theory in my disciplinary home of family science has emerged from the embodied experience of violence, oppression, and inequity and therefore is inextricably linked to the necessity for action on behalf of individual, familial, and societal change (Allen et al., 2009; Few-Demo et al., 2014). More generally, a feminist perspective is ultimately about critiquing and understanding the uses and abuses of power and promoting ways of creating a more equitable society for all (Ahmed, 2017; Alexander & Mohanty, 1997; Srinivasan, 2021). A critical feminist approach is intersectional, which means that there is no universal, homogeneous experience of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and the like (Collins, 2019; Few-Demo & Allen, 2020). Instead, scholars must consider the multiple axes upon which individuals and groups are marginalized (Collins, 1990; Crenshaw, 1991). There are many structural systems of oppression, including racism, sexism, ageism, heterosexism, elitism, classism, and ableism that are built upon a privileged group’s claim to inherent superiority and “the right to dominance” (Lorde, 1984, p. 115). Feminism is always against the dualistic binary of male/female, black/white, either/or, and thus is critical of the Western European tradition of seeing “human differences in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down, superior/inferior” (Lorde, p. 114). A feminist intersectional lens “allows us to complicate and transcend discursively binary understandings of gender, sexuality, and other social locations” (Few-Demo & Glass, 2020, p. 433). Although there is no singular orthodoxy in feminism, that does not mean that “anything goes”; indeed, feminism stands against all forms of domination (hooks, 1984). As an analysis and critique of power, feminism is inherently political (Allen et al., 2022; Few-Demo et al., 2014; Lewis, 2009).
Definitions of Key Feminist Terms.
At the outset, I confess that my perspective is both illuminated and limited by four decades of study as a feminist family scholar, in that I completed academic training and served as a professor of family studies in the discipline of Human Development and Family Science (HDFS). Although there is a great deal of overlap among HDFS and the many disciplines represented by scholars publishing in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, including anthropology, communication, counseling, education, psychology, social work, and sociology, just to name a few, I acknowledge at the outset the limitations of my ability to traverse all of the possible disciplinary terrain and borderlands beyond my own experience and knowledge. But, there is also great potential in understanding and acknowledging one’s limitations. Being aware of how much I do not know opens the door to intellectual curiosity and openness to change, which are among the very goals of a critical feminist perspective that seeks to revolutionize and transform social relations.
The reflexive, autoethnographic method I use in this paper to reveal possibilities of feminism for family and close relationship scholars is to embody how feminism has guided and transformed my own experiences over the life course, in order to shed light on more general social structures and processes. I combine three analytic strategies of (a) theorizing feminism from multiple perspectives (e.g., intersectionality, life course, and ambiguous loss) as a family science scholar, (b) by using a reflexive, autoethnographic approach, and (c) in service of addressing the ongoing need for social change. Feminism, then, offers a simultaneous way to express an epistemology (knowledge), a methodology (the production of knowledge), an ontology (one’s subjective way of being in the world), and a praxis (the translation of knowledge into actions that produce social change) (Allen, 2016; Allen & Baber, 1992; Hesse-Biber, 2007; Lewis, 2009; Harding, 1991; Hawkesworth, 1989).
In writing this paper, I consulted intersectional feminist scholars and activists, both in the United States and internationally (e.g., Ahmed, 2017; Gago, 2020; hooks, 2015; Lorde, 1984; Mohanty, 2003; Moraga & Anzaldua, 2015; Snitow, 2015; Srinivasan, 2021) for inspiration on the dynamics of individual and societal change that can be found in the alchemy of mixing critical theorizing on families and the broader relational and social contexts in which they are situated with reflexive personal narrative and autoethnography (e.g., Adams & Manning, 2015; Allen, 2000; Allen & Piercy, 2005; Gabb, 2018; Hoskin, 2022; Smith & Smith, 2015). This mixture of the theoretical and the personal can unleash the power of a feminist analysis for understanding families and relationships and effecting change in oppressive and marginalized conditions, so necessary in the current moment of political discord, global health disparities, racial inequity, and the urgency of social transformation.
Feminist reflexive practice, which I employ here, is the soul work that inspires feminist theorizing and activism around the world (Allen et al., 2022). Feminist engagement encourages an academic and activist approach to applying an understanding of the sociological imagination (Mills, 1959) to the art and science of critical storytelling and “writing the social” (Davis et al., 2021; Gornick, 2001; Krieger, 1996; Lorde, 1984; Richardson, 1997; Smith, 2004). Merging scientific and artistic genres in this way asks the reader to engage with the story both intellectually and emotionally (Ettore, 2017). Critically narrating the personal, professional, and political requires the writer to be excruciatingly self-conscious (Stacey, 1988), to risk vulnerability in exposing what one does not know or understand (Allen & Piercy, 2005), and to provide a more honest and transparent approach to how one’s personal life intrudes on and informs research about families and relationships (Allen, 2000). This is the type of work that is necessary to transform silence into action (Lorde, 1984).
Theory: Defining a critical feminist approach
How relevant is feminist theory for family and relationship scholars today? In the study of families and close relationships, current features of feminist theory include intersectionality, interdisciplinarity, and internationalism (Allen et al., 2009). Feminist theory has both pioneered and elaborated upon the empirical study of topics such as invisible household labor, inter- and intra-generational carework, sexual and domestic violence, and the making and unmaking of gender in families (Allen et al., 2022). Feminist family theorists have brought a rhetoric of transformation to the personal lives of scholars, to the families they study, to the students they teach, to the activist work they do in the academy, and to the social science they advance (e.g., Allen, 2016; Few-Demo et al., 2016; Kaestle, 2016; Lewis, 2009; Sharp & Weaver, 2015; Walker, 2000). They have challenged the dominating narrative of white supremacy that has structured most of mainstream family theorizing in the United States (Walsdorf et al., 2020) and introduced a global, post-colonial lens to help deconstruct the nature of the White, normative family model (e.g., Beitin et al., 2010; Bermudez et al., 2016). Global, transnational feminism deemphasizes identity politics and focuses more on structural issues that can be changed through politicized action, such as the power of the state, the misery of poverty and violence, and the ownership, use, and meaning of humans’ relationship to the land (Connell, 2015).
In these ways, feminist theory is indeed relevant, especially in view of the geopolitics, violence, and social ecologies that threaten human freedom, equality, and justice (Ferguson, 2017; Rose, 2021). Feminist theory frames many relevant issues on the world stage as societies are constantly reconfiguring and new controversies emerge. For example, feminist theory frames critical analyses and interventions into the current hardening of political divisions, as expressed through the deconstruction and erasure of “truth” and the promotion of sometimes deadly propaganda on social media (Boler, 2015; Boler & Davis, 2021). Feminist theory is at the center of understanding and promoting new critiques of biological gender (e.g., the male/female binary) as well as the call for trans liberation in light of media and political distortions (Faye, 2021). Feminists are also at the forefront of confronting and ameliorating the ever-present reality of rape and sexual violence (Rose, 2021) and sex trafficking of minoritized Black and Brown bodies (Henderson & Rhodes, 2022; Pourmokhtari, 2015), as well as the unpaid, underpaid, and coerced labor of exploited workers worldwide (Glenn, 2012).
Feminism is thus scalable to analyses of problems facing global, technological, and intersectional identities and politics (Mahler et al., 2015). Yet, feminism, as an intellectual project and a social movement, is uncertain, which means it is hard to describe without flattening to a straight line the ripples, curves, waves, and tsunamis that characterize such a dynamic enterprise (Snitow, 2015). Again, feminism is a critical perspective, which aims to upset the status quo and is inherently contradictory and oppositional (Agger, 1998; Allen & Henderson, 2022). Attempts to explain general trends and common features of feminism unfortunately gloss over important twists and turns, and readers should be mindful that there are many variations to feminist thought, method, and action that are also relevant and often contested.
