Introduction

Emancipation movements seek to throw off the fetters of coercion and constraint that are liable to be imposed by dominant social groups on subordinate social groups (Chapter One). In political language, they seek to free groups of people from oppression, from the unjust use of its power by a dominant group against a weaker one (Mansbridge, 2001a). This chapter shows that patients can be subject to domination and oppression, then discusses Alford's political theory and some other political concepts that can help us to understand domination and oppression, and related concepts like repression, as they can affect patients.

Emancipation movements

Emancipation movements are concerned with differences in power between dominant and subordinate social groups and with the unjust use of the greater power (Mansbridge, 2001a). Power is the ability to bring about significant effects, specifically by furthering the person’s or social group's own interests or by affecting the interests of others, whether positively for good or negatively for harm (Lukes, 2005). The feminist literary scholar Carolyn Heilbrun said that emancipation movements question the arrangements between strong and weak groups and work to change them (Heilbrun, 1990). The changes that emancipation movements bring about give more power to the weaker group than it had before and, at the same time, challenge both the forms and legitimacies of power in society (Heilbrun, 1990). Steven Lukes, the sociologist who wrote a classic analysis of power, Power: A radical view, said that sharing power to protect each group's interests rather than letting unshared power harm those of the weakest group must be the long-term objective of any society (Lukes, 2005). Equality of power, of shared power, must be emancipation movements’ long-term objective.

Justice is more difficult to define. The political theorist Iris Marion Young defined injustice as the institutionalised conditions under which people cannot develop and exercise their capabilities as individual people, communicating and cooperating with other people (Young, 1990). (Institutionalised means the patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour that are largely taken for granted within a particular social institution.) The two primary forms of disabling constraints that give rise to injustice, Young said, are domination and oppression (Young, 1990).