Not really, no. The radical feminists worked on a largely Marxist framework that referred to men & women as 'sex classes' & saw patriarchy as part of an oppressive capitalist social order in which men were the workers & women the producers of workers. (Hugely oversimplified) https://twitter.com/RickyVS17/status/1276082479103959046

At the same time as the radical feminists were operating, tho, there were the liberal feminists & they were not necessarily leftist although their aims were progressive. They didn't want a revolution or to destroy capitalism. They wanted equal access to its benefits. @RickyVS17

It was the radical feminists who held sway in academia while the liberal feminists were more mainstream in culture which largely supported them and still does. Most people are feminists by the liberal definition.

The radical feminists & liberal feminists (both of which had subsets but particularly the radfems) maintained this balance through the 60s, 70s & most of the 80s, but at the end of the 80s, they were two new developments that challenged them both. Queer theory & intersectionality

Both of these developments were thoroughly postmodern. Postmodernists regarded the Marxists, radicalism more broadly & liberalism as metanarratives to be dismantled. Queer theory was most explicitly postmodern & rooted in the work of Foucault who is often called the father of it.

Queer theory attacked radical feminism for its biological understanding of men and women as sex classes distinguished by their reproductive systems & for its opposition to sex work as the exploitation of women. They wanted to break down those categories & sexual liberation.

Queer theory attacked liberalism for its embrace of science. They pointed out that liberalism was key to the emergence of sexology as a science in the late 19th century. Sexology regarded homosexuality as a disorder or an 'inversion' (rather than a perversion) of normal sexuality

Queer theorists fail to acknowledge that this was radically progressive at the time following centuries of seeing homosexuality as a heinous sin AND that the empirical study of homosexuality combined with liberal ethics was how it was so rapidly accepted as a normal variation.

Intersectionality represented a joining of black feminism with critical legal theory & was defined by Crenshaw as a provisional concept linking contemporary politics with postmodern theory. Black feminism was critical of both radical & liberal feminism for their whiteness.

It wasn't entirely wrong about this. Black women in America genuinely did face different negative stereotypes than white women & mainstream feminism did not pay enough attention to this. However, attempting to fix that also annoyed the black feminists so they couldn't win.

My mother, who was an active liberal feminist in London in the 60s, 70s & 80s & reads some of my stuff said that on reflection her activism (which was about opening banking positions, mortgages & loans to women) really didn't pay enough attention to issues of class or race.

Intersectionality also criticised liberalism explicitly saying that its attempt to work by removing social significance from issues of race & gender - your race or gender should not determine any of your roles in life - rather than embracing identity politics & making it central.

So both queer theory & intersectionality was seriously challenging radical & liberal feminism by 1990. Also, because they both relied so heavily on postmodernism, they could also work much better together than the radical anti-racism of the New Left & liberal ethos of Gay Pride.

At the same time as Kimberlé Crenshaw was writing about 'intersectionality' & how it could also expand to issues of sexuality, Judith Butler was putting queer theory on the map & writing about the 'intersections' of race, gender & sexuality.

Radical feminism & liberal feminism have been largely in retreat & taking heavy fire ever since this &, I would argue, have decisively lost the battle in academia & activism in the last decade. However, gender critical feminism (which includes radical feminism) is fighting back

Gender critical feminism has been enabled to grow by the overreach of trans activism which has made many people who were never radical feminists & do not necessarily believe in patriarchy, sex classes & gender as a social construct sympathetic to their cause.

One defining characteristic of radical feminism which is much less evident in liberal feminism, intersectional feminism & queer theory is the strength of their commitment & organisation. One could call them 'single-minded' while the others are more diffuse.

This has enabled the gender critical feminists to call people, mostly women, to a single unifying cause to protect women's spaces & the definition of 'woman' as a biological one. Meanwhile critical race theory (intersectionality) & queer theory (trans activism) are less unified

Despite working on the same postmodern conception of the world, it is not certain that everyone who supports anti-racist movements will also support trans activism although it is more likely that people who support trans activism also support anti-racist activism.

This is because trans activism rooted in queer theory wants to break down all categories they see as socially constructed so they also want to break down categories of race. However, race (as we understand it) actually is a social construct while sex is not.

Also, the intellectual history behind anti-racist activism includes a lot of religion & black anti-racist activists are still more likely on average to be religious than white anti-racist activists so they won't necessarily be supportive of LGBT rights at all.

So, I predict that there will at some point soon be a stand-off between the two dominant forms of Social Justice Activism that exist right now - anti-racism & trans activism - and that anti-racism will win.

And this is why you should never ask me what seems like a simple question about the ideological origins of anything unless you have a free hour & a willingness to absorb enormous amounts of detail. https://twitter.com/RickyVS17/status/1276098760918077440