Feminist Theory: A Comprehensive Guide to Key Concepts and Figures
Chapter 6 – Feminism
Mary
Wollstonecraft – A vindication of the rights of women (1792)
Virgina Woolf – A room of ones own (1929)
Mary Ellmanns – Thinking about women (1968)
Kate Millet – Sexual Politics (1970)
Toril Moi – Images of women [feminist literary criticism, norweigan]
The Indian Gayatri Chaktrovrty Spivak – Critique
Alison Bechdel – Dykes to watch out for [comic strip]
Simone de Beauvoir – The Second Sex (1949) [french philosopher]
Gayle Rubin – Sex/Gender System (1975)
Judith Butler – Philosopher
Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva [French]
Nina Baym –
Sandra Gilbert – The Mad woman in the attic: The women writer & the 19th
Century literary imagination (1979) (Gubar too)
Susan Gubar –
Charlotte Bronte – Jayne Eyre
Elaine Showalter [English]
Laura Mulvey – Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) [feminist criticsm,
Article]
Feminism:
About taking women seriously and respectfully. Sets out to reverse a pattern &
History of not taking women seriously, a pattern so deeply engrained it can
Feel like a mere truth.
Misogyny:
What some feminists call
The habit of not taking women seriously.
It is part of a broader cultural history & practice of centering on
Men while underestimating women, which feminists dub patriarchy
First Wave Feminism:
Focused on women’s education, rights like the right to
Own property and the right to vote. (Wollerstonecraft)
Second Wave:
Defined itself along a
Broader cultural agenda. While in
Practical politics, second wave often concentrated on equal rights, concentrating
More on the distinctiveness and specialness of women. Focused on a sense of sisterhood and shared identity among
All women
Cultural feminism
Claimed a woman’s
Culture that was kinder, gentler and more peace than the dominant culture
Difference feminism
Less interested
In equal rights than establishing women’s difference and superiority.
Third Wave:
Objects to 2nd
Wave feminism as essentialist and sought instead to build a feminism that
Focused more on the variety of women, making a point of including women of all
Races and building coalitions across racial and national boundaries. 3rd wave often engaged with
The anti essentialist impulses of deconstruction.
Images of Women Criticism:
Judges a
Work according to whether it proves “positive images” of women. If it portrays good women, then
According to this criticism, it is a good film, novel, song, etc. If it does not portray good women, it
Is seen as bad. This is limiting
And old fashioned because it implies that women characters must be good roles
Models. Feminist writing,
Characters can come in all kinds of good, bad, or too unrealistic to be good or
Bad
The Bechdel Test:
Gauges the
Individual characters less than the film itself, play, novel or any other work
With a plot. Alison Bechdel
Proposed 3 criteria for judging a film as worth watching.
1) must have 2 women
2) they must talk to each other
3) must be talking about something
Other than a man.
With the risk and the advantages of prescribing specific but refreshingly
Simple standards, the Bechdel test shows that even while we may want to
Question the limits of images-of women feminist criticism, we may do well to keep
It as one possible consideration among whatever other critical questions we go
On to ask.
Prescriptive Realism
Tells writers
How to write, prescribing how they should write rather than describing how they
Do write.
Prescriptive realists tell writers
That they should present realistic characters or ones that offer “positive”
Role models.
The authority of experience:
The
Assumption that one kind of experience is authoritative, as in the statement “
As a women I know what sexist means “, where as to many feminists, including
Post structuralists, experience varies, and so does the interpretation of any
Given experience. Experience is
Never stable. It is always
Mediated by culture, which leads different people to understand and experience
In different ways.
Expanding the canon:
Feminist
Criticism began by studying the often disturbing images of women in literature
Written by men and opposing those images to the authority of women’s
Experience, but the concentration on writing by men quickly came to seem as
Limiting as the idea that women had all the same experience. The traditional set to literature came
To be called the canon. Feminist
Critics of all colours and heritages set to expand the canon.
Women as victims vs. Women as agents:
By setting out to expose the abuse of patriarchy, early feminism & early
Feminist criticism sometimes seemed to see women mainly as objects and as
Victims. Womens “subjectivity” and
Their “agency” meaning, their ability to imagine and shape their own
Lives.
Simone de Beauvior:
“One is not
Born, but rather becomes a woman” Sex: what one is born with and the word
gender describes as what one becomes. Use the term female and male to refer to
sex, masculine and feminine for gender.
