Monique Wittig "The Straight Mind", let's all overcome socially enforced gender roles! Moreover, for Wittig, the category "woman" exists only through its relation to the category "man," and the "women" without relation to "men" would cease to exist. She talks about how the "straight mind" has to think of homosexuality in terms of heterosexuality because that is there only frame of reference. The straight mind cannot think about a world where heterosexuality does not order all human relationships. "Lesbians are not women".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monique_Wittig
Patricia Hil Collins and "Black Feminist Thought", sexism, class oppression, and racism are all inextricably bound together. Black women are placed in fundamentally different posiitons than white women. There is a tension linking experience and ideas, they live in a different world from that of people who are not black and female. U.S. Black women's experience is a heterogeneous collectivity and ensuing group knowledge. There is a significance to change, in order for Black feminist thought to operate effectively, it must remain dynamic. Intersectionality plays a big role, part of a wider struggle for human dignity.
Lisa Duggan and "Queer Theory", we can all be queer! A queer community can work as a collectivity "nolonger defined solely by the gender of its members' sexual partners" (Duggan 213). Liberalists like individual rights and responsibilites to the state and the goal of political equality, more concerned with reforming the existing sturcture than uprooting them. Militant nationalism, overthrow existing hierarchies and structures of power.
Judith Butler "Gender Trouble", influential in queer theory and feminism, gender performativity. The catagory of "women" is complicated by class, race, sexuality. In fact, all universal terms are limiting and oppressive. She critiques assumptions about sex and gender, both are constructed. The gender "woman" remains open to interpretation. Butler also asks if grounding feminist theory in the category of women excludes people (which "paradoxically undercuts feminist goals to extend its claims to representation"). We live in a heterosexual matrix. By redeploying those practices of identity and exposing as always failed the attempts to "become" one's gender, Butler believes that a positive, transformative politics can emerge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Trouble