Equality

Another area of sharp contention is whether gender can be understood best as the subordination of women by men. What then defines women is their shared inequality. While some writers such as Catharine A. MacKinnon and Susan Moller Okin claim that gender subordination is universal (all women are oppressed by male domination), others argue for a more differentiated view. First, the question remains, what is the valid standard or norm serving as the unit of measurement? Is it the social, political, economic, and cultural positions of the most privileged men in the world? In relation to this group, many men, due to their race, ethnicity, geographic location, sexuality, or other social relations, are extremely disadvantaged. Are women to be situated in relation to men who share their other social locations? In this case, a poor woman might in many dimensions be equal to her male peer, yet highly disadvantaged in relation to other women.

Second, the binary approach to gender cannot do justice to the multiple ways it is enacted. Binary conceptions occlude the particular, complex qualities of women's and men's locations. The doing of gender is shaped by many factors. Gender is always inflected by other social relations, just as those relations are inflected by gender. Global patterns of the distribution of resources have an enormous impact on women's (and men's) lives, and not all these patterns are solely a function of male dominance. Relative to some marked female, others constituted differently enjoy many privileges. The privilege of some women, due to constituting constellations of race, sexuality, class, or location, and so forth, often rests on the continuing disadvantage of others. For example, the sustained economic deterioration of some areas leads to the immigration of poor women into more prosperous countries. The low-wage labor of these women enables other women to purchase domestic services and compete more effectively for access to higher-paid professions. Conversely, the shared oppressions of many women and men along race, location, ethnic, class, or other lines produces forms of solidarity and common interest among some women and men. In the United States, for example, the intersections of race and gender have produced complex patterns of deep loyalty among many women and men of color as well as oppression of these women both by men of color and by white men and women. Similarly, the horrific forms of colonialist and racist domination of men by other men and some women's complicity in it cannot be ignored. Thus struggles for meaningful transformations of women's condition and gender relations must take local and diverse forms. Unable any longer to speak in the name of a singular subject or to generate a consensus on a universalizable equivalent, discourses of equality may be poorly suited to address such complexities.