Feminism Activism Feminism describes the campaigns, activities, and texts concerned with - PowerPoint Presentation

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

)