Dialectical Feminism: An Unburial Theory

I asked myself when I became a feminist, and realized I didn’t know the answer. I like to say that it started around my tweens, before leaving elementary school. But I certainly didn’t know feminist theory, had never read a book about feminism. I did have impressions from my own life — impressions that included a constant disquiet.

I think what I’m talking about is intuition. I could feel something, was drawn to something, even if I couldn’t explain it. But when I began learning feminist theory, it actually made my disquiet worse, not better! That was because it showed me just how much complexity there is to the questions that feminists are asking, questions I myself was asking before I knew why.

I bet a lot of people feel this way. We know feminism has something to do with being pro-woman, and as a young girl I was almost desperate for something that felt pro-woman, pro-girl, because much of my disquiet was about how anti-girl the world seemed to be. Anti-girl in the most personal way, fixated on seeking and destroying the girlness in me. My disquiet reflected a conflict for survival in my young mind, but that urgency was exactly what made it overwhelming. This was complicated by the controversial position that trans girls and women like me seem to occupy in the feminist milieu. One might even expect me to be scared away, disavowing feminism forever.

But thankfully, my response to an overwhelming topic is often not to stop thinking about it, but to become ruthlessly obsessed with it. Which is what brings me to this moment, in which I share the fruits of my obsession with you!

This essay is the first of a series in which I aim to express my contribution to the feminist project, a theory I name dialectical feminism. With it, I hope to offer a sense of clarity and reassurance to those who, like me, have often found feminism overwhelming.

To do that, we should start here: what exactly is feminism?

What Makes Feminism Feminism?

This may seem like an easy question to answer, but those deeply familiar with feminism — and let’s be real, any philosophy — understand the importance of starting here. Many different people, with many different points of view, claim the name of feminist, and a common critique between those people is that one or more of their opponents really aren’t feminists at all.

So what makes a feminist feminist?

Feminism is among many things a mode of philosophy. This doesn’t always mean crunchy theory, but it can, and theory shouldn’t be discarded as merely the interest of academics. But no matter how crunchy feminism has two defining characteristics.

Philosophical Perspective of Femaleness

The first characteristic is that a feminist philosophy pursues a female perspective. That perspective could be on history, society, gender itself, or any combination.

This is probably a good place to define what I mean by female. Some people use “male” and “female” distinctly from words like “man” and “woman” in order to describe people with a certain reproductive biology. I don’t. I assert female to be an adjectival way to speak about women and girls. The perspective of women and girls is, by definition, a female perspective. This is not a claim that those women or girls have any specific biology. I argue that the reason we call female biology that — female — is because it belongs to women and girls. In other words, femaleness as a concept doesn’t precede the concept of women and girls, but depends on it.

Interest in the Conditions of Female Life

A feminist philosophy is one concerned with the conditions of female life, and in what causes those conditions.

The motivation for the first characteristic flows from the second. We care about this because we observe when society records human perspectives, there’s an overwhelming bias toward the male. History, art, science, religion, philosophy — these disciplines across the ages already have a huge showing for male perspective, one that massively overwhelms the female one. Overwhelm it so much that the male perspective is usually treated as the only human perspective there is.

Here we have one of our first feminist observations, the context for why we’re even making feminist observations to start with — the general character of most human societies is male dominance. This dominance is both cultural and political, which means it’s difficult for women to counterbalance that dominance. A result of this dominance is that the female perspective on any given culture, practice, or event in history, in any given part of the world, is often tricky or impossible to retrieve for modern review.

I call this phenomenon burial of the woman. We can look at feminism’s core interest, then, as unburial. Unburial of female perspectives, female lives, female interests, female bodies. From the silence, from the ground, from the conditions of male dominance. In order to go about this unburial, feminists must account for the conditions that cause that burial and what we can do to counteract them.

This effort cements feminism as an oppression theory — a theory that understands society in terms of a power difference, one which subordinates some section of the species to the interests of another. This naturally leads to two big questions: what causes that subordination, and how do we change it?

Types of Feminism

The game of philosophy is to ask a question once and then pay close attention to the resulting parade of answers. Many of those answers will be in conflict with each other, and some may even be discarded, but they’ll all reveal something about the question.

