Feminist criticism

1
Feminist criticism

• Materials from Selden, Raman and Peter Widdowson.
  A Readers Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory.
  3rd ed. Lexington UP of KY, 1993.

2
First Wave

• Virginia Woolf A Room of Ones Own (1929) and
  Three Guineas(1938)
• material disadvantages of women
• women collude in their own victimization by being
  looking glasses for reflecting mens desired
  images
• gender identity-socially constructed
• women write differently because of social
  positioning (goal androgyny)

3

• Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex (1949)
• man as one woman as other
• distinguishes between sex (biological) and gender
  (social)
• patriarchy will be destroyed when women break out
  of their objectification
• distrusts femininity

4
Second Wave

• Women celebrate biological attributes as sources
  of superiority
• Experiences exclusive to women are source of
  positive values
• Male discourse must be contested or used
  subversively
• Women must tap into the unconscious, which
  initiates free play of meaning (as per Lacan and
  Kristeva)
• Women must change balance of power

5
Second Wave

• Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique (1963)
• NOW in 1966
• white, heterosexual, middle-class American women

6

• Germaine Greer The Female Eunuch (1970)
• women neutralized within patriarchy
• Kate Millet Sexual Politics (1969)
• pushed for womens studies courses, womens
  bookstores, etc
• could never see male authors views as having
  worth

7

• Toril Moi Sexual/Textual Politics (1985)
• examines (and names) Anglo-American Feminist
  Criticism (noting its critical approach to
  individual texts) and French Feminist Theory
  (noting its theoretical approach to the process
  of writing)

8

• Elaine Showalter A Literature of Their Own
  (1977)--creates three phases
• Feminine (1840-80) women imitated the dominant
  male aesthetic standards, remained gentlewomen
• Feminist (1880-1920) women protest male values,
  advocate separatist sisterhoods
• Female (1920--) women create female writing in
  self-discovery

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Showalters gynocriticism

• Specificity of womens writings
• Recuperation of women authors
• Examination of womens own culture

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• Helene Cixous lecriture feminine
• writing effect of the text
• not the gender of the writer
• the textualizing of the woman
• playfulness and pleasure in the text (Barthes
  jouissance)

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Cixous idea on playfulness

• Such transgressions of the laws of phallocentric
  discourse is the woman writers special task, and
  having always operated within male-dominated
  discourse, she needs to invent for herself a
  language to get inside of.

12

• Luce Irigaray Speculum de lautre femme (1974)
• women are mystic, slipping through patriarchal
  net
• men are sight oriented women, touch oriented

13

• Alice Jardine gynesis
• the nonknowledge or feminine space which
  the master narratives contain, but cannot control
• putting into discourse that other--woman

14
Third wave (notes from Yvonne Abrahams article
on Rebecca Walker)

• Contrast to second wave
• too many demands
• too much pressure to be independent
• too much emphasis on professional over personal
• too political

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More Third Wave

• Womens private lives, front and center
• Celebrate womens freedom
• Assume they have many choices
• Individuality
• decentralized feminism
• world is now kind to women
• apathetic to womens traditional causes