Learning from feminism

Feminism refers to a body of approaches that assert that women should be valued, and their needs and interests addressed, on an equal basis to men – and that this is not yet the case. ¹ This includes the proposition that a woman can hold a political relationship with a State that is not mediated by a man. Some feminist approaches focus more directly on social aspects of female experience, others on person-to-person implications, but the interest here is particularly in the institutional relationships between individuals and States, with a focus on what this means in a liberal democratic context. Arising in response to sexism in a related way to that in which noncitizenism arises in response to citizenism or statusism, feminism is examined in this chapter as a methodological tool from which noncitizenism can learn. That is, this chapter analyses feminist critiques of liberalism, and in turn critiques of those critiques, in order to develop methodological insights for the development of noncitizenism.