This section describes styles of feminist thought and the nature of their answers. This won’t be at all comprehensive, but should give a feel for how feminist inquiry operates. I encourage readers to pursue further reading about each type of feminism, and to understand that this is not an exhaustive list.

A crucial difference between theories is emphasis. They aren’t just making different claims about what is true, but different claims about what parts of those truths matter. Even a correct conclusion may not be as useful to our goals as we’d like.

Liberal Feminism (AKA Libfem)

You may know liberal feminism as the most “normal” kind of feminism, and it’s certainly the most mainstream. Liberal feminism’s emphasis is on women as individuals who participate in the realms of modern life. It observes that women are often disadvantaged next to men in how freely we can carry out that participation — such as in the workforce, the marketplace, or in public office.

Liberal feminism focuses on women as being equally human to men, and therefore deserving of equal opportunities. Liberal feminism’s engagement with the conditions of female life tends to focus on the freedom to obtain those opportunities.

A common criticism of libfem is that its scale is very individual, and that this is an insufficient scale for the feminist pursuit: to understand the conditions of female life and to generate a meaningful female perspective.

While I share this criticism, I nevertheless find a spark of value in liberal feminism. It reminds us that at some point, feminism must make what seems like a painfully obvious assertion — women are people. Not property, not sexual playthings, not baby-making machines. People.

As obvious as this should be, it sadly remains an assertion that women must continue to make.

Radical Feminism (AKA Radfem)

Ah, the most controversial style of feminism. This is the style most likely to garner the name “feminazi.” Radical feminism represents a more theoretically rigorous approach than liberal feminism, and is arguably responsible for much of formal feminist philosophy. Radical feminism’s emphasis is society as a structure. Radical feminists have classically argued that the liberal feminist framework makes sexism — the kind of oppression that relates to sex and gender — seem accidental, a natural problem of the human condition that remains unsolved in the same way a tough math equation might. Radfems argue that instead we should see male dominance as an intentional power system that cultivates the burial of women quite deliberately.

Radical feminism has faced an array of criticisms, but perhaps the most recognizable is that of being anti-male. Radical feminism describes men as collectively the oppressors of women, perfuming its expressions with a certain hostility toward men, a hostility often considered cruel or excessive. It doesn’t take much to see that this criticism of radical feminism demonstrates the validity of the very point radical feminists are making. Society limits the social acceptability of female perspectives, such that men fearing and hating women is vastly more acceptable than women fearing and hating men in return, despite male hostility toward women being much more likely to endanger women’s lives.

One of the vital insights from radical feminism is the observation that sexism runs so deep in most human societies that we may not even know when we’re seeing it, let alone reinforcing it. Radical feminists challenge society as being so predicated on male dominance that it needs changed from the ground up.

Marxist Feminism (AKA socialist feminism)

While less widely known than radical feminism, socialist and radical feminisms entail some spicy overlap, including being highly situated around theory and analysis. I’m not even going to start teasing apart “Marxist” and “socialist” here; that could fill a raft of essays. Suffice to say that socialism includes an oppression theory based around class, wealth, and labor exploitation.

Marxist feminists argue that feminist and socialist questions touch at a key point — labor. Women are in part subordinated as sources of work. In other words, at least one cause of the conditions of female life is the fact that we live in a society that exploits people for their work, work that is typically divided by gender.

One of the most powerful insights I associate with Marxists feminism is the distinction between reproductive and productive labor. Productive labor is that which generates direct value for capitalists — the money your bosses make because of your work. Reproductive labor, however, includes all the work we have to do in order to keep going as a human society, whether someone’s making money off it or not, like cleaning the house, raising the kids, and making dinner. Reproductive labor is disjointed from the wage system, meaning people don’t get paid for doing it, unless it’s someone else’s reproductive labor (e.g. hired maids). Reproductive labor is relegated first and foremost to women, which places women in a distinctly double-exploited position. This double-exploitation structures the daily life of the working class, which means that sexism is both a matter of labor and a supporting condition of capitalism.