Generations and waves of contemporary feminist thought and activism
Feminist scholars have offered numerous metaphors and theoretical perspectives for describing the contributions and historical shifts in feminist thinking and action (Allen et al., 2022; Freedman, 2002; Reger, 2014; Sharp & Weaver, 2015; Srinivasan, 2021), including concepts such as waves and/or generations (Aikau et al., 2007; Reger, 2017) and tapestries (Lewis & Marine, 2015). For a general audience, commentators often resort to the wave metaphor, describing at least four waves of feminist movement, mainly associated with feminist activism in the United States, and more recently in the United Kingdom (Chamberlain, 2017).
The wave metaphor is both a blessing and a curse: a blessing because it provides a linguistic framing that has been widely distributed in the popular vernacular primarily through journalistic accounts and social media (Allen et al., 2022; Chamberlain, 2017), and a curse because it is impossible to capture all of the complexity and diversity of feminist thinking in a single word, page, chapter, book, or discipline. Thus, I use the wave metaphor cautiously, as a heuristic (i.e., a theoretical tool), to sketch the dynamic nature of feminist thinking and action, admitting that in using this metaphor, I am also betraying its indeterminacy by representing it as a frozen temporality, and thus reducing its dynamism. What I appreciate about the wave metaphor, however, is that it depicts movement: feminism is a rippling (and sometimes crashing) activist intellectual and social movement that is ever-changing and contains endless possibilities for dealing with contradiction, uncertainty, and the messiness of life.
First wave feminism
The first wave of contemporary feminism in the United States is typically linked to the 19th century, with the year 1848 as a watershed moment corresponding to the Seneca Falls Convention that initiated the push for women’s suffrage (O’Neill, 1969). This era lasted about 70 years, culminating in the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that finally gave voting rights to most women. Importantly, the 19th Amendment ushered in a new era of women’s legal rights to own property, to divorce, to inherit, to go to college, to retain custody of their children, among many other civil rights that we take for granted today (Lorber, 2012). Contraception and a women’s right to plan her pregnancies were also features of the first wave.
Feminist ideas and agitation, however, had ensued for centuries before the Seneca Falls Convention (Kramarae & Treichler, 1992). Furthermore, sewn into the fabric of the women’s suffrage movement was a racial and ethnic schism, where the rights of African American and Indigenous women were given a backseat in favor of securing voting rights and contraceptive rights for primarily middle class White women (Collins, 1990; De Reus et al., 2005; Lorber, 2012), despite the fact that “the political birthplace of feminism in the United States was the anti-slavery movement” (Freedman, 2002, p. 76). The contemporary roots of critical race feminism can be traced to former slave, abolitionist, and feminist Sojourner Truth’s famous speech in 1851, “Ain’t I a Woman,” in which she challenged the White leaders of first wave feminism: Sojourner bared her sinewy arm and asked the question to highlight the fact that Black women were women too, even though their concerns were not incorporated in the discussions of feminists or abolitionists. Modern-day women of color raise the same pertinent question, “Aren’t we women too?” (Wing, 2003, p. 8)
Second wave feminism
French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949, charting men’s dominance and women’s inferiority in Western society, not as a biological given, but as a product of social structure. Although de Beauvoir's (2011/1949) ideas were highly influential, organized political activism that characterized the second wave of the contemporary feminist movement did not take off until the late 1960s. Second wave feminism crystalized around the radical civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, emerging from women’s perceptions of invisibility, objectification, and gender segregation in the male-dominated radical New Left, the Black Civil Rights Movement, and the anti-Vietnam War peace movement (Allen, 2016; Morgan, 1970). Radical feminism, which means to “break at the root,” came out of women’s resistance and rebellion against patriarchy in their shared experience of themes that are still relevant today: [C]onstant denigration…emotional and sexual service to men, the constant sexual innuendoes and come-ons in workplaces and on college campuses, the lack of control over procreation, the fear of physical and sexual abuse. Politically, radical feminism took on the violence in women’s oppression—rape and wife-beating, the depiction of women as sex objects in the mass media and as pieces of meat in pornography, and the global commerce in prostitution. (Lorber, 2012; p. 124)
Small groups of politically active women began meeting in consciousness-raising (CR) groups with one another to explore how “the personal is political, rejecting the ideological division of public and private spheres that dismissed women’s claims of injustice as merely personal” (Freedman, 2002, p. l87). These in-depth conversations in CR groups focused on the connection between the oppression in their own families and homes and their second-class citizenship in society. CR groups were designed to “speak bitterness” about women’s oppression and join forces to resist the patriarchy (Sarachild, 1973). They were first started by radical feminists around 1969 and proliferated in the 1970s (Snitow, 2015).
CR groups were intimate rap sessions that departed from traditional psychiatric practice and the encounter group therapy movement of the time, in which rigid gender roles were often enforced. During the second wave, women collectively began to seek women-only space in order to ask the difficult questions about what was wrong with their lives because “women of every group have almost no place where roles as wife, mother, sex object, hostess, high-level helper, social appendage, or domestic aren’t forced upon us” (Women’s body, 1972, p. 18). The CR group was the forerunner of experiential social science, where women shared their own personal experiences with oppression and “analyzed them communally” (Reinharz, 1983, p. 167).
Yet, despite the radical activism that ignited second wave feminism, this era became associated with liberal feminism, middle class White women’s reformist brand of social change that led to the denigration of feminism as an “undifferentiated, under-theorized sisterhood” (Snitow, 2015, p. 31). One of the main presumptions of liberal feminism is that all women were universally united by a shared (and equal) gender oppression. Liberal feminism was first expressed as “the problem that has no name,” by perhaps the most well-known liberal feminist of the era, Betty Friedan, in her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, in which she described the ennui primarily educated White women felt by being stuck in the domestic sphere. Liberal feminists emphasized women’s equality with men, through affirmative action, and sought broad scale changes through equal pay and gender neutral socialization of children (Lorber, 2012).
These essentialist conceptualizations of androgyny and universal sisterhood that presumed White middle class heterosexual women’s experiences as the standard for every woman were soon critiqued by Black feminists (e.g., Crenshaw, 1991; Lorde, 1984), Chicana and Latina feminists (e.g., Anzaldua, 1987; Baca Zinn & Wells, 2000), Asian American feminists (e.g., Chow, 1987), lesbian feminists (e.g., Feinberg, 1993; Johnston, 1973; Rich, 1980), among many other groups of women who felt their multiple, contested identities and their fight for social justice were being marginalized by the portrayal of universal sisterhood. If feminism stayed in the hands of White, middle class, heterosexual women, they would be the first (and perhaps only) women to get their “piece of the pie.” This critique of feminism as merely a reform movement (hence, not a movement for radical social change), where a few elite women benefitted and most other women had to wait their turn (which may never come), has been part of the internal controversies inside of the feminist movement since its inception.
Third wave feminism
The demarcation from second to third wave feminism is especially murky, given the simultaneity of critique and transformation in feminist thinking occurring across both eras. The critique of a universal concept of “woman,” along with an outpouring of voices formerly eclipsed or silenced by radical and liberal feminism, led the way for third wave feminism, which championed the inclusion of differences among women and their allies. Third wave feminism moved the center away from feminism as a White, middle class, heterosexual women’s movement to one of understanding and embracing the differences across multiple categories. A key idea from the second wave that ushered in the third wave was the emergence of womanism, a term coined by Alice Walker (1983), the author of the award winning novel, The Color Purple. Womanism is a forerunner of intersectional feminist theory that reflected the dual consciousness of women of color, who have allegiances to racial and ethnic groups and gender (Lewis, 2009).
Third wave feminism was also characterized by postmodern critiques of the grand narratives of Western modernity, capitalism, and the liberal state that had formed the foundation for much of political theorizing in the 19th and 20th centuries (White, 1991). Postmodernists stood in opposition to the ethics and politics of modernity and were skeptical of any claims about a single reality or coherent narrative. Instead, they advocated for deconstructing the “truth” or what is seemingly “natural” in favor of plurality in thought and action (Allen & Baber, 1992). Not only were the Enlightenment ideas found in liberal feminism under critique, but now postmodern feminists were also scrutinizing Marxism (Baber & Allen, 1992; Lorber, 2012).
