Reducing the master to simply male obscures real needed changes.

Evidence

Much of the stress on affirming women’s difference has resulted from an effort to problematise the character of a culture whose central protagonist, the apparently neutral rational subject, is defined in opposition not only to women but to many other oppressed groups and even to nature itself. But focusing exclusively on women’s difference as the basis of opposition tries to make women the symbolic and political bearers of the entire domain of exclusion of western culture (Bacchi 1990:250). Thus a conception of women’s difference has been employed to articulate in a novel way a very powerful social critique and alternative vision, but the attempt to present the alternative entirely in terms of gender in the fashion of much radical feminism (Miller 1986:88; Chodorow 1979) places on this critique a load which has been too heavy for it to bear alone. The contraction by this feminist critique of the identity of the master to an identity which is simply male tends to obscure the real political issues and the real measures which are needed to bring about change (hooks 1989:20). To shake the conceptual foundations of these systems of domination we must unmask more fully the identity of the master hidden behind the neutral guise of the human and of the ideals of rationality. — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 264

Categorization

• XREF: Contra radical feminism’s reduction of the master to ‘male’ — ch1 established that reason’s dominator identity is master, not masculinity alone; here it is extended outward to non-gender oppressions and nature. — connects to: Différance disrupts fixed binary oppositions like male and female. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 214; Female emancipation will not produce uniformity between the sexes — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1981
• SEED: hooks-cited critique of radical feminism framing the master as merely male, plus the ‘neutral human’ unmasking, as an article on why anti-dominator feminism must be ecofeminist and antiracist.
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source

Broader Connections

• Différance disrupts fixed binary oppositions like male and female. #expands (0.85) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 214
• Female emancipation will not produce uniformity between the sexes #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1981