Black Feminism

This is an even bigger topic than the above types, so please understand my treatment of it here is necessarily very light. Black feminism is one of several instances of convergence between feminism and anti-racism, the family of oppression theory that concerns race and racism. Black feminism has had particular influence within feminist work and literature, including as a challenge to feminism’s core questions: what does it mean to take a female perspective if populations of women have different relationships to other power systems, like white supremacy?

Two important Black feminist concepts may be recognized by a lot of readers: Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, and Moya Bailey’s concept of misogynoir. These concepts employ a shared core insight — that a person has a compound social identity. “Black person” and “woman” are both positions in society, but the two relate to and even complicate each other, rather than being isolated to totally separate contexts. Black women share certain conditions with other women, and also share conditions with other Black people, but that does not mean that all women and all Black people live within the same conditions as Black women.

Another insight I’ve often valued from Black feminist thought is the observation that because identity is compound, a person can have compound social interests. Black women have incentives to challenge male dominance, but also have incentives toward kinship with Black men not as merely part of their families and communities but as fellow Black people oppressed by white supremacy. These incentives can force Black women to walk an especially difficult tightrope, a tightrope that liberation movements like feminism have usually not sufficiently acknowledged.

Transfeminism

This is the type of feminism I’m the most well known for. I also consider it to be the style of feminism that is currently the least developed and disseminated — or at least, pretty close to the top of that list. As such, it’s difficult to characterize transfeminism except in the broadest strokes. It represents a convergence of feminism with transgender culture and the transgender liberation movement. This convergence demands attention particularly because it appears to throw the very concept of womanhood into the air.

That demand usually means a special focus on trans women, who’ve endured a distinct history as figures of controversy, hostility, and exploitation within feminism and other liberation movements. A bedrock component of transfeminism is Julia Serano’s concept of transmisogyny, a model for assessing the conditions of trans female life.

I consider transfeminism and dialectical feminism to be necessary to each other. In many ways, the questions of transfeminism are what led me to develop my model of dialectical feminism.

Cultural Feminism

This one’s funny to talk about, because it’s an extremely common style of feminism, but it’s not very likely to be known by this name. The term “cultural feminism” was first used critically by Brooke Williams in 1975 to describe a change in the radical feminist movement. It’s often intended as a pejorative, but one way or another, it helps name a familiar pattern of thought.

The chief character of cultural feminism is in perceiving women and men as fundamentally different. This difference may be understood as biological, social, or even spiritual, but ultimately as something we can’t or shouldn’t get rid of. Cultural feminism treats the male-female distinction as a necessary part of nature, such that women and men each bring something unique to the human species. The question of male dominance is then one of balance — that men are naturally made to compete and fight, and that this being valued over the gentler nature of women is what produces sexism.

Cultural feminists believe in a distinct female culture and female role in the species that should be protected from male invasion. While cultural feminists want to improve the standing of these female positions, they avoid or reject the idea of no longer organizing human society around gender.

I reject cultural feminism, but like with liberal feminism, I feel it represents something about feminist questions we ought to remember — the association of certain characteristics with women may be a product of male dominance, but that doesn’t mean those characteristics are bad things. Things associated with women are still aspects of the human species, and can still be good and valuable for their own sake. Though women should be free to reclaim the aspects of their humanity usually associated with men, like assertiveness and strength, those aren’t the only aspects of humanity we should value.

How is Dialectical Feminism (Diafem) Distinct?

You probably get the picture by now — I didn’t lay out those types of feminism so I could say that they’re all doing it wrong and that I’m about to show you how to do it right. That’s my point; each approach is defined by its emphasis, and uses that emphasis to contribute to the pursuit of feminist interests. While those contributions vary in value, they all say something useful about the kind of world in which feminism is a meaningful project — the world we live in.

Dialectical Processism

The underlying metaphysic I bring to my take on feminism. This philosophy understands reality in terms of events, or processes. Processes definitionally contain steps, phases, ups and downs, back and forth. Processes take place over a period of time, and never in a void.