Marxism was the foundation for critical theorizing that undergirded the feminist critique of racialized, patriarchal, gendered, and liberal capitalism (Acker, 1989; Allen & Henderson, 2022). Marxist feminists had extended the concept of social class consciousness and oppression to include gender and race consciousness, deconstructing the assumption of a private-public dichotomy, so important to understanding both internal family dynamics and ways in which families are structured by society (Glenn, 1985; Hartsock, 1983; Lorber, 2012). Building upon Marxist feminism, socialist feminists further examined the lack of pay women received for caring and domestic labor in the home, and the limited pay they received for it in the labor force, thus generating new analyses of the invisible dimensions of women’s productive and reproductive work (Baber & Allen, 1992; Ferree, 1990; Hartmann, 1981). By integrating racial oppression into the analysis of oppressed labor, one of the critiques by women of color is that they served as the caregivers for White women’s homes and children, thereby freeing up White women to seek gender equality with men (e.g., Collins, 1990; Dill, 1988). The ongoing tension about paid and unpaid caring labor in the relations among White and women of color continues to this day (Dow, 2016; Glenn, 2012).
Third wave feminism took another turn in the direction of postmodernism when a younger generation of feminist activists sought to advance more sexual freedoms and analyses about power (Henry, 2004). Rather than root their feminism in second wave foundational ideas about woman’s oppression, third wave feminists championed the differently embodied situations across women’s lives (Mack-Canty, 2004). Many of the initial leaders in third wave feminism were themselves the daughters of radical feminist activists from earlier generations, such as Rebecca Walker (1995), the daughter of Alice Walker. The postmodern influence of third wave feminism was evident in breaking with traditions from previous feminist generations, as Lorber (2012) explains, “Instead of a feminist sisterhood, they form fluid groups of ‘riot grrls’ and ‘guerrilla grrls’—women’s hip-hop bands and art producers. The ‘grr’ is a playful parody of a confrontational snarl and is sometimes stretched to ‘grrr’” (p. 306).
Fourth wave feminism
A fourth wave of feminism has been identified recently, enabled by technological innovations and the ubiquity of social media (Chamberlain, 2017). Fourth wave feminism, like feminism’s earlier iterations, is exceptionally difficult to define, but there is some agreement that feminism is alive and well on social media. Younger generations of digital natives, in particular, find grassroots organizing online and posting about rape, harassment, and violence, among many other concerns, a new outlet for feminist activism. As Chamberlain (2017) explains, “the privacy traditionally associated with the body and personal experience have been necessarily transferred into the public sphere, such that the affect these feelings produce can galvanize feminist collectives” (p. 82). Indeed, hashtag feminism has been especially embraced by intersectional feminists, namely, women of color, sparked by Moya Bailey’s (2021) articulation of misogynoir, which is the meeting point of racialized and sexualized violence against Black women, especially in digital spaces (Jackson et al., 2020).
Specific to the fourth wave, Reger (2014) described five key feminist debates regarding the relevance of feminism in the United States. First, Reger argued that the continual resurgence of the “death knell of feminism” (p. 43) is actually evidence of the resistance to the threat of real institutional change that feminism advances. Feminism’s continuity in the United States can be found among new generations of feminists: “the internet teems with cyberfeminist sites which promote new forms of activism and feminist identities” (Reger, p. 44). At the same time, there are some cautions in relying only on social media to develop an activist community, especially if it is used as a substitute for strong emotional and social relationships (Hall, 2020) or is merely in service of “drive-by difference,” instead of “courageously reaching across differences” and negotiating embodied encounters face-to-face (Boler, 2015, p. 1494).
Second, Reger (2014) acknowledged that the generational divide among feminists still exists. She critiqued the wave metaphor and promoted the generation metaphor, where “the movement becomes one of overlapping generations instead of waves framed by temporal (mostly national) events” (p. 45). Citing Katha Pollit, Reger argued that the dissension among feminist groups is often reduced to a “mother-daughter catfight” (p. 46), which is historically inaccurate.
The third feminist issue Reger (2014) identified in the fourth wave concerns the ever-present contention around race-ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, and gender identification. Charges that U.S. feminism is mostly a White, middle class, heterosexual movement, and thus exclusive of many diverse groups, still stand. As Collins (1990) argued, non-white, non-middle class, and non-heterosexual feminists are critical of the belief in universal sisterhood that privileges White, middle class, heterosexual women. Feminism still has a long way to go in decentering White privilege and building coalitions across axes of identity and practice (Collins, 2019). Even in the contemporary moment where intersectionality has been embraced by scholars and activists, the power of intersectionality, with its roots in Black feminist thought and its ability to name the reality of systemic racism, sexism, classism, and the like is in danger of eclipse and homogenization if the feminist and activist part of intersectionality is not included (Few-Demo & Allen, 2020; Few-Demo et al., 2016). Relatedly, Kendi (2019) wrote that the concept of microaggressions, when substituted for systemic racism or racist abuse, can be used to eclipse and even deny the racism that people of color experience.
The fourth issue Reger (2014) identified as churning in feminist thought today is global feminism, particularly in relation to the ethnocentrism of only focusing on U.S. feminism. To give a few examples, there is a need to globalize and decolonize theory and research methods in gender studies (Ji et al., 2017), family science (Bermudez et al., 2016), masculinity studies (Connell, 2016), relationship research (Adams, 2014), communication research (Soliz & Phillips, 2018), sociology (Weiner, 2012), and psychology (Macleod et al., 2020).
Finally, a fifth issue Reger addressed is gender identity and expression. Most prominent are debates around inclusion of trans men and women as feminists and efforts to combat cisgenderism, which is “the ideology that views cisgender identities as natural and normal, thereby delegitimizing trans identities and expression” (Blair & Hoskin, 2019, p. 2075) as well as transphobia, an enactment of power, which includes the violence and harassment against trans people (Bettcher, 2014). The urgency of deconstructing gender binaries and providing social supports is especially relevant now that there is increasing gender fluidity among children and adolescents (Diamond, 2020). The experience of intrapersonal and interpersonal gender dysphoria can create an additional burden on the mental and physical health of trans and nonbinary youth, and increases the need for access to and use of affirmative health care resources (Toomey, 2021).
In an exciting theoretical feminist turn characteristic of the fourth wave, Hoskin and Blair (2021) take up the denigrated topic of “femininity,” which, from the second wave gender binary framework, is always seen as inferior to masculinity. They argue for a more nuanced approach to gender. They propose a multidimensional understanding of “critical femininities,” in which cissexism, heterosexism, whiteness, and the like, are critiqued, and new ideological and intersectional understandings of femininity can emerge, especially ones that are inclusive of the broader array of LGBTQ identities beyond hegemonic femaleness. Hoskin (2022) provides an autoethnographic account of the multiplicity of intersectional identities and cultural histories she experiences as a queer, femme, Jewish, White, and legally blind woman, and how she navigates the paradoxical and sometimes privileged liminality that can allow her to pass as straight, able-bodied, among other valued identities. At the same time, Hoskin (2019, 2020) addresses the femmephobia, which is the cultural devaluation and infantilization of femininity and applies it to ways in which those who are not cisgender or hegemonically feminine are policed across varying sexual and gender identities. Thus, in the fourth wave of feminism, scholars are integrating both theory and activism to address the urgency with which denigration and violence can be directed at those who differ from normative identifications.
