Feminism And Empowerment

Abstract

The question of what is, or should be, an appropriate feminist discourse is still a matter of much debate within Western feminism, especially in academic circles.  In these on-going debates, even the conventional way of marking the divisions - liberal, Marxist, socialist and radical feminisms - is either replaced or juxtaposed with a less familiar typification of differing feminist discourses: "cultural feminism", "eco-feminism", "feminist empiricism", "feminist standpoint epistemologies", "feminist postmodernism", "postcolonial feminism", "Black feminism", etc. Moreover, these debates when they are staged have also to contend not only with the usual anti-feminist criticisms and the problems of the "academic-activist" divide, but with the all too familiar implications of funding,
personality and ideology that plague all political meetings. These make a critique of feminist discourse/politics (for that matter, any
political practice/discourse) a highly complicated affair. All the more difficult, then, to approach the inquiry of this paper, which is, do
these contemporary debates, regarding appropriate and effective feminist politics, have any import for a "feminist political discourse from a Malaysian perspective"?