Because of this, process — reality — requires the lens of dialectics, defined here as the dialogue-like nature of phenomena. An event doesn’t simply occur, it occurs in a field of other events, which “reply” to that event. The result is a new, more complex event — one integrating the events that led to it — which then goes on to make its own replies. This means that processes will in a sense repeat, but that this repetition also involves evolution. Phenomena dance with each other, and that dance is the flow from which all future phenomena arise

Feminism wants to know who women are, what causes the conditions of female life, and if we’re not happy with those conditions, how we should go about changing them. Dialectical feminism — or diafem, because I like the cute little nicknames — is my application of dialectical processism to those questions.

The Gender Dialectic

To understand who women are and our conditions of life, we must understand how it comes to be that we even have a world in which some people are women and some people are not. Some feminists describe gender as a personal identity, and some describe it as a system of power. Both descriptions are true, but we must grasp the relationship between those truths.

I assert that we can understand gender as an ongoing process in human society. This process has distinct but related layers, each creating points of change and experience.

Normative gender — the system. This layer is gender as a social system, meant to organize the human world. That system distinguishes between two categories of humans, then uses social and physical markers to make it as apparent as possible which category someone is in. These categories are sexual in nature, meaning they entail a species-level strategy for controlling sexual reproduction. The category one is sorted into is based on one’s apparent reproductive biology. In other words, the categories link reproductive biology to a place in a social order.

This may be a shocking assertion to read from a transfeminist. Where do trans people fit into this schema, if it’s based in reproductive biology? Read on.

Emergent gender — the deviation. So we have a social system that says “you have this body, so you go here in the social order.” But what if you don’t agree? What if you’re unable to fit in the assigned place? What if your body doesn’t even work in the way the system says it should?

Across cultures and ages, we find that some version of that situation is true for an awful lot of people. This reveals that the order of normative gender is not entirely natural, not simply an expression of how people already are. Instead, we should see normative gender as a collective effort to standardize human sexual behavior. A standardization most of us will deviate from to some extent.

But if deviation is natural, why does the normative gender system persist?

Gender regulation — the response. Deviation from gender norms is a fairly common experience, but so is something else — punishment for that deviation. This exposes the fundamental function of the gender system, which is to condition human behavior into a form of regularity. Think of this as like the way your body regulates your temperature when you’re hot or cold; it has an implicit intelligence, a way of adapting to maintain a baseline.

The gender system works like this, too. Deviation from the normative gender system results in a punishment, a response that makes it harder for that deviation to continue. I call this gender regulation. The strength and type of punishment will vary, and depending on your cultural environment, some deviations may be more allowed than others. But you can’t deviate very much for free. There always ends up being a cost.

Adaptation — the response to the response. By the time we’re young children, most of us have probably experienced multiple repetitions of the above gender regulation cycle. This sorting and regulation comes from many parts of our social environment — family, religion, the law, surrounding culture, our peers. The effect of this process is to condition us. Over time, we begin to adapt to the regulation. We learn which deviations will be punished and which punishments are too severe to risk. Some of us learn that these punishments can escalate to outright violence, abandonment, or death.

The gender system persists by continually reasserting itself against deviations, ever pressuring the subject to adapt to it. Looking at the gender system this way helps us understand how deeply controlling it is, that its purpose is to override natural variations among people as much as possible, narrowing that variation into an acceptable spectrum.

I’m speaking in an abstract way here for the sake of simplicity — we all know it’s not a vague “system” that does the punishing, but real people around us — but the point is to see gender as a vast ongoing process. The process entails many human beings adapting to the contours of the normative gender system, adapting not only to accepting it but to reproducing it, conditioning others to accept it. We make bargains, accept limits, even come to love our places in that order. So the process continues, incorporating innumerable moments of violence and pain, of adaptation and acceptance. It repeats the cycle of response into response, with each cycle never quite the same as the one before it.

But this process never eliminates deviation for once and all, especially because it has to condition each new generation of humans. Some people never adapt in the way the process pressures them to, and if those people survive, they have a chance to share their story with others like them. This causes a counter-process, in the form of a legacy of people who continue to deviate and whose place in society may have dramatically shifted because of this. The gender system must then have a space for the very thing it’s trying to prevent from existing — people who cannot fit into the concepts of male and female as they’re presented, and who cannot be made to fit no matter how severely they are punished.