Feminist insights for understanding families and close relationships
Examining family and close relationships over the life course requires multiple vantage points, including understanding family structure (who is in families), family process (how family members relate to one another), and family context (how families shape and are shaped by larger social forces) (Allen & Henderson, 2022; Kaestle et al., 2021). How does a feminist perspective help to understand these complex relational experiences affecting individuals, families, and society? Feminist scholars who study families and intimate relationships have applied this type of multifaceted analysis as a critical yet flexible framework that defines and interrogates the power structures that differentially privilege and oppress individuals and social groups on the basis of gender, race, class, sexuality, and other systems of stratification and their intersections (Allen, 2016; Collins, 1990; Curran et al., 2015; Few-Demo & Allen, 2020; Few-Demo et al., 2016; Goldberg et al., 2020; Oswald et al., 2009; Walker, 2009).
Hand-in-hand with feminist theory is feminist activism, or praxis, which is a reflective, empowered, and politicized practice, an “intangible place where theory meets research, and research is applied to real-time contexts (e.g., pedagogy) and problems of human beings” (Allen et al., 2009, p. 11). Praxis is the transformation of theory into action in order to change the world (Freire, 1997/1970; hooks, 1994). Praxis is what separates a collectivist feminist/womanist approach from an individual/traditional approach to social science research in the academy (Lewis, 2009). Thus, feminism offers intellectual, linguistic, and behavioral strategies to inspire and guide people who want to bring about social change in order to ameliorate oppressive conditions (Acker et al., 1983).
There is no singular feminist theory or praxis; indeed, feminism’s very strength, and sometimes its impossibility, is that feminism takes many forms. Although feminism began with a critique of sexism and patriarchy, the work of radical women of color, and Black feminist scholars, in particular, inspired a necessary shift to name hegemonic White middle class privilege in the movement and subsequently to bring intersectionality to the forefront of feminism (Collins, 1990; Crenshaw, 1991; Few-Demo, 2014; Lorde, 1984; Moraga & Anzaldua, 2015). Feminism now embraces the radical critique of White supremacist, neoliberal, capitalist patriarchy, and the nuances of diverse identities and political commitments are no longer collapsed into binaries, such as White women compared to women of color, or heterosexual women compared to lesbians.
Indeed, identity itself has been deconstructed. The voices of individuals previously on the margins are increasingly in the center of their own narratives, which is a truly positive outcome of intersectional feminist theorizing. For example, in a collection of contributions from Asian American-Pacific Islander (AAPI) feminist scholars (Fujiwara & Roshanravan, 2018), the diversity of groups that have previously been collapsed under the “Asian American” umbrella are untangled. This collection reveals the importance of understanding how diverse identities and geographies are critical to glimpsing the nature of any semblance of shared experience, and at the same time, that AAPI groups are still racially invisible in U.S. society, left out of the American Black/White binary (Roshanravan, 2018). Further, using critical race feminist theory, Shih et al. (2019) critique the model minority myth that members of Asian American groups experience, when in fact there are at least 30 ethnic subgroups comprising this population, and only a few actually fare well in terms of education and advancement. In another example, Baker et al. (2021) compiled the stories of 63 survivors of sexual assault in Native communities in order to document their self-determination and resilience. These Native, American Indian, and Alaska Native women told a collective story of abuse and healing entwined with the use of traditional culture and medicine as well as the support of resources to meet basic needs for self-care, mental health, and physical safety. Across all of these works by radical women of color, critical race feminism is the theoretical innovation that illuminates an intersectional perspective (Few-Demo, 2014; Hong, 2018; Shih et al., 2019).
A feminist perspective on families examines “power, privilege, and oppression in the micropolitics of diverse family relationships and in the macropolitics of social institutions” (Allen, 2016, p. 208), and seeks to understand the complex and contested ways that power is enacted for and sometimes against families in diverse communities and societies (Few-Demo et al., 2014). Feminist approaches deconstruct and reconstruct previously invisible family identities and relationships, as in the case of challenging the denigration of the role of stepmother in comparison to biological mother (Sanner & Coleman, 2017). Feminist theorizing also challenges the cultural mandate that presumes that only individuals who reproduce constitute a family, and instead celebrates childfree families (Blackstone, 2019) as well as the families and close relationships of single adults as a more than viable alternative to marriage (Lavender-Stott, 2020; Sarkisian & Gerstel, 2015). Much of the literature on families and close relationships tends to focus only on the disadvantages that accrue to marginalized families, without also shining a light on their resilience, despite the difficulties they face (Anderson, 2019), or on the invisible ways that some families benefit from unearned privileges (Letiecq, 2019; McIntosh, 2020). In these ways, feminist thinking turns prevailing ideas about families and relationships on its ear.
Families are a location where care and conflict co-mingle—and where the inequality of society mirrors the inequality in families (Allen, 2016); thus, concepts such as ambivalence and contradiction are needed to break open the normative narrative of “happy families/happy lives” (Ahmed, 2010). As Ahmed (2017) argues, becoming a “feminist killjoy” is necessary to remain a student of life and a willful subject. One of the first challenges to the “all is well” dominant narrative of families in feminist family science was to deconstruct the boundary of privacy around families, in order to see how broader systems of power and privilege operate in our most intimate relationships (Ferree, 1990; Thompson & Walker, 1989).
Rather than resolving this issue, feminism now reveals how entrenched abuses of power and inequity remain across the globe. Intersectional and transnational feminist scholars writing in the third decade of the 21st century illuminate the theoretical importance of bringing feminist ideas and the mobilization of every “kind” of woman (e.g., mothers, biological females, lesbians, transwomen, and prostituted persons) to the world’s most pressing problems, implicating patriarchal, capitalist, and fascist political regimes that exploit and repress women and families in pursuit of power and profit (e.g., Gago, 2020; Rose, 2021; Srinivasan, 2021). Now, I turn from feminist theory to the second theme of this paper, the use of feminist autoethnography.
Method: Critical feminist autoethnographic research
At a basic level, a critical feminist approach to method acknowledges the subjectivity of the researcher and deconstructs the complex issue of power in the knowledge production process of research, writing, and publishing (Sprague, 2016; Stanley & Wise, 1990). Just as there are a plethora of feminist theories, there is also an explosion of critical feminist methods and methodologies (e.g., DeVault, 2018; Fine, 2018). The past 50 years have also witnessed new quantitative measures of feminist identity and attitudes, particularly since the infusion of intersectionality and the challenges in measuring it quantitatively (Few-Demo & Allen, 2020; McCall, 2005). In light of the evolution of the meaning of “feminism,” in their recent review of the psychometric properties of such quantitative scales, Siegel and Calogero (2021) recommended the importance of defining what is meant by a feminist perspective in the instrument itself to stay relevant to current iterations of feminist ideas and practices.
Given this explosion of methods and measurement, it is beyond the scope of this paper to examine them in depth. Instead, I have selected one type of method to exemplify a feminist approach in this paper—autoethnography. Autoethnography can bring the power of personal narrative and feminist theorizing to explore how one’s personal life is a particular example that can shed light on the general experience in socio-historical context, and vice versa (Allen, 2000). Narrative methods disrupt the tendency in family research to homogenize experience and structure (Langellier & Peterson, 2021). Narrative situates the story in the participant’s hands to ensure greater authenticity and to deal with how life actually unfolds.
Real life is full of irresolvable contradictions. Narrative, storied approaches push those contradictions into the light where their tensions can be examined and changed (Connidis, 2012). Autoethnography is a powerful tool for “writing ourselves into existence” (Davis et al., 2021, p. 21), as a collective of Black women faculty and students in the field of Communication did in describing their self-reflexive approach. Davis et al. (2021) documented their academic experiences with “othering” and being devalued, and agentically used this knowledge to develop a community of resistance, creating alternative meanings of “Black women’s subjectivities….to find healing, mentorship, and validation in hostile environments” (p. 23).