This way of thinking, sex comes from biology and anatomy, while
Contemporary feminists theory usually sees gender as the constructed product of
Culture rather than the natural, inevitable power of biology.
French & Anglo American Feminisms:
3 influential writers Helene Cixous,
Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva
They each see the predominant language as masculine, or phallogencentric and
They try to each imagine feminine alternatives to phallogencentric language.
Helene Cixous
Argues feminine
Writing, has its source in the infants prelinguistc relation to the mother,
Before the infant establishes boundaries & differentiations btwn the self
And the rest of the world around it, that is, before the onset of what Lacan
Calls the symbolic. The free play
Of language and linguistic celebration of the body evoke the prelinguistic
Relation to the mother. A women’s
Voice, “physically maternalizes” what she’s thinking, she signifies with her
Mother body.
Luce Irigaray:
advocates a specifically woman’s
Language that she sees in the language of women’s pleasures and in the bodily
Shape of women’s sexuality.
Julia Krisetva:
describes what she
Calls the chora or semiotic, based on
The fetus’s prelinguistic relation to the mother in the womb. By connecting women’s writing to the
Prelinguistic relation to the mother, she & cixous suggest that women’s
Writing flows in rhythms outside the stultifying logic and systemizing of language
And linguistic structures. They
See women’s writing as evoking a freedom and unpredictability that they believe
Acculturated, rule bound language tries to exile from our imaginations. These women ask whether women and men
Think & write in contrasting ways, and if they do, then why?
Monique Witting:
“Lesbians are not
Women” The very idea of gender, including the very idea of women & men
Depends on taking heterosexual norms for granted. She rejects 2nd wave feminist claims for a
Specific women’s culture, seeing them as depending on the sexist divisions btwn
Gender that they set out to oppose.
Argues that lesbians have no place in heterosexual way of thinking that
Naturalizes heterosexuality and centers on the experience of men. Therefore, she believes the very
Presence of lesbians exposes the fraud in those heterosexual assumptions. Abolish distinction btwn men and women
All together.
English Writing Critiques:
Nina
Baym, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Elaine Showalter
Feminists of colour
Alice Walker, Chandra Talapade Mohanty,
Kimberle Crenshaw & the contributors to This Bridge Called My back:
Writings by Radical Women of Colour.
Edited by Cherrie Moraga & Gloria Andaldua
Womanism
Alice Walker, proposed it
As an alternative term to rename a feminists or womanists that still use the
Term womanism, it has a lower profile than the rethinking o the feminist
Ethnocentrism that walker, talapade, etc have encouraged.
Kimberele Crenshaw
Concept of intersectionality underlies the need for feminists to move beyond
Thinking of women as if they were ordinarily white and underlies the need the
Include gender with other categories of identity. She studies obstacles that black women face when the law
& courts respond to prejudice against women by seeing all women as if they
Were men. Argues that such
Approaches overlook the specific compound position of black women.
Defamiliarization:
allows the reader to recognize and
Laugh at, and perhaps look critically at, patterns of gender that get so taken
For granted that our readers might not have thought much about them before –
Including patterns of self rationalization or self serving.
Laura Mulvey:
help us consider
Feminist film criticism, as well as feminist literary and culture
Criticism. Describe classic
Hollywood cinema as organized around a binary opposition btwn masculine
Spectator (the subject), and feminine spectated (the object). The spectator enacts what has
Been come to be called, the gaze.
The masculine subject gazes, and the feminine object is gazed at.
Subjective camera
Refers to camera
Work that looks as if through the eyes of a character, thus constructing a
Visual focalizer, like the focalizer in verbal narrative.
Shot/reverse shot
Editing that
Invites us to look through the eyes of a character. Subjective camera & shot/reverse leads audiences to look
Through the eyes of an actor/actress, identifying with the actors gaze at the
Actress. The process she sometimes
Called the masculinization of
Spectators, b/c through gendering the camera and the editing, the
Conventions of film can sway spectators, women & men both, into identifying
With a masculine subject position (stance or point of view)
Technological determinism:
the idea
That a given technology produces a predictable result.
Intersectionality
Gains special
Force for feminist inquiry in black studies. The concept of intersectionality has everything to do with
The interdisciplinary ethos of contemporary feminist theory.