Presented by Nazila Manafi

Professor : Mrs. Dr.Jamali

LITERATURE ,GENDER ,FEMINIST CRITICISM

Gendered Options

Sex Biological distinction of being male or female

Gender Social distinctions of being masculine or feminine

Feminisms and Feminist Literary Criticism: Definitions

Patriarchal culture

First-, Second-, and Third-Wave FeminismsFirst-wave (19th century)—political rights (Wollstonecraft, Stanton)

Second-wave (post-World War II)—gender equality (de Beauvoir, Millet, Friedan, Gilbert and Gubar)

Third-wave (1990s to present)—broader group of women included (Anzaldúa, hooks, Sandoval, Rebecca Walker, Rich)

Role of Third-Space women, maternalist studies (especially black maternalist studies)—Morrison, Alice Walker, O’Reilly

The Literary Woman: Created or Constructed?

Elaine Showalter

Elaine Showalter has identified three phases of modern women’s literary development: the

feminine phase (1840-80), during which women writers

imitated the dominant male traditions;

The Literary WomanShowalter’s three phases of feminism: the “feminine” (women writers imitate men), the “feminist” (women advocated minority rights and protested), the “female” (focus is now on women’s texts)

Showalter’s four models of sexual difference: biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic, and cultural

Essentialist and constructivist feminisms

Showalter’s four models of difference: biological,

linguistic, psychoanalytic, and cultural

-Today it seems that two general tendencies, one emphasizing Showalter’s biological, linguistic, and psychoanalytic models, and the other emphasizing cultural model, account for most feminist theories.

-Certain theories may be said to have an essentialist argument for inherent feminine traits that have been undervalued, misunderstood, or exploited by a patriarchal culture because the genders are quite different.

-These theories focus on sexual difference and sexual politics and are often aimed at defining or establishing a feminist literature (and culture, history and so forth) from a less patriarchal slant.

-Opposed to this notion is constructivist feminism, which asks women (and men) to consider what it means to be a woman, to consider that inherently female traits are in fact culturally and socially constructed.

A. Feminism and

B. Feminists of Color

C. Marxist and

Materialist Feminisms

D. Feminist Film Studies

A. Feminism and PsychoanalysisFrench feminism and l’ecriture feminine

Influence of Freud and LacanIrigaray, Cixous, Kristeva

B. Feminists of ColorFeminists of color, like lesbian feminists, have

different concerns than mainstream white heterosexual woman, often competing; new voices,

such as modern slave narrative; postcolonialism and the subaltern woman (Spivak); Anzaldúa, “The New

Mestiza”

Hélène Cixous

Hélène Cixous proposes a utopia place, a primeval female space free

of symbolic order, sex roles, otherness, and

the Law of Father.

The feminine “language” of the unconscious destabilizes sexual categories in the

Symbolic Order of the Father, disrupting the unities of discourse and indicating its silencings. French feminists speak of

“exploding” rather than interpreting a sign.

Luce Irigaray

Luce Irigaray. No mater how

theoretical and abstract French feminists’ prose becomes, French feminist do nota stay far from the

body.

Luce Irigaray etymologically links the word “matter” to “maternity” and “matrix,” the latter being the space for male philosophizing and thinking.

Jacques LacanJacques Lacan comes to the notion of the Imaginary, a pre-Oedipal stage in which the child has not yet differentiated her- or himself from the mother and as a consequence has not learned language, which is the Symbolic Order to be taught be the father.

Like Freud, Jacques Lacan describes the unconscious as structured like a language; like language its power often arises from the sense of openness and play of meaning.

bell hook is a famous critic who challenges the traditional canon.

Black feminists have often turned to the slave narrative and the captivity narrative, both old American forms of discourse, as of especial importance to black women writers.

Sandra Gilbert

C. Marxist and Materialist FeminismsLower-class women have a different view of feminist goals as opposed to middle- and upper-middle-class women; debate between Marxist and materialist feminisms

D. Feminist Film Studies“Male gaze”; social construction of female identity (Marx); Mulvey and de Lauretis

Gender StudiesGender Studies: false binaries; Queer Theory; Sedgwick and Warner

Feminist Film StudiesTeresa de Lauretis and Laura MulveyLaura Mulvey’s insight in the “male gaze” which she describes is based upon

Voyeurism and fetishism,the only available pleasure (usually) being the male one of looking at women’s bodies for sexual cues.

Ex. In films like Charlie’s Angels (2002) and Monster (2003), and Kill Bill (2003, 2004)

Gender StudiesFalse binaries

Queer Theory

Sedgwick and Warner

As a constructivist endeavor, gender

studies examines how gender is less

determined by nature than it is by culture, and such a cultural analysis is at the center of the most complex and vital

critical enterprises at the present time.