Positionality
Autoethnographic methods in the interdisciplinary study of families and close relationships begin with the disclosure of one’s positionality (e.g., Acosta, 2018; Adams & Manning, 2015; Allen, 2016; Allen & Piercy, 2005; Gabb & Allen, 2020; Hoskin, 2022), as a way to map the self-disclosures that follow. In a useful heuristic, Jacobson and Mustafa (2019) developed a Social Identity Map, which is a tool for being explicit about one’s social identities and positionalities, so that a researcher can critically assess their impact (e.g., understand power relations) on the participants and the research process. The map includes (a) the researcher’s social identities (e.g., class, citizenship, ability, age/generation, race, sexual orientation, cis/trans, and gender); (b) how these positions impact the researcher’s life; and (c) analysis of which identities may impact their approach to data, participants, and interpretation and dissemination of the research.
My own positionality is as a White, cisgendered, middle class, able-bodied, thrice married, bisexual woman, in my late 60s, who recently retired from a university position in the southeastern United States. My intimate relationship history has included a legal marriage and divorce from a man (in my 20s–30s), a lesbian partnership and relational dissolution before same sex marriage or divorce were legal in the United States (in my 30s–40s), and a legal marriage to a man, now for nearly two decades (my 50s–60s). I have mothered two sons. My biological son, Matt, died by suicide in 2011. I lost my other son, Zack, born to my former lesbian partner and our donor (who is my brother’s husband), when our lesbian mother family split up in 2000 when Zack was six and Matt was 13. However, when Zack was in his 20s (after a 16 year absence from me), he found his way back to my life.
Resonance
The qualitative concept of “resonance” (Charmaz, 2014; Daly, 2007) undergirds my effort to write personal experience into the theoretical storyline. Does the personal narrative resonate—does it hold up and evoke meaning across experience, time, and space? Thus, the primary research method I use in this paper to communicate ideas about a feminist perspective on families and intimate relationships is to orient the concepts in my own experience and then to connect, interpret, and theorize about wider societal phenomenon from that starting point.
I am certain to make intellectual and memory errors as I engage in this narration, that is at once a reflection on my lived experience, and at the same time, transgresses any certainty because the very act of embodying experience traps and freezes that so-called reality. Snitow (2015) argued for the value of uncertainty in self-reflexive writing, especially about political activism: “I am certain of this: In my activist life, irony (comic whenever possible), doubt, and the unresolvability of questions about how to proceed have protected me from burn out” (p. 309). I agree with Snitow that a feminist perspective, ever-changing and uncertain, has provided an engaging stimulus for the questions and puzzles that capture my imagination. At the same time, I recognize that there is no standard way to write about or enact a feminist perspective, especially in the technological age (Chamberlain, 2017; DeVault, 2018). As Ferguson (2017) remarked, “Many of feminist theorists’ greatest achievements as well as our fiercest arguments result from and reflect intense political passions over the best ways to understand and improve the lives of women and also of men, children, all species, the planet” (p. 270). With these caveats in mind, I rely on the possibilities of using an alternative methodology such as autoethnography, that allows the interplay between interpretive subjective experience and rigorous social science to guide the story along (Connidis, 2012; Davis et al., 2021; Denzin, 2014; Ellis & Bochner, 1996; Gabb & Allen, 2020; Goldberg & Allen, 2015; Richardson, 1997; Weis & Fine, 2004).
The value of applying a feminist perspective, including reflexive, self-critical research, was introduced to relationship scholars by Wood (1995) in her searing analysis of power dynamics and interpersonal processes in the study of social and personal relationships. Integrating feminist theory about families and close relationships with the feminist method of self-reflexive analysis can provide new insight into the complicated nature of relationships and their social and personal contexts. The goal of this method is to help break open old or reified ideas about family and close relationships with new insights gleaned from lived experience. Next, I turn to praxis by using stories from my own life experiences to explicate how feminist thinking, research, and activism can offer fresh possibilities for broader social change.
Praxis: Transforming feminist theory into action
Feminist praxis is the third theme of this paper. I dig into several stories from my own life as a way to connect the personal, professional, and political, relying on a mixture of lived experience and feminist theorizing to produce a resonance that I hope is relevant to others. I employ reflexive autoethnographic analysis with several events and transitions over my life course, drawing from my experiences that traverse the temporality across second to fourth wave feminism as a way to animate the dynamic nature of feminist thinking and practice. The overarching connection for me is how the dynamic nature of feminist thinking and practice has been instrumental in not only directing my scholarship about family diversity over the life course, but also in how feminist thinking and action—what Ahmed (2017) calls the feminist snap—have also changed and empowered my life, helping me to live more authentically as a willful subject. Despite the many privileges of race, class, nationality, health, and the like, that have advantaged and supported my life, I believe that feminist thinking and action have empowered me by naming and thus easing the trauma I experienced as a young woman who was raped during college, a bereaved mother who lost a child to suicide, and an aging woman in a patriarchal society that denigrates and dehumanizes most older adults. Thus, feminist thinking and action have been transformative by opening spaces for me to be more fully alive in my own circumstances, and also more fully compassionate, available, and helpful to others.
Continuity and change over the life course: Experiencing resonance and variability
The first story I tell is about my childhood. My desire in telling this story is to describe a sense of continuity, where something I had written about years ago still resonates with how I reflect upon past experiences. Several decades ago, I was invited to write about my work and my life as a family scholar and a lesbian mother of young children (Allen, 2001). In this reflexive analysis, I described how my early family life was rather chaotic. Reading this paper again after so many years, I still resonate with this description of my childhood in a primarily Irish and Italian Catholic working class neighborhood in Baltimore during the post-war baby boom era: The children in my neighborhood played in the alley….I learned such things as what the private parts of other people’s bodies looked like as well as how to smoke cigarettes. I witnessed the impact of child abuse as older children took out their anger and victimization from harsh parental discipline on younger children. So much for the security and innocence of childhood in the 1950s. (pp. 193–194)
This is exactly how I would describe my childhood today if asked. In the article, I went on to describe how I came to theorize and practice a feminist social science that integrates multiple perspectives beginning with my childhood at the intersection of sexism, racism, classism, and heterosexism: I spent those formative years observing the contradictory messages about race, class, gender, and heterosexuality that positioned me for a life of service and second class status. These messages were so disturbing to my emerging sense of justice that I developed a corresponding urge to rebel against systematically unfair restrictions. Even as a young child, I connected head and heart. I understood the social hierarchy in the major institutions—family, school, and church—structuring my world. I knew about class distinctions, ducking my head when driving in my mother’s old car, so friends from school wouldn’t see me in such a wreck. But the racism and sexism that were taken for granted in my community offended me the most. Once, in the second grade, when I was walking down the street with my best friend, she told me to hold my breath and cross the street so we wouldn’t walk past and catch the germs of a black woman coming in the other direction. I thought she was wrong and stupid to believe such a thing, but I still did as she said. My incredulity wasn’t enough to keep me from conforming to peer pressure by obeying the thoughts and actions of adults parroted by my young friend. Little did I know then that we were being socialized into the systems of domination—racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism—that served to keep most of us in our places. (pp. 194–195)
This sense of continuity to my past is in sharp contrast to a dizzying sense of discontinuity when I reflect on “how I define who is in my family” today. Although I still resonate with the above reflection of how these systems of domination (racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism) were inculcated in me as a child, there are now so many other ways in which my understanding of my own life experiences, as well as the “facts” promoted in family social science, can now be called into question. I liken this variability, or discontinuity, to the dynamic nature of feminist theorizing and to how much of the family science canon from my home discipline that I once held as truth, but is now up for question. As I noted earlier, a particular feature of fourth wave feminism is the deconstruction of the gender binary and the emergence of gender fluidity (Diamond, 2020; Hyde et al., 2019). Today, the very nature and permanence of family is also under scrutiny, but for much of my career, I clung to a sense of the permanence of family that I can no longer sustain. So much has happened in my life that no longer resonates with my tried and true definitions of family, but instead, confounds me, offering key insights to shake up my worldview about families and the received wisdom promoted in traditional family scholarship, roundly critiqued by Coontz (2016), in addition to a growing number of intersectional, queer, and feminist scholars (Few-Demo & Allen, 2020). For example, I consider myself queer, even though I no longer live in a lesbian relationship. I am cisgender and now married to a cisgender man, but I am not heterosexual. Diamond (2008) explained how sexual orientation is not a fixed trait, but more contextual and dependent upon one’s relationship. When I was living in a lesbian partnership, this notion of fluidity would have been heresy for me, but now that I do not fit into the old binaries, I embrace emerging ideas about fluidity.
