MLR 07: FEMINIST STUDIES

I. Feminist Studies – general definition

a strand of studies, informed by feminist literary theory and scholarship, which advocates
equal rights for all women in all areas of life (social, political, professional, personal, economic,
aesthetic, psychological) and which undertakes an analysis of literature and language
from the female point of view
source: Lori Huth, Feminism

II. Major assumptions of Feminist criticism:

• sociopolitical movement – major stance: women and men are equal
• revisionist approach to conceptual structures
• emphasis on the ways in which women were oppressed, suppressed, and repressed
• asking new questions for old texts
• developing and uncovering a female tradition in writing (e.g. Female Gothic)
• analyzing women writers and their works from female perspectives
• redefining the concepts of the dominant discourse (language) in terms of gender
• questioning the superiority of men in patriarchal society
• questioning of basic assumptions about gender and sexuality
• demanding that we become resisting readers to the established hierarchies

III. Four waves of feminism:

1) the First Wave (1830s-1920s): suffragette movement and a progressive social vision; education
and legal rights for women
2) the Second Wave (1960s-1980s): emancipation movements, in reaction to the ideals
of domesticity of the post-war period (40s, 50s); focus on mechanisms of oppression,
discrimination, pathologies of social life (rape, violence, abuse, wage gap), suspicions
about femininity and gender, academic feminist criticism
3) the Third Wave (1990s): triggered by punk subculture, riot grrrl bands, stress of difference
(race, class, culture, nationality, tradition) – intersectionality (various layers of oppression)
4) the Fourth Wave (?): defined by technology, refers to a resurgence of interest in feminist
that began around 2008 and is associated with the issues of women’s empowerment
and the use of social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc.); Everyday Sexism
Project by Laura Bates, hashtag campaigns
focus: violence, rape culture, sexual harassment, the bodily autonomy (#MeToo), sexist imagery
in media, online misogyny, assaults on public transport
social media: the main channel of communication, “the personal is political”
IV. Major studies:
• Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)
• Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)
• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)
• Mary Ellmann, Thinking About Women (1968)
• Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (1969)
• Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology (1978)
• Bagley Kaplan and Margaret Mead, American Women (1963)
• Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963)
• Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (1970)
• Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (1970)
• Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land (1975)
• Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader (1978)
• Nina Baym, Women’s Fiction (1978)
• Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays in Women Poets
(1979), Madwoman in the Attic (1979)

V. Examination of women’s writing: Elaine Showalter A Literature of Their Own (1977):

three phases of female writing:
1) the feminine phase (1840-1880) – women want to be judged by their artistic merit, adopt male
nicknames
2) the feminist phase (1880-1920) – emphasis on female experience and the oppression of women
3) the female phase (1970-present) – emphasis on female understanding of the female experience

Elaine Showalter: concept of gynocriticism:

• central question: what is the difference in women’s writing?
• widening access to female texts rather than revisionist corrections and attacks on male
texts
• wilderness of theory should be women’s home; women should not depend on male
critical theory (concept of creativity based on male experience and put forward as universal),
or seek the approval of men for their criticism
• exposing the subjectivity of value-judgments in literary canon and analysis
• thoughtful assessment of women’s literature
• women not only wrote differently but should be read differently: male mold is ill-fitting
for women’s literature
• focus on female experience
• discovery of recurrent themes and images in women’s writing: imprisonment, hidden
rooms, fantasies of mobility, images of madness (Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre)
 Showalter: four models for women’s writing (Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness):
1) biological – body, text marked by the body, anatomy is textuality (e.g. metaphors of literary
maternity, childbirth, body as a source of images); Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born; Nancy K. Miller
The Arachnologies: The Woman, the Text, and the Critic
2) linguistic – need for female discourse, difference between men and women in their use
of language; Chantal Chawaf, La chair linguistic
signals repression of the feminine voice by the masculine voice (linear, logical authoritative,
realistic)
markers of repression: gaps, silences, puns, rhythms, new images, eccentric, incomprehensible,
inconsistent, frustrating to read, threatens order with chaos
examples: Julia Kristeva (Revolution in Poetic Language, Desire in Language), Helene Cixous
(Laugh of the Medusa), Luce Irigaray (This Sex Which is Not One)
3) psychoanalytic – focus on female psyche and the creative process; Nancy Chodorow,
The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender
4) cultural – society’s influence; embraces body, language and psyche; all linked to the cultural
environment and cultural forces; social dimension of language, cultural ideals, class,
nationality, race, politics, economy, history as determinants
material culture and literary culture: modes of production, high and low art, hierarchies
of genres
no cultural hegemony, binding force of women’s cultures
concepts of silence, silencing and women as a muted group in history and culture
text to be read as palimpsests: main story and the muted story which shows the female tradition
and experience

VI. Intersectionality:
• emphasizes the interlocking effects of race, class, gender, and sexuality
• highlights the ways in which categories of identity and structures of inequality
are mutually constituted and defy separation into discrete categories of analysis
• provides a unique lens of study that does not question difference
• rather, it assumes that differential experiences of common events are to be expected

intersectional perspective: Black Feminism criticism and theory:

• bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Black Looks: Race and Representation
• Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (articulating intersectionality from a sociological
perspective)
• Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose
VII. American Feminism:
• restoration and inclusion of the writings of female writers to the literary canon
• rewriting history: herstory
• examples: Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in
American Life and Letters (1975), The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the
American Frontiers (1984): American land as female
• Susan Gubar and Sandra M. Gilbert, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979): men created images
of women in literature (angel in the house, madwoman in the attic); encouraging women’s
autonomy as writers

VIII. Feminist approaches to literature: methods:

1) exposing and challenging stereotypes of women in literature
2) reading the canonical male authors from the female point of view
3) searching the canon for works written by women
4) using philosophy and psychoanalysis to overturn patriarchy and phallogenocentrism
(exposing how patriarchal discourses empower men)
5) looking for a new discourse: creation of a female language

IX. Example of intersectional study: Beyonce as an intersectional icon:

• an inherent understanding of intersectional identity politics
• has not transcended race, gender, or sexuality; she has purposely made them
an intrinsic element of her audience’s engagement with her
• does not lament the commodification of the black female body but partakes
in it to flaunt and fight stereotypes and move toward a liberation of the self-image
from cultural and social expectations
• resists against fetishistic and oppressive narratives about her body by hyper-
exaggerating them – the curves, the hair, the legs – while enforcing the dialog around
her body at the same time, telling her audience why Black women’s bodies matter: they are not
props and they are not passive sites