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Denise Thompson Feminist Theorist

Denise Thompson is an independent scholar who has been reading, researching, writing, thinking about, and (sometimes) publishing feminist theory for decades. She is an academic writer who has a PhD in Sociology from the University of New South Wales (1996), for a thesis called Against the Dismantling of Feminism: A Study in the Politics of Meaning . It was later published by Sage under the title of Radical Feminism Today. Apart from the PhD, all her work has been done outside academe, while any paid academic work she has had has been sporadic, largely casual, and unconnected to her feminist work.

What she was trying to do was to argue a theory of social domination—more precisely, male domination. That continues to be her task here. Her framework continues to be what is known as radical feminism although, as she has argued elsewhere (Radical Feminism Today), she disagrees with the typology. With Catharine McKinnon, she insists that there is only feminism, unmodified. Too often, modifying ‘feminism’ with something else is a surreptitious way of undermining it by inserting anti-feminist values into the category, e.g. ‘postmodern feminism’, ‘liberal feminism’. Still, ‘radical feminism’ is the common usage for what she regards as her own feminist commitment, and so it is the most appropriate term to use as a description of her theoretical work.