This chapter explores the relationship between ‘queer’ and ‘feminism’, beginning with the fraught way that queer has sometimes been understood as a move away from feminism’s perceived limitations. It maps debates about the relationship between feminism and queer and their respective objects of study across work by scholars including Gayle Rubin, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Annamarie Jagose, Robyn Wiegman, and Clare Hemmings. With a specific focus on the temporal relationship between ‘feminism’ and ‘queer’, the chapter performs a relationship to ‘queer feminism’ that might go beyond the idea that queer emerges ‘after’ feminism. Instead, it opens up a number of different temporal relationships that might be bound to the idea of ‘queer feminism’including repetition, institutional time, belatedness, and the idea of being on, or in, time. It thus insists on ‘queer feminism’ as not only a methodology but also an object that might be tracked, a means of returning to the question of what kinds of objects gender and sexuality are, an invitation to consider disciplinary or institutional time, and a mode of theorising time’s affective structures.

“Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, Feminist Studies,” with the theme of the subordination of women, is marked by diverse and overlapping intellectual traditions and movements. We take a non-Western perspective of this diversity. We use the terms interchangeably, as in the historical development from the earlier focus on Women’s Studies and more recent shift to Gender Studies in the West as well as in third world Women’s Studies, these disciplines have a close relationship with Feminism and the Women’s Movement and have gained from each other.The chapter covers issues including the Women’s Movements, Women’s Studies/Feminism, the different waves of feminism, feminist perspectives, feminist research / feminist methods, objectivity for feminist research and feminist theories. We cover theory and method for social science in general, but there is a section that features psychology specifically and highlights the different strands of feminism.