The Spiral Principle

The process I describe above is a spiral, generating progressive outcomes even as it appears to be moving back and forth. This characteristic is not unique to gender. It infuses all phenomena in the world. To every response is a response to the response.

A spiral incorporates elements of both a circle and a line without really being either. Though the process moves in a certain direction over time, it has sides to it, steps and rotations, and those sides may at times even be internally opposed. Interestingly, that internal opposition is often necessary for the process to continue.

This may seem at first like an amusing but ultimately prosaic observation. We don’t have to look far, though, for examples of how it can practically explain events in our lives.

One such example is the phenomenon of male-dominated cultures often having a narrative of female greatness. Conservative Christian communities may praise motherhood as the jewel of womankind, a beauty humanity should exalt, including in religious practices like the veneration of Saint Mary. Some male-dominated cultures even have long traditions of goddess worship entangled with their otherwise highly patriarchal value systems.

This might seem like male dominance shooting itself in the foot — if women are meant to be subordinate to men, why exalt anything about us? Why even go so far as to say that something about womanhood can be holy?

These stories sweeten the pot, giving women a sense of value to further motivate us to adapt to the gender system and its male dominance. It’s a bargain that contains an element of contradiction, but ultimately serves the male-dominated gender process.

Feminism produces principally similar examples. In my above summary of types of feminism, we can see radical feminism and cultural feminism as depicting a tension within feminist thought. Both are interested in a female perspective, and in changing the conditions of life for women. But radical feminists want gender as a social order to fade away, so that the human world is no longer so divided into the male and female. This has often been expressed in radical feminist lexicon as the project of gender abolition, which aims to dissolve the conditions that keep the gender system going.

Cultural feminism takes an almost opposite view, which is that the division between male and female is natural and worthy of celebration. They identify the problem with women’s lives as instead coming from the male side of the question being valued more than the female one. They want the gender division to continue, just in a more balanced way.

How can the same movement lead to such sharply opposed takes on their core questions? What should feminists learn from this happening?

In both examples, we can see that each one has a disagreement that occurs at one layer, but only because there’s also an agreement on another layer. I call these layers levels of abstraction. The gender dialectic also looks different depending on what level of abstraction we see it from. We can see the process as a whole, as steps, or as part of other processes. Each different way of looking at it may yield a different picture, and these pictures don’t always make sense together. Some of those pictures may even look entirely contradictory.

I call this characteristic the spiral principle, which can be simplified like this: States that are in opposition at one level of abstraction may be in harmony at another level of abstraction; internal tension may be conducive to a process’s continuation.

Pretty fun, right? But how do we use this principle?

The Unburial of Trans Women

As I said in the intro, trans women tend to be . . . controversial. This seems to be true everywhere you look. From the left to the right, from religious institutions to queer communities, and certainly within feminist discourse.

This controversy matters to me as a trans woman, because I have to live in it. For me, it’s a condition of female life, one that greatly informs my female perspective. But it also matters to me as a feminist writer. To me, trans women represent an absolute philosophical gold mine. Not only do trans women illustrate every principle of dialectical processism I named above, we illustrate that we need those principles to understand the world we live in.

In other words, understanding the conditions of trans female life and our perspectives is necessary for the long-term success of feminism. Note that when I name my feminism, I don’t call it dialectical transfeminism. This is because there is no other kind of dialectical feminism.

Most people reading this essay will have heard of the anti-trans “gender critical” movement, one also described with the acronym TERF. TERF means “trans (woman) exclusionary radical feminist.” It was originally used to mark a distinction within radical feminist thought — centered on the perennial question “what do we do about trans women?“ — but is often used today as a shorthand for a variety of perspectives that appeal to feminism to argue against the interests of trans women, and usually against trans-positive politics in general. While radical feminism tends to get most of the blame for this, I and many others argue that the most common style of TERF belief is better understood as an expression of cultural feminism. This belief tends to frame trans women as a kind of massive male invasion of the female, a male essence forcing a way across the line between the sexes, threatening to make the burial of women even worse than before.

