Feminisms

1
Feminisms

• 1. women's positions in patriarchal society and
  discourses
• 2. history of feminist movement writings
• 3. Feminisms and Gender Studies Radical
  Feminism, French Feminism, Post-Feminism, Lesbian
  Feminism, Taiwanese Feminisms

2
Feminist Movements

• 1. Liberalist equality in the public sphere
  (e.g. workplace, civil rights, education, money)
• --Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights
  of Woman
• -- John Stwart Mill The Subjection of Women
• --Charlotte Perkin Gilman Herland
• --Virginia Woolf A Room of Ones Own

3
Feminist Movements The Second Wave since 1960s

• Emphases the politics of reproduction, to
  women's 'experience,' to sexual 'difference.'
• American Feminists Radical Feminist,
  Psychoanalytic Feminist
• French Feminists
• Since the 80s, Lesbianism, Postmodern Feminism,
  etc.

4
Central Issues in Contemporary Feminisms

• A. 60s -70s -- Womens Studies Womens
• 1) biology (next week)
• 2) experience and social position
• 3) writing (this and next week)
• B. 80s Gender Studies 1) gender relations
  (cultural difference)
• 2) gender constructions (next week)

5
Womens writings in the 19th century

• Very few of them got to write write diaries or
  letters.
• the use of pseudonyms to write,
• The use of madness, death as tropes of
  self-preservation e.g. Christina Rossettie, Emily
  Dickenson, Yellow Wallpaper, etc.
• General plot exclusion death or domestication
  

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Feminist Writings and Criticism in the 20 century
(gynocriticism)

• Writings
• Bring about changes in both form and content.
• Content
• Critique of patriarchal society, e.g. A Room of
  Ones Own.
• empowerment of female roles and female bonding.
  Granny W
• Discovery of female desires.
• Analysis of female psyche.

• Criticisms main concerns
• 1. Languistic
• 2. Cultural
• 3. Biological
• 4. psychoanalytic

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Virginia Woolfs A Room of Ones Own.

• Womens position in fiction and in real life.
• Why did not women write poetry in the Elizabethan
  age?
• e.g. Shakespeare vs. Shakespeares sister life
  in the living room, arranged marriage, not being
  able to work and survive by herself in London,
  with child.
• Androgyny manly woman, womanly man.

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Katherine Ann Porter (1890-1980)

The Jilting of Granny Weatherall What does
the title mean? p. 382
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Jilting of GW

1. How do you characterize Granny? What does she
   feel about being jilted? What is she proud of?
   P. 380 381
2. How does Granny relate to the people around her?
   Why is she impatient with the doctor as well as
   her daughter Cornelia?
3. Why is Granny pre-occupied with Hapsy? 383
4. This story is, like ??,composed partly of
   interior monologue, and in this story, Granny
   gets to be farther and farther away from reality.
   How is she different from the mother in ??? How
   is Granny different from Emily in A Rose for
   Emily?

10
American Feminist Literary criticism
gynocriticism

• A literature of their own
• the contrast in style and subject matter between
  masculine and feminine writings
• feminine writing--more concerned with community,
  open ending associational logic subjective
• male--individualistic, closure, sequential,
  objective

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Psychoanalytic Feminisms American Nancy Chodorow

• The Reproduction of Motherhood
• (an example of object-relations theory)
• Males have fixed ego-boundaries (rigid and
  defensive) because they define themselves through
  separation from their mother.
• Females have fluid and permeable ego-boundaries
  because they never break up their relationship
  with the mother. This sense of
  self-in-relationship and need for connection to
  others in turn underlies the desire to mother
  (be a mother).

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French Feminine ecriture

• Biology feminine writing
• Against the psychoanalysts emphasis on Oedipus
  complex and the Father.
• Against the fixity of male writing and systems of
  thoughts
• Cixous phallogocentrism
• writing from the body write in white ink in the
  Realm of the Gift vs. the Realm of the Proper
  (property-- appropriate--the fear of castration)

13
Irigaray

• autoeroticism plural sexuality
• an alternate discourse that is multiple, fluid,
  and heterogeneous,
• feminine style 1) mimicry 2) "self-touching"
  and "self-affection" --

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Kristeva the semiotic

• the feminine as the silence of the unconscious
  that precedes discourse
• its utterance is a flow or rhythm instead of an
  ordered statement
• expression is fluid like the free-floating sea of
  a womb or the milk of the breast.

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