weird liberal feminists: see, women are oppressed for being feminine! for being pretty and wearing dresses and makeup and long hair and for being sugar and spice and everything nice which is BETTER than being a gross unfeminine person!! ugly mannish women are just as bad as men and pretty men are just as oppressed as women!!! being BEAUTIFUL is the source of oppression really!! what’s a gender role?
weird radical feminists: no, no, women are oppressed because biology! for having ovaries and a vagina! some body parts predispose you to oppress others and others predispose you to be a victim! gender is REAL and IMMUTABLE and BIOLOGICAL and INEVITABLE. but we can abolish it. By enforcing a rigid binary based on sex characteristics–
actually fucking useful feminism: okay but hey, what if we looked at gender like we do every single other form of exploitation?
What if ‘womanhood’ is a somewhat generally-defined social class, culturally constructed specifically to be exploited for certain types of labour for the benefit of an (also-socially-constructed) oppressor class? You know, like the fact that employees only exist as a group because capitalists exploit them for their labour?
What if gender is imposed and enacted and enforced and not indicative of anything innate or inborn? What if oppression doesn’t arise from bodies? What if instead it is enacted on and through women’s bodies and our bodies (especially trans women’s bodies!) are fetishized, held to impossible and conflicting standards, treated as aberrant regardless of which standards they do or do not meet, and used to justify our oppression — like other time-honoured forms of oppression, like racism or ableism?
oh wow it’s like when we take a materialist rather than an essentialist view of gender we can actually come up with useful analysis that’s actually consistent with literally everything we know about the way gender has been constructed differently in different times and places!