More perplexing, however, is my maternal status—which seems like it should be a certainty—but how I define and perceive myself as a mother is increasingly fuzzy. Two decades ago, I wrote about my experience as a lesbian mother of two sons (Allen, 2000, 2001). But I no longer “have” children, at least not in the way I once described. Today, I am no longer sure of how to write about my maternal status or even my relationship to my sons. My biological son, Matt, died at the age of 23 in 2011. As any parent who has lost a child, at any age, knows, my heart was broken by his loss and each day brings new questions, worries, and uncertainties about why he ended his life. Yet, even as the overwhelming sense of grief exacts new demands each day, my love and respect for Matt deepens and grows profoundly (Allen & Craven, 2020). My nonbiological son, Zack, was taken away at the age of six when his biological mother, my former lesbian partner and co-mother to Matt, left us to live with another woman and her children (Allen, 2007, 2019). The only time I have seen Zack after they left was at Matt’s funeral more than a decade later—and I did not at first recognize the boy who had now become a 16 year old young man. We lost track of one another again, especially after he moved across country, until Zack sought me out when he was 22 years old. As Zack and I navigate the current version of our relationship, I recently wrote to him that, “I do not know what we are to each other.” He wrote back immediately, saying, “That’s simple. We are family!” His youthful understanding of family dynamism certainly helps to soften my more rigid perceptions.
And so, the family scholar in me who asks research participants the question, “How many children do you have: 0, 1, 2, 3, or more?”, cannot answer her own question. How many children do you have is a seemingly simple enough empirical question, but to those who have lost children in one way or another, there is no clarity in how to respond. I have two children. I have one child. I have no children. I am really not sure. Furthermore, I doubt most people want an explanation. It is now possible to talk openly about politics, sex, and religion, three formerly very taboo topics, but as any bereaved parent knows, the death of a child is the ultimate taboo topic, “the one subject we are most eager to repress” (Church, 1996, p. 7). Again, I no longer “have” or “see” my children, even though they are still very alive in my heart.
The theory of ambiguous loss (Boss, 2016) has been very helpful in understanding my maternal losses, and to explain my lived experience of “lost and found” with my second son, Zack. Ambiguous loss is a contextual relational framework that identifies and addresses the structural contradictions and boundary ambiguities in relationships, where the emotional assault of uncertain loss never lets up (Boss, 2006). With ambiguous loss, a person is perceived by family members as physically present, but psychologically absent (e.g., a person with Alzheimer’s disease; a chronic mental illness), or as psychologically present, but physically absent (e.g., a soldier missing in action; a kidnapped child; a biological parent in an adoption case). This framework includes a path to resilience, by normalizing the ambiguity of losses that are ill-defined in society and helping individuals embrace “the paradox of learning to live well with the ambiguity of unanswered questions about their families” (Allen, 2007, p. 177). Thus, I am no longer living in a lesbian partnership, and my two sons are no longer alive (Matt) or living near me (Zack), but I embrace my lesbian motherhood, and will always carry that identity with me, even if it is one that I typically now keep to myself. Integrating ambiguous loss theory with a critical feminist perspective strengthens and extends my ability to deal with the discontinuity and change in my own family life as well as in my scholarship. McGuire et al. (2016) extend a critical feminist queer framing of ambiguous loss theory to explain family and relational attachment ruptures in order to promote healing for trans individuals undergoing gender transition. Theories that capture paradox, discontinuity, contradiction, and change are necessary for understanding contemporary family life, as feminist scholars who traverse the borderlands across gender, race, social class, sexuality, and the like explain (e.g., Acosta, 2018; Allen & Craven, 2020; Collins, 2019; Few-Demo et al., 2016; Hoskin, 2022; McGuire et al., 2016).
From universal sisterhood to intersectional ally through feminist consciousness raising
Now I turn again to the feminist practice of consciousness raising, to reflexively examine the dynamism in feminist theorizing and praxis by orienting this topic in my own lived experience. In the current social-historical moment, characterized by a divisive political landscape, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, the Me Too movement, the quest for transgender rights, accelerating climate change, and ongoing armed conflicts around the world, I have joined or initiated various social or political groups as a way to “do something” in a positive direction when so many problems that are out of my very limited control abound.
Activist work is typically born of necessity. For example, after my son died and I had engaged in several years of individual grief work with therapists, I was ready to reach out to others and build community among bereaved families. I researched the resources available in my town and the surrounding area and found that there were no organized groups for parents who had lost their children. I consulted with counseling professionals, I searched online, and I talked with other parents, one by one, in order to locate resources and seek out a community. I found that since there was no organized community, I needed to take action. I teamed up with another mother whose son had died from a drug overdose, and together we started a parent bereavement support group. For the first 2 years or so, we met in person, and often it was just two or three of us, in the basement of the Unitarian Fellowship building. Then, COVID-19 shut us down, and we were forced to hold our meetings on zoom. After we did a local podcast, our numbers swelled. Just as Chamberlain (2017) observed about organizing on the Internet, people found out about us online, and now we have a much larger group who meet and support one another virtually. Some of our members are from other states. Although we are from all walks of life and probably do not share the same political views, we do practice consciousness raising, where each person speaks their own truth, and we learn—collectively—from one another. We went from isolation in our bereavement to support and understanding of one another and the capacity for outreach beyond our comfort zones. It took a lot of pain and a lot of time, but we are providing a grassroots resource for those who are able to join us.
I have also joined several reading groups, admittedly a comfortable strategy for an academic. However, participating in group discussions of intersectional feminist and critical race theories, especially when multiple generations are present, has been vitally important for consciousness raising, learning about people’s lived experiences, and generating ideas and strategies on behalf of social change. Besides, being engaged in socially conscious groups provides opportunities to do what scholars do best: study, dialogue, and chart a course for taking action on social justice issues we care about personally and professionally.
I participate in several groups in which we read and discussed antiracist books, such as Kendi’s (2019) How to be an Antiracist, McGhee’s (2021) The Sum of Us, and Kendall’s (2020) Hood Feminism. I have joined groups with faculty and graduate students in my academic department (HDFS), members of the antiracism group at my spiritual community (Unitarians), and members of the community dialogue on race group in my town. Reading and discussing these books provides a common language to decenter from misperceptions, such as “I’m not a racist” in order to understand the differences among segregationist, assimilationist, and antiracist beliefs and practices (Kendi, 2019). In the Unitarian antiracist group, our discussion of McGhee’s historical and contemporary analysis of how governmental policies have harmed wealth accumulation for communities of color, has led us to a letter writing campaign about tax cuts, voting rights, and housing policies in our community.
I resonate with Kendi’s (2019) stories about how Black queer and feminist activists who were dealing with the intersecting issues affecting them needed to form their own space. His analysis reminded me about the critically important time in my college years when I was first part of a consciousness-raising (CR) group. As a junior and senior at the University of Connecticut (1974–1976), I participated in an intergenerational women’s CR group. I still have the button that says, “Together Women Together” as well as the mimeographed “Guidelines and Discussion Topics” handout from the UCONN Women’s Center, nearly 50 years later. That Together Women Together button embodies the power and the critique of second wave feminism. Here we were able to have the space so necessary to develop a critical consciousness about gender and women’s empowerment. The questions on the mimeographed sheets examined 30 topics: childhood, puberty, early relationships, sex roles, masculinity/femininity, virginity, education, self-image, love, mothers, fathers, siblings, marriage/being single, housework, motherhood, pregnancy and childbirth, abortion, children, sex, lesbianism, aging, independence/dependence, ambition, competition, work, power, money, anger/violence, and health. I note that although lesbian experience was a topic we discussed, race was not even on the list of the four single-spaced pages. The omission of race became one of the major schisms of second wave feminism as noted above—the critique of the common bond of a universal sisterhood, that ultimately led to the articulation of intersectionality as a definitive feminist truth (Combahee River Collective, 2000/1977; Crenshaw, 1991; hooks, 1984; Kendi, 2019; Lorde, 1984; Norman, 2006; Snitow, 2015; Wing, 2003).