Many theorists point out that what is “normal” sexually depends upon when and where one lives

Lesbian critics reject the notion of a unified text,

finding corroboration in poststructuralist and post modernist

criticism and among the French

feminists.

Lesbian critics counter their

marginalization by considering lesbianism a

privileged stance testifying to the primacy of women

C. “The Workshop of Filthy Creation”: Men and Women in Frankenstein

Femininity = Life, Masculinity = Death; Victor appropriates female role but fails

1. Mary and Percy, Author and EditorIn Mary’s life, due to her miscarriages and the suicides of family members, death and life were horribly mixed; novel is artistic resistance by a woman against a patriarchal family, husband, and society; Percy’s role is debatable

2. Masculinity and Femininity in the Frankenstein FamilyFamily, gender, and parental roles are skewed

3. “I Am Thy Creature. . .”Victor fails at being a father to the Creature: “’I was thy Adam’”

A. The Marble Vault: The Mistress in “To His Coy Mistress”

Grotesque attack on female body disguised as a love lyric

B. Frailty, Thy Name Is Hamlet: Hamlet and Women

Hamlet cannot resolve his Oedipus Complex to become a mature man

He loathes the female body

Heilbrun on Gertrude: how we read Gertrude determines how we read Hamlet

D. Men, Women, and the Loss of Faith in “Young Goodman

Brown”

Hawthorne’s women characters are superior to his male

characters; story’s sexuality

E. Women and “Sivilization” in Huckleberry Finn

Strong women characters like Mrs. Loftus; Jim’s maternalism

F. “In Real Life”: Recovering the Feminine Past in “Everyday

Use”

Motherhood and sisterhood; quilt as symbol of black women’s

creativity and family history; narrator: a womanist

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986): The Second Sex

Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908 to a bourgeois family. Like her famous companion, Jean-Paul Sartre, whom she was met at

the École Normale Supérieure, she was an acclaimed French existentialist philosopher who wrote fiction and memoirs, as well

as Philosophy. The Second Sex (1949)– Woman as a social construction– No “natural” distinction between the sexes "one is

not born, one becomes a woman” .

Woman as a construct "If the definition provided for this concept [of the

eternal feminine] is contradicted by the behavior of flesh-

and- blood women, it is the latter who are wrong: we are told not that

Femininity is a false entity, but that the women

concerned are not feminine.”

In her most influential book, The Second Sex

(1949), de Beauvoir argued that women have been defined by men and that if they attempt to break with this,

they risk alienating

themselves.

A Brief History of Women’s Rights in the United States

1700s

American colonial law held that “by marriage, the husband and wife are one person in the law. The very being and legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated into that of her husband under whose wing and protection she performs everything.” By 1777, women are denied the right to vote in all states in the United States.

1800sIn Missouri v. Celia (1855), a slave, a black woman, is declared to be property without the right to defend herself against a master’s act of rape. In 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment is passed by Congress (ratified by the states in 1868). It is the first time “citizens” and “voters” are defined as male in the U.S. Constitution.1900sIn 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified. It declares, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” In 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment is introduced in Congress in the United States. In 1963, the Equal Pay Act is passed by the U.S. Congress, promising equitable wages for the same work, regardless of the race, color, religion, national origin, or sex of the worker. In 1982, the Equal Rights Amendment, which had languished in Congress for fifty years, is defeated, falling three states short of the thirty-eight needed for ratification. (National Women’s History Project n.d.; Jo Freeman, American Journal of Sociology, in Goodwin and Jasper 2004)

Radical FeministsKate Millett (a founder of NOW) Sexual Politics “The personal is political”

• MEN, not just the patriarchy, at fault because all men benefit from women’s oppression.

• patriarchal assumptions permeate all social institutions--including marriage, family, love, heterosexuality etc.Loosely organized groups calling for complete restructuring of society:

• Betty Friedan (NOW); Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem, Susan Steinmetz; Pam Allen and Shulamith Firestone--the famous “bra burning” protest at Miss America Contest in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on Sep 7, 1968.

Susan Brownmiller Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape

• “Rape is the act of terror by which all men control all women”• Journalist/ Humanities like many others

Feminist SchoolsMarxist-feminism focus on destruction of capitalism as way to liberate women.

