Affilia, Ahead of Print.
The paradigms of academic and activist feminisms in the United States in the middle and later half of the 20th century were developed in part as critical explorations of exclusionary practices within feminist ideology. The strength of critical feminisms is their capacity to reimagine the limiting parameters of exclusion (e.g., of Black people and people of color, of butch lesbians, etc.) that are based in many of the same principles that bolster patriarchal definitions of gender and sexuality. Such patriarchal definitions include the pressure to express and experience gender and sexuality in a static manner that relegates all other expressions as Other or merely transitional. If the purpose of critical feminisms is to explore the “issues of power [and]…the ways that gender ideology… is produced, reproduced, resisted, and changed in and through the everyday experiences of” people, then the concepts that this paper explores should be of the utmost importance within critical feminisms. In doing so critical feminisms must examine the contributions and experiences of trans, non-binary, and queer people that help us to reimagine what it means to be a feminist in a world of free expression.