Sharing deeply from my personal experiences with contested family relationships, abuses of power, and my struggle with heterosexual and lesbian experience (having no language yet to name my fluid sexuality), and listening to the older women in the group describe an illegal abortion or how it felt when their husbands and boyfriends had affairs with graduate students and younger colleagues, radicalized my consciousness. This experience of vulnerable activism, coupled with taking classes in parent and child relationships, marriage systems, and research and theory about families over the life course in the University of Connecticut’s School of Family Studies, helped to bring the personal and the intellectual together. Not yet aware of the rarity of having my consciousness raised in the privileged environment of a formal education, I still appreciated the value of having both the internal and the external spaces to begin to interrogate and understand the connection of the personal and the political.
Fifteen years later, in 1989, as my marriage to my first husband was ending, I moved to Virginia Tech. I co-founded our community’s lesbian moms group, where sexual minority women and their children could socialize with one another in a safe space and come into consciousness about what was facing us in the early 1990s in rural Virginia, a state where the Sharon Bottoms custody case was unfolding (a judge gave custody of Sharon’s son to her mother—a legal stranger—because Sharon was a lesbian). Newly partnered with a woman, we wrote a paper about lesbian motherhood that we gave at the Southeastern Women’s Studies Association (SWESA) meeting in 1991. We brought along Matt, who was 4 years old at the time. At the informal dialogue session, one of the women did not hide her anger that we had brought a male child, and said to us, “No dicks allowed.” Stunned, I had not expected condemnation from lesbians, believing that only heterosexual family and community members would be disdainful about my “deviant motherhood” (DiLapi, 1989). I naively walked into this moment with a belief about universal sisterhood and learned a sharp lesson about the proliferation of identities and politics among lesbians, some of whom were feminists, some of whom were mothers, but in no way was our identity universal. Feminism has always been “beside itself” (Elam & Wiegman, 1995), critiquing one another internally, just as we dealt with the external critiques from those who were not feminists (Brownmiller, 1999). The critique of feminist thinking and action is built in—often painful, but always leading feminists to urgently ask, so, what is next? (Snitow, 2015).
Having a private space to try out identities, to confront injustice, to raise our consciousness, and to contend with our double consciousness as insider and outsider is so necessary (Collins, 1990). It is a place to unpack the normative storyline that individuals on the margins have chaffed against. It is a place to examine and gain the skills to fight the external sources of power. As a feminist teacher, I knew how important it was to start off a class with reflexive, consciousness-raising questions, that allow students to tap into their own experience (Allen, 2001; Allen & Lloyd, 2011). Particularly when teaching the difficult topics facing families, including inequality, poverty, addiction, and violence, I asked students to stop in the middle of the lecture and write a personal response to the topic at hand. The feminist practice of creating a safe space and engaging in empathic listening by asking students if they wished to read aloud or tell their stories helped to form a bond with and among students, even in the context of unequal power relationships that exist in the classroom.
With listening at the core, feminist praxis genuinely values, invites, and protects vulnerability (Allen, 2000; Lewis, 2015). Of course, having boundaries is key to this effort—I would never ask students to share about issues that I had not already experienced and processed in some way. This pedagogical strategy involved taking responsibility for myself—to be the container and the wiser person in that moment. I have used this type of reflexive practice to stay grounded—in the classroom, in research, and in life. Connecting the intellectual in the personal is a key strategy of critical, feminist, intersectional, and queer pedagogy (Allen & Lavender-Stott, 2020; Few-Demo et al., 2016; hooks, 1994; Kafer, 2013). At the same time, one downside of creating this safe and private space to name, discuss, and critically analyze our relationship with the marginalization we experience is the tendency for individuals who are activists in social movements to feel the need to be above reproach. As a lesbian couple with male children, my former partner and I felt an urgency to be the “lesbian poster family” (Allen, 2007). This feeling of wanting to be both strong advocates for all lesbian mothers, and at the same time, beyond critique—the perfect alternative family whose picture graced refrigerators all across our community—was part of my double consciousness struggle back then.
In the 1990s, I was engaged in a campus-wide effort to recruit and retain Black faculty to my university, with the goal of transforming critical feminist intersectional theory into praxis. One of the corollary efforts was to inform myself, as a White woman, about the racism impacting my Black colleagues and how recruitment to primarily White campuses is not enough—internal and external work must be undertaken in order to change the culture and community. Again, I returned to the consciousness-raising group format, and Black and White women across my campus formed a CR group to discuss our feelings about and struggles with one another, across race, academic rank, age, and sexual orientation lines (Allen, 2000). We were practicing what Came and Griffith (2018) now describe as antiracist praxis, which includes (a) reflexive relational practice, (b) socio-political education, (c) structural power analysis, (d) systems change, and (e) monitoring and evaluation.
Now, 20 years later, as I am again in antiracist groups, and I have read contemporary antiracist texts in the context of the current historical moment of the Black Lives Matter movement (Cokley, 2022; Kendall, 2020; Kendi, 2019; Watson et al., 2020), I have gained a new, and less defensive perspective, as an ally. Today, for example, I am able to hear the critiques of White womanhood as advocating a universal sisterhood that unwittingly promotes White middle class heterosexual women’s experiences, and to more critically understand the legacy of my own privilege as a university professor who has benefitted from the neoliberal, individualist mindset of the academy (Allen & Lavender-Stott, 2020; Lewis, 2009; Sharp & Weaver, 2015).
The urgency of the current cultural moment has brought home the reality of being an antiracist ally, to step aside from my privilege in exchange for “listening, learning, and being led” (Kendi, 2019, p. 197). As Lewis (2015) concludes, “Listening is an integral part of praxis and must work in concert with our critical thinking and action” (p. 326). It is challenging to admit I have so much to learn about intersectional identities, ontologies, and oppressions that I have not experienced, especially since I champion reflexive understanding. Being an ally to others beyond my own experience requires that I grapple with the White supremacy that has granted me invisible privileges and given me unearned advantages (Crenshaw, 1991; McIntosh, 2020). As a cisgendered woman, I must return to a learner’s openness about transgender and nonbinary experiences, dismantling my assumptions about gender as a natural, embodied experience lest I contribute to the negativity, invalidation, and invisibility that nonbinary trans people experience (Faye, 2021; Goldberg et al., 2019; Hoskin & Blair, 2021; Worthen, 2021).
Just as listening, learning, and being led, as Kendi (2019) points out, are essential strategies for allyship, taking action steps to contribute to positive social change is equally necessary. In addition to the strategies I have described above that link feminist theory to praxis through consciousness raising and social activism, I have also been inspired to show up for political marches, register people to vote, and create a community foundation fund in my son’s name to support social, emotional, and mental health through inclusive social action.
Reflexive Questions for Critical Consciousness Raising and Action: Some Examples.
