Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
International Conference on Research in Education and Science (ICRES), Nevşehir, Türkiye, 18 - 21 Mayıs 2023, ss.91-92
This paper aims to investigate the issue of women’s
empowerment and try to reconceptualize in a feminist perspective the issues of
oppression, power, and agency through the methodology of intersectionality and
of the analysis of the matrix of domination. According to the intersectionality
approach, each woman is embedded in a matrix of domination made of laws and
institutions (structural domain), bureaucracy (disciplinary domain), cultural
and ideological (hegemonic domain) and influenced by everyday interactions
(interpersonal domain). However, a woman’s capacity to resist, accommodate, act
independently, or become an accomplice to it depends also on the factors
characterizing her singular being: her class, race, religion, marital status,
age, nationality, etc. Within this perspective there are few pure victims or
oppressors for each individual derives varying amounts of penalty and privilege
from the multiple systems of oppression which form everyone’s lives. This
creates the potential for both multiple and conflicting experiences of subordination
and power that requires a wider-ranging and complex terrain of analysis. This
paper tries to understand how oppression, power, and agency are related as well
as investigating woman's ability to oppose it, make accommodations, take
independent action, or collaborate with it.
The matrix envisaged within an intersectional analysis builds upon an
expanded Foucauldian understanding of power, whose exercise is deeply connected
to the production of discourses of truth and moves the theoretical analysis away
from a binary conception of power (dominant-subordinate), questioning, at the
same time, dominant universalizing truth claims.
Keywords: Intersectionality,
Power; Oppression, Agency, Foucault.