Building Blocks: Feminist Theory (sans video games)

This will be part of a series. I want each post to be a layer, a coherent building block of a bigger analysis. Feel free to call me on my shit as i'm sure I will be making some mistakes as I travel further into theoryland.

A while back I decided to do a paper on Gender and video games. I’d like to do a content analysis of the most selling games on the American console, the Xbox 360. I am limiting myself to this for several reasons. First, I wanted to minimize the cross-cultural influence. Video games are cultural artifacts. They are created using the subconscious assumptions of fun and play and are imbued with fictional aspects that, while the inspiration might be cross-culture, are created and forced into native form. Second, with limited time, I needed to focus on a very specific group of games. A criticism of my work, and you can see it in this blog, is that I tend to focus, not on the thing I am talking about, but on the things causing the thing I’m talking about. For instance, I’ve written more about the trappings of the enlightenment and its current use as a trap of perception in the “post-modern” times than I have about video games as a whole. And this is a games blog (or is supposed to be).

In any case, gender and video games, xbox 360, top 25 best selling games that aren’t sports or racing or board games. Why leave those three out? Well, these three (while not so much board games anymore) are quite studied as it is. So, no need to talk about that. While it literally hurts me to do such a sad thing, I feel as though I must.

So for the next few weeks, I’ll be talking about gender and video games. I’ve been reading about it for weeks now. It’s time to do some exploration of it. I figured I would start with a portion of a social theory exam that I had as a graduate student. I love social theory as much as I love video games, so this is fun for me. It may be boring as fuck for you, but stick around and I’ll try to be entertaining as these things can be!


This is a classic question. It’s difficult for males to answer and this question actually took twice as long as the rest of the test did. I won’t get into first wave or second wave as it doesn’t really matter in the long run. What does matter, is the difference between everyone that isn’t Judith Butler. Butler is a post-modernist thinker. For Sociology, this is (or can be) something of a bad word. However, in this case, she raises a lot of interesting (albeit contrary opinions).

I should explain the terms of the question. Keep in mind these are definitions as my discipline has defined them for this question. These definitions are subject to change and I’ve tried to simplify them:

Epistemology: For the purposes of social theory and simplicity, think of this as a way of knowing things. For instance, growing up where you did, in the country you did, shaped your perceptions. Your parents imbibed you with how they saw things, you saw an infinite amount of things and those things shape what and how you understand things.

Ontology: In the sense that epistemology is a way of knowing, ontology in this sense is a means through which we start. Here, ontology means metaphysics or simply, knowledge used before primary assumptions. Think of this as the building blocks of an impulse where epistemology is the end result of these building blocks.

Pragmatist: simplest or most practical answer or solution.

The questions was:
Using the works of Judith Butler, Dorothy Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, and other readings, make the case that feminism is an epistemology. Would Collins say feminism is an epistemology or epistemologies? Explain. Is Collins a Pragmatist? Explain.

Using the notes of Karl Marx, Frederich Engels wrote The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State. In this book, Engels makes the case that women are not subjugated by men because of their biology, rather, women are subjugated by men due to men having been the mobile tool makers. When the first farms were established, the men used those strengths to gain the upper hand and through that, created a labor force that was controlled by them; women (Ritzer 2008: 472-4). Through this early victory, men were able to keep women dominated in all aspects of life. Because of this, almost all thought processes, belief systems, and cultural ideals come from men, in favor of men. However, over the past 200 years the woman has slowly gaining power and while inequality is far off, it is closer now than it has ever been. Feminism is an epistemology in that being a woman represents a different way of knowing the world than a man does. If it was not an epistemology, women and men would see the world in an almost identical fashion. Using this assumption, the works of feminists such as Judith Butler, Dorothy Smith, and Patricia Hill Collins demonstrate this epistemology; or lack thereof.

Dorothy Smith wrote of the anomical gap between the way a female lives and the knowledge of how their male counter-part lives. Smith goes further using her term, “relations of ruling” (Ritzer 2008: 477). In this term Smith implies that there is a system of tendencies that have created the patriarch in which we live. Further, there are various unseen ways that maintain it. These ways and means women function throughout the day to day activities of normal life. Through media like magazines, television ads, and other visual displays, the patriarchy communicates to all who woman is. Through those same invasive mannerisms, men control women by patterning advertisements and all aspects of life by creating a separate way in which women are expected to do things. To Smith, studying these things will create a body of knowledge that will identify those aspects of the feminine identity, and separate them from the epistemology of women. Patricia Hill Collins added a few things to this idea.

Patricia Hill Collins wrote of the “matrix of domination” (Ritzer 2008: 478-480). In this view, she adds to the body of feminist theory by stating that not all females share the same epistemology. The black woman is oppressed much the same as women everywhere are. Unlike white women, however, Black, minority women, are further oppressed by not only gender, but class, race, and sexual identity. To Collins, “Black feminist thought sees these distinctive systems of oppression as being part of one overarching structure of domination” (Collins 1990: 554). This multitude of ways in which women are oppressed changes how various groups of women understand the world. While a white woman might see a glass ceiling with her male counterparts, a black woman would be oppressed further because of her race; the later may never even know there is a ceiling. Collins, in Marxist fashion, moves past theory and seeks to empower those whom are oppressed. She seeks to improve the lives of women by finding practical knowledge that will benefit all women. In this way, Collins is a Pragmatist.

Judith Butler is an opponent of the general idea of the “woman” as feminism has defined it (Ritzer 2008: 484). In fact, she would say that feminism is a way of knowing but not in the way that feminism has defined it. In true post-modernist fashion, Butler states that the focus of Sociology is incorrect, that all theories are wrong. It is the idea that of a female gender that is created outside of the physical body that we are born with that should be in question. Butler questions the amount of agency that is present in the construction of gender. In order for the heterosexual world that we live in to exist, there needs to be two sexes. Men and women are formed not by socially constructed gender roles, they simply, according to butler, imitate the world around them. Because men have always been men and women have always been women, the likelihood that a change will come about is not an individual choice, but a cultural one. Butler says, “…we never know our sex outside of its expression as gender. Lived or experienced ‘sex’ is already gendered” (Butler 1986: 39). It is up to culture to change the idea of gender will change with it.

Ritzer, George. 2008. Socioogical Theory: 7th Edition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.