analyzing patriarchal structures feminist theory seeks to propose new ways for women to bring about social change First Wave From the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of collective female political action in the form of the Suffragette and New Womens movements in Brit ID: 743059
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Slide1
FeminismSlide2
Activism
Feminism describes the campaigns, activities, and texts concerned with challenging and transforming how women are treated and represented in society. It is a political movement and discourse that encompasses a diverse range of perspectives, theories, and methods. As well as
analyzing
patriarchal structures, feminist theory seeks to propose new ways for women to bring about social change.Slide3
First Wave
From
the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning
of collective female political action in the form of the Suffragette and New Women’s movements in Britain and the US, and the granting of partial (1918) and full (1928) franchise for women in
Britain. They also fought for the right to own
property. Slide4
Second Wave
1960s to 1980s.
Women collectively campaigned on a broad range of issues including sexual health and contraception, pornography, domestic abuse, and gender discrimination in the workplace.
Elaborate
feminist theories.Slide5
Third Wave
More global and plural view.
Interdisciplinary: gender studies, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and postmodernism.Slide6
Where does feminist criticism begin?
And
whan
I
saugh
he
wolde
nevere
fyne
To
reden
on this cursed book al
nyght
,
Al
sodeynly
thre
leves
have I
plyght
Out of his book, right as he
radde
, and eke
I with my fest so took
hym
on the
cheke
That in
oure
fyr
he fil
bakward
adoun
.
And he up
stirte
as
dooth
a wood
leoun
,
And with his fest he smoot me on the heed
That in the floor I lay as I were deed. (Chaucer:
Wife of Bath’s Prologue.
Ll. 788-796)Slide7
Mary
Wollstonecraft
,
A
Vindication
of
the Rights of Woman
(1792)
A philosophical essay against the social, political, and economic marginalization of
women.
At a time when the question of the “rights of man” was being debated in France and the US.
The difference between men and women is not natural (ideology) but learned.
Education should be changed, so that instead of making women sentimental and childlike (often domestic slaves), they become fully rational agents.
Criticism: universal Enlightenment ideal of Reason
.Slide8
Nineteenth Century
John Stuart Mill introduced a parliamentary bill calling for the extension of enfranchisement to women.
JS Mill (with Harriet Taylor, his wife), “The subjection of women” (1869): all women were repressed citizens, attacked British marriage laws (which denied women their own rights to children, land, and property).
Ever more vocal suffragette movement: Millicent Fawcett, Emmeline Pankhurst.
“Feminism” and “feminist” entered public usage by the 1890s.
The 1928 Representation of the People Act.Slide9
Virginia
Woolf’s
A Room of One’s Own
(1929
)
Modernist Women: H. D., Edith Wharton, Zola Neale Hurston, and
Djuna
Barnes, Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, etc.
Developed from two lectures that Woolf had delivered to women students in Cambridge.
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”: the relationship between economics, education, and creativity.
“Intellectual
freedom depends upon material things”.
“Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.”Slide10
Virginia
Woolf’s
A Room of One’s
Own
2
Transgressing the demarcations between traditional gendered “spheres”.
“Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in
real life she could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.”
Literary androgyny:
“one
must be woman-manly or man-womanly” (Shakespeare, Keats, Sterne, Cowper, Lamb, and Proust)
“Chloe
likes
Olivia
”
:
has become a critical slogan for lesbian writing.
A demystification of genius and a promise of the arrival of Shakespeare's sister.
Three Guineas
(1938): war and fascism in the context of women’s domestic, political and cultural suppression, also unleashing women’s potential to prevent war through liberation and education.Slide11
Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex
(1949)
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”.
No essential “femininity”; “femininity” is itself constructed through certain cultural, social, and linguistic practices (social constructionism).
Attack on the social institutions of motherhood and the family, discussion of female sexuality, just 5 years after French women were enfranchised. The Pope put the book on the list of works which Roman Catholics are forbidden to read and public campaign to have it banned.
Lévi-Strauss + Marx on myth (nature v. culture, femininity as a cultural product + an oppressive code to be exploded)
Sex and gender as sharply separate (controversial).
Biological essentialism v. social constructionism debate in feminism (and generally).Slide12
1960s
Feminism is at the forefront of the subversive movements of the ´60s.
Consciousness Raising groups encourage women to talk about their experiences.
“ The
personal is political.”
Attacking Freudian psychoanalysis for its
androcentrism
: a representation of woman as “lacking a sexual organ” (Kate Millett’s
Sexual Politics
and Germaine Greer’s
The Female Eunuch
(both 1970
)
)
.
