Feminism

Feminist analysis treats time as historically structured by gender — the long duration of patriarchy, the periodisations of first-, second-, third-, and fourth-wave organising, the unpaid temporal labour of social reproduction that women have disproportionately borne. The 'double shift', the time-poverty of caregivers, and the gendered rhythms of biological and reproductive life are taken as serious analytical subjects, not background conditions. Recovery work — Gerda Lerner's history of patriarchy, the rediscovery of forgotten women writers and thinkers — treats historical time as a contested archive that must be re-read against the grain. Feminism is constitutively historical in its self-understanding.

Space, for feminist analysis, is gendered: the public-private split, the association of the domestic with the feminine and the political with the masculine, the street as a site of harassment and surveillance, the workplace as a structure of exclusion. Feminist geographers and theorists from Doreen Massey through bell hooks have shown that spatial arrangements — who can go where, who feels safe, whose body belongs in which room — encode and reproduce the structures of power. Space is therefore relational rather than neutral: it is constituted by the social relations that traverse it, and changing those relations changes what the space is.

The body is the irreducible analytic centre of feminist thought — the menstruating, labouring, pregnant, ageing, gendered, racialised body whose treatment in law, medicine, and labour exposes the abstractions of liberal personhood. Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex', the materialist feminisms of Federici and Delphy, and the contemporary politics of reproductive labour all insist that matter is not a neutral substrate but the site through which gender domination operates. The framework reads this commitment as relational: bodies are constituted in webs of social, economic, and biological relations rather than as self-contained substances.

Observers are embodied, gendered, plural, and situated within historically specific structures of power. There is no neutral perspective from outside these structures; emancipatory analysis proceeds from inside.

Energy, in feminist analysis, is the largely invisible labour that sustains everyone else's productive life — the cooking, caring, listening, soothing, cleaning, and managing that has been extracted from women without recognition or wage. The Wages for Housework campaign, Federici's 'Caliban and the Witch', and the contemporary literature on emotional labour all show that the energy budget of social reproduction has been systematically off-loaded onto gendered bodies. Feminism therefore treats energy not as a neutral physical quantity but as a political economy whose distribution is itself a structure of injustice.

Feminist epistemology — Sandra Harding's standpoint theory, Donna Haraway's 'situated knowledges', Patricia Hill Collins's Black feminist epistemology — argues that what counts as knowledge has been shaped by the social position of the knower, and that the supposedly neutral observer of mainstream science is usually a specific (often male, white, propertied) historical figure. Information is therefore treated as constructed within particular power relations rather than as the transparent recording of an independent world. The corrective is not to abandon the pursuit of knowledge but to make its conditions of production visible and to recover the suppressed vantages of those the dominant frameworks have ignored.