Lesbian feminism Lesbian-feminist politics is a political critique of the institution and ideology of heterosexuality as a cornerstone of male supremacy Rita Mae Brown, Charlotte Bunch, TiGrace Atkinson, McKinnon, Andrea Dworkin--Amer. Hert. dict. & Violence Against Women Act-- Adrienne Rich “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1980)

Humanist feminism women’s oppression is the inhibition and distortion of women’s human potential by a society that allows the self-development of men.

Black feminism reaction by black women to the middle-class, white dominance of the feminist movement. bell hooks, Audre Lorde.

Eco-feminism combination of radical feminism, the ecology movement, and secular humanism.

Anarcha-feminism Emma Goldman--anti-hierarchal, anti-authoritarian-- rid the society of dominance-submission of all kinds, including sexism, race, classism, lookism, ableism, etc.

A Feminist critic would analyze Juno. These pictures depict her as: confident, powerful, equal, firm, at peace, dauntless, self-sufficient, co-owning, secure, judged but able to withstand, even bolder than her “man”

Foucault’s Notion

Foucault’s declarations in The History of Sexuality (1976) that “Homosexuality

appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy to a kind of

interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul . The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a “species”, inspired much of

gay theory.

A Feminist critic would analyze Twilight. These pictures depict her as: insecure, submissive, dependent, reliant, protected, main but lesser, sustained by, accessory, strong because of, empowered by, obedient, even slavish

Judith Butler

Studies that focus on gender also challenge essentializing feminist discourse and its proposition that (women’s)

gendered identities are ‘real’ or ‘natural’ or occupy a pre-social or pre-civilizational realm which lies in close bond with nature. Judith Butler proposes gender be considered as a signifying practice: we ‘do’ or ‘perform’ gender, relying

on the repetition of words and acts.

Gay and lesbian studies

Gay and lesbian studies have found common cause with the feminists as well as with gender theorists, gay and lesbian theory has trained its sights on gender formations as a whole, arguing that “heterosexuality can be understood as forming a continuum with homosexuality” since “the male bonding that sutures patriarchy is necessarily homophilic and forms a continuum with homosexuality”

Traditional gender or sexual binaries were

unstable, variable and historically contingent pointed the way towards

queer theory .

Queer theory

an approach to literary and cultural study that rejects traditional categories of gender and sexuality

Ms. SedgwickQueer theory, which Ms. Sedgwick developed along with

Judith Butler, a professor at the University of California, Berkley, is a prism through which scholars

examine literary texts. Queer theorists scorn traditional definitions of ''homosexual'' and

''heterosexual.'' There is no strict demarcation between male and female, they argue. Instead, queer theorists say, taking their cue from the historian

Michel Foucault, sexuality exists on a continuum, with some people preferring sex partners of the opposite sex, others preferring partners of both sexes. Only since the 19th century, queer theorists argue, have sexual definitions become rigid. And along with this

rigidity, they say, has come anxiety, panic and intensifying homophobic attitudes.

In the late 1960s, gay and lesbian scholars silent regarding their sexuality or the presence of homosexual

themes in literature began to speak. Their work brings into

being a new school of gender theory in the 1980s. Gender

critics, inspired by Foucault’s work on the history of

sexuality, began to study gender and sexuality as discursive and

historical institutions.

Gender Theory and Gay/Lesbian Studies

Queer Theory- which linked gay/lesbian scholarship to such public concerns as HIV/AIDS. Gender and gay/lesbian

theorists are concerned with unearthing a hidden tradition of homosexual writing and with examining the

gender dynamics of canonical literature .

THE OPPOSITION BETWEEN HETEROSEXUAL AND Homosexual

Heterosexuality contains a moment of homosexuality, when the child identifies with the parent of the same sex, or when heterosexual men relate to each other while competing over women , and homosexuality comprises both masculinity and femininity , in mixed and variable amounts.

Moll Flanders feminist novel

Told from the point of view of her lover, the story covers Moll's early wish to be a man, later acceptance of her unique brand of femaleness, and some of her famous adventures. What I loved most about this book was its determined effort not to be tragic.

Historical novels with lesbian characters often involve

physical/psychological abuse, isolation, and sadness. This Novel have the lighthearted tone and happy ending of this book. The lady of the house had two sons as well as two daughters. The first was "a gay gentleman that knew the town as well as the country," and he began to subtly take notice of Moll, speaking well of her to his sisters when he

knew she was in earshot.

Moll or Mrs.FlandersShe and her female friends are all notably women on their own: the stereotype of young girls being married to young men according to the arrangements made by their powerful parents does not hold. Here She had all the liberty and all the opportunity to be gay and appear in company that She could desire, her landlord's sister being one of the maddest, gayest things alive, and not so much mistress of her virtue as She thought as first she had been.

THANK YOU APRIL ,2014