Both contain literary analysis: reading canonical male writers for proof of misogyny, analysing the power politics, the stereotyping that women characters are subjected to and their impact on readers. Slide13
1970s
More affirmative turn to female writers.
Elaine Showalter: “
gynocritics
,” - “woman as writer – with woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres, and structures of literature by women”. From the female reader’s estrangement from a male authored canon to a sense of female subculture: writer, character and reader
.Slide14
1970s
Elaine Showalter’s
A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from
Brontё
to Lessing
(1977), and Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar’s
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
(1979). On the difficulties facing women writers: overt hostilities of their male contemporaries, and internalised sense of guilt about being women intellectuals and writers. Madness as an inevitable result if women invaded the masculine
privilege of writing.
Re-reading canonical women writers and extending the female canon.
A debated issue: is there a separate female tradition or did each writer have to fight her own fight
?Slide15
Some Unresolved Dilemmas
With its own agendas and canons, does feminism also have an independent literary theory?
Are the grievances voiced by feminists representative of the experiences of women in general?
Gynocritics
reclaim
a
past for women.
Gender as one component that intersects with all the others of your identity.Slide16
Feminisms
A diversification of feminisms from the late ’70s: black feminism (e.g. Barbara Smith and bell hooks), feminist postcolonial studies and US Third World feminisms (e.g.
Gayatri
Chakravorty
Spivak
or Gloria E.
Anzaldúa
), lesbian feminism (e.g. Adrianne Rich, Bonnie Zimmerman and Judith Butler)
.Slide17
New French Feminism (’70s onwards)
Abstract academic discussions but connected to the radical movements of ’68 and also specific radical feminist groups.
Continue and complicate de Beauvoir’s description of how historically ’woman’ has been constructed as the ’other’ of man (structuralism). They use esp. Derrida and
Lacan
to deconstruct the binary code (uncover the hierarchy in the binaries).
Engagement with the theories of Jacques
Lacan
: the psychic development of the child, concentrating on the moment when it leaves behind its imaginary unity with the mother and enters into the symbolic order.
Concept of
écriture
féminine
, a peculiarly female mode of expression which is supposed to reflect the physical closeness between infant and mother. Wishing to break away from patriarchal representations and their normative function in the socialisation of boys and girls, they proposed the language of irrationality as a possible subversion of the rigours of logic. Slide18
New French Feminism 2
Hysteria was hailed as a specifically female transgressive language: chaotic , associative - antidote to literary styles and modes of philosophical reasoning which defined women as inferior to men… by celebrating the opposite of patriarchal rationality as woman’s imaginative and intellectual sphere, they alienated many women who felt that this position was a stab in the back to the longstanding struggle to have women’s rationality recognised.
Strategic essentialism: a woman’s body determines not only her identity but also a mode of writing and thinking fundamentally different from and in revolt against masculine modesSlide19
L’
écriture
féminine
Coined
in Hélène
Cixous
’s
“The
Laugh of the Medusa
”
(1976
).
“Woman
must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing… Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement.”
Using
Lacan’s
ideas that the structure of language is centred by the Phallus, and that language within the Symbolic Order is representational, where a single signifier is connected to a single signified,
Cixous
argues that the subject position of “woman” or the “feminine” is on the margins of the Symbolic, and thus less firmly anchored and controlled by the Phallus.
T
he psychoanalytic concept that woman is constituted by “lack” because of the lack of a penis. … female unconscious is less repressed, less radically separated from consciousness. Using Derrida’s idea of play,
Cixous
notes that “woman” is decentred, and therefore freer to move and create.Slide20
L’écriture
féminine
2
Feminine writing is associated with the Lacanian Real, with the maternal body, which is barred from the Symbolic Order; she associates representational writing with the Symbolic, and non-representational writing with the female and maternal bodies.
L’écriture
feminine comes from the female body, but men can write from that position as well. She describes
l’écriture
feminine through a variety of metaphors, including milk, orgasm, honey, and the ocean; she claims that
l’ecriture
feminine serves as a disruptive and deconstructive force, shaking the security and stability of the
phallogocentric
Symbolic Order, and therefore allowing more play—in gender, writing, and sexuality—for all language-using subjects.Slide21
Luce
Irigaray
(b. 1932
)
Belgian-born feminist philosopher and practicing psychoanalyst (trained with Jacques
Lacan
).