Feminist takeaway messages for emerging scholars and activists
Feminist theory advances the notion that we are accountable to the higher ideals of equality and justice for all. Feminist praxis translates that theory into action through the reflexive practices of continually self-educating, to challenge the very ideas and institutions we participate in and benefit from, reaching out beyond our comfort zone to experience community and activism on behalf of others. Feminist thinking and behavior have guided me for decades, even before I had the language to name my feelings of outsiderness and diminishment in male dominant, White-capitalist-patriarchal institutions. It has helped me gain a seat at the table and learn to be an ally because seating at the tables of power and visibility is still limited throughout the world (Collins, 2019; Ferguson, 2017; Mahler et al., 2015; Srinivasan, 2021). Feminist thinking and practice provide the language of critical thinking, consciousness raising, and allyship so that we can listen to both the head and the heart. Here are some ways readers may also connect feminist theory and action in their personal, professional, and political lives.
Personal
As a framework that arises from lived experience, feminist theory helps us to understand the nuances of ways in which life is difficult and challenging—more so for some of us than others—and at the same time, to embrace the possibilities for growth, change, and justice that are before us when we live from an authentic space. As Burke and Brown (2021) reveal, in their anthology of Black writers, actors, and activists sharing their stories of facing and overcoming race-related shame and vulnerability, we need to listen to the truth of our own lives and start from there.
From a very personal and practical standpoint, no one else can walk this walk for us; we each must find our own pathways to understanding and healing. For example, what has helped me to continue on with a resilient spirit are the loving relationships I have formed with self, family, friends, colleagues, therapists, social change agents, among many others, both living and dead. Autoethnographical writing, from a deeply reflexive space, has also helped me to grapple with and transform some of the trauma I have experienced. Writing personal narratives, as radical feminist Vivian Gornick (2001) said, allows us to continually reinvent our life and become “a truth speaker to interpret it” (p. 26). A takeaway message, then, for family and close relationship scholars who are open to being informed by feminist theory, method, and praxis is to not neglect the essential work of taking on your own life and healing journey. We are each responsible for learning to center ourselves, so that we can come to know what messages from the wider world—that are constantly bombarding us—we wish to prioritize. As poet Yrsa Daley-Ward (2021) encourages, “You have to reduce the noise in order to hear yourself” (p. 28).
Professional
As scholars, teachers, and activists, the feminist takeaway message for our professional lives is to engage in work that we truly value because it makes a positive difference in the lives of the people we study, teach, serve, and with whom we interact. Again, the research topics that feminist scholars are often drawn to have meaning in an embodied way. For example, I would not have been curious about the invisible topic of lifelong single White working class women for my dissertation work if I had not been intrigued by the life of my great-aunt Katherine McQuade (Allen, 1994). Born in 1905, Aunt Katherine was single and childfree, but she cared for both older and younger generations throughout her life, thereby maintaining her extended family in ways that the family development theories I had studied, which emphasized only two generations of parents and children, had ignored. Aunt Katherine was the inspiration for my research into how older single women—deemed invisible in the family literature—performed essential and unheralded emotional and physical labor in keeping their families together.
Doing the difficult work on challenging topics of great importance to feminists is life sustaining. In a contemporary example, feminist family scholars Sharp et al. (2017) brought together many feminist-informed research and activist projects regarding the persistence of sexual violence in college settings, published in a special issue of the journal, Family Relations. These studies demonstrate how feminist scholars go beyond merely studying a difficult topic such as sexual assault, by generating actions that promote social change. Hand-in-hand with the feminist naming of individual and institutional sexual violence (theory) are the translational efforts of students and scholars turning that theory into action for social change (praxis). One of the many exemplary examples of turning theory into action is the development of an interdisciplinary film series to create a productive response to sexual violence on campus (Purcell et al., 2017); another is the critical assessment of the literature on false reports in which Weiser (2017) provides educational activities and policy changes to confront the myths around the nature of rape and false reports. These scholars are doing self-sustaining work that matters in our everyday lives. What is more, feminist scholars are willing to name the private commitments that guide our work, which is not only life sustaining but also makes for more valid and rigorous science (Allen, 2000).
Political
Feminist thinking and action is political—it is about taking a stand on the side of social justice, and expressing the words and actions that stand up for the underdog. Feminist political work builds community and thus is the antithesis of the contemporary impulse toward “cancel culture,” in which contempt and shunning are used to silence those individuals we disagree with or oppose, whether mildly or vehemently. Perhaps the technological turn to social media merely exacerbates the operation of cancel culture, and for these reasons, feminists insist on continuing to build community across our differences. Feminist action rejects the “zero sum game” (i.e., if you win, then I’m going to lose), of thinking that is racist, sexist, heteronormative, ableist, and the like. In her compelling analysis of how racism (and other forms of oppression) hurts everyone, Heather McGhee (2021) argues for the “solidarity dividend,” that dismantles the zero sum game of “you win/I lose,” toward focusing on the public good, and acknowledging how “we truly do need each other” (p. 271). Being responsible for self and other through solidarity and community are critical, intersectional, antiracist feminist goals that are needed to transform society. This responsibility—to care about what happens to others—is empowering. It starts in self-responsibility, bringing us full circle to taking on the burdens, ambiguities, and possibilities of our own lives. As Isabel Wilkerson (2020) concludes in her groundbreaking book, Caste, claiming our responsibility for self is necessary for today and part of our legacy for the future: [W]e are responsible for what good or ill we do to people alive with us today. We are, each of us, responsible for every decision we make that hurts or harms another human being….We are responsible for our own ignorance, or with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom. We are responsible for ourselves and our own deeds or misdeeds in our time and in our own space and will be judged accordingly by succeeding generations. (p. 387–388)
Conclusion
Now, in the current cultural, historical, and political moment, in the midst of renewed engagement in social justice movements, a worldwide health pandemic, and contentious political divides, I have decentered from my privileged position as a university professor. Although retirement is a predictable life course transition, it is also a scary place—to be a scholar without an academic position, to be a teacher without a classroom. At the same time, as I critically analyze my circumstances, I am sitting in the comfort of my own home, with the economic privilege that a lifetime of work in a wealthy country allows me to not have to leave my home to earn a paycheck. Feminist reflexive analysis provides the mechanism to grapple with the contradictions and uncertainties of both privilege and marginalization. Although in retirement, I have lost some advantages that have accrued over a lifetime of educational, economic, and race privilege, I have also gained a new sense of liberation and possibility.
My feminist goals are to listen, to be in relationship with diverse others, and to be accountable for my actions and to rectify my inactions. Now I ask, what does it mean to be an old, queer, White, middle class woman who wants to live on the side of social justice? I retired from full time employment so that I would have the emotional space and time to pursue underdeveloped interests and to use my accumulated wisdom and vulnerabilities for social change. I have time now to walk every day and face with compassion the grief of losing my beloved child to suicide in 2011. I also have time for intensive community service, which includes serving on the board for a retirement center, teaching and taking classes at the lifelong learning center, facilitating two support groups, providing care for aging family members, and just being available to offer compassion and support to the people in my life who ask for my attention. Feminism helps to process all that has occurred and provides a way of seeing the world where I do not have to know all the answers.
Feminism reminds us that life is uncertain and contradictory—rarely are things what they seem to be on the surface. Too often, the wrong people and groups have the power, but feminism provides inspiration and direction for the less powerful to pick up the feminist mantle and activate the power to turn it around. This requires us to step outside our own identity groups—to get to know, befriend, and to work with, for and beside—those who do not share our gender, race, sexuality, nationality, politics, religion, age, and the like. And for those of us who know the heady experience of addressing audiences (of students, conference attendees, readers, etc.), it means to stop talking and listen! Eventually, it is time to get out of the book group and into the streets. Feminism reminds us not to just slide back into the comfort of the status quo but to continually name all of our unearned privileges and to work on behalf of others. With these possibilities in mind, I predict an exciting future for continuing to bring the influence of feminist theory, method, and praxis into family and close relationship research.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
My deepest gratitude goes to Editor Melissa Curran, the anonymous reviewer, and the generous insights of Caroline Sanner, Angela Henderson, Brandy McCann, and Candy Beers.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Open research statement
As part of IARR’s encouragement of open research practices, the author has provided the following information. This research was not pre-registered. The material used in this research can be obtained via email:
