Moving Through the World as a Woman

The category of womanhood is often under-analysed within academic ‘gender equality’ schemes, which can lead to the implicit exclusion of women who experience multiple intersecting forms of marginalisation from anti-sexist campaigns. This chapter offers an exploration of what it might mean to be (or not be) a woman, drawing on the author’s own experiences while also centring perspectives from black, disabled and trans writers. Reading across critical theory and feminist philosophy, it accounts both for the instability and incoherency of ‘womanhood’, and its continuing importance as a category for the conceptualisation of inequality and oppression. The chapter concludes by proposing the notion of ‘moving through the world’ as a model for conceptualising experiences of womanhood.