Feminist Criticism and Theory Today.

Feminist Criticism and Theories

Feminism is a type of literary criticism that became a dominant force in Western literary studies and was not inaugurated until 1960s. In general it is a voice against the victory of the male principle of intellect brings to an end the reign of the sensual Furies, emotions and asserts the domination of patriarchy over matriarchy.( Aristotle’s declaration that ‘the female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities.’ The belief of St. Thomas Aquinas that woman is an ‘imperfect man’.) Setting aside the word ‘political’ for a moment it requires focusing upon the paired concepts of sex and gender. Sex refers to the determining of identity on the basis of biological category, while gender stands for ‘the cultural meaning attached to sexual identity.’ With the help of some theoretical stands one can evaluate the major aspects related to the movement.

· Feminist criticism, in all its many and various manifestations, has also attempted to free itself from naturalized patriarchal nations of the literary and the literary-critical.

· A new knowledge about the embodiment of women drawing on psychoanalytic, linguistic and social theories about gender construction and difference.

· Amongst ‘five-waves’- the first wave consists two significant names such as –

Virginia Woolf – in Mary Eagleton’s phrase

‘The founding mother of the contemporary debate’

Simone de Beauvoir with whose Le Deuxieme Sexe or The Second Sex(1949) Maggie Human suggests, the ‘first wave may be said to end’

· Virginia Woolf’s creative writing contributed to her fame.

Such as, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929), Three Guineas (1938)

· As the major theory of the first wave her work is concerned with women’s material disadvantages compared to men.

· Her major contribution to feminism is her recognition that gender identity is socially constructed and can be challenged and transformed.

· According to Toril Moi, Woolf is not interested in a ‘balance’ but in total displacement of fixed gender identities.

· In her essay ‘Professions of Women’ she thinks that women wrote differently not because they were different psychologically from men but because their social positioning was different.

· Here one can observe the overlapping of class and gender.

· Simone de Beauvoir :- A French feminist, life long partner of Jean-Paul Sartre, Pro-abortion and women’s rights activist in her The Second Sex(1949) assaults on men’s biological and psychological as well as economical, discrimination of female gender.

· French Feminists draw on the ideas of French psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, and reminded us that the language is a realm of public discourse. All children learn to speak a language structured in accordance with binary oppositions (dichotomous terms) such as masculine/feminine, father/mother, son/daughter,

· Woman tries to define herself, no man would do so.

· Man is the ‘One’ and she the ‘Other’

· De Beauvoir sees an interaction between social and natural functions as,

‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature… Only the intervention of someone else can establish an individual as an Other’.

Second Wave:-

· Betty Friedman’s – The Feminine Mystique in 1963 reveals the frustrations of white heterosexual, middle- class American women – careerless and trapped in domesticity.

· Its focal emphasis shifts to the politics of reproduction, to women’s ‘experience’, to sexual ‘difference’ and to ‘Sexuality’, as at once a form of oppression and something to celebrate.

· Five main foci are involved in most discussions of sexual discussion nowadays as,

(1) Biology (2) Experience (3) Discourse (4) The unconscious and (5) Social and economic condition.

· The old Latin saying “Tota Mulier in Utero’ women is nothing but womb.”

· The third focus is upon that women have been fundamentally oppressed by a male dominated language. If we accept Michel Foucault’s argument that what is ‘true’ depends on who controls discourse.

Kale Millett:-

· Her argument ranges from History, literature, psychoanalysis, Sociology and other areas.

· Patriarchy subordinates the female to the male or treats the female as an inferior to male, and this power is exerted, directly or indirectly, in civil and domestic life to constrain women.

· Determining the sex – biological where gender – psychologically.

Marxist feminism:-

· Marxist feminism’s primary task was to open up the complex relations between gender and the economy.

· Juliet Mitchell, Sheila Rawbotham and Cora Kaplan.

Elaine Showalter: Gynocriticism:-

· Elaine Showalter in her A literature of Their Own (1977) outlines a literary history of women writers and promotes both a feminist critique (concerned with women readers) and a ‘gynocritics’(concerned with women writers).

French Feminism:- Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray:-

· French feminist theoreticians in particular, in seeking to break down conventional, male constructed stereotypes of sexual difference, have focused on language as at once the domain in which such stereotypes are structured, and evidence of the liberating sexual difference which may be described in a specifically ‘women’s language’.

Feminist Criticism and Theory Today.

Saturday, October 6, 2012

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Feminist Criticism and Theory Today.: Feminist Criticism a...

Friday, October 5, 2012