‗Feminist theories‘ also have commonalities with social constructionism and critical theory, in that all three approaches share the belief that those social groupings that hold the balance of power decide what the dominant discourses are. Feminist theories are concerned with the study of women‘s experiences of social marginalisation. Similar to existential phenomenology, social
constructionism and critical theory, feminist theorists reject ‗the modernist assumption that there is a single ideal knower who is typically a male and who can know and or describe one true and final correct representation of reality‘ (Ezzy, 2002).
What sets feminist theories apart from other paradigms is that they use gender as an organising principle for social life across the life-course and criticise processes of power through the lens of age and gender, while politically, feminist theorists work towards equality for women.
Feminist research has contributed to the theorising of gender relations and the experiences of women, and to the theorising of the performance of gender in
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human society as a socially constructed phenomenon. Feminist researchers regard dominant constructions of women and their social roles as disempowering and disadvantageous for women. Most feminist researchers recognise more than one theoretical stance, hence the plural is used to signify a constellation of theories that fall under the feminist umbrella. Some feminist theorists have investigated the environmental and social spaces of women and have adopted the principle that experiences of spaces are gendered (Chasteen, 1994); and that women's
experiences of the same spaces differ from the experiences of men, including their experiences of homes and neighbourhoods.
A group of feminist researchers in Boston (Fletcher, Blake-Beard and Bailyn, 2005) has used action research within a ‗feminist post-structural lens‘; to investigate organisational change. This approach acknowledges the relationship between discourse, knowledge and power, and starts with the premise that some voices in the discourse are heard and counted as knowledge, while others are silenced, marginalised or excluded. Feminist research seeks to give voice to the
marginalised perspectives of women, disrupt the status quo and call attention to systems of power that account for a particular social group‘s marginal status. Within this paradigm, difference feminism supports a separate consideration of housing issues for older women, who have encountered difficulties having their voices heard. Carol Gilligan (1982), a former student of Erik Erikson and Lawrence Kohlberg, helped form a new psychology of ‗difference feminism‘. Gilligan‘s book,
In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (1982),
responded to feminists like Germaine Greer (1970), who emphasised similarities between males and females. Gilligan‘s interview methods involved listening to women and rethinking the meanings of commonly accepted concepts, such as self and selfishness. In analysing her interviews with women Gilligan examined who was speaking, whose story they were telling and in what cultural context. Based on her research, Gilligan asserted that women have different moral and
psychological tendencies from men. She conceptualised men as thinking in terms of rules and justice and women as thinking in terms of caring and relationships.
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Both of these ways-of-being and knowing were considered by Gilligan to be of equal value to society.
Gilligan‘s work on difference feminism is closely paralleled by the work of feminist sociologist and psychoanalyst, Nancy Chodorow (1999) who theorised the existence of sex differences in the early experiences of individuation and relationship to mean that:
Girls emerge from this period with a basis for ‗empathy‘ built into their primary definition of self in a way that boys do not. (And that) girls emerge with a stronger basis for experiencing another‘s needs or feelings as one‘s own (or of thinking that one is so experiencing another‘s needs and feelings).
Another influential theorist of difference feminism is linguist Deborah Tannen, who holds that who gets heard depends on how a person communicates, that language is a learned behaviour, a set of symbols that is deeply influenced by cultural experience, and that women have often learned different styles from men, which can make them seem less competent and assured, particularly when being assessed by men. Tannen (1995) has referred to gender differences in
communication styles that are characterised by features like speed, degree of loudness, directness and indirectness, pacing and pausing, word choice, figures of speech, the use of humour, gender differences that influence differences in
interpretation that lead to misunderstandings.
Gender differences observed by Tannen included that girls tend to play with just one other girl, spend a lot of time talking and use language to negotiate. Girls tend to downplay ways that one is better than another; tend to avoid sounding too sure of themselves and, overall, tend to balance their own needs with those of another. On the other hand boys tend to play in large groups and not everyone is treated as if equal, dominant boys are expected to emphasise rather than downplay their status, and generally one or several are seen as the leader or leaders. Boys use language to display their social status by displaying knowledge and abilities and by challenging others and being challenged. Other gender differences identified by Tannen are that girls tend to downplay their certainty while men tend to
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minimise their doubts. In her research Tannen found that the end result of these differences in the workplace was that men were listened to, given credit and promoted more often than women. (Tannen, 1995)
Other proponents of difference feminism who have contributed to the
understanding and interpretation of women‘s meaning systems and ways of being in the world are British feminist social scientist, Ann Oakley (1999, 1981, 1972), and US feminist therapists Judith V. Jordan and Jean Baker Miller (Jordan, Kaplan, Baker Miller, Stiver et al, 1991).
Critical and feminist theories have contributed to feminist gerontology, which seeks to challenge the large body of biomedical research on ageing, and its assumptions about the meanings of concepts to do with ageing and gender (Ray, 2003, 1999). A feminist lens within social gerontology has enabled the theorising of subjectivity and the creation of positive role models for older women, that
emphasise strengths and diversity for marginalised and disempowered groups (Bengtsson et al, 1997; Wray, 2004, 2003; Tulle and Mooney, 2002), and that have informed a questioning and problematising of biomedical concepts like frailty (Barrett, 2006).