Gender content is not exhausted by the powerlessness that shaped it.

Evidence

We can agree that feminine identity, like colonised identity, is not an independent nature only accidentally and inessentially subordinated, but has been shaped in and through colonisation (Memmi 1965; Freire 1972; hooks 1989). Nevertheless, powerlessness does not exhaust its content, and therefore difference does not coincide with dominance. As feminists women are not passive recipients of the identity woman, but are actively engaged in shaping it and in positioning themselves critically in relation to its traditional meanings, often without total abandonment (Alcoff 1988). MacKinnon’s account leaves out the content of gender, those actual characteristics, activities and life-areas which have been devalued and assigned to the background along with the women they have been taken to characterise, and the value they might have in another context. Traditional femininity was devalued and backgrounded but was also the expression of a range of tasks, values and interests, concerns, areas of life and social orientations of real value and importance; they cannot just be dismissed, because of this denial, as powerlessness. — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 258

Categorization

• XREF: Rejoins ch2’s ecofeminist revaluation thread: rejecting devaluation of women’s assigned tasks (and nature-linked knowledges) while not treating them as intrinsically oppressive. — connects to: Reworking gender needs both transcendence and affirmation of identity. — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 255; Social identities empower even when shaped by oppressive power relations. — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 251; Studying gender does not require or imply feminist consciousness — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 225 (+1 more)
• SEED: Replies to MacKinnon’s ‘difference means dominance’ — the ‘content vs powerlessness’ distinction as an article on why environmental care work is not merely servility.

Broader Connections

• Human rights discourse does not exhaust political languages of the human. #corroborates (0.78) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 681
• Studying gender does not require or imply feminist consciousness #expands (0.72) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 225