Not all feminists agree with this, but even feminists who try to be supportive of trans women can have a hard time knowing how to answer the question that TERFs seem to raise. Feminists observe that people are ordered into sex categories based on our reproductive biology, and that this order underlies the conditions of female life. But transness necessarily requires the idea that reproductive biology is not what determines someone’s gender. For good or ill, transness represents a paradox for feminists, one that demands solving.

Trans women tend to become the avatars of this paradox, because the accepted sex categories define us as a type of male — born male and raised male, if nothing else. Regarding trans women as an authentic female perspective demands a radical examination of womanhood itself.

Opposition to doing this often relies on an argument I here call sex denialism. This argument goes that the construction of the sex system through social organization — defining this body as male and that body as female — is a primary condition of male dominance, which feminists must work to change. In this view, redefining womanhood to no longer depend on this relation to the sex system is inherently anti-feminist.

I present two counter-arguments, each exhibiting the spiral principle. The first is the counter-process argument. Transness represents not a denial of the sex system but a counter-process to it. The contradiction between transness and feminism only exists on one level of abstraction, and it’s the type of contradiction that occurs naturally within complex processes. Though trans-positivity may at first appear to obviate the sex distinction, that sex distinction is as important to the conditions of trans life as it is to the conditions of female life. This means that female perspectives and trans perspectives, rather than being at odds, possess a natural harmony at higher levels of abstraction. This harmony is even richer for trans women, because we represent female and trans perspectives synthesized within a single individual, within a single population. This synthesis transcends mere unification, vibrantly greater than the sum of its parts.

The second counter-argument is the female reclamation argument. Remember that a core feminist project is the “unburial” of femaleness from the conditions of male dominance. Implicit to this unburial is the reclamation of femaleness from its subordination to the gender system. Though we wish to topple the gender system that gives womanhood context, we nevertheless are women, call ourselves women, and reclaim ourselves as women. Male-dominant society classically defines femaleness by reproductive biology, and it does so through the construction of the sex system. In order to understand that system, we must be aware of this definition. However, we need not agree with it. We must understand our enemy, but that doesn’t mean we must think as the enemy does. If trans women require us to redefine womanhood beyond the terms of the sex system, this is cause for celebration, not fear. Redefining — reclaiming — womanhood on our own terms is already exactly what feminism relies on for its success.

I assert that trans womanhood must be understood in two ways. The first way is as an emergent form of femaleness. This is true aesthetically, culturally, spiritually, but also politically — evidence abounds that trans women not only suffer sexism like other women, but that sexism against trans women can be especially harsh. The second way trans womanhood needs to be understood is as a counter-process to the construction of manhood. Our femaleness represents a deviation from the systematic pressure to be male. Trans women thereby contend with a uniquely cruel form of female burial — a burial within the concept of maleness itself. We are buried so profoundly that our very femaleness is buried. Degraded, exploited, then wiped from history. The plight of trans women represents the most total destruction of women by men, women reimagined as indistinguishable from the men who bury us. In this way, trans women are not only natural subjects of the feminist spirit, but incarnations of it. Trans women live our self-unburial every day, despite forces working to re-bury us in real time. In doing so, we embody the hope of all women — that against the odds, we can reclaim ourselves.

Follow the Spiral

We must remember that the unburial is not finished. The more deeply we seek answers, the more we learn about the questions. This deeper discovery — this uncovering — is equally a deeper discovery of ourselves as the askers of the questions, of why the questions matter to us.

Part of the message of dialectical feminism is that we must expect the uncovering process itself to be a spiral. It will contain twists and turns which at times may feel like mistakes or wrong answers. But if life, obsession, and intuition have taught me anything, it’s that the moment your question seems hardest to answer often comes right before the answer itself.

Please stay tuned for future essays from me about dialectical feminism, liberation, writing, and philosophy. If you’d like more content like this from me, a great way to encourage that is to support me through donations. You can donate to my crowdfund on Kofi and even sign up for monthly contributions. You can also recommend this essay to others, share it on social media, or talk about it with your friends. Every bit of support counts and makes it a lot more possible for me to keep writing. Thank you for reading.