Feminist ideologies encompass a wide range of social and political movements, thoughts, and goals; through their commitment to defining and establishing political, economic, personal and social equality between the sexes. Feminist ideology and theory aspires to understand gender inequality by examining the social roles and lived experience of women. Furthermore, feminist studies have evolved, merged and intertwined with various disciplines useful for addressing gender issues and inequality. In this article we will take a closer look at the radical feminist ideologies of Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldua. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Feminism has synthesized itself to address not only structural issues surrounding women, but also multicultural, intersectional, and android issues. Unfortunately, despite the apparent unity, feminism, like any other school of thought, has many major divisions both internally and externally. Although both are feminist, liberal feminism and radical feminism have their differences. Both schools ascribe the goal of catapulting women into a position of equality in an android-centric (oops… I should say, machismo-centric) society. However the main disagreements occur over who should be allowed to join the movement and how feminism should be presented. In Age, Race, Class, and Gender: Women Redefine Difference, Audre Lorde discusses differentiated feminism; the cultural homogenization of third world women as a pretext for oppression in the form of otherness; and is critical of “first world” feminist movements and power structures for underestimating sexual, racial, and class differences. It reminds us of the “institutionalized refusal of difference”; fear of using human differences; and the exclusion of women of color from literature and discourse. She believes that community homogenization leads to the “othering” of Women of Color, “whose experiences and traditions [are] too 'alien' to understand” and therefore unworthy of differentiated academic attention. Audre Lorde invites us to embrace these “alien” differences rather than reject them. “It is not our differences that separate women, but our unwillingness to recognize those differences and effectively address the distortions that arise from ignorance and misnaming of those differences.” She hypothesizes that “the future of our earth could depend on the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new models of relationships across differences.” In other words, understanding women's individuality, concerns and social labels should be the first aspiration for the development and transformation of the global community. Similarly, in La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness, Gloria Anzaldúa articulates the construction of multiple hybrid identities; the social relations of the mestiza; and transcendence of thought. “From this racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollination, an 'alien' consciousness is currently in formation: a new mestiza consciousness, a conciencia de mujer.” Anzaldúa discusses the idea of the Borderland, an abstract space where multiple identities, histories, and cultures overlap. This space evolves, intertwines and converges, where cultures and classes collide, and is the result of the “meeting of two self-coherent but habitually incompatible frames of reference”. Anzaldua describes the internal conflict of La Mestiza created by the convergence of cultures,.
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