Program description for a graduate-level research group called "Feminism and Discourses of Power," offered at the University of California Humanities Research Institute in Irvine:

Until the early eighties, feminism largely identified 'power' as the hierarchical positioning of men over women. In this last decade, this formulation has been questioned... That the subject of feminism is not 'outside' relations of power, that it is not opposed to power but formulated within its terms, suggests the need to rethink the central terms of feminist conceptions of power: if power is not a property of the self, is not an individual potency or capacity, but is, rather, that by which subjects are relationally defined and established, then the subject is in its very constitution implicated in culturally and historically specific power relations... Moreover, if power not only oppresses or dominates, but is also that which produces, sustains, and circulates subjects, then how might feminists take account of the ambiguity of power-relations, the subordinating and constraining effects of power as well as its generative and formative workings? How are feminist thinkers limited by extant vocabularies of power which do not account for such ambiguities? How have these vocabularies hindered efforts to conceive the complex intertwining of race, caste, class, sexuality, and gender in the subject of feminism?

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