Focus on female subjectivity and language, especially the language of philosophy as the site of the exclusion or marginalisation of women.
Not patricide (Freud) but matricide is the foundational cultural act: the suppression of women/material body/nature.
Attacks Freudian and Lacanian psychology for conceptualising femininity as lack (castration). Language is the symbolic order that defines what is real to us (
Lacan
). Phallocentric language disables the
articul
a
tion
of femininity.Slide22
Luce
Irigaray
(b. 1932)
Promotes re-examining mother-daughter relationships as a hope for new female identities outside the male-dominated signifying system.
Celebrates multiplicity and
heterogenity
in the understanding of femininity and calls for a separate “
parler
femme”: a talk by, about and between women.
Also and activist in women’s movements in France and Italy.Slide23
Hélène
Cixous
(b.1937)
Theorist, poet, novelist, playwright, philosopher, and literary critic
Born in Oran, Algeria, in1937 of Spanish/French and Jewish/German descent.
Entered the English-speaking literary scene with the publication of “The
L
augh of the Medusa” (1976[1975])
Écriture
féminine
: both theory and practice. A mode of writing that represents what is repressed in the Symbolic order (Derrida and
Lacan
). Revolutionary
articu
l
ation
of non
-
hierarchical difference as opposed to a phallocentric language based on binary oppositions like man/woman, mind/body, self/other, where the first term is invariable dominant.Slide24
Hélène
Cixous
2
Writing that echoes the rhythms and processes of women’s bodies, writing that is forceful and fluid, writing that undermines the unitary, authorial “I,” opening space for multiple voices and perspectives within a single text.
Based on the body (essentialist?), but more about behaviour: ways of relating. Masculine: censorship, order, and binary logic vs. Feminine: censorship, order, and binary logic. Not mutually exclusive: men can potentially enter into feminine relational modes (bisexuality: both potentials present in individuals).
Exemplary of revolutionary writing are men, such as Shakespeare and Franz Kafka. Later
Cixous
discovers the Brazilian writer Clarice
Lispector
.Slide25
Julia
Kristeva
(b. 1941)
Writer, theorist and literary critic, also trained as a
psychoanalyst
(contributor to
Tel
Quel
with e.g. Barthes and Foucault
)
.
To restore the body and psychic life to structuralist theories of language.
“Semiotic” experience prior to
Lacan’s
“symbolic” order of language:
extra
-
linguistic
bodily desires and psychic drives which emerge in language through indicators like rhythm, tone, metaphor, and figure. Social life is conducted through the symbolic order of language, which is rigid, strictly coherent, and authoritative (Freudian Law of the Father). The semiotic is feminine and associated with maternal attachment. Infant induction into the symbolic realm of language: suppression of the Semiotic, rejection of the mother
.Slide26
Julia
Kristeva
2
The preverbal child and the poet offer semiotic expressions that derail symbolic order, engaging in imaginative and radical practices that contest the coherent authority of language. Poetry is particularly capable of semiotic signification, insofar as the creative manipulations of tone, pitch, cadence, rhythm, and metaphor express the
unconscious
.
Kristeva
aligns semiotic expression to anti-authoritarianism, pitching a creative femininity against the rigid masculinity of the symbolic.
Linguistically coherent subject is constituted by the “abjection” of this original maternal relationship, theorizing that the subsequent sexual discrimination and oppression of women both derives from and repeats this original
abjection
.Slide27
The abject
“
A
bjection
”
refers
to
the
negative reaction by which a
subject
severs
themselves
from
an
object
with
which
they
were in contact, is critical in the
formation
of
infant identity. It entails an
affective
repulsion
registered
bodily
pre-Oedipal
child is
en
route
to
language
and
the law of the father which
necessarily
entails
the supplanting of the
mother.
Although
the maternal function
leaves
women
abject, Kristeva notes that it
also
endows
them with the radical potential
of
the
semiotic body.
Abjection
is the “
civilized”
response
to anything that reminds us of the drives and desires
we
have
thrown into the unconscious through repression during
the
Oedipal
phase of development. The abject is what culture
throws
away
, its garbage, or its waste products;
e.g
.
excrement, blood (especially menstrual blood),
and
dead
bodies. Slide28
The abject
Things that
are abject create a feeling of horror or disgust in the adult civilized
viewer because they remind him or her of the time before differentiated
selfhood; they threaten to dissolve the boundaries of the self
and to return the viewer to a non-differentiated state of
egolessness
that is frightening to the self.
(
Horror films
)