Feminist Criticism

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

Rebecca West, 1913

Author and critic

Two terms that sometimes cause confusion

SEX: biological constitution as female or male

GENDER: our cultural encoding as feminine or masculine. We can envision gender identity as an evolving process.

Discussion

What are your assumptions or preconceptions about feminist criticism?

When you hear the term, does it have negative or positive connotations?

What do you think radical feminism means?

People often say, “feminism has gone to far.” What might be too far?

What might a feminist critic ponder?

Some similarities to Marxism.

Texts exist as commentary on a cultural framework that directly relates to and affects notions of gender.

Patriarchy is one ideology that many cultures have used to create social distinctions and hierarchies.

Patriarchy is the privileging of the male perspective as the only valid perspective, effectively limiting or abolishing women’s ability to define themselves as women or people

Power structures in patriarchal societies reinforce this ideology through the institutionalized marginalizing of women .

What questions would I ask?

Is there a hidden subplot that emphasizes gender issues? Is the text narrated by a male or female? What types of roles do women have in the text? Are the female characters the protagonists or secondary and

minor characters? Do any stereotypical characterizations of women appear? What are the attitudes toward women held by the male

characters? What is the author’s attitude toward women in society? How does the author’s culture influence his or her attitude? What is the role of marriage? Do the female characters speak differently than do the male

characters? Compare the frequency of speech for the male characters to the frequency of speech for the female characters.

How is the plot concluded? Is there closure based on gender roles?

What would my feminist thesis look like?

Literature, as a cultural product, can either reinforce or resist the patriarchal influences in society

The goal of the feminist critic is to reveal ways in which particular texts interact with issues of gender and patriarchy

A feminist thesis would reflect a knowledge of feminist theory along with an understanding of how the text in question relates to the operation of patriarchal ideology and institutions in culture.

Feminism

The theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.

Feminist Criticism

Examines ways in which literature reinforces or undermines the oppression of women.

Economically

Socially

Politically

Psychologically

Patriarchy

social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line; broadly : control by men of a disproportionately large share of power

a society or institution organized according to the principles or practices of patriarchy

Any system of culture that privileges men by promoting traditional gender roles.

Traditional, however, is a word fraught

with difficulties

Traditional Gender Roles

Men

Rational

Strong

Protective

Decisive

Women

Emotional (irrational)

Weak

Nurturing

Submissive

Traditional gender roles have been used successfully to justify inequities such as excluding women from equal access to leadership and decision-making positions and paying men higher wages than women for doing the same job.

The Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)

Married to William Godwin, political activist and anarchist who attacked aristocratic privilege

Mother of Mary Shelley

The Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)

“Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives.”

The Gaze

In Ways of Seeing (1972) Berger insisted that women were still “depicted in a different way to men - because the "ideal" spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him” (64).

Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at (45).

Holbein, The Ambassadors, 1533 and the anamorphic perspective

Renaissance Painting

Women in Painting and Ads (Ingres, Jupiter and Thetis, 1811; Memling, Vanity, 1495)

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

Madwoman in the Attic (1979)

Initiated a revision of the way we read literature.

Analyze literature in relationship to the myths created by men and challenge such myths.

Initiated a revision of how we determine the canon, beginning with their analysis of Jane Eyre.

They asserted that women are either depicted as angels or monsters.

Feminist Criticism

No one critical theory of writing dominates feminist criticism; few theorists agree upon a unifying feminist approach to textual analysis.

American: textual, stressing repression

British: Marxist, stressing oppression

French: psychoanalytic, stressing repression

Feminist Criticism

Asserts that most of our literature presents a masculine-patriarchal view in which the role of women is negated or at best minimized.

Feminist View

Attempts to show that writers of traditional literature have ignored women and have transmitted misguided and prejudiced views of them;

Attempts to stimulate the creation of a critical environment that reflects a balanced view of the nature and value of women;

Feminist View

Attempts to recover the works of women writers of past times and to encourage the publication of present women writers so that the literary canon may be expanded to recognize women as thinkers and artists; and

Urges transformations in the language to eliminate inequities and inequalities that result from linguistic distortions.

Christian Theology and Feminist Theory

Or is our faith expanded, and we see new ways to think about literature?

All theories, in all disciplines, are not entirely neutral or objective.

As Dan Coleman has discussed in In Bed With the Word, we must risk being vulnerable to a text’s possibilities, even uncomfortable ones, if we wish to have respect for literature as an act of God’s creation.

If the exposure of oppression is one of the principles of feminism, then don’t we have a responsibility as Christians to listen with our full critical faculties?

Judith Butler: Gender and Queer Theory

Teaches at Berkeley

Known as a deconstruction feminist

Butler argues that feminism had made a mistake by trying to assert that 'women' were a group with common characteristics and interests.

Judith Butler: Gender and Queer Theory

Rather than opening up possibilities for a person to form and choose their own individual identity, therefore, feminism had closed the options down by reinforcing a binary view of gender relations.

David Halperin (University of Michigan) says, “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.”

It is not (necessarily) just a view on sexuality, or gender. It also suggests that the confines of any identity can potentially be reinvented by its owner.

The determined, forced identity affects those burdened by race, ethnicity, or even age.

What does it mean to not fit into gender classifications?

“Identity categories tend to be instrument of regulatory regimes…I would like to have it permanently unclear what precisely that sign signifies” (1707-08)

What are the benefits (or disadvantages) of not declaring one’s identity?

What does it mean to not fit into gender classifications?

What are the benefits (or disadvantages) of not declaring one’s identity?

And is “normative” necessarily a social construct?

And if it is, is this always a bad thing?

Prospero in The Tempest describes Caliban (and indirectly Miranda) as someone “on whose nature nurture can never stick.”

In other words, is being a woman express an inborn, natural disposition?

What does it mean to not fit into gender classifications?

Prospero in The Tempest describes Caliban (and indirectly Miranda) as someone “on whose nature nurture can never stick.”

In other words, is being a woman express an inborn, natural disposition?

To be a lesbian, then, is to defy a very particular, essentialized notion of what it means to be a “woman.”

You may be marginalized, but there is also a certain creative freedom in that marginalization.

What does it mean to not fit into gender classifications?

In other words, is being a woman express an inborn, natural disposition?

To be a lesbian, then, is to defy a very particular, essentialized notion of what it means to be a “woman.”

You may be marginalized, but there is also a certain creative freedom in that marginalization.

In this sense, we compose our lives in shifting discourses to reveal what Butler would call the “performance” of identity.

Ways of Seeing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1GI8mNU5Sg