10.1177/0192513X04267101JOURNAL OF FAMILY ISSUES / October 2004Allen / DISCUSS NT COMM NTS Janet Saltzman Chafetz Plenary Discussant Comments

Feminist ideas and practices permeate the consciousness, relationships, and politics of women and men across continents. Certainly, they are cen-tral to our work in the scientific study of family structures and processes. It is exciting to engage in discussion and debate with other feminist scholars about the relative contributions of feminist theories and methods in family social science. When asked to organize the many competing, conflicting, and passionate views I hold about feminism into something that someone else might read and reflect on, I find myself embarking on a quest for new knowledge. Feminism does that to me. For the past 3 decades, feminism has motivated me to read, study, question, challenge, and write about fam-ilies in innovative ways with a diverse community of scholars. As I have examined before, feminism also brings something powerful into the mix that my scholarly training in the family field has subtly tried to erase: my lived experience as a human being as well as the full humanity of those whose lives I seek to understand (Allen, 2000). Feminism provides the energy that powers both my intellectual momentum and action orientation. Reading across the disciplines, something I have learned to do as a feminist scholar and a student of the family, I am not alone in finding my journey powered by feminist thinking and action. As Freedman (2002) demonstrated in her comprehensive history of feminism, No Turning Back, feminism is global and central to the future of women. Feminism is a big, in-determinate movement, one that cannot be grasped by comparing topics in a table of contents, as in Janet Saltzman Chafetz’s decontextualized attempt to deconstruct the critical concept of intersectionality. It is beside the point to place feminist theory or method in a taxonomy of sociological theorie